INTRO to my Amiga retro development environment!

[sorcerer_see]

Introduction: my Amiga retro development environment

The past week I have been entangled in setting up an emulated Amiga system do do my programming in, and for. These were not compatibility issues like I had when I was trying to make gaming work smoothly on Linux, on this laptop, of which the hardware is not well supported for Linux.

I am running Windows 10 these days, to be certain that the basic tools that I need for my work, as well as games that I choose to play, are always working effortless on this picky laptop of mine. Fedora Linux was also working effortless in regards to regular applications, but games were a hell to get running. I only managed to run 25% of the games that  I tried, and only with great effort. Granted, these were games made for Windows, which is the case for most games, since the market share for Windows is so much greater

Amiga emulation, however, is surprisingly well supported. By a big community of retro gamers and dedicated retro developers. The software I am using to emulate Amiga is WinUAE, a topnotch emulator. Everything in this emulator is working perfectly. It is simply I who has to learn how to work with it.

Amiga was a very popular OS in the eighties and beginning of the nineties. It ran on the Motorola 68000 architecture range of processors, where as MS DOS and Windows ran on the 8086 architecture range of processors. Current Intel and AMD processors are still based on that architecture but in a very evolved form.

Besides Amiga, in those days, also Atari, Tandy, Apple, and many other microcomputers ran on 68000 architecture processors.

Developing on Amiga stimulates my creativity and learning greatly because I have a passion for retro computing. As a child I was mesmerized by the

• Commodore64 (1982 / Motorola 6502 8bit CPU / 64KB RAM)

and later owned an

• Atari 130XE (1985 / Motorola 6502 8bit CPU / 128KB RAM)

and again later an

• Atari 520ST (1985 / Motorola 68000 16/32bit CPU / 512KB RAM)
• Atari 1040ST (1986 / Motorola 68000 16/32bit CPU /1MB RAM)

My best friends at the time owned an

• Atari 600XL (1983 / Motorola 6502 / 8bit CPU / 16KB RAM)
• Atari 800XL (1983 / Motorola 6502 / 8bit CPU / 48KB RAM and later 64KB RAM)
• Sinclair ZX Spectrum (1984 / Zilog Z80 / 8bit CPU / 16KB and later 48KB RAM)

It is hard to convey the magic surrounding computing in those days. It was a niche activity conducted by people who were really deep into the technical nitty gritty of computing. People were also incredibly creative to get the most out of the very little processing power that these machines had. I feel all in all computing in those days involved way more depth, passion and mysticism than it holds these days.