Amigas still useable for serious work today?

[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............

[Buleste]

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.

[woody.cool]

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.

[Harrison]

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.

[TiredOfLife]

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.

[Harrison]

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.

[TiredOfLife]

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.

These days, they like to hit real destinations.

[Vangar]

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.

[Teho]

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.

[amigakit.com]

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