The best 80s computer / console
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Amiga, no way! 
give the amiga 400 or 500 mhz accelerator and workbench with a a descent web browser , maybe even a office thing compatible with ms stuff....and why would you need windows?
Oh where would the amiga be now? after 20 years of progress??
Oh where would the amiga be now? after 20 years of progress??
Geraldine
Re-discovering Amigas after a bit of an absence!
Perhaps we would have an Amiga 9000 by now :roll:
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commodorejohn
Shameless recidivist
All nostalgia aside, and coming at it from as best as I can approach an objective viewpoint, I'm...actually still going to have to go with the Amiga. The hardware design is just pure genius; the idea of building the entire audio and video system around one central DMA controller, and then opening that controller to the programmer and making it a central point in the system design, is so awesome that I can't believe later systems didn't take that approach. And the software architecture is nearly as cool as the hardware, with the same "well-designed internals opened up and documented for programmer use" philosophy. It really is a hacker's machine, in the oldschool Usenet sense of "hacker" - designed by hackers, for hackers.
It's not without its flaws - four channels of sound with fixed stereo was cool in 1985, but it was outgrown pretty quickly thereafter, for instance, and exta half-bright mode is an interesting novelty but just having 64 colors would've been better - but it's just a damn fine machine and at least a decade ahead of its time. And the wide selection of quality games doesn't hurt, either
It's not without its flaws - four channels of sound with fixed stereo was cool in 1985, but it was outgrown pretty quickly thereafter, for instance, and exta half-bright mode is an interesting novelty but just having 64 colors would've been better - but it's just a damn fine machine and at least a decade ahead of its time. And the wide selection of quality games doesn't hurt, either
yeah, but AmigaDOS is completely alien to the rest of the OS, and there's no way to safely implement either SMP or memory protection. (has nothing to do with DMA, in case someone says it)
even the original amiga devs admitted this. Personally I'd say the 68k NeXT design is perfect for modern life. Needs a GPU though.
even the original amiga devs admitted this. Personally I'd say the 68k NeXT design is perfect for modern life. Needs a GPU though.
Nope its a retro machine 
---------- Post added at 12:49 ---------- Previous post was at 12:47 ----------
Only Microsoft OS need that amount of RAM anyways! lol
---------- Post added at 12:49 ---------- Previous post was at 12:47 ----------
The Amiga and it was the last of the best... before the crock of carp we have now... I'd have 1MB over 4GB of ram anyday of the year... so what if I live in the past
Only Microsoft OS need that amount of RAM anyways! lol
commodorejohn
Shameless recidivist
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that it was without fault - it's just a really nice design that's as simple and elegant under the hood as the hardware. (SMP I can live without, but yeah, memory protection was an oversight.)
Technically it has to be the Amiga, as it was very advanced for the time back in the 1980s (light years actually) and is an excellent machine which so versatile as to still allow developers to produce useful/modern hardware for it like USB connectivity to this day.
My heart says the ZX Spectrum because it was very cheap compared with an Amiga which was a lot more money (and computer!) so I didn't get to own one until the 90s.
The Spectrum was a crude old beast, but it was packaged with 128k (my Amstrad version at least) which was really good for an 8 bit machine at that moment in time, and like the Amiga, what was squeezed out of it was really incredible. To see the difference in quality between something like Jet Set Willy and Ocean's Batman was incredible, taking nothing alway from JSW which was an awesome homebrew achievement.
Also some of the 128k speccy sound tracks were really cool to my ears
I also preferred Rainbow Island on the humble speccy over my mates Amiga version!
A total heart decision - the final plus point for the Speccy was if you brought a 48k in 82 (or expanded your 16k to 48k) you would still be able to buy new games for it up until the end of 1992 which I still think is an impressive achievement
My heart says the ZX Spectrum because it was very cheap compared with an Amiga which was a lot more money (and computer!) so I didn't get to own one until the 90s.
The Spectrum was a crude old beast, but it was packaged with 128k (my Amstrad version at least) which was really good for an 8 bit machine at that moment in time, and like the Amiga, what was squeezed out of it was really incredible. To see the difference in quality between something like Jet Set Willy and Ocean's Batman was incredible, taking nothing alway from JSW which was an awesome homebrew achievement.
Also some of the 128k speccy sound tracks were really cool to my ears
I also preferred Rainbow Island on the humble speccy over my mates Amiga version!A total heart decision - the final plus point for the Speccy was if you brought a 48k in 82 (or expanded your 16k to 48k) you would still be able to buy new games for it up until the end of 1992 which I still think is an impressive achievement
For me its hard to choose "the 80's" computer/console
Unfortunately if we went on sales alone the Nintendo NES would probably win hands down, however thats not really a fair appreciation of a platform.
As a child in the 80's I was quite lucky as my brother and I had
Atari2600
Zx81
Atari 800XL
Spectrum +
Spectrum 128 +2
I think it was the 1989 that we got the Atari ST and the Amiga 500 for Christmas (and late birthday present lol)
So the Amiga / Atari ST was a bit of a late comer to the computer-console scene for me.
My fondest memories are of playing laser squad on my spectrum and elite on the C64
so I choose both of them - since I cannot decided =D
Unfortunately if we went on sales alone the Nintendo NES would probably win hands down, however thats not really a fair appreciation of a platform.
As a child in the 80's I was quite lucky as my brother and I had
Atari2600
Zx81
16k ram pack
Kempston interface
Currah Speach
Spectrum 48k (rubber key)Kempston interface
Currah Speach
Kemptson Interface
Commodore 64Atari 800XL
Spectrum +
Spectrum 128 +2
I think it was the 1989 that we got the Atari ST and the Amiga 500 for Christmas (and late birthday present lol)
So the Amiga / Atari ST was a bit of a late comer to the computer-console scene for me.
My fondest memories are of playing laser squad on my spectrum and elite on the C64
so I choose both of them - since I cannot decided =D
Skilllie
Indeed I had a currah speach unit and a kempston interface for it - it would of been about '86
A currah speach converts a phonetic and sends this to its own internal speaker - you could also use the one I had for beep/sound generation to.
I would been about 11/12 years old and I distinctly remember getting beaten round the head for making it sware a lot... to be fair I wrote a program that instulted you based on input - at one point it did sound as though it was suffering from tourettes
did you know that if you had a spectrum (48k) with a Currah speach and luna jetpac it actualy had speach - =D
@thread
btw added the largest pol in history =)
Indeed I had a currah speach unit and a kempston interface for it - it would of been about '86
A currah speach converts a phonetic and sends this to its own internal speaker - you could also use the one I had for beep/sound generation to.
I would been about 11/12 years old and I distinctly remember getting beaten round the head for making it sware a lot... to be fair I wrote a program that instulted you based on input - at one point it did sound as though it was suffering from tourettes
did you know that if you had a spectrum (48k) with a Currah speach and luna jetpac it actualy had speach - =D
@thread
btw added the largest pol in history =)
Justin
Active member
hmmmm ummmm now let me think......
AMIGA!!!!!!
i may be bias
AMIGA!!!!!!
i may be bias
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