Doom clones:

Alien Breed 3D 1995

Alien Breed 3D was the first successfully commercial “Doom-clone” on the Amiga. It was only compatible with the Amiga 1200 and the Amiga 4000 because it used some clever hardware tricks for the game engine only present in the AGA chips. Alien Breed 3D can run on a stock Amiga 1200 with 2 MB but shines on an Amiga upgraded with a 030 CPU. In the graphics department Alien Breed 3D has worse graphics than Doom and runs in a much smaller window. The actual game though is very good and fun to play.

Breathless 1995

Breathless was the first FPS on the Amiga with true 1×1 pixel graphics, but that also meant big hardware requirements like a 060 CPU and AGA. No worry though since you could run in blockier low resolution mode if you had a more basic CPU in your Amiga. As usual pretty graphics alone can not make a game great and Breathless suffers a little in the design department. But to be fair, in 1995 lots of games took place in boring shiny corridors with basic level design.

Citadel 1995

Citadel is a weird 3D game that is unique since it can run on the Amiga 500 (with a tiny, tiny screen), most FPS on the Amiga needed at least AGA and 2 MB.

Deathmask 1995

Deathmask was a game that tried to ride on the success of the “Doom-clone” games in the middle of the 90′ies. Deathmask can actually run on every Amiga, even an unexpanded Amiga 500 with 1 MB because the game does not use a true real-time 3D-engine. The engine used is a fake “Dungeon Master” like engine with real-time scrolling when you turn around. But the animation when you change direction is not very convincing and looks more 2D than 3D. There is only one floor with no variations in height and game takes place in boxy tunnels so Deathmask is a horrible attempt at a “Doom clone”.

Fears 1995

Fears is a true “Doom-clone” since it features full screen action stairways and lifts. But the graphics are very blocky and the game does not flow as well as Doom, game play is horrible to be honest with you. Fears were made by a demo group on the Amiga to prove that Amiga could have Doom style games.

Gloom 1995

Gloom was one of the first good “Doom-clones” on the Amiga and ran on the A1200 and the A4000. What made Gloom so fun was the heavy emphasis on action, very much like Doom. Graphics where blocky and levels where flat like Wolfenstein, but the engine was fast and there actually seemed like the developers had put in an effort to make a fun game and not only a demonstration of a 3D engine.

Gloom Deluxe 1996

Gloom Deluxe was an improved version of Gloom using a better 3D engine capable of higher resolution it could also run on any Amiga with at least a 020 CPU and 2 MB memory. Gloom Deluxe could also run on a graphics board and on the Workbench in a small window. Gloom Deluxe is one of the best “Doom clones” on the Amiga.

Alien Breed 3D II 1996

Alien Breed 3D was a big hit on the Amiga so Team 17 decided to release a sequel. This time the graphics engine was heavily upgraded with 3D-modeled weapons and better graphics. Alien Breed 3D II can run on a standard Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000 but you will need a 030 CPU to begin to have fun with the game. But even a top of the line 060 CPU will not play this game smooth in some levels. The first game was almost as fun as Doom was but the sequel did not live up to the expectations, the levels where boring and confusing, enemies hard, choppy frame rates made the game even harder, some actually like Alien Breed 3D II but you should try it to make up your own mind. There is a patch AB3DII on AmiNET which makes it compatible with graphics boards.

Nemac IV 1996

Nemac IV was a good looking FPS on the Amiga, if you had an expanded machine. While the graphics where very nice in the ads for the game I found the game to be boring. But Nemac IV is liked by some and can be played on a variety of Amigas.

Trapped 1996

Trapped was a German RPG and also an FPS made by a demo group. It some 3D real-time polygonal enemies and ran on a hi-end Amiga with AGA or graphics board.

Testament 1997

Testament is more of a Wolfenstein clone than a true “Doom-clone”. Testament is probably most famous for getting a very good review in the magazine Amiga Format when it was released. If it really deserved that good review because the game was good or it got a good score because it was a 3D game on the Amiga is unknown but Testament is very polished in comparison with other Amiga games if a little bit boring after a while (just like Wolfenstein).

Trapped 2 1997

Trapped 2 was the follow up to Trapped released in 1996.

Genetic Species 1998

Wow! This was a rather big game in the Amiga world when it was released. Made by members of a demo group it had impressive graphics and was released at almost the same time as Quake. Genetic Species flies on a fast Amiga with a 060 CPU and graphics board but is also playable on a 030 CPU and AGA.

Ports:

Wolfenstein 3D

Wolfenstein 3D can be played on the Amiga thanks to Amiga fans who ported the game over to their favorite machine. It took quite a while before a solid Wolfenstein 3D port was released on the Amiga. Was the wait worth it? Hard to say since I never been that big fan of Wolfenstein.

Doom 1997

It was only a matter of time before a port of Doom was released for the Amiga when ID software released the source code of Doom as a tribute to the fans of the game. The first Doom port for the Amiga was ADoom which was developed until it was a perfect version of the game on the Amiga. The Amiga version of Doom is very interesting since many claimed Doom was impossible to run on the Amiga. Now that Doom was ported to Amiga it was obvious that even a 030 equipped Amiga could play Doom with adequate frame rates.

Heretic

Following the port of Doom to the Amiga soon Heretic was ported and it was widely regarded as a good game.

Hexen

Hexen was also ported to the Amiga. Hexen was a kind of follow up to Heretic but had tougher puzzles and less traditional FPS action.

Quake 1998

Quake on the Amiga began as an illegal port of the stolen source code of ID software’s Quake engine. The binaries where spread on Amiga bulletin board systems with a short text file explaining Quake was now on the Amiga and the Amiga community went wild with excitement. The hardware requirements for Amiga Quake were lots of RAM and at minimum a 020 CPU. In real life you needed an over clocked 060 CPU to get frame rates over 10 FPS. After the illegal release of the Quake port a commercial effort was made to officially release Quake for the Amiga. The official Quake port was more polished than the illegal port and a special 060 build of Quake was also released. But even with the 060 build frame rates where an issue since they rarely went over 15 FPS. A PPC port of Quake was released when the source code of Quake was released to the public by ID software. The PPC port was a lot faster than the 68k version and many wondered why Quake was never ported to the PPC in the first place when it was commercially available for the Amiga.

Descent 1998

The source code of the MS-DOS game Descent was released on the net and an Amiga port was shortly thereafter compiled and released for free by Amiga fans. You would need to have a powerful Amiga to be able to play Descent with good frame rates. The Amiga port of Descent might best be remembered to be the only (?) game with direct support of the 3D hardware of the CV64-3D Amiga graphics card.

Shogo 2001

Shogo was a PC game ported to the Amiga by the same guys who ported Descent to the Amiga. Shogo was a commercial release and needed a PPC accelerator and a fast graphics board.

Duke Nukem 3D 2003

There is a port of Duke Nukem 3D for the Amiga since the source code was released. Duke Nukem 3D has a more advanced game engine than Doom but the read me file tells that the game runs in 15 FPS more or less on a top of the line 060 CPU Amiga with a fast graphics card. Which are almost the same frame rates I got on my old 486 DX2 66 MHz.

Fear not, many old Amiga computers are out in the second hand market. If all you want is to play some old Amiga games any old Amiga 500 will work perfectly fine, (hopefully), but old floppies are not known to be the most reliable medium, especially Amiga floppies. There is a solution called WHDLoad which can install non installable Amiga games to the harddrive. Most WHDLoad installed games need a slightly beefier Amiga than your old A500, needing harddrive, some extra memory and in some cases a turbo board. Expanding an old Amiga 500 can be expensive, an A1200 is a better option since it has an IDE interface ready for a harddrive and comes with 2 MB memory. Add some extra memory and you will have a perfect retro Amiga.

The A1200 is the best all around solution if you want to add an Amiga to your computer park again. With an Amiga 1200 you can easily add a harddrive, expand it with a turbo board and even add an industry standard PCMCIA network card enabling you to see your SAMBA shares on your home network. And if you feel that your wallet is slightly to fat you can even put your A1200 on the extreme side by converting it into a tower, adding expensive PPC turbo board and graphics board. If only Commodores engineers knew this back in the early 90′ies.

I got the opportunity to work at the Swedish Amiga show AmiCon92 in 1992. AmiCon92 was located in a suburb to Stockholm called Sollentuna.

We thought the show was going to start early in the morning but we failed to take notice that the show was about to start 4 hours later than what we thought. Thankfully, to save us from a lot of free time a person from the show organizers asked us if we wanted to help out and work there. We was let in early and got to see all the big names in the Swedish Amiga industry at the time.

I earned 500 SEK by working there for two days which was not at all bad. I also got a free Amiga t-shirt that sadly got to worn to wear, it had a fantastic multicolored Amiga logo with the double tick. It was cool to see all the Commodore business guys. Basically my job was to guard an open door so that nobody could sneak in to the backside, but my guarding place was located at the toilettes so I also had to guard a baby and a boxed brand new GVP hard drive for an A500 while the father took a leak. All in all it was a small show but very crowded, plus it was cool to take part in the Amiga world when it was still a big mainstream platform.

Some of the cool stuff on the show was an A2000 that played up a short scene from Back to the future 2 in full screen on a Commodore monitor over and over again, it was a huge crowd catcher. There was also a very cool -at the time- A2000 that was used a BBS computer. It had three disk drives, which was awesome, and anyone could choose three PD programs to copy for free if you supplied empty floppies yourself. Naturally Scala was there and lots of other small and big Amiga dealers and such. Then there was some lottery program some guys and their father tried to sell. It was called Ranko and had the most irritating tune ever that they had set on replay. Apparently they didn’t sell that many copies of the program the first day, so the next day they brought a digitizer and a camera with them and told everyone passing by they could get a digitized image of their own face for 50 SEK. Believe it or not I think they made more money on digitizing peoples faces than with the lottery program.

Amitech 97 and Amitech 98

Amitech was a new Amiga show that was intended to promote the Amiga and show people who thought Amiga was dead that it was still alive.

Amitech 97

I remember going to Amitech in 1997 not knowing what to find but I left very impressed of what I saw there. The area was small. But there was still a lot of interesting stuff to see. Phase 5 had a cool booth and the largest area where they showed of their PPC boards on some cool Infinitive towers. Their huge booth looked very professional. There were also some Amiga dealers showing off the usual cool stuff like tower kits and the rare Draco Amiga clone. There were also some guests that came and held speeches. Petro was there but I didn’t want to stay around to wait for him. I listened to some guy from Motorola that was there to promote the PPC CPU from Motorola. But his speech was very short and nobody had any good questions afterwards. He said he was impressed by the Amiga demos, and then he told everyone he had a PC at home and the crowd started to boo him out. There was some great stuff shown at the show and it all felt very positive, I left with a good impression of the Amiga and its user base, and it seemed to be a popular show.

Amitech 98

Amitech 97 was actually a good show so I wasn’t really prepared for the disaster that Amitech 98 turned out to be in 1998. I don’t exactly remember how much it cost to attend the show, but it was higher than before and not really that cheap for such a small show. When I entered the building I saw a lot of empty tables and a very empty hall. -Where were all the people?

I am not making this up but I walked around the area in 10 minutes then I had seen all the show had to offer!

So what was there to see?

Well. They had an A1200 with every possible accessory mounted inside a cool Infinitiv tower running Doom (which was just released on the Amiga at the time thanks to the source code being released). On another booth they had recorded someone playing Doom on the Amiga on a VCR and were showing the video on an old ugly 80′ies television. I don’t understand what the point was of that? It was disgusting watching Doom being played from a low quality VCR player on a ten year old television! I saw the Index Inside Out project which was a small PCI card intended to be used with a 040 or 060 CPU inside a PC or other PCI compatible computer. Sadly it never made it to the market. Index booth was just a table that had a black carpet on it and then the small PCI card on it. Jens Schönfeldt was there showing of his hardware. He had all his fantastic products there. Also an A4000 was running the game Myst. After 20 minutes I had seen enough and left the building. Later I read in a magazine that there had been far too little attention of the show made, and the bad weather was also a reason for the little interest in the show. It was a surprisingly dull show and a total waste of money.

By observing the small mini tower I noticed that it was not that small at all, at least not on the inside. It could easily hose a normal AT PC motherboard with a normal PSU without any problems. The Amiga 4000 motherboard is almost the same size as the AT standard was in the PC world. I measured the tiny box over and over again and came to the conclusion that it would be possible to fit an Amiga 4000 inside it. It would be a very tight fit -if the Amiga motherboard had been one centimeter taller it would not have fit the case. After about two weeks the case was finally taking shape. It was a challenging task to mount the Amiga 4000 motherboard in the small case.

After much time spent on the case I came to the conclusion that I was not satisfied with the look of the case with the Amiga inside it. The reason was that I had to mount my 5.25 units vertical since there was not any space left to mount them horizontal as they was meant to be. This did not look nice, something I wished I knew before I started to chop of plastic from the front panel of the case. After three months I decided to mount my Amiga parts back into the original A4000 desktop case. But one thing is for sure, it was an extremely small case and it is interesting that so much hardware could be squeezed into it. I am a perfectionist, in reality there was not so much wrong with the case. But I like nice design. And truly this case did not look half as cool with the 5.25 slots vertical as it looked with them horizontal.

Hardware:

Phase 5 Cyberstorm 060 mk2 with SCSI module.

64 MB memory, 2 MB chip memory.

Phase 5 Cybervision 64 3D with Scandoubler module.

LanRover ASDG NIC.

Buddha/Catweasel Zorro2 card.

Elbox Zorro 3 7-slot doughtercard.

Harddrive, floppydrive, tapestreamer and CD-rom.

Workbench -the operating system of the Amiga- comes with a different set of icons depending of the version of the operating system. The earliest Workbench, 1.x came with the original set. In 2.x the icons where upgraded to a much more modern look, the operating system was also upgraded back then and became much better than 1.x ever was. Workbench 3.0 and 3.1 used the same icons as 2.x but when Workbench 3.5 and 3.9 was released the icons where completely redrawn in color.

Commodore original icons 3.x

The original workbench icon set is in 4 colors only. Opinions about the look of these icons are very broad, some hate them and some like them. I happen to like them, they are very basic but they look all right even high resolution and in low resolution. They are the fastest icons to run if you want Workbench to be snappy and responsive because of their limited use of the palette.

Magic Workbench

MWB -short for Magic Workbench- was released in 1993 and was instantly crowned as one of the most important add on for Workbench ever, many claimed a future release of Workbench needed to have MWB installed by default. Commodore folded a year later in 1994 and there would be many years until a new version of Workbench was officially released.

Magic Workbench is an amazing icon package where the icons are based on only 8 colors. Not having to run Workbench in more than 8 colors meant the tradeoff between a good looking desktop and a fast desktop was minimal. With the fastest 060 turbo board a switch to MWB can bring an amazing speed boost over a PNG or GlowIcon Workbench. Many claimed that Magic Workbench looks dull, but I have to disagree, the icons are very detailed and have a professional look and most important, the original icon set from the main MWB-package just flows together to form a unified and great looking Workbench.

New Icons

New Icons where an icon set that made it possible to run color icons on the Amiga. NI was released around the same time as Magic Workbench and while MWB users claimed that NI icons looked like ketchup and mustard, New Icons users claimed MWB was a dull and gray icon set. While New Icons definitely did show it was possible to have a colorful desktop with nice looking icons most of the icons lacked quality and did not look as good as Magic Workbench. NI was also much slower than the original Commodore and MWB icons so you had to have a fast Amiga and preferably a graphics board to keep the Amiga from slowing down. New Icons did show in which way the future for Workbench would lead but in the end it was a hack and you needed to have a very beefed up Amiga in order to not experience much slow downs.

Glow Icons

A revolutionary icon pack was released on Aminet in 1998. It was called Glow Icons and consisted of a set of New Icon compatible icons with a nice effect, when an icon was clicked a nice glow was added around the image. Icon sets for MWB and NI was not something new, there are many of them on Aminet but Glow Icons had style -much thanks to the original author being a designer- something the default amateurish New Icons lacked. The images where deliciously dithered by hand and the colors where calm and easy to look at, it was obvious that there was a real designer who had created this icon set. Glow Icons got the official approve by the Amiga world when the icon pack was integrated into the new official update of Workbench called Workbench 3.5. While the original Glow Icons did look very good, many of the third party icons released by Amiga fans did not live up to the high standards of the original set, also the glow effect did not fit all icons but overall GI was a superb update and a realistic alternative to MWB.

PNG

Amiga could not use PNG icons until there was a patch released called Powericons. With the patch installed the big world of PNG icons opened up and Workbench changed the look from dithered pixels to smooth photoshopped faded icons. While the hardware requirements for New Icons could be claimed steep back in the day, nothing compares to the hardware requirements needed to run PNG icons, it requires the fastest CPU and graphics board you can get your hands on for pleasant experience, the author claims the best Amiga to run the patch on is an emulated one. But users have been reported they have got reasonable speed on a 060 based Amiga with the right system-speedup-patches.

A PC today can easily be connected to a television, most graphics card have the possibility to show output on a TV, sometimes with no drivers needed. So the Amiga is not so unique anymore.

A graphics card used to be quite expensive for an Amiga and where exclusive to expensive big-box Amiga computers since they connected to the internal Zorro slot. While the TV-out signal of the Amiga was great for games or video editing it was not so good for everyday work. A resolution of 640×256 (every pixel is taller on the height than on the width) is and was quite low, higher resolutions demanded expensive monitors and often limited to 8 or 16 colors to keep the speed of the system high. Thanks to Amiga specific graphics card it was possible to run the operating system of the Amiga in the same resolutions as the PC used.

Zorro graphics card are compatible with the A2000, A3000(T), A4000(T) and various Zorro busboards. There are two different versions of Zorro slots, Zorro 2 and Zorro 3 where Zorro 3 is the faster one. You will only find Zorro 2 slots on the A2000 and various Zorro busboards. All Zorro 2 boards are compatible with Zorro 3 based Amigas.

Some of the best graphics cards on the Amiga are:

Picasso IV by Village Tronic

The Picasso IV is the ultimate Zorro based graphics card. It has a built in scandoubler and flickerfixer so that the TV-out signal from the Amiga is converted to a signal possible to be viewed on a standard PC monitor. Picasso IV is also a very fast and stable board with expansion possibilities for sound card and TV-card. The card is compatible with booth Zorro 2 and Zorro 3 based Amigas and supports resolutions up to 1600×1200.

Picasso II by Village Tronic

The Picasso II is a stable Zorro 2 graphics card that is much slower than the rest of the listed cards here. Picasso II is a great card if you do not mind running Workbench in lower resolution with 16-bit color mode or in higher resolution with 256 or less colors.

CV64 by Phase 5

The CyberVision 64 is a fast Zorro 3 only card. It is actually faster than the CV64-3D that came after it and many consider it to be a great card. CV64 has a pass through for a scandoubler/flickerfixer.

CV64-3D by Phase 5

The CyberVision 64 3D is a Zorro 2 and Zorro 3 based card that has the option of running a small optional scandoubler card. The optional scandoubler is very rare today and not easy to find. CyberVision 64 3D was supposed to be a card that brought hardware supported 3D to the Amiga but not many applications where made that used the 3D part of the card.

Amiga is capable of playing MP3 music. You need at least a Motorola 060 processor to be able to play MP3 music without loss of audio quality but without a soundcard music will be played in 8-bit. With a soundcard you can enjoy MP3 music in 16-bit. Another classic use for sound cards in Amiga system was in video editing.

MacroSystem made some very nice hardware for the Commodore Amiga. They also created one of the few commercial Amiga clones called the Draco. The Draco was a 040/060 based hi-end computer running Workbench 3.1 intended to be used for video editing. The Draco lacked the custom chipset of the Amiga and ran only ‘system friendly’ application. MacroSystem was also the company behind the Vlab and Vlab motion Zorro 2 card for the Amiga 2000, 3000 and 4000 systems. The Vlab was a video digitizer, you could grab images from a video source and save them out as pictures. The Vlab motion was a video editing card and could digitize 24-bit video.

The Toccata soundcard (also made by MacroSystem) could be used with the Vlab motion to edit non linear sound and video. The Toccata soundcard is a nicely designed Zorro 2 card. The board layout is quite classy with chips dominating the left part of the card and the sound chip firmly planted in a PLCC-socket in the middle of the card. The right side of the card is dominated by three massive 6.3 millimeter stereo sockets accessible from the back of the card and two internal 3.5 millimeter internal stereo sockets. The three 6.3 millimeters stereo sockets are, “sound out”, “sound in” and “aux”. The two internal 3.5 millimeter sockets are “aux2″ and “mic”. There are no hand soldered “last minute” patch cables running between chips on this piece of hardware.

The “aux” ports are highly useful since the native Amiga sound is outputted from the motherboard connectors. By routing native Amiga audio in to the Aux port user do not have to switch cables when listening to 16-bit audio or native 8-bit Amiga audio. However this will only work inside Workbench so any software which is “banging the hardware” directly wont sound anything if speakers are hooked up to the Toccata card.

It might seem weird at first to find internal 3.5 millimeter stereo sockets on the side of the card not accessible from the outside of the computer but it makes perfect sense. It is for example possible to route audio from the CD-rom to the “aux2″ socket so music from the CD is mixed in with the 16-bit and 8-bit audio.

The MacroSystem Toccata sound card was not the first sound card for the Amiga and there are newer sound cards for example the Prelude and the Delfina (made by other manufacturers). MacroSystem do not make Amiga hardware anymore but all hardware I have used which was made by them have been great and stable hardware, so if you happen to find a Toccata, get it, it is well worth it if you are an Amiga enthusiast with a big box system.

Buying a hard drive for your Amiga used to be a huge investment. Not only did you buy the hard drive, you also needed to buy the controller for it since some Amiga models did not come with a HD controller built in. You could easily pay more for a hard drive controller and a hard drive than for the Amiga 500, if you wanted extra memory added in the controller price could easily hit the stratosphere.

At the end of the lifespan of the A500 some IDE hard drive controllers where released. IDE is not as good as SCSI is (or was) but it is cheaper and works well for most users, these hard drives where a bit cheaper to buy than a SCSI controller and SCSI eventually fell in popularity with mainstream Amiga owners.

Alfapower 500 is an excellent hard drive controller for the Amiga 500 and A500+. Since it is using IDE units is possible to run a Compact Flash card as a hard drive instead with an IDE to Compact Flash adapter easily found on the net right now. I was kinda surprised to find booth a 40-pin header for 3.5 drives and a 44-pin header for notebook drives (same as A600 and A1200). There should be space inside it to run dual 2.5 inch hard drives or a single 3.5 inch and a single 2.5 inch drive internally, but why would you? Compact Flash price is dropping every day and the awesome speedup, silent operation and low watt consumption of CF-cards makes it a winner anytime over regular old school IDE hard drives.

Another cool thing with the unit is the slot on the backside that is open for a 40-pin IDE cable to pass through letting the user hook up an IDE CD-rom easily to his A500.

Most Amiga hard drive controllers have some way of expanding memory and so does the Alfapower 500. There are actually two versions of this controller around, the older one supports ZIP-memory, hard to find these days. The newer version supports 72-pin memory, relatively easy to find these days. Booth versions can be expanded to 8 MB.

Alfa Data provided the case of the controller with two switches, one lets you turn off the hard drive, it will still spin up like its operational but it will be invincible to the system. The other switch lets the user turn off the extra memory. Some software (mostly games) had problems running with an expanded Amiga, turning off hard drive could mean a running game or not.

All in all this is a great add on to any Amiga 500 and will add more enjoyment to it eliminating painful floppy loading and read write errors from old disks kept in storage for years.

There where actually a couple of different PPC solutions planned but only Phase 5’s BlizzardPPC and CyberStormPPC cards where released. Phase 5’s cards where dual processor cards containing both a classic 68k CPU and a faster next generation PPC chip. The idea was that the operating system would run on the 68k CPU and applications would run on the PPC CPU, a perfect thought and a good compromise between next generation and truly next generation at the time.

Sadly though PPC did not become the defacto next generation standard for the Amiga many had hoped for. As the PPC was used only as a co-processor used for specific programs it did not do anything to speed up the system if the user did not run specific programs compiled for the PPC CPU. For example datatypes where made for PPC which meant quicker JPG decoding. PPC cards where expensive so there where some who did not buy the cards because they could get a PC for the same cost. Technically there was a problem where a program used both the 68k CPU and the PPC CPU did not get the speed boost everyone expected since the OS was still running on the 68k side. But it was not only the fault of the hardware, company politics where behind the problems to.

The first generation PPC cards where not a perfect solution and Phase 5 already had plans for the next version of the turbo boards which cut out the 68k CPU completely. This time a G3 CPU was supposed to be used emulating the 68k processor giving the whole system a speedboost. Sadly, the G3 card never came to the market since Phase 5 went down.

Other PPC alternatives for the Amiga were a G3 accelerator by Metabox (a company with some roots with the Amiga) called the AmiJoe. AmiJoe was actually showed at various Amiga shows but the card was not finished so it was never showed in a working state, the AmiJoe project was eventually canceled. Escena was another company who was supposed to make a PPC card, however no card was ever released.

Before OS4 was released for the classic Amiga computers there was not any valid reason to get a PPC card for the Amiga, IMHO. In these times of 3 GHz processors and free multitasking operating systems ,like Ubuntu with good usability, Amiga is not the kind of workhorse it used to be, most tasks can already be done on any other computer but an Amiga much better and faster too.

But even though Amiga is not so much up to the task anymore competing with latest PC hardware performance wise there is something special about the operating system on the Amiga, and there are a dedicated few who want to push their favorite computer to the limits, any cost it will have. That is why there was a batch of pure PPC motherboards manufactured and released as the “proper” successor to the Amiga after year 2000. Those motherboards “called AmigaOne” can not be bought anymore and where far more technically advanced than the classic Amiga/PPC combo. There is hope for the future that a new AmigaOS4 compatible motherboard is going to be relased, however for now an Amiga 1200 or 4000 with a PPC card or an AmigaOne motherboard is your only option for running the latest version of Workbench.

To release OS4 for classic at this point of time is a bit strange since the community have been hurt for a lot of years by broken promises. You could easily say the remaining few who are still around are pure hardcore users, but many hope OS4 will be a kind of accelerator for the community bringing in those who used to like the Amiga but let it go years ago when they could not install Unreal Tournament on it.

The problem with OS4 Classic is that it is only possible to run it on an Amiga with a PPC card. I would not claim PPC cards are rare but they can fetch heavy prices at the moment. In the future many hope there will be other hardware options but right now and here it is positive to be able to run OS4 on something else than the AmigaOne motherboards relased back in 2002 or 2003 which have not been available for quite a long time now.

So let us focus on AmigaOS4 instead…

Installation of OS4 is relatively easy. During installation of AmigaOS4 I felt slightly lost in the procedures but a quick look in the manual set me off in the right direction. It is the first time in years that I have had to read a printed manual to be able to successfully install software.

Workbench 4 installation takes about 20 minutes and leaves you with a fresh installation with a set of applications in the system partition.

For Amiga users known to previous variants of the Workbench you will most probably feel at home right away. Everything is almost the same way that OS3.9 was, it is just that a lot of essential system patches are already built into the operating system. I noticed directly that opaque window movement was fast, fonts looked great since they are all anti-alized. Icons are colorful and speedy, you still have to wait for them to pop up but they are much faster than I thought GlowIcons where in OS3.9. The overall system is much faster than older variants of Workbench, granted nothing can probably beat a basic four color Workbench 3.0/3.1 installation on a 060 and graphics board equipped Amiga for speed but OS4 is fast with lots of eye candy stock.

As I checked out the newly installed OS4 I noticed a lot of improvements. Going into ‘prefs’ there are now quite a lot of options you can change. Some of the ‘prefs’ programs contains a lot of options, going through them and learning what they each do is going to take some time.

My own motive for getting OS4 was to have a modern Amiga environment without spending a couple of weekends perfecting a “perfect” Workbench 3.9 setup. It is also sort of nice to be able to use a familiar system on faster hardware. I was also very much interested in running classic 68k applications in OS4, Amiga Workbench 4 contains a 68k emulator so that users can run system friendly applications on the PPC chip, a necessity since the 68k chip is not running when OS4 have booted. After a quick test with a couple of favorite programs it is quite clear that running 68k applications in OS4 may or may not be a walk in the park. When it works though expect a massive speedup of the program.

If I have to say something bad about AmigaOS 4 it must be the various degree of compatibility with older native 68k software even though the operating system is running on classic Amiga hardware and not on next generation Amiga hardware. You can not assume that every piece of software is going to be released specifically for OS4 but usually you will find replacement software that does what the old software did in previous versions of Workbench. But then again that leaves the question, if you can not run your old favorite software, why would you want to run OS4 at all? A solution would be to run two system partitions, one for 3.9 and one for 4.0. I would have preferred to only work in OS4 but it is not a perfect world yet.

OS4 is a product for the hardcore Amiga user who is familiar with the operating system. Gamers who lounge for the glorified past of Commodore 16-bit gaming wont find anything useful in this operating system and are better off with an Amiga 1200 with extra memory and a hard drive. It is going to take a bit of dedication to get the most out of AmigaOS 4. Even though the release date is 2007 sometimes it feels as if Workbench is still in 1997 but there is really no reason to argue about bad things in OS4, all positive aspects in OS4 outnumbers them, by a lot.

Another reason to remember GVP is their later accelerators which only accepted their “own” memory standard which makes those products slightly unattractive on today’s international second hand market if the product offered is not already generously populated with RAM since finding the rare GVP-Simms is difficult and costly.

Anyway this is a GVP HD8+, a SCSI hard drive controller for the Amiga 500 and 500+. There used to be quite a lot of hard drive controllers available for the Amiga 500 but it seems the HD8+ is one of the more remembered models. Contrary to most other hard drive controllers for the A500, the GVP unit is shaped exactly like the Amiga shell. So it might not be the smallest external hard drive controller but it is definitely the best looking.

Externally the case has a switch on the front of the case, the switch lets the user chose between “Autoboot” and “Game”. Some games which booted of off a floppy drive did not work with a hard drive controller attached so by disabling the hard drive with the switch you did not have to remove the whole package from the 86-pin edge slot on the side. When the switch is in “Autoboot” mode the hard drive boots automatically and drops the user in Workbench 1.3+ (depending on which version of Workbench is installed on the SCSI hard drive).

On the back of the GVP HD8+ case there is a 25-pin external SCSI connector so more SCSI units could be attached. Back when SCSI was a common standard outside of server environments one of the big selling points was that you could attach up to seven devices to a SCSI cable. There where scanners, tape streamers and CD-ROM drives in SCSI format which in theory could be run from the external 25-pin port. Besides the external SCSI controller there is a small power plug for the external power supply provided with the GVP hard drive controller. The unit will not work without it. On top of the shell there are two small windows for internal LEDs, one show if power is on and the other shows hard drive activity.

Inside the case most of the space is taken up by the 3.5 inch SCSI hard drive. In this case an old 850 MB drive which is noticeable more loudly than modern SATA drives but not irritatingly loud. In front of the hard drive are a couple of jumpers and four 30-pin SIMM slots. Thankfully the GVP HD8+ uses standard 30-pin SIMM which can offer up to 8 MB combined. To the right of the hard drive there is a long pin header which was meant for a 286 bridgeboard made by GVP. When the GVP HD8+ was available you could do most typical PC tasks with a basic 286 so the possibility of having a basic IBM-PC compatible inside your multitasking Amiga Workbench was an interesting option. The jumpers over the SIMM-slots set the amount of memory installed. On the back of the hard drive there is a 50-pin pin-header for the internal SCSI cable.

The GVP HD8+ is a stable and proven hard drive controller, it is relatively easy to set up and get going and is an attractive package since it lets you expand memory up to 8 MB with relatively easy to find 30-pin SIMM memory.