[gijoe77]

Hi, long story short (I would love to type out the longer story, but first someone tell me they care to read it hah)

I would like to dive into the amiga world for the first time. I really don't know anything about amiga's other than they were awesome and had an awesome demo scene and music scene (and graphics and video stuff). I just finally got e-uae working under IRIX, loaded kickstart 1.0 and inserted the floppy for altered beast and some music demo.

Where do I go from here to experience this very wonderful world?

[Jacques]

In all my Amiga days ('89-'97) my favourite system was my A1200. it was stock with only 2mb chipram and the standard ec020 @14mhz, but it gave me the best computer experience to this day.

WIth the AGA chipset and 3.0 kickstart you could run just about anything you wanted to. I had a ton of games and demos and traded with quite a few guys from the demo scene in the early 90's. My favourite app was Imagine 2.0, I ran out of memory quite quickly though...

I'd try and get an A500 or A1200 and have a play, there are loads of packed SD cards on eBay and still loads of games available, if that is your interest.

If I could have another Amiga I'd buy an A1200, they were just so expandable.

[CiaoTime]

I'd *highly* recommend getting an Amiga with a PCMCIA slot. The A500 is a wonderful system, and (along with the A2000) one of the most ubiquitous. The downside is that it's quite difficult to get software onto them if you don't already either another Amiga or real disks to play with. A normal PC floppy drive can't write Amiga disks, and the A500 has no hard drive. It also only outputs B&W video over the composite output, so you'd all but need to use the RGB output to get decent video out of it. I'd avoid the A520 adapter box as well, the quality of the output is total junk.

The A600 and A1200 make life a lot easier, since you can use the PCMCIA slot as a compact flash card reader and transfer files directly from a PC to the internal hard drive. PCMCIA also allows you to do fun stuff like connect to the Internet! The A1200 is a wonderful machine if you can find one for a good price.

[PA8600]

The whole issue with Amigas right now (in the USA) is they cost an insane amount, and it seems like in the last year or so even the prices for an A500 have shot up. They've gone from being around $100 to like what, $300-400? It's made worse by the fact that Amigas were never terribly common in the USA compared to Europe, especially outside of specialized fields, and a lot of Amiga games and nearly all demos are written for PAL instead of NTSC so you'll want a later revision that can switch on the fly or has switching be as simple as changing a soldered jumper.

Look on UK ebay if you want them cheaper. An A1200 might be $600-700 on US ebay, but it'll be 250 GBP on UK eBay and set for PAL already. Some sellers offer international shipping but a lot of times it'll be through the shitshow known as Global Shipping Program, which is known for everything <URL url="https://trixter.oldskool.org/2018/07/31/public-service-announcement-do-not-use-the-ebay-global-shipping-program/">from package theft to <URL url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijmdVlQ36-w">repackaging items in a manner that allows them to get destroyed. Use a package forwarder instead, or hell even ship it to a friend who lives in the UK and have him ship it to you.

[gijoe77]

I was sort of thinking of getting more familiar with the Amiga platform via emulator for now. I compiled an emulator and it seems to work very well so far <URL url="https://forums.irix.cc/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=251"><LINK_TEXT text="viewtopic.php?f=8&t=251">https://forums.irix.cc/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=251</LINK_TEXT>

<QUOTE author="JacquesT" post_id="2302" time="1534088689" user_id="104">

WIth the AGA chipset and 3.0 kickstart you could run just about anything you wanted to. I had a ton of games and demos and traded with quite a few guys from the demo scene in the early 90's. My favourite app was Imagine 2.0, I ran out of memory quite quickly though...

ok so I set the emulator for AGA chipset, PAL, CPU 68020 with emulate FPU enabled, kickstarter v3.1. I'm sort of using that as my baseline. I was able to launch the "spaceballs-state of the art" demo - it worked fine on the o2 but it was slow. I had to do some tweaking on my Tezro (different kickstart, no Z3 or P96 RAM) but it ran the "state of the art" demo full speed, looks/sounds just like the video I found <URL url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCc5ZHqwdXY">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCc5ZHqwdXY

what exactly is Z3 and P96 memory?

What is this workbench I keep hearing about? Is that like a desktop or something?

I came across a lot of interesting sound programs/trackers videos - anyone have any experience using something like in this video? <URL url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eclMFa0mD1c">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eclMFa0mD1c

[Jacques]

<QUOTE author="gijoe77" post_id="2472" time="1534379686" user_id="243">

what exactly is Z3 and P96 memory?

What is this workbench I keep hearing about? Is that like a desktop or something?

Z3 refers to the Zorro III expansion bus, see below for a detailed explanation.

<URL url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Zorro_III">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Zorro_III

P96 is an abbreviation for Picasso96, a RTG (Retargetable Graphics api) device driver library used by some Picasso and other graphics boards.

You can pretty much ignore these for most demos and games.

Workbench is a graphical file (and I dare say, desktop) manager for Amiga, akin to MacOS, 4DWM, etc. Essentially gives you a window and desktop environment to work in. Workbench was the name of the operating system given to the Amiga OS up until about AmigaOS 3.0 / 3.1...can't remember. Workbench 2.0 / 3.0 was probably my favourite, not a huge fan of 1.3 that shipped with most OCS chipset Amiga 500 / 2000 machines...

If you can find a copy, Mahoney and Kaktus released a super two disk music complilation, the scroll text comments were a bit weird but funny! Amiga scene had some of the best musicians going in the 80's and 90's. Jesper Kyd was one of my favourites, and look what he's been doing recently

<URL url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwB3Mku_KoM">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwB3Mku_KoM

ps - a bit of workbench for you at the beginning of the vid

And here is the demo.

<URL url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZTnR3FpUEA">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZTnR3FpUEA

[CiaoTime]

<QUOTE author="gijoe77" post_id="2472" time="1534379686" user_id="243">

ok so I set the emulator for AGA chipset, PAL, CPU 68020 with emulate FPU enabled, kickstarter v3.1. I'm sort of using that as my baseline. I was able to launch the "spaceballs-state of the art" demo - it worked fine on the o2 but it was slow.

Early Amiga demos can sometimes get upset about running on hardware newer than it's meant for. State of the Art was designed for a stock A500 with a Kickstart 1.x ROM and 1Mb of RAM, after all. It runs great on my actual A500, but won't even load on my A1200!

[Jacques]

You should be able to run it if you disable cpu cache in the Kickstart boot menu and select enhanced chiset support (both mouse buttons down on boot)

Failing that, you can softboot it with a 1.3 kickstart disk.

[gijoe77]

<QUOTE author="JacquesT" post_id="2494" time="1534446825" user_id="104">

And here is the demo.

<URL url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZTnR3FpUEA">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZTnR3FpUEA

oh dang it, can't watch it in my country, gonna have to work around that.

The Amiga is cooler and cooler the more I play with it.

[gijoe77]

ok so I disabled the Z3 and P96 memory on my o2, loaded up kickstart 1.3, the "state of the art" demo works fine on the o2 (just kinda slow).

I then loaded up workbench 3.1 (although once I'm in it says W.M.S. v 3.0). I'm sort of stuck there, no idea what to click on - how do I actually open another disk or whatever to run an app? Can you guys point me to a super newb beginner tutorial video or site?
(edit: you don't have to refer to a video or website - I'm totally cool with someone taking a few hours of their time to hold my hand through this every inch of the way hah)