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Although I had a friend with an Amiga growing up, I don't remember ever personally using one. Every screenshot or video I've seen since though makes it look like the aspect ratio was very weird and everything was "too wide" - was that actually the case, or is it an artefact of displaying on modern displays etc?

For example: [1] - I'd expect the clock to be circular instead of oval?

[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/Amiga_Wo...




The classic AmigaOS NTSC resolution was 640x200, and PAL was 640x256, both displayed as 4:3, so they look very cramped and squished on modern square-pixel displays. It's not difficult to double the height to get a 640x400 or 640x512 image, which is a lot closer to the intended appearance on modern screens, but still not quite right.

Later versions of AmigaOS supported higher resolutions, including square-pixel resolutions, but a lot of the UI artwork was still designed with lower-resolutions in mind so it still looks weird.

640x200, doubled to 640x400, but the clock still looks weird: http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga1apps.png

640x512, with a reasonable-looking circle at the top, but the icons in the middle look ridiculous: http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga2bounce.png

640x480 (square pixels!) with a nice clock, a nice colour wheel, and nice icons, but the title-bar buttons and the keyboard shortcuts in the menu look weird: http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga35utils.png


Aha, that makes sense - thanks for the detailed answer. I guess the same thing must afflict screenshots of machines I used, but none had the GUI of the Amiga so the effect is not so pronounced.




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