Talk:Amiga/Archive 5

Doesn't AREXX Deserve A Mention?
There is an article about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARexx, but it seems worthy of a mention in the main Amiga article as well. As a former Amiga user, I recall AREXX being a powerful tool for serious applications. I remember synchronizing SMPTE time codes in non-linear editing application with an audio application made by two different companies, simply by linking them together via AREXX scripting. Thoughts? 63.166.226.83 (talk) 20:19, 30 April 2008 (UTC)
 * why do people ask about this stuff? just add it, jeez

AReXX is a powerful scripting language, and sure deserves a mention. It is still being used with profit in AmigaOS 4.0 and MorphOS. Just to make some examples all actual Amiga programs to see youtube ".FLV" videos are nothing than meta-applications built in Arexx and combining the features of two or more single programs, such as it does TubeXX script using mPlayer (multi-platform media player), mencoder and wget. No other platform worldwide could realize such sinergy between single programs, joining their features and combining it in a bigger meta-application capable to do things impossible just to one software at once. Also Amiga programs to show weathercast and RSS Feed News from the web are AReXX scripts. The article regarding Amiga lacks of quality and professionality. --Raffaele Megabyte (talk) 14:52, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

AREXX should have an article of it's own AREXX as this Amiga article is too long. Commodore Amiga licensed the REXX language from IBM to make AREXX in exchange for IBM basing the OS/2 2.0 object oritented Workplace Shell on AmigaDOS/Workbench based on that book "The Art of Unix Programming" p. 66 ISBN 0131429019, 9780131429017 which that link goes to Google books to clearly show the certified historic reference of IBM and Commodore Amiga trading technologies. Since this happened before the World Wide Web was developed it is only in rare Amiga books, and now this The Art of Unix Programming book and some vets remembered it on OS/2 web sites as well. I think they need to be cited in the AREXX article in a NPOV way as it is factual. This key event in history helped bring an object oriented dekstop to desktop computers, before that Xerox had the object oriented desktop, but Apple did not develop an object oriented desktop and programming Triumph of the Nerds part 3 "And they showed me really three things. But I was so blinded by the first one I didn't even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object orienting programming they showed me that but I didn't even see that. The other one they showed me was a networked computer system...they had over a hundred Alto computers all networked using email etc., etc., I didn't even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I'd ever seen in my life. Now remember it was very flawed, what we saw was incomplete, they'd done a bunch of things wrong. But we didn't know that at the time but still though they had the germ of the idea was there and they'd done it very well and within you know ten minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this some day." Steve Jobs saw that the Xerox GUI was flawed, but it used object oriented programming and an object oriented desktop GUI as a result. Apple didn't have an object oriented programming or object oriented GUI until OSX when OSX inherited the Next GUI and Objective-C OO programming. It can be thought that the Next company saw that the Amiga had AmigaDOS based on Tripos a Unix-like OS, and Workbench an object oriented GUI that IBM had licensed for OS/2 2.0 and up. Jobs saw that the Macintosh was failing and saw that he would have to start over with a Unix OS and build an OO GUI on top of that to beat the Macintosh and maybe the Amiga. This is a logical deduction on a historical quote that Apple was scared when the Amiga prototype was shown. "When the Amiga came out, everyone [at Apple] was scared as hell." (Amazing Computing, Nov. 1996) Orion Blastar (talk) 03:18, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

Article regarding Amiga lacks of quality
I saw a general decreasing in quality of this article...

To many people rewritting it, splitting it, and making it awful, ELEMENTARY and rubbish...

It needs to be rewritten with a certain care...

It lacks of many informations and points to secondary Amiga features such as "three finger salute" totally irrilevant to a main article.

(Sure this feature deserves a mention in AmigaOS article, but not here in the mainpage regarding the platform as a general overview...

Any proposal to make a diagram and insert news, informations and historical facts with a certain care? --Raffaele Megabyte (talk) 15:04, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

The Simpsons
The Deep Space Homer article mentions that an Amiga was used to animate parts of the episode. Was the machine used in any other Simpsons episodes? Bastie (talk) 11:45, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Sourcing of Eric W. Schwartz
Is anyone here able to provide more sources for the above article, particularly those relating to the subject's activities in the Amiga community? (Asking here as WikiProject Amiga seems kinda dead.) GreenReaper (talk) 23:03, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

The name "Amiga"
Does anyone actually know of any reason why this family of computers was originally named after the Spanish word for "female friend"? J I P | Talk 22:02, 10 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I pretty sure I heard someone mention it in some Amiga History video, but I forgot what it was. Look here, Amiga History on YouTube, you might find the part there. Marko75 (talk) 23:15, 10 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I seem to remember reading once that they wanted the Greek word "Amica" (same definition as Amiga), but it was already used by another company.173.58.64.64 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 00:55, 13 September 2010 (UTC).

"Amica" is not Greek, but Latin... The original name of the company was "Hi Toro". This name was already taken by another company, so the developer team had to choose a better name. (Source: "On The Edge") --194.77.253.245 (talk) 11:02, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Added reference to Video Toaster.
Hi,

I have added a reference to NewTek's Video Toaster, which was one of the factors that made the Amiga so popular in the field of television.

Jlturriff (talk) 01:55, 27 November 2009 (UTC) J. Leslie Turriff

BTW, I had an A1200 for at least a year before Commodore went bust and sold out to Escom; both the A4000 and the A1200 were available earlier.


 * Yes, I noticed the addition. That makes seven (7) references to Toaster in the article (which have now gone from WP:OVERLINK to WP:WAYWAYOVERLINK).  I did not revert your edit, because when judging "what belongs in the lead" versus "what belongs in the body", you may have a good point that that actually belongs there.  &mdash;Aladdin Sane (talk) 02:31, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Babylon 5
The article says Amigas were used for the pilot and first two seasons of B5 but the reference cited only indicates it Amigas were used for the pilot. It doesn't rule out that they were used later on in the series, but there is nothing definitive to support that. Does anyone have a better source? Argel1200 (talk) 00:16, 22 December 2009 (UTC)
 * All sources I've seen indicate that they switched to Pentiums after the pilot. The "Notable historic uses" does not seem to be all that notable to me though. In my opinion if the uses were truly significant they should be included in the main history section. --Anss123 (talk) 01:02, 22 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Working on it. I don't think we'll ever get to pinpoint a precise date of changeover to pentiums, because that's not how the hardware replacement cycle works.  I expect the replacement was gradual as is the normal cycle, and probably completed by 1995 or 1996 (say, season 2 or 3 era).  But the cites could be better I agree, and I may have a better one for this article some day.  For now, I've got a "just as good" one.  See Babylon 5 if you're interested in more on the subject.
 * I'll keep my eye out for more info to use as sources for this article; I watch it specifically because of this issue.
 * As to in-article notability: It is transitive.  The in-article notable aspect is that the series claims credit for "first all-CGI" American "major" TV series; no models at all were used, helping cut production costs dramatically.  That they were able to "go there" at all, at that time (c. 1992 was when pre-production on the pilot began, I believe), is credited to the Amiga hardware; that is what got the all-CGI ball rolling.
 * There's more in the midwinter archive, and other places, but tracking it down for this article may take a while. Here's some searches to get us started:  Google midwinter Amiga (probably does not include the FTP archive) and Google jmsnews Amiga  &mdash;Aladdin Sane (talk) 07:34, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

Assessment
Assessed as C; it lacks sourcing in a lot of things, and so much content is strewn throughout the article as one-liners, short paragraphs, or lists. It also seems like a thinly veiled trivia section is at the bottom. I'm sure a lot of it is important, but it should be completely rewritten in prose and only include the important stuff. Article also uses an excessive image. - The New Age Retro Hippie used Ruler! Now, he can figure out the length of things easily. 09:27, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

Possible source - from IEEE Spectrum
This may be a useful source for the article: Amiga: The Computer That Wouldn’t Die by PAUL WALLICH in IEEE Spectrum March 2001, pages 40-46. Jodi.a.schneider (talk) 02:43, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

Floating point on an Amiga
When the Amiga first came out, what kind of floating point math was it capable of?

How many bits wide was the mantissa? How many bits wide was the exponent?

I understand the Atari ST used 4 byte floating point, with the exponent not being a signed integer but rather the top bit of the exponent was a sign flag, and the top bit of the 3 byte mantissa was also a sign flag.

The main page of this article could be improved by adding a link to an article comparing Amiga and Atari floating point. Dexter Nextnumber (talk) 02:13, 22 March 2010 (UTC)
 * The Amiga 1000 didn't have a floating point co-possessor. This means that floating point math was done through use of software libraries. IEEE-754 was common back then and I believe the Amiga had a built in library for such math that could transparently be replaced by the Motorola 68881 FPU.
 * I also believe that the Atari ST used the same scheme. I.e. Amiga and Atari floating point math is done the same way, both having math libraries was based on the same 68881 FPU. --Anss123 (talk) 10:31, 23 March 2010 (UTC)
 * The Amiga supported FFP (fast floating point) format from Motorola and standard IEEE floats and doubles via software libraries. Xorxos (talk) 22:16, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

Did they die again?
Their website has been down, and by down I mean I get redirected to my ISP's "could not find this site" page, for weeks now. Did they go belly-up again, or something? I haven't seen anything in the news about it, but when you can't even be bothered to keep your domain renewed, you're in pretty bad shape at best. Octan (talk) 05:42, 15 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Their domain registration with godaddy still seems to be OK but possibly they've failed to pay their hosting ISP. Zac67 (talk) 09:17, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

fanboy wording
>One of the most challenging aspects of emulation is the design of the Amiga chipset, which relies on cycle-critical timings This is not only typical for the Amiga, but also for most home computers before which also share a common clock between all chips (including the CPU). Can we remove the fanboyism ? -- Arnero (talk) 15:56, 25 July 2010 (UTC)
 * All home computers share rather integrated designs, yet the Amiga uses a pretty complex scheme with 25 (or so) DMA channels and several coprocessors. Cycle exact emulation (which some demos require to work) is a challenge, even on modern systems. Zac67 (talk) 20:51, 25 July 2010 (UTC)
 * agree this isn't "fanboyism" it's noting an important difference in the Amiga with regards emulation. I'd say keep the wording. Splateagle (talk) 08:49, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

Number of sold Amiga
I found this official Commodore statement:

"COMMODORE SELLS 2 MILLIONTH AMIGA" Article date:November 12, 1990

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-9588953.html —Preceding unsigned comment added by Calimero (talk • contribs) 10:09, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Patent litigation / Prior use
I wasn't sure where to put this, but it seems it needs a mention: "My Amiga Killed a Troll!" A restored Amiga was used to prove prior art to "Patent No. 5,072,412 for a User Interface with Multiple Workspaces for Sharing Display System Objects issued Dec. 10, 1991"  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.110.4.104 (talk) 22:40, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

XOR patent troubles
The CD-32 was banned in the USA because of patent litigation against Commodore. XOR was used to blink the cursor on the display, which was apparently patented... Arguably, this led to the company's ultimate failure. http://xcssa.org/pipermail/xcssa/2005-February/002587.html
 * I'm not sure this merits adding without a stronger source - I'm sceptical of the validity of the linked claim, not least since (during normal use) the CD32 never displayed a cursor, blinking or otherwise.Splateagle (talk) 13:27, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Amiga in movie production
According to http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/fau/movies.html Amigas were used in the production of Jurassic Park, Terminator 2 and Robocop 1 and 2, among others. May be worth mentioning in historic uses.

Amiga 1500?
The photo showing an "Amiga 1500" appears to be 1000. The 1500 was a A2000 version with two 3.5" floppies for the UK(?) market. Zac67 (talk) 10:13, 24 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Yes that is a A1000. I have reverted the edit. You are correct about the A1500, it was just a HDD less A2000 with dual floppy drives. - Pix el8 10:52, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Tao Group
Apparently Tao Group were involved too. Could this be usefully included, either here and or at Amiga, Inc.? I didn't follow the Amiga much, although my brother had one for a number of years in the '90s. --Trevj (talk) 10:09, 8 June 2011 (UTC)