It’s been a good amount of time for me seeing custom mouse cursors (maybe since the days of MySpace). Very fitting. Thanks for taking me back, amigalove.com
I used to spend ungodly amounts of time making my own cursors in the Preferences page in Workbench 1.3.
I was a terrible designer when I was 8. My creations were usually a large box with an “X” connecting the corners, and the hotspot in the center. Hot pink, electric blue, and bright yellow where the 3 colors I settled on.
My Amiga 1000 handled all my computing for a decade, and it was still a downgrade in 1995 when I begrudgingly switched to a 486.
> My Amiga 1000 handled all my computing for a decade, and it was still a downgrade in 1995 when I begrudgingly switched to a 486.
Yes. Many Amiga owners I knew, and I myself, felt that way when it became clear around 1993-4 that the Amiga's future was not looking bright. I had invested quite a bit into my A1200 setup (HD disk drives, 68030+68882, MacGyvery external HD using a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE cable) and it could do most things I needed and wanted to do. But the need to collaborate with fellow students on papers, projects (SPSS, AutoCAD) drove me to get a (admittedly low end) 286 PC. I hated it, but it got the job done. I kept my Amiga around for many years after that, and used it, mostly for gaming, well into the 2000s. I finally got rid of it only fairly recently when I moved abroad. I tried Amiga gaming on emulators, but not having a native joystick (Suzo Arcade!) makes that no fun whatsoever.
While CPU speed was okay-ish with the software emulators, graphics performance was underwhelming. You also had to suffer interlace for the high resolution modes.
>You also had to suffer interlace for the high resolution modes.
1200/AGA should have the double-scan (31KHz-ish) "productivity" modes. VGA monitors work just fine with these. The graphiti would have offered chunky modes (vs bitplanes) from AGA, for major performance improvement. Else, Amiga video cards generally do chunky.
Haha well yes, I suppose I described a laptop, but really I was looking for a case I could put my own components into, so I could make something workstation class.
I have a NUC which came with s VESA mount, and would love to attach it to the back of its monitor, but the monitor (and actually, every monitor I own with a VESA wall mount) uses the wall mount as the attachment point for the stand.
I have doubts about the ergonomics of the keyboard, now days I'm used to almost flat keyboard (Apple ones). Sometimes I miss my A500, but not for the keyboard :)
With the Amiga 500 I as a teenager learnt assembler - which was mostly about controlling hardware (graphics, disc drive, sound, etc.). It gave me a solid foundation in understanding bits and bytes, hex and octal. And last but not least, as a programmer always make programs fast and memory efficient. Today we always assume there is a lot of memory. Back then we were counting bytes and processor cycles.
It would be beneficial for the whole computer industry if every programmer get a year where they have to develope under similar constraints as we were under.
This is excellent, and these sorts of projects are wonderful to see, as they're nice reminders that although our modern computing tools are more powerful, there's much to be learned from studying the past.
2. To run the cores for the vast majority of supported systems you need a custom 32 MB SDRAM board. For timing reasons the DDR3 memory on the FPGA board can't be used.
As far as emulation goes, how is this better/different than running an emulator on my pc or raspberry pi? I really want one for the cool factor but am unsure of how practical it is. FPGA dev sounds fun.
Emulators add a lot of extra latency, both on input and on display. Actually it isn't so much the emulator as the host os, with its compositor etc. An FPGA has the possibility of running with dramatically better latency. Similar issues go for startup time.
