Amiga at NASA (1999)

http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/amiganasa_en.php

by LeoPanthera • 5 years ago

63 31 5 years ago

obligement.free.fr

Afaik the Amiga had fairly open hardware esp the Zorro bus which made time sensitive expansion cards like the Video Toaster possible.

mastazi3• 5 years ago

It also made home music production affordable for the average person, thanks to Paula[1] which had 4-channel audio playback. It's not a case that all music trackers for Amiga, such as ProTracker[2], had 4 tracks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Chip_Set#Paula

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eclMFa0mD1c

squarefoot• 5 years ago

Oktalyzer had a maximum of 8. If I recall correctly it downscaled sounds on the fly to 7 bits to gain a maximum of four more tracks. Its samples were noticeably worse in quality and less loud, but back in the day I still had a lot of fun using it.

https://www.robotplanet.dk/amiga/oktalyzer/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXTuWQDCylE

howaboutnope• 5 years ago

StarTrekker also had 8 channels: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=13415

anthk5• 5 years ago

An Amiga 4000 was not powerful enough to even play Doom in.... 1999 when HL and Unreal existed. But, yet, with a 68040, they were able to play MP3s and some low res videos!!!

And today you can even install modern TLS libraries and some modern (JS less) browser.

So you coudn't play Doom but you could comment into HN just fine...

tibbydudeza2• 5 years ago

Defender of the Crown looked awesome :).

teknopurge• 5 years ago

Makes me wonder if any of the NASA staff played SDI on the amigas when no one was watching.. :)

GregorBrandt• 5 years ago

That was mostly due to the planar based video layout rather than a byte per pixel display.

rbanffy2• 5 years ago

Planar graphics allowed some interesting effects, but Doom’s shortcuts for perspective calculation weren’t compatible.

When VGA came out, it became difficult to see a future for the Amiga - the hardware was just too tied to TV frequencies to match PCs in graphics, just because they didn’t have to be compatible with anything else.

LeoPanthera3• 5 years ago

Doom actually runs OK on 040 Amigas: https://youtu.be/fl-gYdkIXCk

But of course very few Amigas had an 040, only the highest end ones.

anthk5• 5 years ago

Ah, sorry. Then a bare 4000 with a 68030, ok.

Yet, a Pentium MMX with 32MB of RAM in 1999 would stomp the Amiga...

code_duck• 5 years ago

In its heyday, the Amiga easily beat Windows PCs for graphics and sound capabilities. But 1999 wasn’t a great time for the Amiga.

anthk5• 5 years ago

Not by 1996...

And by 1997-1998 everyone got a "Multimedia PC".

tarkin2• 5 years ago

Gary Jones: "If its not a PC, NASA gives us a lot of grief when we try to buy anything to go with the Amigas. They want us to buy PCs and run Windows 95 and NT. We keep trying to tell them its not fast enough so they tell us to buy DEC Alphas. We tell them its too expensive. They don't like the Amiga; it doesn't cost enough."

So even NASA has these problems!

The article makes me more interested in learning about the Amiga platform vis-a-vis the PC. Any tips?

rbanffy2• 5 years ago

You can get a fairly extensive coverage for the launch from BYTE magazine from archive.org. The Amiga 1000 is described extensively. A similar in-depth analysis was done for the 2000 and the PC bridgeboard.

There were also lots of Amiga-specific magazines, but they lack the perspective of general magazines, which is useful when first approaching a new platform.

anthk5• 5 years ago

Old but gold:

http://www.upv.es/amiga/

EDIT: just in Spanish and French, but Deepl may be able to translate this right.

spullara• 5 years ago

Maybe they moved to the Amiga 2000?

Not only does the Amiga 2000 include five Zorro II card slots, the motherboard also has four PC ISA slots, two of which are inline with Zorro II slots for use with the A2088 bridgeboard, which adds IBM PC XT compatibility to the A2000.

LeoPanthera3• 5 years ago

Mirror if necessary. https://web.archive.org/web/20210712080928/http://obligement...

itomato• 5 years ago

Here is some of the video they cite with Gary and Hal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAPD9HA8Unw

thought_alarm• 5 years ago

    > For more than a dozen years, Amiga computers have been
    > hard at work at Cape Canaveral's Hanger AE supporting the
    > launches of every American spacecraft including the space
    > shuttle.

12 years from 1999 would mean that they adopted the Amiga back in 1986 or 87. That time frame makes a little more sense. The Macintosh wouldn't have been a good choice if you need to interface with custom hardware (the Mac II arrived in 1987 with NuBus expansion slots, but that was brand new).

It's not entirely clear why, say, an IBM AT 286 with multiple ISA slots is less suitable than an Amiga 1000 with 68000 and a single expansion slot.

I guess it depends a lot on personal preference. That would be a very fun job, especially when you get to choose which platform to work with.

the_third_wave• 5 years ago

It's not entirely clear why, say, an IBM AT 286 with multiple ISA slots is less suitable than an Amiga 1000 with 68000 and a single expansion slot.

The hardware might work OK but back then that AT would be running PC-DOS or MS-DOS, i.e. it would effectively not be running an operating system. The Amiga did have a functional operating system which was flexible enough to get out of the way when needed. Given that the Amiga seemed to do the job and they were comfortable using it there was no valid [1] reason to look elsewhere.

[1] bureaucratic reasons are not valid reasons, at least not to engineers. The right tool for the job, not the right tool for the acquisition department.

pornel• 5 years ago

Amiga had great graphics, with chips that made it feasible to animate at 50/60fps, and a genlock expansion that gave it ability to overlay graphics on top of a TV signal.

bcrl2• 5 years ago

The IBM AT didn't come with an operating system with a lightweight premptive multitasking kernel capable of being used for real time applications.

I learned quite a bit about operating systems by disassembling the Amiga exec and other libraries with a debugger. The code was elegant and efficient, modular and well thought out. Putting the core of the operating system in ROM was a good idea for the time as it freed up most of the RAM in the system for application use - an important design choice when machines were only shipping with 512KB to 1MB of RAM.

Amiga at NASA (1999)

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