I found this searching for information on how to program for the old Commodore Amiga’s HAM (Hold And Modify) video mode and you gotta touch and feel this one to sneer at it, cause I haven’t seen a website this aggressively shitty since Flash died. the content isn’t even worth quoting as it’s just LLM-generated bullshit meant to SEO this shit site into the top result for an existing term (which worked), but just clicking around and scrolling on this site will expose you to an incredible density of laggy, broken full screen animations that take way too long to complete and block reading content until they’re done, alongside a long list of other good design sense violations (find your favorites!)
bonus sneer
arguably I’m finally taking up Amiga programming as an escape from all this AI bullshit. well fuck me I guess cause here’s one of the vultures in the retrocomputing space selling an enshittified (and very ugly) version of AmigaOS with a ChatGPT app and an AI art generator, cause not even operating on a 30 year old computer will spare me this bullshit:
like fuck man, all I want to do is trick a video chipset from 1985 into making pretty colors. am I seriously gonna have to barge screaming into another German demoscene IRC channel?
Whats the appeal of Amigas? I really regret being too young to appreciate things like it and BeOS.
it definitely varies based on the person but roughly:
this concludes the prepared Amiga rant you have fallen victim to
youtube must’ve heard me cause this compilation of Amiga demos from the Revision 2023 demoparty a few months ago was in my recommendations (flashing lights warning for those unfamiliar — this is basically the live visuals and music for a very nerdy type of rave). I timed it to skip the first demo, Blood Sugar Rising, cause I felt like it wasn’t as impressive as the rest. note the lower right corner of the screen when each demo starts — OCS demos run on the Amiga’s original 1985 chipset, and AGA demos target the 1992 revision of that hardware. traditionally, demos usually target unaccelerated Amigas, so they’ll usually run on machines with ordinary CPUs and mild RAM upgrades
when you watch these, note how many impossible things seem to be happening: none of these effects are built into the Amiga, it definitely shouldn’t be able to support complex 3D, and it should have a very constrained color palette to work with; these and many other visual effects in these demos are enabled by tricks the demoscene has mastered. even the audio shouldn’t be possible — the amiga’s audio hardware was considered to be too primitive to play back samples at high fidelity or handle complex effects
a lot of the tricks the demoscene discovered have made their way back into Amiga development — there are now AmigaOS apps that use the 1985 chipset to do previously impossible things like better-than-VHS video playback and MP3 playback while multitasking
I was just opening pouet to pull up this year's revision entries
if you look at the specs of it, it's absolutely astounding what sceners produce on the amiga
edit: this made me think of something, so I posted about it
fuck yeah! an OCS Amiga runs on a ~7MHz 68k CPU (the basic one with no cache or FPU), usually 512k of RAM (modern demos and games often grab a luxurious full 1MB cause a lot of Amigas had that RAM upgrade back then) and a single 880k floppy drive with no other permanent storage. but all the rest of the chips in the system run as concurrently as possible, in a way that feels like having a primitive GPU but with a lot more control over what its individual components do