After 14 years a new printed UK Amiga magazine

by doener • 6 years ago

148 52 6 years ago

drcode2• 6 years ago

Similarly, I'm really enjoying my subscription to Freeze64: https://freeze64.com/

tialaramex• 6 years ago

The nice thing about 64-fandom is that the fans are aware that it's history. So you can't sell them a $5000 "new" C64 that promises to have a four core 64-bit ARM CPU because that's not what they're here for - they specifically like the Commodore 64 which they're aware is not a modern computer.

Amiga is still wrestling with that. There are "classic" fans who thought the 1980s A500 was cool, but unfortunately there are still a loud contingent who are sure that somehow Amiga is the future, and this makes them easy victims for a long parade of hucksters and charlatans.

drcode2• 6 years ago

I think part of it is that there is clearly a much larger theoretical space of possibilities in hardware & OS software than what we currently see with the Linux/Microsoft/Apple triopoly. There really were some compelling ideas in old systems, such as AmigaOS, BeOS, LispMachineOS, Altos, etc etc that still need to be fully realized at some point in the future.

Some day, a startup might finally figure out a new hardware/software combination that really proves this.

sundvor2• 6 years ago

"I want to upgrade from my simple eight bits, but will you still love me when I'm sixty-four?"

Therein lies the question; for me, the past is in the past.

rasz• 6 years ago

Its especially weird/funny when you consider 99% of existing Amiga software was specifically hardcoded to floppy only A500 with 1MB ram, and doesnt benefit from any acceleration. It was also one of the reasons for its downfall.

vidarh5• 6 years ago

Part of the issue is that there are still things many people - even those of us who haven't used an Amiga in years - miss from AmigaOS.

The tight integration of everything via AREXX, for example (though AREXX is an awful language, the expectation of a tightly integrated AREXX port in applications was important). The device model that led to a plethora of device drivers and filesystem drivers doing interesting things (e.g. FrexxEd, an editor co-written by Daniel Stenberg of Curl fame, exposes a filesystem where you can find all open files, so anything that can read or write a file can manipulate the editor buffer directly). Datatypes. Widespread "standard" libraries for pluggable compression. A culture of tightly controlled APIs to the point that e.g. the default file requester etc. was easily replaced across huge swathes of applications just by dropping in new libraries.

It's especially notable that none of it is down to technical limitations of modern OS's, but cultural differences. You could do the above trivially in Linux (or any other OS) if you wanted to, for example, but it only matters if it gets wide traction. Amiga had a culture of quickly coalescing around standards that promoted reusability and modularity and sticking to them.

And that is also part of the reason why some of the hardcore fans stick to it: Their 30+ year old applications can open modern file types if someone writes a datatype for it (and they often do). Their 30+ year old apps can transparently compress and decompress new formats if someone writes a suitable library for it, and so on.

I'm not going back to AmigaOS, but I do still wish we'd see a resurrection of that culture, because in the ~25 years since I used AmigaOS as my primary OS, while we've surpassed it in a whole lot of areas, there are still areas where it was more pleasant to use an Amiga.

bartread• 6 years ago

Amiga is still wrestling with that. There are "classic" fans who thought the 1980s A500 was cool, but unfortunately there are still a loud contingent who are sure that somehow Amiga is the future, and this makes them easy victims for a long parade of hucksters and charlatans.

I think there's more to it than that. I want to push beyond the base A500 (in fact I don't even own one of those at present, even though that was the machine I had back in the day), preferring instead the A1200, but don't in any way see Amiga or AmigaOS as "the future".

This manifests as a (very slow) mission to build what would have been my ultimate Amiga circa 1992. So, yes, I'm adding a 68030 accelerator board with a 68882 FPU, and I'm taking advantage of modern conveniences like Flash storage, but fundamentally I'm not departing too much.

I may add an FPGA accelerator at some point but, with that, it feels like you can quickly stray into "Is it even an Amiga any more?" territory.

rob74• 6 years ago

Well... the C64 was an 8-bit computer, so the platform was simply too limited for doing anything other than games, simple BASIC programming etc. Of course there were some "serious" apps available too that pushed the limits of the platform, but I guess once more performant computers (like the IBM PC/clones, the Apple Mac, the Amiga or the Atari ST) became affordable, people wouldn't think twice about using a C64 for those tasks anymore.

The Amiga however was already from the next generation, with a "real" OS and really suitable for business, productivity, multimedia and other "serious" applications. Two of those 16-bit machines (or rather their evolved descendants) are still with us today - the PC and the Mac. So you can't blame people for phantasizing about what could have become of the Amiga platform if Commodore had managed it better. But today of course thinking that the platform could be revived and updated to become mainstream again is a pretty fringe view...

mjcohen• 6 years ago

I still have my "Los Angeles Amiga Users' Group" shirts.

deccanchargers• 6 years ago

Is this for legacy Amiga computers ? Or Will Amiga computers relaunch ?

bitwize2• 6 years ago

I think it's both for legacy Amiga users and users of modern Amigoid machines, such as the Vampire V4 and the AmigaONE line, that can run AmigaOS 3.x or 4.x.

vidarh5• 6 years ago

"It's complicated" with Amiga. There is a whole span from dedicated fans of "pure" legacy Amiga's with legacy expansions, via modern/new expansions, some of which replace so much of the functionality of the original that there's not much left that's actually used, via pure FPGA reimplementations, some which aims to significantly improve on the original, to new-ish PowerPC machines that can run AmigaOS 4.

So there's new hardware (that's not branded Amiga for legal reasons, but can run AmigaOS), old hardware, and everything in between.

7thaccount2• 6 years ago

Can't believe a modern Amiga is like $1700 for 2 GB of RAM (upgradable to 4 GB),when I just bought a Pi4 with 8 GB RAM, quad-core processor, and 128 GB micro SD card for like $150 with a case, fan, heat sinks, hdmi cables...etc.

fogihujy• 6 years ago

"Yes"

AmigaOS 3.x is still common by people running emulators, and legacy hardware, and the Vampire V4. AmigaOS 4.x is still under active development for legacy hardware with PPC accellerators and "modern" PPC Amigas.

Then there's the open-source AROS and the commercial MorphOS too.

It's a mess.

brtkdotse• 6 years ago

I really, _really_ miss printed magazines as a concept. Everything has moved online and there it commenced racing to the bottom. Back in the 90s you could make a business case of selling a printed magazine written by talented writers with insight and expertise. Now? Not so much.

I tried purchasing a few magazines about music production this summer but they read mostly like advertisement brochures, all “reviews” read like ghost written blog posts and there was no soul, for the lack of a better word, to be found.

In short - get of my lawn you damn kids, things were better in my days.

sundvor2• 6 years ago

There's also this, pre order now available

https://fusionretrobooks.com/products/the-story-of-the-commo...

NikolaNovak• 6 years ago

Interesting, thanks! I got a book [1] covering similar topic from Bitmap books earlier this year - was stunned by quality of production and ordered a bunch of others. Turns out I don't actually have time/inclination to play through a bunch of games from my childhood - but tremendously enjoy reading quick blurbs for that hit of nostalgia :-)

1: https://www.bitmapbooks.co.uk/collections/all/products/commo...

quickthrower2• 6 years ago

You might like this https://www.quantamagazine.org/. Top quality, free, online

Nux• 6 years ago

Me too, there are so very few places online with good quality stuff.. it's sad.

Let's not forget the case of the beloved H-online.com which could not sustain themselves despite top-notch quality.

Race to the bottom indeed...

mjlee2• 6 years ago

Membership to the Association for Computing Machinery (acm.org) is affordable and comes with a high quality monthly printed magazine. - https://dl.acm.org/magazine/cacm

It also bundles in O'Reilly Learning membership, and is cheaper than you would otherwise pay for the same...

fierarul• 6 years ago

Very interesting. But honestly I can't figure out if the membership price is per month or per year or what time division?

But... do people join ACM? They seemed like a supreme institution back when I was in the University but rarely hear about them nowadays.

singemonkey• 6 years ago

I also rejoined ACM last year (after a 10 year hiatus), mainly for access to the O'Reilly stuff (what used to be safarionline). Tremendous value, and the monthly ACM mag is actually quite interesting.

timthorn• 6 years ago

Music magazines - give Sound on Sound a try. High quality content and has a long pedigree. https://www.soundonsound.com/

dep_b• 6 years ago

Yes I love it. It used to be one of my go to reads on long train trips together with C'T magazine.

globular-toast• 6 years ago

Me too. In the early 2000s when I was a teenager I earned money from a paper round and would regularly buy a PC magazine (Computer Shopper) and the Playstation 2 magazine. I would read them cover to cover.

I'm sure there are good articles online, but it seems very hard for me to justify spending the time reading them when there is so much else. There is too much choice.

I remember a teacher at school telling me how once he bought all his favourite films on DVD he never watched them again. Once it becomes a conscious choice to spend your time on this rather than that it often ends up spent on nothing at all.

I've come to realise that choice (or freedom) is just not the greatest thing for humans. I firmly believe most people benefit from some kind of external structure and constraint. I think declining happiness, especially for women, is mostly due to this structure being removed. I also notice that the best art tends to be made under tight budgets and strict constraints. Artists tend to produce worse work when they are given freedom to do whatever they want.

yetihehe2• 6 years ago

I don't. I had to drive out 150kg of printed amiga and pc magazines to local recycling center, because they didn't want to take it and I got less than I spent on fuel. Noboty wanted to buy it and it was too hard to just burn it, because nice glossy paper with special anti-flammable additives burns rather awfully. Re-reading it is almost pointless, maybe for nostalgia about how AGP will be THE BEST in graphics soon.

What you miss is quality, not printed magazines.

sgt• 6 years ago

You burned Amiga magazines? Heretic!

DogRunner• 6 years ago

Well, it doesn't help you, but supporting independent online "magazines" give you much more quality articles than in the good old days. I support "The Pod", a german-based video- and computer game podcast. The quality is beyond everything I had in the years before and I bought magazines since the mid 80s.

I am pretty sure there are far more magazines/podcasts/blogs which work with just supporting readers, but you have to find them.

bitwize2• 6 years ago

Oh wow! As the owner of an Amiga 500 and someone who actually does productive hobby work on a "Pimiga", I find this really exciting. The Amiga is really the TR-808 of personal computers, and those who grew up with its distinct personality will cherish it forever.

ricardo812• 6 years ago

Good to see a disk taped onto the front!

dazzawazza• 6 years ago

if you look carefully it's a picture of a disk and the page says it's just a joke which made me unreasonably sad.

ricardo812• 6 years ago

I think back in the day they used to do those photos of disks too, and you'd get the actual disk at the counter as people were stealing the demo disks from displays.

matt1982• 6 years ago

Just purchased a single issue. It looks a worthy cause I think and the team look passionate about it. Would be happy for it to be a quarterly though which might make more sense.

peterburkimsher2• 6 years ago

Is there any way to install Amiga OS on an 11" MacBook Air 2013? Apparently there's something called Syllable, but the linked site is down.

https://www.howtogeek.com/190217/10-alternative-pc-operating...

doener• 6 years ago

Yes, with https://fs-uae.net/:

http://amigax1000.blogspot.com/2015/03/amigaos-41-fe-classic...

peterburkimsher2• 6 years ago

OK, so it's still only a VM, right? I understand why that's easier, but that does give me the impression it's not a desktop-class OS.

wingi• 6 years ago

There are only 56 of 500 pre-orders - so at this time no printed magazine.

WillFlux• 6 years ago

Where did that number come from?

Looking at https://www.simulant.uk/shop/amiga-addict-magazine it says 341 more orders required, so 159 orders so far.

bstar77• 6 years ago

I just ponied up for the first issue, I really hope this meets the minimum requirement. Just the other day I subbed for Retro Gamer. It's expensive af at $92 with a 20% discount, but worth it, imo.

Something about having a physical magazine that's an unchangeable snapshot in time is so appealing to me lately. I have no nostalgia for the Amiga (never had one growing up), but I do have an Amiga 500+ now and love discovering this thing 30 years later. Community is incredible and the Amiga's ongoing development makes it a really fun system to own.

Edit: On a side note, I still subscribe to National Geographic Magazine. If you are interested in that type of content, Nat Geo magazine is just exquisite. Photography is stunning and the long form articles are usually months/years in the making and written beautifully. It's absolutely loaded with substance, even the ads are interesting. I can't recommend it highly enough and I think it's only $19/year. Paper quality is slightly lower than what I remember as a kid, but that's pretty minor.

kqvamxurcagg• 6 years ago

Just ordered. Hope they reach the minimum quantity!

Thev00d00• 6 years ago

NOTE: Image of a floppy disk on the front cover is just for a joke and no actual cover disk is included.

Such a disappointment!

After 14 years a new printed UK Amiga magazine

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