
Ask HN: Why are Amigas so inaccessible as a retrocomputing platform? - codezero
Since lockdown I&#x27;ve been playing around with a bunch of platforms that were around when I was young, but never really played with, I&#x27;ve made my way through the VIC, C64, Spectrum, and ended up  around the Amiga where I got pretty  stumped.<p>It appears all the software and firmware is super proprietary still, that seems a little bizarre, and especially weird there are no clean room implementations of things.<p>I&#x27;m mostly baffled because the platform looks great, it&#x27;s almost the ideal thing I&#x27;d like to play around with, and there&#x27;s basically a huge barrier to entry :(
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PaulHoule
The Amiga didn't age well.

It was dramatically better than other computers at multimedia when it first
came out, but that didn't last.

I remember programming planar graphics for the EGA, and it was tricky. HAM
mode on the Amiga was kinda cool but I'd hate to have to code for it. If you
look at the WDDM/Wayland/Programmable Shader model of programming today it
vastly better.

In the 1980s there were many computer vendors who got on the 68k train but
they all got off because Motorola gave up on it. Apple, Sun, and some others
switched to RISC architectures. Quite a few others went out of business.

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codezero
Any chance the Motorola legacy had anything to do with the ROM situation being
so weird and inaccessible 30-40 years on?

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tjr
The Amiga was great. Nothing today comes close in terms of sheer joy.

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codezero
Any reason you can think of it never had a more open source following in terms
of compatibility/retrocomputing?

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db48x
The owners think they still have a chance to commercialize the software. In
fact, I think there are actually multiple people fighting over who owns what.

