Stupid Amiga Tricks

From: ghldbrd_at_ccp.com <(ghldbrd_at_ccp.com)>
Date: Thu Jun 10 16:17:21 2004

Sellam,

The A1000 had that kickstart image on flyppy because it was rushed to
market, and the BIOS core wasn't compeletely finished. IT was decided to
do this, and send floppy disks with the updates as they became available.

The A1000 only worked with the Kickstart/Workbench 1.x until the ROM chips
were made standard with the later machines. Some hackers have put in a
512k WOM and loaded in a 2.04 image off of floppy, or just made a board
with a socket and a ROM.

The phono connector should have been in color on the A1000, only it and
the AGA Amigas had composite video ouput with NTSC color encoding. The
A500/2000/3000 had a jack but only in monochrome, no color information at
all.

Another great bugaboo was the serial and parallel ports on the A1000 were
opposite sex to the PC standard. This was fixed on later models.

The Amiga was just enough different to be a pain in the butt to the normal
PC thinking technician, and that helped Commodore loose the market. Lack
of vendor support was another burr in the saddle. AT first ahead of the
technology curve, they slipped behind in the 90's and management milked
Commodore of its operationg capital.

But once you learn some of the quirks and traits of the Amiga OS, you find
a great system for the learning challenged. There is a reason they called
the kernal Intuition.

Gary Hildebrand
ST. Joseph, MO


>
> You know, everytime I have to setup a computer other than an Apple, I'm
> reminded of just how lame every other computer is.
>
> So I pull an Amiga 1000 off the shelf and proceed to set it up since I'm
> making no progress with the 500 and time is being lost. It still doesn't
> work with any of the video cables I have, but I was able to get a cable
> splitter to connect the composite output to the inputs on the back of the
> display. Now I have color. But, now I have no boot disk. The disk that
> booted on the 500 won't boot on the 1000. I have a Workbench v1.2 disk
> that works on the 500 and the 2000, but not the 1000. What a joke.
>
> You know, there's probably a really good reason why Commodore and Atari
> are gone but Apple is still around.
>
> --
>
> Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer
> Festival
Received on Thu Jun 10 2004 - 16:17:21 BST