Amiga Day 2

So it's officially day 2 of my retro-amiga-weekend-love-in.

Here's some of my initial observations,


* The Indivision AGA/LCD combo is great but I find that my panel takes a few seconds to re-adjust itself when switching resolutions. I really want to try a VGA CRT next just to see the difference.

* The euro keyboard takes a little getting used to although the feel itself is very good. There are some strange blank keys which I need to remap. One is by the shift key which I always hit by accident and the other is near the return key.

* It's quite easy to farg up the configuration and have the amiga not boot by just doing a simple change. Thankfully the newer 3.x ROMs have a feature to boot without the startup script so you can just get in quickly and revert back. Always back up your configuration files before making changes!

* AmigaKit has pre-installed OS3.9 for me but I'm not sure what is original and what has been added. There seems to be a nifty dock on the bottom and I found that a better shell had been installed (Vince's?).

* Working with AmigaOS reminds me of how computing has become very appliance like in our day to day lives. It's good and bad because nobody really has a good idea of how everything works in today's modern operating systems. We just hope and pray that it doesn't break and if things get bad enough, you just reinstall or revert to a backup (easy to do with VMWare).

In the early days of MSDOS and Windows, you really had to know what you were doing in order to get things straight. I remember having to make intricate diagrams of which hardware cards were using particular interrupts, Base IO addresses and DMA. It was a difficult task but there wasn't much room for error. You had to know a lot about the hardware and software to get things running. It kept the layman from messing with things because it would inevitably break if they did. Now-a-days, everybody is an expert and I think part of the reason is that it's so easy just to click through installation screens without having even the slightest idea of what you are doing. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that things are easier and I would not want to go back to those config.sys/autoexec.bat/jumpers/dip-switch days. But I wouldn't mind a cleaning out of all these mediocre-wanna-be-techs that have infiltrated the industry. It's one of the reasons that I no longer give out technical advice or assistance because A) It's under-appreciated and B) "Joe", your Mom's friend at work will convince your Mom that what you did wasn't right and that he has a better program/system, etc.

I didn't mean to get off on a rant, but working with the Amiga really means you have to think and be clear about what you are doing. You have to understand what's going on if you want this machine to work. I was thoroughly enjoying the experience and having to type in commands and edit configuration files and research command line arguments. Call me crazy, but I'm having quite a bit of fun trying to figure these things out. I'm still very much at a novice level when it comes to AmigaOS but I look forward to really understanding and getting the Amiga to function like I want it to.