SPiFF wrote: ↑Fri Jul 30, 2021 1:05 pm
I was looking at the Warp, but for me it is a step too far with RTG, wifi, ARM co-processor and other stuff. At that point, it is not really an Amiga. At least to me. Just run EMU or Mister or something else. I feel the same way about PiStrom and Vampire.
Yeah especially the PiStorm where you actually run an emulator on a completely separate OS... At that point it's no longer an Amiga 500, even though the whole thing fits in the original case and you have most of the original hardware still sitting there.
Then on the other hand I'm sure some people will feel the same way about this picture of me using my A1200 that I posted the other day:
The difference here is that it's all I/O that's been added. And the Amiga does run the USB stack software. I think for a late and expandable model like the A1200 this is not unreasonable, and I do actually think an FPGA-based recreation of the Amiga with more modern I/O would be the way to preserve the legacy as older Amigas fall by the wayside and the I/O situation becomes harder and harder to manage. (See
this post on my blog about that.)
However... sitting on the next desk is that Amiga 1200, and if I boot holding "2" then the 68060 card is disabled (yikes, just 2 MB chip mem, way too authentic!) and I can of course use the regular video out rather than the Individsion AGA MK3 HDMI, unplug the PCMCIA network card and use a normal Amiga mouse. Then the only non-stock part is the CF card that I use as an HDD. And even that is in theory not entirely period inaccurate, as CF cards were introduced in 1994.
I do think things are different for the older machines, though. If I had an Amiga 1000, I wouldn't dream of adding a bunch of upgrades. Probably a newer mouse and an external Gotek drive to keep my sanity, but that's it. And of course run WB 1.x.
A big part of the difference is probably that I upgraded that 1200 (and my 3000) over a good number of years when those were my daily drivers, so to me those upgrades don't seem unnatural.