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The Amiga has a wide range of powerful applications. Office software and desktop publishing, music, painting and animation, 3D rendering, word processing and spreadsheets, accounting, internet applications, programming and open development... just to mention a few.
Amiga applications can't compete with modern PC software, however, each category of program will have some tasks that are simply done faster, more efficiently or more creatively with the Amiga. Aminet is good starting point for Amiga applications.
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For an internal hard disk, you can use any 2.5" laptop HDD. To connect it you need a 44-pin cable, which can be purchased from AmigaKit. Kickstart 3.0/3.1 only takes advantage of 4 GB, but this can be solved with IDEfix for example. With OS 3.5 and later you can use bigger drives as long as your boot partition is below the 4 GB limit.
It's also possible to use a standard 3.5" HDD externally along with a 2.5 <-> 3.5 adapter cable (also known as 40-44 pin adapter).
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There is an excellent piece of software called WHDLoad. WHDLoad has install scripts for thousands of games and demos. Once you've installed the WHDLoad base package onto your hard disk, all you need is the original disks and a WHDLoad installer for your chosen game. Furthermore, WHDLoad game installers usually fix bugs and compatibility issues that stop the games working on upgraded Amigas, as well as offering the ability to quit back to workbench without rebooting. WHDLoad and installers can both be downloaded from the WHDLoad Support Page.
Be warned though that WHDLoad installed games often require a bit more RAM than the same game running from disk, so it is best to at least have some extra fast RAM installed!
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Yes, but OS3+ and atleast 6Mb is strongly recommended. You can use almost any PC-compatible serial modem, but you will need a 9-pin -> 25-pin adapter to plug it into your Amiga port. For a nice Amiga internet experience I would recommend Miami (TCP/IP), the browser IBrowse and Yam for email. AmIRC may also come handy for IRC addicts.
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If you're aiming for broadband, you'll need to attach a network card. What sort of network card depends on which Amiga you have:
Amiga 500
It is very tricky to add ethernet to an A500, but not impossible. Some ethernet cards were produced for the A500, such as the AEM-500. It is also possible to add a Zorro-II network card with a Zorro backplane.
Amiga 600
You can add a PCMCIA network card to an A600 or A1200. There are drivers on Aminet for 3com and CNet based cards. Note that you can ONLY use 16-bit PCMCIA cards, NOT cardbus! Not all cards will be compatible, so consult the documentation for the drivers on Aminet. If you are not sure, AmigaKit sell cards guaranteed to work, with drivers and support for Amiga users.
Amiga 1200
You can add a PCMCIA network card, just like with the 600 (see Amiga 600), but there are two further options. You can add a Zorro backplane and use a Zorro network card (See A2000/3000/4000), or a PCI backplane such as the Mediator, and use a standard PCI network card.
Amiga 2000/3000/4000
These machines all come with Zorro slots as standard, so you can use a Zorro network card such as the X-Surf, AmigaNET, or Ariadne. The 3000 and 4000 can also be expanded with a PCI backplane such as the Mediator or Promethius, so that you can use a standard PCI card.
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With the introduction of Workbench 3.0, several screenmodes were added that should work with most SVGA monitors. You can hook up the Amiga with a simple adaptor. However, to configure your Amiga to use these modes you'll have to first connect it to your TV, and copy the DBLPAL, DBLNTSC, or Multiscan modes from "Monitors" on your storage disk (or storage directory on your hard disk) to "Devs:Monitors", and select the relevant mode in screenmode prefs.
Note, however, that most games will still use 15KHz PAL or NTSC modes which won't work on an SVGA monitor! To display these games and other software that require 15Khz modes, you'll have to add a scandoubler. These can be quite expensive and difficult to find.
Finally, it is possible to add a graphics card to most Amigas to make use of proper SVGA modes. Some of those (like the Picasso-IV) even include built in scandoublers and monitor switchers, so you can view both Picasso-IV and native video on the same monitor. Most, however, do not include this functionality, and you may have to use a seperate monitor, or scandoubler and switch, to view native modes still.
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The Amiga was always an enthusiast's machine and there was a constant friendly rivalry between many talented sections of the Amiga-using community. Parties were held where demos were exhibited, demos being music-video sequences crammed into 1 or 2 Mb of RAM, and stored on a couple of 880k disks.
Demos were always an exercise in making the Amiga perform amazing graphical feats, showing off programming talent in an extremely enjoyable way. Popular demos spread quickly around the world, copied from disk to disk by Amiga users.
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They are compressed archives, just like ZIP and RAR are for PCs. LHA and LZH are older compression methods, while LZX is a newer, better and faster. To extract any of these three archive formats on your Amiga (real or emulated) I recommend downloading LZX.
LHA and LZH files can be extracted in Windows using WinRAR or PicoZip.
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OCS (Original Chip Set) was used in the early A1000/A500/A2000 models. Later machines such as A500+/A600/A3000 used ECS (Enhanced Chip Set). ECS featured a few extra video modes but overall it was very similar to OCS.
The newest Amiga models A1200/A4000/CD32 use AGA (Advanced Graphic Architecture). It was a great improvement with many new screenmodes and allowing a lot more colours on screen. Software written for AGA will not work on OCS/ECS machines.
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In the early 1980s Jay Miner, along with other Atari staffers, started to create a new 68000-based games console, codenamed Lorraine. To raise money for the Lorraine project, Amiga designed and sold joysticks and cartridges for consoles such as Atari 2600 and ColecoVision. |
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