Amigas still useable for serious work today?

I remember Amiga technology over the years being used for everything from Disney animators to NASA to kiosks interactive displays and of course major video production. I myself missded out in much of this and sadly I have no skill for programming but I did love it for basic video titling, art and animation......

I was wondering though with the low cost of PC hardware and the powerful things PC's can do, does anyone still use Amiga platform for anything serious? Do any of you use or know anyone who uses real or emulated Amiga's to do modern day serious work? Please share............

When my Amigas working I do use ImageFX and a few other serious programmes like Lightwave etc. but only for playing around. I don't think anyone uses Amigas for anything more serious than WP because the cost of an Amiga that can do serious software well is at least twice the cost of a PC that can do things better.

I've been known to use AWeb or iBrowse to browse the net, Wordworth, PageStream and a few other serious apps on a regular basis.

I'd say the Amiga can still cut it for some types of 'serious' work.

You could definitely still use Amigas these days to do a lot of useful tasks. 2D graphics, 3D, audio, video titling, DTP etc... The PC software has left the Amiga equivalents behind, but that doesn't mean they still can't produce some great results. It just means they are missing the current range of features found in the latest software on the market.

As for Amiga still being used in a professional environment, I did see something about them still in use at NASA quite recently, but I'm not sure if that is still the case. It would be interesting to find out if they are still in use anywhere.

The London Transport Museum used a large bank of CD32's with SX-1 modules until recently to power their interactive kiosks around the museum.

It all depends on what you want to do.
Can't see NASA using them for the next shuttle launch but probably could do a large proportion of computer related jobs on one.

Remember that the Shuttle is now very old, dating back to the late 70's. I bet the first computers controlling it were about as powerful as a ZX Spectrum!

I remember reading that the Apollo missions were powered by a computer with 1KB of ram. :)

Ah but you forget, that was in the days when it didn't really go anywhere.
They just pretended to land it on the moon for instance. :D

These days, they like to hit real destinations. ;)

I'd say a lot of Amigas are still being used for their retro-sounding music tracks and backing tracks. A lot of music in indie games or animations like to use Retro-Amiga music.

Some of these do use actual Amiga sound. I installed a Tetris game on my work-PDA a while ago (S-Tris 2), and it used an old Amiga module I immediately recognised from an old Amiga game called Cubulus. Either these are the same devs, or the composer Bjørn Lynne retained the rights to the music. I don't know, it's properly credited in the game anyway so not a case of theft I think. I thought it was pretty cool to hear it again in a modern production. :)

All the computers (except one) are networked Amigas in our office, we use them every day for invoicing and processing orders.

That is great to hear that an Amiga store is actually using Amigas for its business.

Great stuff :thumbs:

What about the site though... is it hosted on an Amiga? ;)

No - its a Linux server unfortunately, but it is heavily modified to work with Amiga Ibrowse.

That is a shame, but we all know that Amigas are not really up to the task of hosting todays websites. At least you are cattering for real Amiga browsers. :)

We need a lot of bandwidth to cater for all the customers.

However on the backoffice, networked Amigas are great for order processing and printing. We use Wordworth 7, Pagestream 4, IBrowse, Ghostscript 8.6, GS8Viewer for PDFs, EasyNet for networking.

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Originally Posted by Harrison

That is a shame, but we all know that Amigas are not really up to the task of hosting todays websites. At least you are cattering for real Amiga browsers. :)

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Not up to the task?
There are a couple of sites hosted on speccys and C64s.

Wouldn't want the emergency services to be hosted on those though.
:o

I used them for some of my GCSE coursework which got printed out on a 9 pin printer, but most of that was draft copies which later got done in MS Word and printed on a laser printer.

Most of the work I do for college is either handwritten or done in MS Word, but I can't see why it couldn't be done on an amiga given a good word processor.

I do sometimes mess around in DPaintIII for drawings.

Abiword in Cygnix seems pretty good.
Don't know how well it runs on classic hw but will be testing that over the next few days.

Abiword for Cygnix works just about on Classic HW but it is very slow due to running 2 OS's and then Abiword. A PCI graphics card may help speed it up a little but not enough for it to be better than FW5 or WW7.

Is that with the new version of Cygnix released a few days ago?
Now called AmiCygnix?

That was with the older version.

Ah right.
Yeah it was too slow.
Useful now and then to read the odd MS Word Doc but that was about it.

Will test the new version on classic hardware this week.

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Originally Posted by Chewieshmoo

I remember Amiga technology over the years being used for everything from Disney animators to NASA to kiosks interactive displays and of course major video production. I myself missded out in much of this and sadly I have no skill for programming but I did love it for basic video titling, art and animation......

I was wondering though with the low cost of PC hardware and the powerful things PC's can do, does anyone still use Amiga platform for anything serious? Do any of you use or know anyone who uses real or emulated Amiga's to do modern day serious work? Please share............

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That would all depend on what you would class as "serious work". When my son is old enough, I intend to give him my A600 so that he can use it as an educational learning tool. So if you class educating a child on using a computer as serious work (which i do) then yes. The Amiga 4000 video toasting days are long gone but legacy it left behind still very much remains. It was way ahead of its time and if you want to make some personal home video's then yes its more than capable; I use it because I LOVE Amos. The simplicity and beauty of a BASIC procedure-driven programming language such as AMOS is amazing.

Giving children older computers to start off with is a great idea in my view. Kids that just start off with todays consoles and PCs have no idea how they work or what is involved and no grounding at all in computing from a raw point of view. Most of us in our 20's and 30's started out with computers that you had to learn how to use. Command line interfaces in 8-bit systems for example were that beginning of sparking an interest in programming. I think it is a great idea to start children off on older hardware, but maybe even older than the 16-bit systems. Give them a C64 or similar from that era and let them experience the evolution of computing through the generations.

Tested the newer version of Amicygnix on classic hardware.
Loads a lot faster, but still a bit slow.
Fine for short term usage but that's about it. :(

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Originally Posted by Chewieshmoo

I was wondering though with the low cost of PC hardware and the powerful things PC's can do, does anyone still use Amiga platform for anything serious? Do any of you use or know anyone who uses real or emulated Amiga's to do modern day serious work? Please share............

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Hello. I work as a computer games artist and still use winuae for deluxe paint/brilliance and personel paint for pallete based artwork and colour cycling. We have pro motion for this, but it is very expensive, and many amiga programs can do what it does just as well. The object in the picture is 3D from 3D studio, but the textures are a combo of photoshop and Amiga programs. The game is for the nintendo DS, for Xbox360 stuff, we tend to use 1024 pixel textures in 24 bit, so an Amiga is not so usefull.

Of course when I first started, all 2D artists had Amiga 4000D's on their desks, but gradually these were sold off :(

You didn't manage to buy one of their old A4000's when they got rid of them did you? That is a great way to obtain older hardware.

It is great to hear you are still utilising Amiga graphis packages for bitmap artwork. Very nice. :)

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Originally Posted by Harrison

You didn't manage to buy one of their old A4000's when they got rid of them did you? That is a great way to obtain older hardware.

It is great to hear you are still utilising Amiga graphis packages for bitmap artwork. Very nice. :)

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I did, I gave it away for nothing on Amiga.org about 5 years ago, thought i'd give something back to the community.

The Amiga is still really usefull, so long as you use it for things it was built to do.

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Originally Posted by leohopkins

[I use it because I LOVE Amos. The simplicity and beauty of a BASIC procedure-driven programming language such as AMOS is amazing.

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I'm glad I'm not the only AMOS fan here :)

I'm reinstalling 3.9 onto my A1200, and I fancy learning to code. Which would you recomend for a novice (games programming) Blitz or Amos?

Definitely Blitz. It is a properly structure language which has a lot of game related elements, but is a full language that can be used for anything. Plus a version exists for Windows, so if you learn it on the Amiga, but later wanted to code something on the PC you would have a language you already knew.

AMOS isn't that great a language. It does have loads of easy to learn commands, but the language is slow and prone to crashing, and for some strange reason you normally know when any software was written with AMOS. It all seems to feel and look the same.

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Originally Posted by Khephren

I'm reinstalling 3.9 onto my A1200, and I fancy learning to code. Which would you recomend for a novice (games programming) Blitz or Amos?

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I'd say AMOS, without a doubt!
It's an easier language than Blitz