Commodore Amiga 500 Demonstration - Part 2: HAM graphics

[jazzmunky]

very interesting video, thank you!

[KaitainCPS]

It's amazing now that the Amiga has been airbrushed out of history. It came out a year after the Macintosh and was a FAR more capable machine. It really was the greatest machine of the 80s.

[jamesbooty]

@KaitainCPS I completely agree. It's not just the Amiga, but Commodore in general. Documentaries about the history of personal computers typically skip over Commodore entirely. I just watched an episode of "Modern Marvels" with the topic "80s Tech." They talked quite a bit about IBM and Apple, but despite showing a Commodore 64 multiple times (even showing screen shots of a C64 disk listing and a BASIC program writing "MODERN MARVELS" on screen) they never once mentioned the machine by name.

[KaitainCPS]

The only crap thing I remember about my Amiga days was that the mouse gradually degraded in performance. The rubber balls would get clogged with fluff and (yuck) old skin, and the button sensors would gradually get worse and miss presses. I used to add sticky tape onto the plastic button structs so they pressed a little harder on the actuators underneath. But I kept having to buy new mice.

[jamesbooty]

@KaitainCPS Yes, I have several Amiga... mice(?) with flaky buttons and a ball that has transformed from soft rubber to a smooth, hard marble. Some rubber conditioner might soften the ball up a bit, but those buttons did eventually stop working.

[TeamRocketReviews]

@KaitainCPS Happens to most old ball mice.

[mrvesteraas]

Nostalgia!

[yak2be]

Awesome HAM explanation!

[sheridanmedia]

@yak2be Thanks. When I was a teenager and the Amiga was new, I remember being very impressed with the quality of images a person could get on the Amiga. Photo-realistic images on a PC at that time was revolutionary, and looking back it's amazing to think that the HAM feature was almost not included. It was a very interesting graphics mode and one of the things that helped make the Amiga special.

[jamesbooty]

@yak2be Thank-you.

[296erm]

nice video...5

[bar4122]

nice video

[richardmaudsley77]

I've got almost exactly that setup. Identical floppy drive and all.

[jamesbooty]

@richardmaudsley77 Sweet.  It's funny how the 3rd party floppy drives were so much lower profile than the Commodore brand. The original Amiga external 3.5" drives were enormous. I just acquired another external floppy which is even smaller than the one in this video.