afaik you only need a multisync CRT to display Amiga signal. I thought most Amiga's (500/600/1200) came with an A520 as they were marketed towards the home computer market. A2000/A3000 and A4000 were marketed more towards the business end and tended to come with CRT's (and no A520). At least thats how it was in the UK. Of course UK used PAL instead of NTSC which always complicated matters.

brostenen wrote:

Yup.... TV's was what we used back then for gaming in our childhood bedrooms. Well... Those that had an Amiga.
And it will be what gives the original experience, as if it was "gaming like it was 1989 again". :-p

Ah yes, I still remember our old B/W TV with RF connector. It was of orange colour and made by Teleton or a similar company, I believe.
Back then, RF was the "normal" way of connecting home computers and consoles (up to the MegaDrive, SNES and N64 even).
Sure there was CVBS (Composite) and mono audio - often transported over a pair of red/white or red/black RCA cables,
but these were rather used by video game enthusiasts than kids of the day since RCA/Cinch plugs were often only
found on "modern" looking 90s TV sets (big+black, plastic look) or European TVs with EU SCART (that ugly connector always carried CVBS, too).
(Okay, I was among of the exceptions here, since my father gave me his old Commodore 1702 that I used as my NES monitor,)

Speaking of such "real" TVs with only an aerial connector, I recall they also were the reason for the awesome orange/blue colour scheme of Kick 1.x.
It gave good contrast even on cheap television sets. Even though Amiga's heyday was a bit before my time,
I still prefer that look over that of Kickstart 2.x. Btw, the only reason I use Kick 2.x and higher is the the auto-config
feature for virtual HDDs in emulators. With Workbench 1.3, of course, but that's another story. 😉

spiroyster wrote:

Of course UK used PAL instead of NTSC which always complicated matters.

Ahem. China also used PAL and found ways to create PAL circuitry (even cheaply and with little parts). 😉
Seriously, though - You're right, but ut wasn't PAL's fault that US and Japan were very important in video business and foolishly used 60Hz and NTSC..
From a pure technical point of view, PAL wasn't bad at all. It had higher resolutions, safer colours and was closer to 24fps cinema format, too.
It was just a little bit slower, since the mains power in UK and EU were 50Hz and creators wanted TVs to be in sync with the flickering of light bulbs.
As a side note, the IBM MDA monitors also used 50Hz by default, so NTSC's 60Hz timing wasn't always #1 in computer industry.
Albeit with afterglow tubes (P5?) and 720x350 pels. Anyway, these a just some random thoughts of mine to this matter. No offense. 😁

Edit: Edited, Some typos fixed.

BloodyCactus wrote:

No. VGA ModeX is also bitplane plannar like Amiga graphic modes. What amiga had is blitter, copper etc custom hardware asics where VGA was nothing but raw bandwidth with evereything in software.

Nope, Amigas store one bit of each pixel in each bitplane. So to update a pixel in 256-colour mode on Amiga, you need to update a single bit in 8 bitplanes.
Mode X has 4 'byteplanes'. That is, the columns of pixels are stored 'interleaved' in video memory. So for pixels 0, 4, 8 etc, you select plane 0, for pixels 1, 5, 9 etc, you select plane 1, and so on.
The pixels themselves are still 1 byte each, and so all bits of a pixel are packed together in memory.
This is much more efficient for 'chunky' effects like texture mapping.

Well I want a desktop setup for my Amiga - I've looked around and most Trinitrons are huge heavy beasts that I couldn't even carry up the stairs. Smaller ones are usually quite a bit older and in worse shape. A monitor would be sooo much easier for many reasons. I guess I could first try with my Philips 109P ...

As for Amiga 500 vs 1200, I suppose it depends a bit on what games you target.
The Amiga 1200 is not entirely backwards compatible with the Amiga 500, although you can work around most issues by disabling caches and using an alternative Kickstart ROM (which you can also do with a software solution, so no need to have a physical chip).
For the 1990-1994 era, the compatibility issues will probably be minor, it's mostly with the earlier games.

spiroyster wrote:

afaik you only need a multisync CRT to display Amiga signal. I thought most Amiga's (500/600/1200) came with an A520 as they were marketed towards the home computer market. A2000/A3000 and A4000 were marketed more towards the business end and tended to come with CRT's (and no A520). At least thats how it was in the UK. Of course UK used PAL instead of NTSC which always complicated matters.

You are talking RGB to areal/antena signal or Composit. I am talking about RGB to scart. Scart is in its own nature RGB. It is the plug that are named Scart. There might be some other technical terms, regarding the Scart/RGB solution. Yet it is actually just RGB. The reason why it has become so populair to modefy a NTSC television to have RGB input.

Jo22 wrote:

Ah yes, I still remember our old B/W TV with RF connector. It was of orange colour and made by Teleton or a similar company, I b […]
Show full quote

brostenen wrote:

Yup.... TV's was what we used back then for gaming in our childhood bedrooms. Well... Those that had an Amiga.
And it will be what gives the original experience, as if it was "gaming like it was 1989 again". :-p

Ah yes, I still remember our old B/W TV with RF connector. It was of orange colour and made by Teleton or a similar company, I believe.
Back then, RF was the "normal" way of connecting home computers and consoles (up to the MegaDrive, SNES and N64 even).
Sure there was CVBS (Composite) and mono audio - often transported over a pair of red/white or red/black RCA cables,
but these were rather used by video game enthusiasts than kids of the day since RCA/Cinch plugs were often only
found on "modern" looking 90s TV sets (big+black, plastic look) or European TVs with EU SCART (that ugly connector always carried CVBS, too).
(Okay, I was among of the exceptions here, since my father gave me his old Commodore 1702 that I used as my NES monitor,)

Speaking of such "real" TVs with only an aerial connector, I recall they also were the reason for the awesome orange/blue colour scheme of Kick 1.x.
It gave good contrast even on cheap television sets. Even though Amiga's heyday was a bit before my time,
I still prefer that look over that of Kickstart 2.x. Btw, the only reason I use Kick 2.x and higher is the the auto-config
feature for virtual HDDs in emulators. With Workbench 1.3, of course, but that's another story. 😉

spiroyster wrote:

Of course UK used PAL instead of NTSC which always complicated matters.

Ahem. China also used PAL and found ways to create PAL circuitry (even cheaply and with little parts). 😉
Seriously, though - You're right, but ut wasn't PAL's fault that US and Japan were very important in video business and foolishly used 60Hz and NTSC..
From a pure technical point of view, PAL wasn't bad at all. It had higher resolutions, safer colours and was closer to 24fps cinema format, too.
It was just a little bit slower, since the mains power in UK and EU were 50Hz and creators wanted TVs to be in sync with the flickering of light bulbs.
As a side note, the IBM MDA monitors also used 50Hz by default, so NTSC's 60Hz timing wasn't always #1 in computer industry.
Albeit with afterglow tubes (P5?) and 720x350 pels. Anyway, these a just some random thoughts of mine to this matter. No offense. 😁

Edit: Edited, Some typos fixed.

No.... We used RGB-Scart cables in the 80's. None of that horrible areal or composit. That was a thing of the C64 and other 8-bit machines. Yeah... During the Amiga500 gaming era, we used SCART cables, because it gives the best quality on TV's.

Scali wrote:

As for Amiga 500 vs 1200, I suppose it depends a bit on what games you target.
The Amiga 1200 is not entirely backwards compatible with the Amiga 500, although you can work around most issues by disabling caches and using an alternative Kickstart ROM (which you can also do with a software solution, so no need to have a physical chip).
For the 1990-1994 era, the compatibility issues will probably be minor, it's mostly with the earlier games.

I still had to use Relokick-1.3 (Kickstart downgrader floppy boot disk that loads kickstart into memory and reboots to run kick 1.3) on the 1200 I used to have. Sometimes I had to enter early bootmenu and set it to OCS or ECS chipset compatibility and sometimes I had to disable the IDE interface. However, this is when booting a game from floppy disks and not WHD Loader.

The 1200 is fully (95 percent) compatible with OCS and ECS games. Yet in most cases, when running OCS games, you need to do some tricks. Before it becomes fully compatible.

true, with whdload there is no need to do anything other than start the game from it's icon - no need for bootdisks/tricks it's all done automatically.

And to say Amiga users mocked the PC for being complicated 🤣 I guess you have to have grown up with an Amiga to understand the nuances.

red_avatar wrote:

And to say Amiga users mocked the PC for being complicated 🤣 I guess you have to have grown up with an Amiga to understand the nuances.

Haha.... Yeah... 😀
I think it is more simple than that. It all depends on what view angle you have and were you started. The reason why it is good to know as many different systems as possible. What you know is always the easiest and most logic. Like people today, wanting a retro machine and thinking that Dos 6.22 is totally difficult, because they only know XP and up.

brostenen wrote:

No.... We used RGB-Scart cables in the 80's. None of that horrible areal or composit. That was a thing of the C64 and other 8-bit machines. Yeah... During the Amiga500 gaming era, we used SCART cables, because it gives the best quality on TV's.

Are you sure about that? I don't remember any A500/A500plus coming with a SCART cable. They came with A520's and plugged into either RF or Composite inputs.

SCART was quite 'high-end' (in the UK not everything had SCART by default) and the Amiga was not 'high-end', marketed towards the home. If you look at boxed Amiga A500/A500plus from the day, there was no SCART connector. It was an A520 with either composite or RF. Nothing else. All this SCART stuff is aftermarket by Amiga enthusiats. Amiga's never came with SCART. At least not in the UK, SCART was for the VCR and nothing else 😀.

red_avatar wrote:

And to say Amiga users mocked the PC for being complicated 🤣 I guess you have to have grown up with an Amiga to understand the nuances.

Honestly, they really aren't. Its the enthustiasts these days that have made it that way, if you wanted to experience what it was like back then, just buy an Amiga and plug it into your TV. You never needed the upgrades, only locked into ECS, OCS or AGA, that was it (heck HD's weren't even required). I never came across a non-AGA game that couldn't run on stock Amiga (A500plus) back then. Yes you could get RAM upgrades and CPU upgrades, but honestly, thats not the "Amiga" experiece.... thats enthusiast stuff. Amiga's were like consoles, there were not hundreds of combinations that meant you picked up a game and tried to work out if you could run it (like on PC). The specs were striaght forward.

Back in the day, all that was needed was to buy an Amiga. They came with KS and workbench, the A520, DP3, Lemmings... blah blah... Just plug it all together, no need for upgrades and plug it in to the TV, then get disk juggling.

Jo22 wrote:

Ahem. China also used PAL and found ways to create PAL circuitry (even cheaply and with little parts). ;) Seriously, though - Yo […]
Show full quote

spiroyster wrote:

Of course UK used PAL instead of NTSC which always complicated matters.

Ahem. China also used PAL and found ways to create PAL circuitry (even cheaply and with little parts). 😉
Seriously, though - You're right, but ut wasn't PAL's fault that US and Japan were very important in video business and foolishly used 60Hz and NTSC..
From a pure technical point of view, PAL wasn't bad at all. It had higher resolutions, safer colours and was closer to 24fps cinema format, too.
It was just a little bit slower, since the mains power in UK and EU were 50Hz and creators wanted TVs to be in sync with the flickering of light bulbs.
As a side note, the IBM MDA monitors also used 50Hz by default, so NTSC's 60Hz timing wasn't always #1 in computer industry.
Albeit with afterglow tubes (P5?) and 720x350 pels. Anyway, these a just some random thoughts of mine to this matter. No offense. 😁

None taken 😉, you'll have to work a lot harder than that to offend me. 😎

I never said PAL was bad, just different. I used to get imported consoles (mainly Japan), and unlike other 120V NTSC global locations, it was always something extra required to get sh*t to work... and even then it tended to come out black and white 🤣.

Yea, back in the day, Amiga was very easy to use. Most software came on self-booting floppies, so just stick the floppy in the drive and power on the machine, that's all there is to it.
And the OS came with a GUI, which was also very easy to use. Compare that to the weird BASIC commands for floppy use on a C64, or having to learn how to navigate a DOS prompt.

spiroyster wrote:

Are you sure about that? I don't remember any A500/A500plus coming with a SCART cable. They came with A520's and plugged into either RF or Composite inputs.

Positively.... All Amiga users that I knew in the late 80's, used the the modulator for one month or less and then bought an RGB-Scart cable. They were cheap and all TV's had Scart. The really rich kids, bought a real Commodore or Philips monitor instead of a TV. And some had a TV from when they sold their C64 in order to supplement the cost of an A500. Amiga500 and TV and one external floppy drive was the defacto standard setup. And then some 400 to 800 floppy disks with pirated games.

Regarding mocking Amiga or PC users. Then it was a custom to keep to your platform of choice. Yet as it is with all young teenagers, then they tease, make fun of and mock others to feel good about them self. And it was no different between PC and Amiga users. Amiga users made fun of PC users for batteling with CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT, bad sound, bad GFX, no multitasking and so on. PC users began to make fun of Amiga users when games suddenly became better on the PC (around 91/92) and the fact that Amiga's were hard to upgrade and had poor selection in hardware choices. Like when SB16 came, then it was custom to make fun of the not so 16-bit Amiga sound. Yet there are still a technology that are exclusive to the Amiga platform, and that is a 100% dynamic ram disk. Anyway... I belonged to a sub genre of computer user back then. Because I liked anything Computer, and Amiga as well as PC or C64, was all fair game to play with in my opinion. And still are.

spiroyster wrote:

I never said PAL was bad, just different. I used to get imported consoles (mainly Japan), and unlike other 120V NTSC global locations, it was always something extra required to get sh*t to work... and even then it tended to come out black and white 🤣.

The best Amiga games are PAL, and you get the widest choice of games on Pal Amiga's. Regarding the B/W output on the Amiga500. Then yes it has Composit output from the computer, yet that is B/W output. The modulator is required to get colour Composit output.

brostenen wrote:

Regarding mocking Amiga or PC users. Then it was a custom to keep to your platform of choice. Yet as it is with all young teenagers, then they tease, make fun of and mock others to feel good about them self. And it was no different between PC and Amiga users. Amiga users made fun of PC users for batteling with CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT, bad sound, bad GFX, no multitasking and so on. PC users began to make fun of Amiga users when games suddenly became better on the PC (around 91/92) and the fact that Amiga's were hard to upgrade and had poor selection in hardware choices. Like when SB16 came, then it was custom to make fun of the not so 16-bit Amiga sound. Yet there are still a technology that are exclusive to the Amiga platform, and that is a 100% dynamic ram disk. Anyway... I belonged to a sub genre of computer user back then. Because I liked anything Computer, and Amiga as well as PC or C64, was all fair game to play with in my opinion. And still are.

There was quite a bit of mocking going on in the demoscene. So much so, that one of the early good demos on PC was made by a group of former Amiga users, and they actually mocked the PC in the end scroller.
See here: https://youtu.be/3W6zVP-tdGU?t=530

brostenen wrote:

Regarding mocking Amiga or PC users. Then it was a custom to keep to your platform of choice. Yet as it is with all young teenagers, then they tease, make fun of and mock others to feel good about them self. And it was no different between PC and Amiga users. Amiga users made fun of PC users for batteling with CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT, bad sound, bad GFX, no multitasking and so on. PC users began to make fun of Amiga users when games suddenly became better on the PC (around 91/92) and the fact that Amiga's were hard to upgrade and had poor selection in hardware choices. Like when SB16 came, then it was custom to make fun of the not so 16-bit Amiga sound. Yet there are still a technology that are exclusive to the Amiga platform, and that is a 100% dynamic ram disk. Anyway... I belonged to a sub genre of computer user back then. Because I liked anything Computer, and Amiga as well as PC or C64, was all fair game to play with in my opinion. And still are.

It's funny but I never felt like that - mainly because there was no-one I knew who had an Amiga. In Belgium the Amiga was almost unheard of - even a Commodore 64 was a machine for the "elite", only found in homes of kids with rich parents. Until 1993, my Gameboy, Atari 2600 and my friend's NES were the only consoles I knew so when my father bought our first PC (an 386SX 25 IBM PS/1 which was already outdated the moment he bought it) I was blown away. In my class only one other kid had a PC so it was quite rare to have a computer back then. A friend gave me a few games - the Dizzy series and Prince of Persia - enough to tickle my interest.

At the end of 1993 I bought my first PC magazine called PC Review which had a big image of Indiana Jones on the front. My English was pretty basic at the time (I was just 13 years old) but I devoured that magazine - was totally blown away by the many games and game genres available. Alone In The Dark, Prince of Persia, Indiana Jones & Fate of Atlantis, strategy games, flight sims (TFX was just released at the time), RPGs (Elder Scrolls Arena anyone?), ... for a 13 year whose gaming world largely existed of stale platform games, this was immensely exciting. Then the next month I bought another magazine: the very first issue of PC Gamer (UK) which had a cover disk with Beneath A Steel Sky. That game COMPLETELY blew me away. Such amazing artwork, atmosphere, puzzles - my first contact with a point 'n click adventure game. After that I bought each issue of PC Gamer but also would browse lots of magazines including all the Amiga ones - I'd really feel envy for those games that wouldn't appear on PC (but I bet at the time, Amiga users had far more envy for the PC).

So yeah, I never felt any animosity towards the Amiga and when in 1995, Stuart Campbell (well known Amiga Power writer) started writing for PC Gamer, I didn't know why he was so negative about the PC - he kept taking pot shots at it which seemed strange for someone writing for a PC games magazine. At the time I didn't know the bad blood Amiga users had for the PC - especially since many seemed to feel Amiga devs were traitors for moving to PC - which is a damn shame.

Why don't you take a Super Nintendo (or Sega Genesis / Mega Drive)? Same kind of games as on the Amiga and much more reliable (Amiga fan boys are probably going to say that's no comparison but I have owned several Amiga's too and there's nothing desirable about them unless you like to spend tons of money on upgrades that you won't need for playing classic Amiga games).