I can't believe it: The second memory expansion card has a sticker on it saying. "Kupke - Entwicklung & Vertrieb" which translates to "Kupke - Development & Distribution" and the phone number starts with the area code of my home town (City of Dortmund, Germany). Maybe I should give it a try, dial the number and see if this company still exists ;-) It's a little crazy sitting in Dortmund in Germany in 2022 and watching a video from the 8-bit guy from Texas, US with a piece of old hardware from exactly this german city. :-)
Nope. The company was closed in 1994 according to Northdata. The fun thing about this is that many hardware extensions made for the Amiga or Atari ST originated in Germany.
Its also worth remembering that while the original Amiga did a fairly poor job of emulating a contemporary PC, the PC couldn't usefully emulate an Amiga at all until the late 90s/early 2000s.
Exactly, which is why these things bug so much at times. If you wanted/needed a PC, buy a PC. It's like buying a Ferrari and complaining that it's a terrible mini-van. The software systems were never intended to replace a full PC, but provide some compatibility for that spreadsheet you needed to work on at home without having to necessarily own another computer. Sometimes it was a lame excuse for the marketing department to claim some kind of IBM compatible BS too.
@@digitalarchaeologist5102 Interesting counterpoint: There was a brief period of a few months where the fastest Apple Mac money could buy was an Amiga 2000 with a GVP 030 card and a software emulator.
@@Wheagg They essentially bank on someone freaking out and caving to the demands. Throw out say, idk, 1K claims. And even if only 25-50 stick, that's some cash flowing in. Throw out 10s of thousands and you can see how this scam can quickly increase in cash flow
Maybe it's worth mentioning that the Sidecar, like the Amiga 2000A, was developed by Commodore Germany in Braunschweig. The Amiga was extremely widespread in Germany, unlike the Atari ST, and the Amiga 500 was basically replacing the C64. I had an internal memory expansion (4.5MB!) that just stuck between the 68k and the motherboard. Left room for the 250MB SCSI harddisk :) I love the Lorraine, and it was my Kickstart 😉 to become a pro software developer.
I completely disagree on the Atari ST not being widespread in Germany. I grew up in Germany - in the South - and the ratio Atari ST to Amiga was about 4:1 if not higher until about 1990. The ST was significantly cheaper while most of the games looked and played pretty much the same. The Amiga - with the Amiga 500 coming down in price - caught up to the ST in the early 1990s at a time when most people already started to switch to MS-DOS systems. In these days, many of my friends and myself also had an interest in electronic music and synthesizers and the Atari ST - with its native MIDI ports and pro software - had an additional advantage over the Amiga. A big selling point of the ST was also the amazing quality monochrome monitor which was easy on the eyes and great to work with for early DTP applications. Many a Gymnasium Newsletter in the late 1980s has been made with Calamus... During the abitur I remember many parents buying Atari STs for their kids for this simple reason alone. So in short, I think the Atari ST was much more widespread in Germany compared to the Amiga for the longest time. If you looked at software in computer stores in Munich in 1989 the Atari ST section was twice the size. But of course it always depends on who was "in your scene" around you :)
I'm just a bit too young to experience the Commodore/Amiga era. But I'm from (an still living in) Braunschweig/Brunswick. I know that commodore has manufactured here. But it reminded me again as I saw the stylized coat of arms on the card at 11:50. That is still used by the local government today! 🤯
The dad of a friend used to work for Commodore in Braunschweig back then… i remember him having a Amiga in a large tower, amazing fast at that time… Never seen that Amiga Computer ever again, he just called it an A4000!?
@@paleosetimagazine7481 South Germany here. 100 "Abiturienten" in '90-'92, about 20 Amigas, 1 single ST. In a 500m radius around my home, there were 5 Amigas, no ST. Also, there were around 1.5 million Amiga in Germany, the ST had 2 million world wide, most of them out of Europe... lt was a great time! Looking around the neighborhood, with everyone doing intros and demos in assembler. It was hard to get information about coding the custom chips of the Amiga back then (no internet...), but the neighborhood improved in intros, later demos. Knowledge was also spread on copy partys that happened quite every second weekend in a ~30km radius. Oh the times :)
@@maedsen Not exactly rare, but few of them were made as this was in the last days of Commodore. Yes, the 4000T, coupled with the Newtek Video Toaster, was just the best low-cost video editing system. It's a shame they couldn't keep it going, with its 68040 processor, it was fast. Later expansions included the '060, and those were very rare indeed!
You should be able to use your game disks to plug all you want- it's your channel and games, and you have so many different versions to test on different computers.
Not to mention the fact that his games appear to use all of the features (graphics, sound, etc.), of whatever machine or configuration available to him. That's a GREAT way to test evenly across platforms.
Well... Using Planet X3 to test out a computer is a good idea, I say. Your game has a wide support, and you know how it is meant to be run. And it works well even with a very modest computer. You can not help you programmed such a versatile game. 😉
Yeah exactly! If something doesn't look or feel right, he'd know, and hes is more likely to understand what kind of compatibility issues are happening.
I love this review of the original 1060 sidecar. Thank you. This thing seemed like pure magic when it came out. Being able to run an IBM PC in a window while boing demo and everything else ran in the background made the Amiga seem preposterously good. My town didn’t have a store selling the Amiga so i had to drive 80 miles to see it. They had the sidecar setup and everything but it was stuck in a back corner of the store. It was sad because then I realized Commodore couldn’t market their way out of a wet paper sack. The Amiga was generations ahead of anything else in that store.
Wow! I watch a ton of retro pc content, but finally someone has mentioned "Castle"! This was the ONLY dos game I really played as a kid. I was born in '89, but inherited my grandpa's old machine for a while, and played this game to death. Finally-- thanks, bro. Lol
Played this game a lot as a kid in the late 80s on my dad's Amstrad XT. Kids nowadays can't believe how primitive something like Castle is - it might as well be banging rocks together for fun!
@@sedme0 My highschool Earth Science teacher had WAY too much fun banging rocks together. He opened up the first class by dropping a soda-can-sized rock on the floor, which it hit with a loud crash, breaking into several chunks. He looked up with a maniacal grin and announced, "I like rocks."
Yes! A video of Amiga 1000! This brings back memories… I have two prototype devices for the A1000. A flat bed scanner, and a 2 MB memory expansion. The latter made my A1000 a 2,5 MB computer. :-)
I had 2.5 megs of ram and a sidecar. In the sidecar I installed two 30 meg hard disks. I partitioned them to be 40 for Amiga and 20 for dos. In the ram I set a recoverable ram drive, which loaded the workbench and survived rebooting. This made the Amiga fly, keeping floppy access to a minimum. In 1990 I loaded Windows 3.0 from about a dozen 720kb floppies. I had an 'HP Paintjet' colour inkjet, NEC P7 printer, 'Perfect Sound' audio capture, 'Digiview' image capture, and a small scanner [a bit like a large mouse]. I really spent a lot of time and money on that system!
I used a Sidecar with a HDD controller which allowed me to have 2x40MB HDDs in another external enclosure that I built from an old IBM external full height 360k 5.25” floppy case. The software to control the sidecar was called “Janus” and let me partition the external drives for use both in the IBM and also for the Amiga. I had a custom workbench boot disk that transferred the boot sequence across to a partition on the HDD as it started. This not only sped up the boot but meant that I had pretty well all of the machine running from the HDD, making the machine dramatically faster for a lot of tasks. Some simple scripting let me load various games onto the HDD and this was great for some of the multi-disk games that were out at the time - they booted straight away and never asked for a drive swap. I wish I still had the setup and didn’t loan it to my ex sister-in-law, never to be seen again.
My 40GB HD took up the drive bay of the Sidecar. God that Janus software was dog awful though. Mine was so flaky to get started, but once it did it was terrific. I wish I could get it working again, if only to see my homework from 1988. ;-)
Never had the original Amiga myself. A friend did though and I remember how amazed I was when I saw him play games like Marble Madness and such on it. I was in high school at the time and a classmate who also had the original Amiga made some of his school projects on it, while the rest of us had to work with the Nord-100 terminals. At the same time we had two PC/XT's in the back of the classroom and they couldn't even get close to what that Amiga could. Eventually got the A500 myself and the rest is history.
Isn't it crazy that all of this older hardware can be emulated with pretty much 100% accuracy and speed in software now? The only things hard to emulate accurately are analogue chips like the old SID audio chips.
Agreed. I'd love to see this Amiga 1000 fully loaded out with all the RAM expanders, the sidecar, and four disc drives. Oh, and a joystick, just because. The whole kit and kaboodle. I wonder if it's even possible to hook all that up onto the BUS at once.
I’m glad you use Planet X3 as a demonstration game! Planet X3 is amazing and it’s the perfect game to use as standardized demonstration software. The trolls who are mad that you use Planet X3 for demonstration purposes are just jealous of your success, so please don’t listen to them! Your actual subscribers, by and large, have no issue with you using Planet X3 at all! So please don’t feel the need to explain yourself, these toxic trolls don’t deserve the attention, or even the time of day!
Show me the comment? I guess David makes the mistake of Techmoan etc. - at their scale a 1 or 2 comments out of hundreds is fringe and non-representative. And acknowledging they exist is only going to feed the troll.
I just figured 8-Bit Guy wrote Planet X3 so he'd have something to demo on early PCs that wasn't Avoid the Noid :P But no seriously he added a bunch of lesser-used graphics modes that pretty much only X3 supports so it's outright *necessary* for any sort of obscure IBM PC/compatible testing
@@Okurka. Bro you can't buy like any of this software anymore. Why even complain if it's pirated. The authors wouldn't profit it you bought it used anyways.
Castle Adventure is the game we had on our 286 when I was a kid, and I've never known the name of it and have been looking for it for the last 25 years!! Finally!
Also had a Sidecar (actually connected to my A500 - with the back side facing forward). I added a hard disk to the Sidecar having two partitions: one for PC Dos and one for the Amiga (the Amiga sill had to boot from floppy but I could launch applications and access may data from the hard disk). Also had a video card with monochrome monitor for the Sidecar. Extremely versatile combination.
I bought an Amiga in '85 and the guy at the computer store promised the sidecar was coming out "soon". I wasn't aware that it ever came out. I did buy the bridgeboard with the 8086 processor, but by that time, the emulated CGA graphics were so outdated that I regretted paying for it. I also bought a kit for the A1000 that that put the kickstart in ROMs inside the A1000. It made it a lot more elegant.
I did love the PC emulation Software back in the day. Friends learned Turbo Pascal 3.14 at school, and it worked perfectly on my Amiga, so I could help them. Nice memories, thank you!
More or less the same here. We had XTs and 286s at school and mostly Amigas and STs at home (and some older Schneider and Atari boxes as well). And we had to work with Pascal and C for school assignments at the time. I tried using KickPascal and Aztec C at home on my Amiga at first, but the whole hassle of bringing those files to school, reading incompatible disks, converting and finding out that libraries are not directly compatible weren't worth it (no internet or email in those days). At last I just fired up PC Transformer and worked with Borland's Turbo Pascal and Turbo C. And for those tasks Transformer was enough.
Thank you for your videos, your videos are the ones that got me into old/retro/vintage computers at 14! I love using emulators, writing BASIC on a C64, old windows 9x to XP systems, and I really want to get a classic Mac or a PET
Before I sold my Amiga 4000, I had a A2386SX BridgeBoard and Emplant card, allowing Windows/DOS, Macintosh System 7 and Amiga Workbench running all at once!
Loved this episode! When I was in college in 1989, the guy down the hall had an A1000. He boasted about its PC compatibility, so I gave him a copy of Norton SI to run. Just as you discovered, it came back with a pathetically low SI value. Rather amusing. Thanks for this fascinating trip back in time.
@@customsongmaker nobody cared to do that. People needed specific PC programs to run. compilers, applications. Examples in the application business world were Lotus 1-2-3 and Word Perfect, nothing came close to that on the amiga by light years apart.
What an awesome machine, thank you for the trip back to the 90's! Would be nice to see the 386/486 versions of those pc sidecars if can get your hands on them! Thanks again for the amazing content.
These vids take me back a long way and remind me of good gaming together with good creative software on the Amiga, no matter which model it was, and the thought of 2MB of RAM is laughable now but it set you apart from other people back in the day until everyone had the most RAM they could fit!
Thanks for putting this stuff out for us...I wasn't born yet by the time the 8-Bit era had essentially come to a close (even 5.25" floppies were a rarity by the time I ever laid eyes on a computer in-person), so it's fascinating to see how the PCs I grew up using evolved from stuff like this.
“People complain that I plug my game” Ah, people, spoken like they’ve never made or tried to self publish a game. Man has the right to do what he wants, literally his channel
Someone once said (and it may have been The 8 Bit Guy) "It's my channel and I can do what I want." I've adopted this saying and state it in my Intro on my channel.
with all the historical artifacts,, this should be converted into a museum seriously. Your knowledge is amazing. Something I could imagine visiting Dave.. thanks for your many great videos. Stay safe.
Had the 386sx bridgeboard card. It was great since it was essentially full PC board using the shared amiga resources, though the best way was to get a dedicated ISA video card. Had a combo video card that also did 16 bit sound with joystick ports. So at that point all you were really sharing was the keyboard/mouse and drive system. Ran everything full speed as the original metal if it were standalone.
The Amiga was so superior to any other PC of the time period. The Atari ST was not bad, I always had both - but it was no Amiga. It took more than 5 years for the PC to catch it after the Amiga ceased production.
Both are certainly classics, can't wait to see David cover the ST, Falcon and Atari's other classic computers. I'd like to see a modern A1000 come to market someday.
But then a Wolfenstein 3D came along and murdered the Amiga with one punch. The elaborate 2D hardware was a dead end from the beginning. 68k was also more a curse than a blessing.
That AST 6-pack card was probably the most popular single upgrade for the original IBM PC -- it contained literally everything you needed that the PC didn't come with originally, and it all fit in one single slot. When I went to college in September of 1988, a family friend gave me his old IBM PC and it had an AST 6-pack card in it.
This brought back memories of using my A500 with a KCS powerboard to emulate a PC, I used it to compile COBOL & Dbase stuff I was doing in my college computing course. I still have it somewhere & the A500.
My first computer with a mouse & gui was an A500, such a huge step up from a ZX Spectrum. I didn't know Commodore did a 5.25" floppy drive for the Amiga, I can see why the 5.25" was rare as the PC was transitioning to 3.5" disks around the late 1980s. I did hear of the sidecar back then but not in action, still got happy memories of my A500
Brings back some memories... I had a 1000 but eventually ended up with a 3000 with the A2386 BridgeBoard. That was a 25MHz 386SX IIRC. Worked well enough and a bit more elegant than the Sidecar. BTW did the Action Replay work on the 1000?
That card is great because you can throw a 486SLC on it. Pretty much all A500 expansions work on the A1000 (the bus was retconned as "Zorro I"), but you have to be careful as a lot of them assume that they will be supported from the bottom by the same desk the A500 is on. If you plug them into the A1000 they can hang in space and cause physical damage from flexing.
@@NozomuYume Our Hard Drive that we had for our A1000 was meant for an A500. So we had a custom passthrough cable made up so we can sit the drive on top of the computer & link the 2 with the cable.
@@svenkarlsen2702 Well it's more back to front than upside down. If we were to plug in our Hard drive directly, it the drive would be facing backwards. So the cable we used had a 90 degree twist so the drive could face us.
Action replay did work on the Amiga 1000, you did need to have something to sit underneath it to support it, most Amiga 500 expansions worked too but again you had to support it and the back of the device would be facing the front.. e.g. my GVP Impact Series II plugs into my A1000 fine but the power and SCSI ports are facing you and the LED's and game/isolation switch is facing the back of the A1000
As slow as they might be, I bet those emulation options saved the day for many Amiga owners that needed to line up their home setup to whatever MS-DOS applications they were using at school or work. Expecting more than simple applications like WordStar or Multiplan wouldn't have been reasonable. Considering how closed each ecosystem was at the time, Commodore was very ingenious.
You should always plug your game, you worked hard on it and ported it so that it works well as test software. That is truly an achievement. Love your content.
Oh Dude, you're missing the best part!!!! The Janus sidecar software let you access a standard (cheaper) PC HD disk in the Sidecar!!!! I had a 40MB one in mine, that took the place of the drive bay, partitioned 20MB for PC and 20MB for Amiga. You could probably get it working with the HD emulator in the Sidecar you seem to have. I also had a 7Mhz 286 accelerator in one of the slots. It would slightly glitch the CGA graphics on the Amiga but would run fine through a smaller monitor I had sitting on the A1000. I remember using it predominantly for programming in Pascal in my computing class. I had 2MB internal RAM too, and didn't need an external RAM expander.
@@Daijyobanai Ha Ha thanks. Of course it was 2MB memory and 20MB partitions on the HD (fixed it). 😆 It seemed like a huge spec at the time. It just shows how far we've come. 😀 As I currently sit here at home on a machine with 64GB memory with access to 20TB of HD space(and still running out) I guess it wouldn't be going out on a limb to say we'll be talking in Petabytes 30 years from now. 🤓 Our setups with multiple screens of unfathomable resolution on machines practically running an infinity times faster would've been beyond a dream in the 90s let alone 80s. And yet I miss that simpler (yet more complex) age. It's one of the reasons I think you should only update your classic machine only so far or that era's magic can no longer be appreciated.
Man, I used to use an A.Max back in the day at work as the company used Macs for the internal mail system. I had it for some time on an Amiga 4000 Tower. (It had a low serial number)
Thank you for sharing with us the Amiga Side Car... I always wondered about them even though I didn't buy one... Back in the day I thought the side car for the Amiga was a kludge... and seeing it here confirms my suspicion. It was cheaper just a few years later to buy a 386 with more memory and running much faster than the side car. When I purchased my Amiga 1000 they said there were PC software emulators coming out... then they said those were disappointing, so they introduced the Side Car... at first I was excited but quickly I realized it wasn't really as good as I thought... It didn't take it long for the Side Car to show it's age... The Side Car really wasn't upgradeable. And as the PCs evolved, it wouldn't be long before the side car would turn into a paperweight. I know the dream was for Amiga users to have the best of both worlds... and I believed in that dream! The Amiga's graphics and sound was easily 10 years more advanced than the first PCs with their CGA (Crummy Graphics Adapter) video.... EGA (Even Crummier) LOL VGA and a decent sound card is where I stopped making jokes as I said... wow (unimpressed) you finally arrived, what took you guys so fricken long? Imagine if Commodore were still making machines during that evolution... with a 10+ year lead we'd probably have 4K video back in the 2000's. Do you remember 720i, 720P, 1080i, 1080P nonsense? LOL Consumers had to go through so many changes in media, format, cables, TV's, etc. ... it was nuts I want to dust off my Amiga 1000 and give it some love... I really miss that old computer, good memories! But I'm afraid to turn it on and have a power supply blow up or the disk not work... I have the expanded memory, external Floppy, and the monitor... Wow! it was a fantastic machine! 🙂
I had a 7mghz 286 Accelerator in my Sidecar. Which was okay for the era. The thing the 8-bit guy missed was that the sidecar let you put in a cheap PC Hard disk that was accessible from the Amiga. I too have started to re-experience my A1000. My floppies don't work any more, so good luck with a Kickstart disk. Skip getting a Gotek or kickstart ROM upgrade and take a look at the PiStorm add-on which kinda negates all those and is an accelerator as well.
I used the IBM Transformer PC emulator on my Amiga 1000 in the mid 80s in college to be able to do my lab work assignments at home. It worked great! It was a bit slower, but did the job. Our college had just bought all new IBM PS/2 computers which were a brand new model at the time and included a 3 1/2" disk drive on them, which the professors were unfamiliar with on a PC. I was able to take the 3 1/2" disks home and read them directly on my Amiga's disk drive. Some of the programs we used were DBase III Plus, Word Star & Lotus 123. Transformer, which came out in 1985 on the Amiga 1000 introduced me to the world of software emulation of actually emulating not only other brands of computers, later on arcade machines with MAME, synthesizers with the VST format, consoles such as the Atari 2600 with Stella and much more. I was blown away by the emulation concept in 1985, and envisioned all kinds of things for it which later on did became reality eventually. Even in the mid 80s, the Amiga also introduced me to MIDI software synthesis long before VST's came out, and even emulation of the Ensoniq Mirage sampling keyboard which I bought an emulator program for in the 80s and could read the Mirage disks on my Amiga and playback the sounds in my bands using any MIDI keyboard. Today, I'm still big time into software emulation. I've built 4 MAME machines (most close to 25 years ago) using real early 1980s arcade cabinets, original controls, and RGB CRT 19" arcade monitors. Even a color vector monitor and a b&w vector monitor MAME machine. Today, all of my classic computers such as my Amiga's, (I had 4), Apple ]['s, C-64's and classic consoles run in one of my MAME machines with an authentic 19" CRT RGB monitor for even clearer picture than the composite output some of them could only produce. I've collected synthesizers since the mid 80s and have a bunch of them. I started off with a Casio CZ-101 to use with my Amiga mostly to use as a MIDI controller for the soft synths, but I also loved the CZ's sounds. Today, almost all of my classic synths such as my CZ's, Korg M1, ARP analog, Roland's, Yamaha's and much more exist on my laptop as VST's. I still have 13 keyboards, but mostly use the VST versions now. I have the Amiga to thank for introducing me to software emulation, really the first major system to do it. And I'm still a big fan of software emulation over FPGA hardware solutions. Software seems to be much more developed, and it's often free. Software emulation of the Amiga 1000 & Atari 2600 are even cycle accurate. Whatever flaws it has as generally eventually corrected and I know people that switched from FPGA solutions like Mister back to software emulation both because it was sometimes better, and because......it's often free.
I worked at a Software Etc in 1989/90 and one of my co-workers was an Amiga fan. He brought in a piece of hardware with Macintosh ROM chips and demonstrated in to me on the Amiga 500 we had in store. I had known about and played with Amigas (even the 1000) at stores in the past but this guy really sold me on it. We didn't sell computers (would've been nice to get an employee discount) so I ended up buying one at a Montgomery Wards, of all places, because they gave me a credit card.
In the early 90s I used to write my school coursework in plain text files in an emacs editor and save them too 720KB FAT formatted DD disks using Crossdos file system handlers that came with AmigaOS. Then I'd load the files into word on the library PCs in school and format the text and print it.
Very, very interesting, even though I had never used that particular computer, and never heard of the peripherals. It's usually a good day when David posts, and today is no exception.
the Amiga program CrossDos can read/write pc floppies on an Amiga.. actually the Amiga floppy drive is more flexible at how to move its internals then a pc drive. It's kinda weird to me that you make an Amiga video but it covers more IBM MS-DOS stuff :P But hey, it's your channel and you do you! ;) It's nice tho to see a Amiga MS-DOS compatible things from history, as this comes before CrossDos came out in 1989 (i guess?)
Love it when we expand 16bit machines with good upgraded ram. It was ahead of the time in multitasking. The upgraded 060 cpu and newer kickstarts helped updated storage devices to be used. A4000 was the best but even a A1200 packed a punch with a 030 chip.
Great video. Always in anticipation of the next video. Nice there Geekbits got a mention. I have my podcaster set to stun when the next episode arrives. :)
I used to run an Amiga 3000 which ran ShapeShifter for 68K Macintosh emulation and had a GoldenGate 386SX bridge board and VGA card installed, even into the later 90s I used to blow minds when demonstrating applications when I'd casually switch between Windows 3.1, System 7.5 and AmigaOS due to the multitasking nature of things. Of course Windows 95 and Mac PPC software becoming the the norm made it a bit old hat. Being a bridge board it was much more integrated than the A1060 was allowing sharing of peripherals plugged into the Amiga such as printers and the internal drive, and as I mentioned you could use the ISA slots built into the A3000 for PC expansions like that VGA card. Powerful stuff for the time.
Great video. Brought back lots of great memories. I had a hard drive (huge device physically, super expensive for 20MB,) and memory expansion so they were both dangling off the side. They weren't the same size so needed items to wedge so they'd be the same size. Not very stable. If you hit the desk too hard the Amiga would crash. I also remember that first IBM emulator you showed. I used to run DbaseIII ok.
I used to use the ability to read 720k DOS disks all the time in Workbench 3. There was a driver called PC0 in, I believe the "devices" drawer(yes, drawer), and if you run it, it would add PC0:, which would read/write/format 720k DOS disks in DF0: to the desktop, if you had external drives, it would also had PC1: for DF1: etc. I used to use it to download WHDLoad(utility for installing floppy based games to hard disk) files to my dad's computer, put them on 720k floppies and use them on my Amiga to install my games to HD for faster loading.
The kludges we came up with back then are simply amazing. Whats crazier is how much these things cost! That was the equivalent to a $30K computer back then.
@@revivedfears A $55 Raspberry Pi4 runs circles around this. We all owe a huge debt of gratitude to the earliest tech buyers for essentially funding our cheap tech of today.
When I was doing my year of duty, I wrote a software for my officer's office. I programmed it on a Thomson PC XT (I don't remember the exact model but it was an 8086 running à 8 MHz with CGA color graphics), and the software ran in the office on an Amiga 2000 with the famous PC Zorro emulation board
I remember this device. I never pulled one apart, but I always suspected it was actually a fully self contained unit with passthrough to the Amiga, which is why the update of the display was fairly slow.
You should look into the EMPLANT emulator card, IIRC, it allow you tu run a PC and a Mac in the background, basically 3 systems in one - at the same time. I did play around with Amax, PCTask and Transformer back in the day and was amazed that i could read/write 720k disks, was easy to write stuff at home and bring disks in to school/work and print out things. There was also an emulator called CrossPC i think, never had that though.
I don't think he would abandon that channel. But during the last year he was busy with all kinds of projects, including building a new studio. Also, the topic of that channel (old toy pianos and to some extent old digital sound synthesizers) really doesn't seem to be that expansive so the unfortunate fact is, we might have to wait until he got some more topics to talk about.
I had an AMIGA 1000 back in Germany in 1986 with a sidecar added later, which I did real work on (on the PC side, the AMIGA was 95% used for gaming. I unfortunately had to sell it, and replaced it a few years later with an AMIGA 2000 and the A2088 card and the accompanying 5.25" drive. The A 2088 PC in that computer was used to do actual work on what later became a major commercial software product for National Instruments. The AMIGA (both the 1000 and 2000) taught me A LOT about software and hardware (all on my own and based on trial an error, as there was no computer store, library or user group anywhere near my home at the time). I have seen the Sidecar at Bo's house, and will check if he has an A2088 next time I get over there ...
I have the Amax. I used to run trivia bots on GEnie with it because the mac had the software to do it and the Amiga didn’t at the time. It felt downright dirty at the time to “downgrade” my A500 to run that software haha but I loved doing it. I don’t have the ROM chips you slide into it anymore.
I remember those. I used to have just about every model of Amiga ever produced. The only thing I didn't have was the older drive you showed towards the beginning of the video. I had the larger RAM expansion and a sidecar for the A500, 1000, & 1200. Amazingly that same sidecar works with the 4000 as well. It's just a little more fiddley to install. I remember that on mine I had to put a penny under the feet nearest to the computer to raise it up just enough to slide into place.
Loved this. When I went to college in 1990, I needed a PC, so I got the ATonce emulator for my a500. Could even do windows 3.1 and used the amiga memory, mouse and drives, with workbench in another window. Amazing stuff
Reminds me of my AMIGA 2000 i had. I got it from the dad of a friend whom worked at Commodore back then… some year later i wanted to test out MS-DOS and the same person whom given me the A2000 had just what was needed… a ‚PC Card‘ which was an entire PC in an Bus Card with 286 processor and an Tseng graphics card, which was put into the A2000 and made it a pc 😅
My favourite was a Hard Drive expansion I used to have on my Amiga 500. I forget what it was called now, but it was a really nice looking one where the case perfectly matched the style of the A500's. I miss that system the most I think. The Amiga was always my favourite computer whose multitasking was superior to faster PCs long after Commodore went bankrupt.
Awesome. At the time of introduction Transformer had an Norton SI rating of 0.2, and Sidecar was too expensive for anyone to really consider but because Commodore put in the effort to build it (albeit in their Germany office) it lead to the Bridgeboard and that was useful and impressive. I wasn't the only A2000 owner with one, and 20MB hardcard (accessible form the Amiga side btw) and like the Sidecar above an AST 6-Pak.
8:25 - for the B: drive you need to plug in the Amiga drive into the PC sidecar expansion. Does it work as a secondary drive for the Amiga when the expansion is not in use that way or do you need to move the cable to the Amiga’s own port?
I know there's the "exposure" aspect to using your own software in demos, but I always thought the best part of using software you wrote is that you know no one's going to copyright claim your footage, haha
Hi David! love it whenever a new 8bit guy episode gets pushed! Just wondering if you guys are continuing the podcast? it's been a small while since we had one and the topics were really really interesting.
@@silverhand7748 Well, I imagine he wouldn't advertise that podcast if he weren't planning on continuing it. I've only listened to the first few episodes, and I haven't checked when the last one was published, but I'm sure they have reasons to not releasing one in some time. I'm sure it'll eventually come back, though, sooner rather than later.
6:30 I'm not sure if anyone has commented about this already, but you don't necessarily _have_ to use full software rendering in emulation. With sufficient knowledge on both architectures, you can set up a program acting as a translation layer to convert graphics commands for one VDP/GPU to those that produce identical results with another VDP/GPU. That's why Bleem! was able to run N64 games so well on the Dreamcast and Y2K-era PCs-it converted Reality Co-Processor routines to, say, Voodoo 2 routines. I doubt these do that, though if the Motorola 68000 is freed up to just render video in the PC Sidecar, that'd certainly contribute to its relative speed.
Woah! GWBASIC. That's a blast from the past. My first job in '86/'87 was converting a specialist software company's PET software to PC via GWBASIC. That company's still going.
Back in the day I got a Vortex ATonce card. It plugged into the CPU socket and gave the Amiga 2 processors: a 68000 to replace the removed one and an Intel 286 for running PC programs. The speed was pretty decent for the day and I was able to run most of the PC software I needed for my studies. It would be great to review it on this channel... by the way I still have that Amiga and that card is still in it although I haven't been able to use it for many years having lost the software which made it run!
I can't believe it: The second memory expansion card has a sticker on it saying. "Kupke - Entwicklung & Vertrieb" which translates to "Kupke - Development & Distribution" and the phone number starts with the area code of my home town (City of Dortmund, Germany). Maybe I should give it a try, dial the number and see if this company still exists ;-)
It's a little crazy sitting in Dortmund in Germany in 2022 and watching a video from the 8-bit guy from Texas, US with a piece of old hardware from exactly this german city. :-)
Yeah the world is connected more than we think.
Nope. The company was closed in 1994 according to Northdata. The fun thing about this is that many hardware extensions made for the Amiga or Atari ST originated in Germany.
It is a little crazy. Wish it happened to me :p.
The best Amiga games th-cam.com/video/bfcNQteXC4A/w-d-xo.html Do you know these games? 😉 Poland = Quality.
Small world
Its also worth remembering that while the original Amiga did a fairly poor job of emulating a contemporary PC, the PC couldn't usefully emulate an Amiga at all until the late 90s/early 2000s.
Haha! Touche, IBM!
Exactly, which is why these things bug so much at times. If you wanted/needed a PC, buy a PC. It's like buying a Ferrari and complaining that it's a terrible mini-van. The software systems were never intended to replace a full PC, but provide some compatibility for that spreadsheet you needed to work on at home without having to necessarily own another computer. Sometimes it was a lame excuse for the marketing department to claim some kind of IBM compatible BS too.
@@digitalarchaeologist5102 Interesting counterpoint: There was a brief period of a few months where the fastest Apple Mac money could buy was an Amiga 2000 with a GVP 030 card and a software emulator.
@@xeroniris Absolutely. Used to be a badge of honour for Amiga owners. "The fastest Mac is an Amiga". :-)
since the Amiga was superior in hardware to a PC, the Amiga could emulate a PC in theory.
Planet X3 having a port for pretty much any system is a great way to compare their abilities!
"Does it run Planet X3?"
@@scythal I’ll do you run better
“can it run a operating system?”
@@scythal"Does it run PETSCII Robots?"
It's perfectly fine to plug your own game in equipment demos. You're ALMOST guaranteed to not get a DMCA claim...
Almost?
@@Wheagg yea
@@Wheagg various companies have been known to DMCA claim videos for no reason at all.
@@daemonspudguy lmao there is absolutely no way they'd get away with this one I'll tell you that, no matter how broken TH-cam is.
@@Wheagg They essentially bank on someone freaking out and caving to the demands. Throw out say, idk, 1K claims. And even if only 25-50 stick, that's some cash flowing in. Throw out 10s of thousands and you can see how this scam can quickly increase in cash flow
Maybe it's worth mentioning that the Sidecar, like the Amiga 2000A, was developed by Commodore Germany in Braunschweig. The Amiga was extremely widespread in Germany, unlike the Atari ST, and the Amiga 500 was basically replacing the C64.
I had an internal memory expansion (4.5MB!) that just stuck between the 68k and the motherboard. Left room for the 250MB SCSI harddisk :) I love the Lorraine, and it was my Kickstart 😉 to become a pro software developer.
I completely disagree on the Atari ST not being widespread in Germany. I grew up in Germany - in the South - and the ratio Atari ST to Amiga was about 4:1 if not higher until about 1990. The ST was significantly cheaper while most of the games looked and played pretty much the same. The Amiga - with the Amiga 500 coming down in price - caught up to the ST in the early 1990s at a time when most people already started to switch to MS-DOS systems.
In these days, many of my friends and myself also had an interest in electronic music and synthesizers and the Atari ST - with its native MIDI ports and pro software - had an additional advantage over the Amiga. A big selling point of the ST was also the amazing quality monochrome monitor which was easy on the eyes and great to work with for early DTP applications. Many a Gymnasium Newsletter in the late 1980s has been made with Calamus...
During the abitur I remember many parents buying Atari STs for their kids for this simple reason alone.
So in short, I think the Atari ST was much more widespread in Germany compared to the Amiga for the longest time. If you looked at software in computer stores in Munich in 1989 the Atari ST section was twice the size. But of course it always depends on who was "in your scene" around you :)
I'm just a bit too young to experience the Commodore/Amiga era. But I'm from (an still living in) Braunschweig/Brunswick. I know that commodore has manufactured here. But it reminded me again as I saw the stylized coat of arms on the card at 11:50. That is still used by the local government today! 🤯
The dad of a friend used to work for Commodore in Braunschweig back then… i remember him having a Amiga in a large tower, amazing fast at that time…
Never seen that Amiga Computer ever again, he just called it an A4000!?
@@paleosetimagazine7481 South Germany here. 100 "Abiturienten" in '90-'92, about 20 Amigas, 1 single ST. In a 500m radius around my home, there were 5 Amigas, no ST. Also, there were around 1.5 million Amiga in Germany, the ST had 2 million world wide, most of them out of Europe...
lt was a great time! Looking around the neighborhood, with everyone doing intros and demos in assembler. It was hard to get information about coding the custom chips of the Amiga back then (no internet...), but the neighborhood improved in intros, later demos. Knowledge was also spread on copy partys that happened quite every second weekend in a ~30km radius. Oh the times :)
@@maedsen Not exactly rare, but few of them were made as this was in the last days of Commodore. Yes, the 4000T, coupled with the Newtek Video Toaster, was just the best low-cost video editing system. It's a shame they couldn't keep it going, with its 68040 processor, it was fast. Later expansions included the '060, and those were very rare indeed!
You should be able to use your game disks to plug all you want- it's your channel and games, and you have so many different versions to test on different computers.
And there are way worse products to plug, and considering his vids are a delight every time, I'm happy to ignore the shameless self plugs.
Yep
Not to mention the fact that his games appear to use all of the features (graphics, sound, etc.), of whatever machine or configuration available to him. That's a GREAT way to test evenly across platforms.
💓 The best games #EchaEkranu 👈😃👍
Well... Using Planet X3 to test out a computer is a good idea, I say. Your game has a wide support, and you know how it is meant to be run. And it works well even with a very modest computer. You can not help you programmed such a versatile game. 😉
And there are way worse products to plug, and considering his vids are a delight every time, I'm happy to ignore the shameless self plugs.
Yeah exactly! If something doesn't look or feel right, he'd know, and hes is more likely to understand what kind of compatibility issues are happening.
You also know without a shadow of a doubt that you have the copyright owner's permission to use it! 😁
Plus he made an awesome game, so of course he should be proud of his work and show it off at every opportunity.
@@silverhand7748 This was going to be my comment. No need to worry about copyright violation when you're the copyright holder, lol
I love this review of the original 1060 sidecar. Thank you. This thing seemed like pure magic when it came out. Being able to run an IBM PC in a window while boing demo and everything else ran in the background made the Amiga seem preposterously good.
My town didn’t have a store selling the Amiga so i had to drive 80 miles to see it. They had the sidecar setup and everything but it was stuck in a back corner of the store. It was sad because then I realized Commodore couldn’t market their way out of a wet paper sack. The Amiga was generations ahead of anything else in that store.
Wow! I watch a ton of retro pc content, but finally someone has mentioned "Castle"! This was the ONLY dos game I really played as a kid. I was born in '89, but inherited my grandpa's old machine for a while, and played this game to death. Finally-- thanks, bro. Lol
I had Castle in the late 90s. Never beat it...
I'm surprised anyone played this game in the 90's or especially late 90's. That's great though. It's a very simple yet effective game. :)
Played this game a lot as a kid in the late 80s on my dad's Amstrad XT. Kids nowadays can't believe how primitive something like Castle is - it might as well be banging rocks together for fun!
@@sedme0 My highschool Earth Science teacher had WAY too much fun banging rocks together. He opened up the first class by dropping a soda-can-sized rock on the floor, which it hit with a loud crash, breaking into several chunks. He looked up with a maniacal grin and announced, "I like rocks."
Yes! A video of Amiga 1000!
This brings back memories…
I have two prototype devices for the A1000. A flat bed scanner, and a 2 MB memory expansion. The latter made my A1000 a 2,5 MB computer. :-)
I had 2.5 megs of ram and a sidecar. In the sidecar I installed two 30 meg hard disks. I partitioned them to be 40 for Amiga and 20 for dos. In the ram I set a recoverable ram drive, which loaded the workbench and survived rebooting. This made the Amiga fly, keeping floppy access to a minimum.
In 1990 I loaded Windows 3.0 from about a dozen 720kb floppies.
I had an 'HP Paintjet' colour inkjet, NEC P7 printer, 'Perfect Sound' audio capture, 'Digiview' image capture, and a small scanner [a bit like a large mouse]. I really spent a lot of time and money on that system!
I used a Sidecar with a HDD controller which allowed me to have 2x40MB HDDs in another external enclosure that I built from an old IBM external full height 360k 5.25” floppy case. The software to control the sidecar was called “Janus” and let me partition the external drives for use both in the IBM and also for the Amiga. I had a custom workbench boot disk that transferred the boot sequence across to a partition on the HDD as it started. This not only sped up the boot but meant that I had pretty well all of the machine running from the HDD, making the machine dramatically faster for a lot of tasks.
Some simple scripting let me load various games onto the HDD and this was great for some of the multi-disk games that were out at the time - they booted straight away and never asked for a drive swap.
I wish I still had the setup and didn’t loan it to my ex sister-in-law, never to be seen again.
My 40GB HD took up the drive bay of the Sidecar. God that Janus software was dog awful though. Mine was so flaky to get started, but once it did it was terrific. I wish I could get it working again, if only to see my homework from 1988. ;-)
Never had the original Amiga myself. A friend did though and I remember how amazed I was when I saw him play games like Marble Madness and such on it. I was in high school at the time and a classmate who also had the original Amiga made some of his school projects on it, while the rest of us had to work with the Nord-100 terminals. At the same time we had two PC/XT's in the back of the classroom and they couldn't even get close to what that Amiga could. Eventually got the A500 myself and the rest is history.
💓 The best games #EchaEkranu 👈😃👍
Isn't it crazy that all of this older hardware can be emulated with pretty much 100% accuracy and speed in software now?
The only things hard to emulate accurately are analogue chips like the old SID audio chips.
Oh man, when the sidecar was connected I had old memories of the SEGA Megadrive/Genesis expensions with the Sega CD and 32X.
Agreed. I'd love to see this Amiga 1000 fully loaded out with all the RAM expanders, the sidecar, and four disc drives. Oh, and a joystick, just because. The whole kit and kaboodle.
I wonder if it's even possible to hook all that up onto the BUS at once.
I’m glad you use Planet X3 as a demonstration game! Planet X3 is amazing and it’s the perfect game to use as standardized demonstration software.
The trolls who are mad that you use Planet X3 for demonstration purposes are just jealous of your success, so please don’t listen to them! Your actual subscribers, by and large, have no issue with you using Planet X3 at all! So please don’t feel the need to explain yourself, these toxic trolls don’t deserve the attention, or even the time of day!
It makes sense for David to use it because he's the programmer and therefore familiar with the software's behavior.
Show me the comment? I guess David makes the mistake of Techmoan etc. - at their scale a 1 or 2 comments out of hundreds is fringe and non-representative. And acknowledging they exist is only going to feed the troll.
I just figured 8-Bit Guy wrote Planet X3 so he'd have something to demo on early PCs that wasn't Avoid the Noid :P
But no seriously he added a bunch of lesser-used graphics modes that pretty much only X3 supports so it's outright *necessary* for any sort of obscure IBM PC/compatible testing
It's better than using pirated software like in previous videos.
@@Okurka. Bro you can't buy like any of this software anymore. Why even complain if it's pirated. The authors wouldn't profit it you bought it used anyways.
Castle Adventure is the game we had on our 286 when I was a kid, and I've never known the name of it and have been looking for it for the last 25 years!! Finally!
The best games #EchaEkranu 👈😃👍
Also had a Sidecar (actually connected to my A500 - with the back side facing forward). I added a hard disk to the Sidecar having two partitions: one for PC Dos and one for the Amiga (the Amiga sill had to boot from floppy but I could launch applications and access may data from the hard disk). Also had a video card with monochrome monitor for the Sidecar. Extremely versatile combination.
I bought an Amiga in '85 and the guy at the computer store promised the sidecar was coming out "soon". I wasn't aware that it ever came out. I did buy the bridgeboard with the 8086 processor, but by that time, the emulated CGA graphics were so outdated that I regretted paying for it.
I also bought a kit for the A1000 that that put the kickstart in ROMs inside the A1000. It made it a lot more elegant.
I commented your last video on "Amiga" saying "thank you", and now I redo the same thing: thank you 8/16 bit guy... Cheers from Italy.
I did love the PC emulation Software back in the day.
Friends learned Turbo Pascal 3.14 at school, and it worked perfectly on my Amiga, so I could help them.
Nice memories, thank you!
Why use PC emulation on a superior system (Amiga)? I just don't get it. Compatibility is not enough, IMHO.
More or less the same here. We had XTs and 286s at school and mostly Amigas and STs at home (and some older Schneider and Atari boxes as well). And we had to work with Pascal and C for school assignments at the time. I tried using KickPascal and Aztec C at home on my Amiga at first, but the whole hassle of bringing those files to school, reading incompatible disks, converting and finding out that libraries are not directly compatible weren't worth it (no internet or email in those days). At last I just fired up PC Transformer and worked with Borland's Turbo Pascal and Turbo C. And for those tasks Transformer was enough.
Thank you for your videos, your videos are the ones that got me into old/retro/vintage computers at 14! I love using emulators, writing BASIC on a C64, old windows 9x to XP systems, and I really want to get a classic Mac or a PET
Before I sold my Amiga 4000, I had a A2386SX BridgeBoard and Emplant card, allowing Windows/DOS, Macintosh System 7 and Amiga Workbench running all at once!
Wow, must've been a great machine to have. One of the ultimate computer setups to have imo
Honestly, an Amiga with Shapeshifter made a better (68k) Mac than an actual 68k Mac, regardless of the Emplant card.
You can also sit a mono monitor on top of the sidecar plug it in to the back of the sidecar and use that for your msdos programs.
Yes. I also did that. I had one of those small IBM ones and it was really cool. It broke down and I threw it out. I now wish I'd kept it and fixed it.
Loved this episode! When I was in college in 1989, the guy down the hall had an A1000. He boasted about its PC compatibility, so I gave him a copy of Norton SI to run. Just as you discovered, it came back with a pathetically low SI value. Rather amusing. Thanks for this fascinating trip back in time.
How well did PCs run Amiga software?
@@customsongmaker nobody cared to do that. People needed specific PC programs to run. compilers, applications. Examples in the application business world were Lotus 1-2-3 and Word Perfect, nothing came close to that on the amiga by light years apart.
What an awesome machine, thank you for the trip back to the 90's! Would be nice to see the 386/486 versions of those pc sidecars if can get your hands on them! Thanks again for the amazing content.
These vids take me back a long way and remind me of good gaming together with good creative software on the Amiga, no matter which model it was, and the thought of 2MB of RAM is laughable now but it set you apart from other people back in the day until everyone had the most RAM they could fit!
I never thought anyone's sidecar expansions would make the PCjr's look elegant. Wow.
PCjr with sidecar in my closet too. I need to sell that as well.
I used to work at a computer store in the 80's, we sold the HELL out of the AST 6 pack. Was the most popular upgrade for an IBM PC we had.
I have all the original manuals, hard drive manuals to the amiga500 and 2000 and c64. From my teen years and still have my amiga2000 and Amiga500
Thanks for putting this stuff out for us...I wasn't born yet by the time the 8-Bit era had essentially come to a close (even 5.25" floppies were a rarity by the time I ever laid eyes on a computer in-person), so it's fascinating to see how the PCs I grew up using evolved from stuff like this.
“People complain that I plug my game”
Ah, people, spoken like they’ve never made or tried to self publish a game. Man has the right to do what he wants, literally his channel
Someone once said (and it may have been The 8 Bit Guy) "It's my channel and I can do what I want." I've adopted this saying and state it in my Intro on my channel.
Also it's a cool looking game, so it's totally fine by me
@@aa-au It was the 8-Bit Guy, but he was referring to the Nintendo cartridges that he had bought and re-labeled, not his channel.
with all the historical artifacts,, this should be converted into a museum seriously. Your knowledge is amazing. Something I could imagine visiting Dave.. thanks for your many great videos. Stay safe.
Had the 386sx bridgeboard card. It was great since it was essentially full PC board using the shared amiga resources, though the best way was to get a dedicated ISA video card. Had a combo video card that also did 16 bit sound with joystick ports. So at that point all you were really sharing was the keyboard/mouse and drive system. Ran everything full speed as the original metal if it were standalone.
The Amiga was so superior to any other PC of the time period. The Atari ST was not bad, I always had both - but it was no Amiga. It took more than 5 years for the PC to catch it after the Amiga ceased production.
Both are certainly classics, can't wait to see David cover the ST, Falcon and Atari's other classic computers.
I'd like to see a modern A1000 come to market someday.
But then a Wolfenstein 3D came along and murdered the Amiga with one punch. The elaborate 2D hardware was a dead end from the beginning. 68k was also more a curse than a blessing.
That AST 6-pack card was probably the most popular single upgrade for the original IBM PC -- it contained literally everything you needed that the PC didn't come with originally, and it all fit in one single slot. When I went to college in September of 1988, a family friend gave me his old IBM PC and it had an AST 6-pack card in it.
This brought back memories of using my A500 with a KCS powerboard to emulate a PC, I used it to compile COBOL & Dbase stuff I was doing in my college computing course. I still have it somewhere & the A500.
My first computer with a mouse & gui was an A500, such a huge step up from a ZX Spectrum. I didn't know Commodore did a 5.25" floppy drive for the Amiga, I can see why the 5.25" was rare as the PC was transitioning to 3.5" disks around the late 1980s. I did hear of the sidecar back then but not in action, still got happy memories of my A500
I've got a garage full of Amiga 500s and Amiga 2000's.
God bless ya dude.
Brings back some memories... I had a 1000 but eventually ended up with a 3000 with the A2386 BridgeBoard. That was a 25MHz 386SX IIRC. Worked well enough and a bit more elegant than the Sidecar. BTW did the Action Replay work on the 1000?
That card is great because you can throw a 486SLC on it.
Pretty much all A500 expansions work on the A1000 (the bus was retconned as "Zorro I"), but you have to be careful as a lot of them assume that they will be supported from the bottom by the same desk the A500 is on. If you plug them into the A1000 they can hang in space and cause physical damage from flexing.
@@NozomuYume Our Hard Drive that we had for our A1000 was meant for an A500.
So we had a custom passthrough cable made up so we can sit the drive on top of the computer & link the 2 with the cable.
Isn't the connector pin compatible but upside-down?
@@svenkarlsen2702 Well it's more back to front than upside down.
If we were to plug in our Hard drive directly, it the drive would be facing backwards.
So the cable we used had a 90 degree twist so the drive could face us.
Action replay did work on the Amiga 1000, you did need to have something to sit underneath it to support it, most Amiga 500 expansions worked too but again you had to support it and the back of the device would be facing the front.. e.g. my GVP Impact Series II plugs into my A1000 fine but the power and SCSI ports are facing you and the LED's and game/isolation switch is facing the back of the A1000
As slow as they might be, I bet those emulation options saved the day for many Amiga owners that needed to line up their home setup to whatever MS-DOS applications they were using at school or work. Expecting more than simple applications like WordStar or Multiplan wouldn't have been reasonable. Considering how closed each ecosystem was at the time, Commodore was very ingenious.
You should always plug your game, you worked hard on it and ported it so that it works well as test software. That is truly an achievement. Love your content.
Oh Dude, you're missing the best part!!!! The Janus sidecar software let you access a standard (cheaper) PC HD disk in the Sidecar!!!! I had a 40MB one in mine, that took the place of the drive bay, partitioned 20MB for PC and 20MB for Amiga. You could probably get it working with the HD emulator in the Sidecar you seem to have. I also had a 7Mhz 286 accelerator in one of the slots. It would slightly glitch the CGA graphics on the Amiga but would run fine through a smaller monitor I had sitting on the A1000. I remember using it predominantly for programming in Pascal in my computing class. I had 2MB internal RAM too, and didn't need an external RAM expander.
2GB RAM?! That's 2004 Thinkpad specs! The future is .. uh, some time approximately 20 years ago, or more.
@@Daijyobanai Ha Ha thanks. Of course it was 2MB memory and 20MB partitions on the HD (fixed it). 😆
It seemed like a huge spec at the time. It just shows how far we've come. 😀
As I currently sit here at home on a machine with 64GB memory with access to 20TB of HD space(and still running out) I guess it wouldn't be going out on a limb to say we'll be talking in Petabytes 30 years from now. 🤓
Our setups with multiple screens of unfathomable resolution on machines practically running an infinity times faster would've been beyond a dream in the 90s let alone 80s. And yet I miss that simpler (yet more complex) age. It's one of the reasons I think you should only update your classic machine only so far or that era's magic can no longer be appreciated.
9:19 you can play with the menu setting *Set Display Task Priority* to make it update screen more frequently
Yeah, I set it to highest priority. Didn't make any difference.
@@The8BitGuy that's disappointing
Man, I used to use an A.Max back in the day at work as the company used Macs for the internal mail system. I had it for some time on an Amiga 4000 Tower. (It had a low serial number)
Thank you for sharing with us the Amiga Side Car... I always wondered about them even though I didn't buy one...
Back in the day I thought the side car for the Amiga was a kludge... and seeing it here confirms my suspicion. It was cheaper just a few years later to buy a 386 with more memory and running much faster than the side car. When I purchased my Amiga 1000 they said there were PC software emulators coming out... then they said those were disappointing, so they introduced the Side Car... at first I was excited but quickly I realized it wasn't really as good as I thought... It didn't take it long for the Side Car to show it's age... The Side Car really wasn't upgradeable. And as the PCs evolved, it wouldn't be long before the side car would turn into a paperweight.
I know the dream was for Amiga users to have the best of both worlds... and I believed in that dream! The Amiga's graphics and sound was easily 10 years more advanced than the first PCs with their CGA (Crummy Graphics Adapter) video.... EGA (Even Crummier) LOL VGA and a decent sound card is where I stopped making jokes as I said... wow (unimpressed) you finally arrived, what took you guys so fricken long? Imagine if Commodore were still making machines during that evolution... with a 10+ year lead we'd probably have 4K video back in the 2000's. Do you remember 720i, 720P, 1080i, 1080P nonsense? LOL Consumers had to go through so many changes in media, format, cables, TV's, etc. ... it was nuts
I want to dust off my Amiga 1000 and give it some love... I really miss that old computer, good memories! But I'm afraid to turn it on and have a power supply blow up or the disk not work... I have the expanded memory, external Floppy, and the monitor... Wow! it was a fantastic machine! 🙂
I had a 7mghz 286 Accelerator in my Sidecar. Which was okay for the era. The thing the 8-bit guy missed was that the sidecar let you put in a cheap PC Hard disk that was accessible from the Amiga. I too have started to re-experience my A1000. My floppies don't work any more, so good luck with a Kickstart disk. Skip getting a Gotek or kickstart ROM upgrade and take a look at the PiStorm add-on which kinda negates all those and is an accelerator as well.
I used the IBM Transformer PC emulator on my Amiga 1000 in the mid 80s in college to be able to do my lab work assignments at home. It worked great! It was a bit slower, but did the job.
Our college had just bought all new IBM PS/2 computers which were a brand new model at the time and included a 3 1/2" disk drive on them, which the professors were unfamiliar with on a PC.
I was able to take the 3 1/2" disks home and read them directly on my Amiga's disk drive. Some of the programs we used were DBase III Plus, Word Star & Lotus 123.
Transformer, which came out in 1985 on the Amiga 1000 introduced me to the world of software emulation of actually emulating not only other brands of computers, later on arcade machines with MAME, synthesizers with the VST format, consoles such as the Atari 2600 with Stella and much more.
I was blown away by the emulation concept in 1985, and envisioned all kinds of things for it which later on did became reality eventually. Even in the mid 80s, the Amiga also introduced me to MIDI software synthesis long before VST's came out, and even emulation of the Ensoniq Mirage sampling keyboard which I bought an emulator program for in the 80s and could read the Mirage disks on my Amiga and playback the sounds in my bands using any MIDI keyboard.
Today, I'm still big time into software emulation. I've built 4 MAME machines (most close to 25 years ago) using real early 1980s arcade cabinets, original controls, and RGB CRT 19" arcade monitors. Even a color vector monitor and a b&w vector monitor MAME machine. Today, all of my classic computers such as my Amiga's, (I had 4), Apple ]['s, C-64's and classic consoles run in one of my MAME machines with an authentic 19" CRT RGB monitor for even clearer picture than the composite output some of them could only produce.
I've collected synthesizers since the mid 80s and have a bunch of them. I started off with a Casio CZ-101 to use with my Amiga mostly to use as a MIDI controller for the soft synths, but I also loved the CZ's sounds. Today, almost all of my classic synths such as my CZ's, Korg M1, ARP analog, Roland's, Yamaha's and much more exist on my laptop as VST's. I still have 13 keyboards, but mostly use the VST versions now.
I have the Amiga to thank for introducing me to software emulation, really the first major system to do it. And I'm still a big fan of software emulation over FPGA hardware solutions. Software seems to be much more developed, and it's often free. Software emulation of the Amiga 1000 & Atari 2600 are even cycle accurate. Whatever flaws it has as generally eventually corrected and I know people that switched from FPGA solutions like Mister back to software emulation both because it was sometimes better, and because......it's often free.
I worked at a Software Etc in 1989/90 and one of my co-workers was an Amiga fan. He brought in a piece of hardware with Macintosh ROM chips and demonstrated in to me on the Amiga 500 we had in store. I had known about and played with Amigas (even the 1000) at stores in the past but this guy really sold me on it. We didn't sell computers (would've been nice to get an employee discount) so I ended up buying one at a Montgomery Wards, of all places, because they gave me a credit card.
You know, one of the things I love about your videos is that they are so pleasant. It’s like slipping into a hot tub of nostalgia.
Why you need that? nostalgia? feelings.....
What skills you have, what did you create on it!
In the early 90s I used to write my school coursework in plain text files in an emacs editor and save them too 720KB FAT formatted DD disks using Crossdos file system handlers that came with AmigaOS. Then I'd load the files into word on the library PCs in school and format the text and print it.
The best Amiga games th-cam.com/video/bfcNQteXC4A/w-d-xo.html ❤
Very, very interesting, even though I had never used that particular computer, and never heard of the peripherals. It's usually a good day when David posts, and today is no exception.
I had an Amax unit, with roms and a disk drive... Years ago. I'd send it to you if I still had it. Love the content, keep up the good work!
the Amiga program CrossDos can read/write pc floppies on an Amiga.. actually the Amiga floppy drive is more flexible at how to move its internals then a pc drive.
It's kinda weird to me that you make an Amiga video but it covers more IBM MS-DOS stuff :P
But hey, it's your channel and you do you! ;)
It's nice tho to see a Amiga MS-DOS compatible things from history, as this comes before CrossDos came out in 1989 (i guess?)
Love when David spots AST products in the wild, it’s like a master in his craft lol!
I wonder if he's still willing to do customer support to retro enthusiasts in his area.
Love it when we expand 16bit machines with good upgraded ram. It was ahead of the time in multitasking. The upgraded 060 cpu and newer kickstarts helped updated storage devices to be used. A4000 was the best but even a A1200 packed a punch with a 030 chip.
A1200 was an 020 chip, not an 030. Clocked at 14MHz, so double the speed of the original 68000.
@@d2factotum Imagine that : running an A1200 with an overdrive he didn't mention
@@d2factotum very true but replaced with a viper card 030 and add a Fpu chip on board gives it a nice performance boot.
@@d2factotum More than double. Twice the clock speed isn't twice the speed when comparing a 68000 to a 68020.
What 16bit machine are you talking about? The Amiga was a true 32 bit machine.
Looking forward for an Amiga 500 video, that was such an influential computer.
Great video. Always in anticipation of the next video. Nice there Geekbits got a mention. I have my podcaster set to stun when the next episode arrives. :)
I used to run an Amiga 3000 which ran ShapeShifter for 68K Macintosh emulation and had a GoldenGate 386SX bridge board and VGA card installed, even into the later 90s I used to blow minds when demonstrating applications when I'd casually switch between Windows 3.1, System 7.5 and AmigaOS due to the multitasking nature of things. Of course Windows 95 and Mac PPC software becoming the the norm made it a bit old hat. Being a bridge board it was much more integrated than the A1060 was allowing sharing of peripherals plugged into the Amiga such as printers and the internal drive, and as I mentioned you could use the ISA slots built into the A3000 for PC expansions like that VGA card. Powerful stuff for the time.
I have to confess that the intro song is a guilty pleasure for me, it makes me want to dance and remembers me of happier days back in my childhood.
I love the intro music on these videos. It takes me straight back to the 80s. :)
Great video. Brought back lots of great memories. I had a hard drive (huge device physically, super expensive for 20MB,) and memory expansion so they were both dangling off the side. They weren't the same size so needed items to wedge so they'd be the same size. Not very stable. If you hit the desk too hard the Amiga would crash. I also remember that first IBM emulator you showed. I used to run DbaseIII ok.
I used to use the ability to read 720k DOS disks all the time in Workbench 3. There was a driver called PC0 in, I believe the "devices" drawer(yes, drawer), and if you run it, it would add PC0:, which would read/write/format 720k DOS disks in DF0: to the desktop, if you had external drives, it would also had PC1: for DF1: etc.
I used to use it to download WHDLoad(utility for installing floppy based games to hard disk) files to my dad's computer, put them on 720k floppies and use them on my Amiga to install my games to HD for faster loading.
I mainly used the 1020 floppy drive to read IBM PC disk. CrossDOS for the Amiga allowed you to read and write PC and MAC disks.
I bet anyone who used all these components in conjunction with their home computer was absolutely LOADED with cash
Dude was just hoping for a new vid from you. Keep rocking from a Fellow Texan Tech.
Another great video on computers that I never used back in the day (my family couldn't afford them). Thanks for sharing, David.
Same here! I'm glad I'm not the only low-income early '90s kids who never had any of this cool stuff haha.
What always gets me aboutt he 8-bit guys videos is the music choice. IT's 100% spot on all the time.
07:33 SEGA Genesis/Mega Drive 32X CD: "Mom? Is that you?"
The kludges we came up with back then are simply amazing. Whats crazier is how much these things cost! That was the equivalent to a $30K computer back then.
Insane how much the prices of technology have came down!
@@revivedfears A $55 Raspberry Pi4 runs circles around this. We all owe a huge debt of gratitude to the earliest tech buyers for essentially funding our cheap tech of today.
Castle Adventure! That was one of my favorite PC games when I was in 5th grade, because it ran so well on my Xerox XT/CGA clone.
When I was doing my year of duty, I wrote a software for my officer's office. I programmed it on a Thomson PC XT (I don't remember the exact model but it was an 8086 running à 8 MHz with CGA color graphics), and the software ran in the office on an Amiga 2000 with the famous PC Zorro emulation board
Thanks for the part about the Transformer. It is a rare piece of information. Thinking about how early this appeared, it is quite a feat. :)
Used to run Opus BBS with A1000 and Sidecar. Memory was expanded with chips to 640kb and there was 40mb hard disc card inside.
Bonus content! Thank you 🤖
Ahh, so good to watch an episode of 8-Bit Guy after a long day :)
I remember this device. I never pulled one apart, but I always suspected it was actually a fully self contained unit with passthrough to the Amiga, which is why the update of the display was fairly slow.
I get so happy whenever I wake up with a notification of yours
You should look into the EMPLANT emulator card, IIRC, it allow you tu run a PC and a Mac in the background, basically 3 systems in one - at the same time.
I did play around with Amax, PCTask and Transformer back in the day and was amazed that i could read/write 720k disks, was easy to write stuff at home and bring disks in to school/work and print out things. There was also an emulator called CrossPC i think, never had that though.
Where the heck do you get brand new looking Amiga 1000 kickstart disks !
I made them myself.
@@The8BitGuy that is very cool
@@The8BitGuy very creative
I am loving the Amiga content Dave!
This feels like one of your old videos, I loved it!
Curious, has David ever mentioned if his 8-bit Keys channel is officially abandoned or not?
He did say it ain't abandoned, just lower priority, think it was for lack of time.
I wait with so much enthusiasm for the next 8-bit keys video
@@rautamiekka i wonder how long it can go until lack of time becomes lack of interest....?
@@rautamiekka Lack of time? He made 19 videos the past year.
I don't think he would abandon that channel. But during the last year he was busy with all kinds of projects, including building a new studio. Also, the topic of that channel (old toy pianos and to some extent old digital sound synthesizers) really doesn't seem to be that expansive so the unfortunate fact is, we might have to wait until he got some more topics to talk about.
I had an AMIGA 1000 back in Germany in 1986 with a sidecar added later, which I did real work on (on the PC side, the AMIGA was 95% used for gaming. I unfortunately had to sell it, and replaced it a few years later with an AMIGA 2000 and the A2088 card and the accompanying 5.25" drive.
The A 2088 PC in that computer was used to do actual work on what later became a major commercial software product for National Instruments.
The AMIGA (both the 1000 and 2000) taught me A LOT about software and hardware (all on my own and based on trial an error, as there was no computer store, library or user group anywhere near my home at the time).
I have seen the Sidecar at Bo's house, and will check if he has an A2088 next time I get over there ...
I have the Amax. I used to run trivia bots on GEnie with it because the mac had the software to do it and the Amiga didn’t at the time. It felt downright dirty at the time to “downgrade” my A500 to run that software haha but I loved doing it. I don’t have the ROM chips you slide into it anymore.
I remember those. I used to have just about every model of Amiga ever produced. The only thing I didn't have was the older drive you showed towards the beginning of the video. I had the larger RAM expansion and a sidecar for the A500, 1000, & 1200. Amazingly that same sidecar works with the 4000 as well. It's just a little more fiddley to install. I remember that on mine I had to put a penny under the feet nearest to the computer to raise it up just enough to slide into place.
Loved this. When I went to college in 1990, I needed a PC, so I got the ATonce emulator for my a500. Could even do windows 3.1 and used the amiga memory, mouse and drives, with workbench in another window. Amazing stuff
Reminds me of my AMIGA 2000 i had. I got it from the dad of a friend whom worked at Commodore back then… some year later i wanted to test out MS-DOS and the same person whom given me the A2000 had just what was needed… a ‚PC Card‘ which was an entire PC in an Bus Card with 286 processor and an Tseng graphics card, which was put into the A2000 and made it a pc 😅
Happy to see David back, The world had being lacking in older technical information lately.
I'm so happy, I've been waiting years on this.
My favourite was a Hard Drive expansion I used to have on my Amiga 500. I forget what it was called now, but it was a really nice looking one where the case perfectly matched the style of the A500's. I miss that system the most I think. The Amiga was always my favourite computer whose multitasking was superior to faster PCs long after Commodore went bankrupt.
Awesome. At the time of introduction Transformer had an Norton SI rating of 0.2, and Sidecar was too expensive for anyone to really consider but because Commodore put in the effort to build it (albeit in their Germany office) it lead to the Bridgeboard and that was useful and impressive. I wasn't the only A2000 owner with one, and 20MB hardcard (accessible form the Amiga side btw) and like the Sidecar above an AST 6-Pak.
8:25 - for the B: drive you need to plug in the Amiga drive into the PC sidecar expansion. Does it work as a secondary drive for the Amiga when the expansion is not in use that way or do you need to move the cable to the Amiga’s own port?
I know there's the "exposure" aspect to using your own software in demos, but I always thought the best part of using software you wrote is that you know no one's going to copyright claim your footage, haha
Hi David! love it whenever a new 8bit guy episode gets pushed!
Just wondering if you guys are continuing the podcast? it's been a small while since we had one and the topics were really really interesting.
Yep, I'm wondering that too?
Did... Did you not watch the video till the end?
I did. David just said he'd leave a link in the description. I checked and discovered that the last episode was from 2 months ago.
@@silverhand7748 Well, I imagine he wouldn't advertise that podcast if he weren't planning on continuing it. I've only listened to the first few episodes, and I haven't checked when the last one was published, but I'm sure they have reasons to not releasing one in some time. I'm sure it'll eventually come back, though, sooner rather than later.
@@Alfonso162008 I saw the end, but was hoping for an update as a response since its been months without one.
Excellent video. Thanks!
6:30 I'm not sure if anyone has commented about this already, but you don't necessarily _have_ to use full software rendering in emulation. With sufficient knowledge on both architectures, you can set up a program acting as a translation layer to convert graphics commands for one VDP/GPU to those that produce identical results with another VDP/GPU. That's why Bleem! was able to run N64 games so well on the Dreamcast and Y2K-era PCs-it converted Reality Co-Processor routines to, say, Voodoo 2 routines. I doubt these do that, though if the Motorola 68000 is freed up to just render video in the PC Sidecar, that'd certainly contribute to its relative speed.
Holy shit!! New 8BitGuy!!
Woah! GWBASIC. That's a blast from the past. My first job in '86/'87 was converting a specialist software company's PET software to PC via GWBASIC. That company's still going.
This was my absolute favorite home computer 💻😀👍nice share♥️🙏
Back in the day I got a Vortex ATonce card. It plugged into the CPU socket and gave the Amiga 2 processors: a 68000 to replace the removed one and an Intel 286 for running PC programs.
The speed was pretty decent for the day and I was able to run most of the PC software I needed for my studies.
It would be great to review it on this channel... by the way I still have that Amiga and that card is still in it although I haven't been able to use it for many years having lost the software which made it run!
What a disgustingly beautiful system this is.