Jay Miner was a legendary hero! Did you know he also designed the graphics chip of the Atari 2600? If you look at Atari 2600 games, you can already recognise his signature Amiga Copper chip color gradient.
I had my Amiga 1000 in early 1986, back when only one single store in the Netherlands had a first few imported Amiga software titles. I remember buying Activision's Hacker game for my Amiga 1000 for about € 120 (HFL / Dutch guilders back then :) ). And not long after that I got Marble Madness. I was blown away by its near-arcade quality. The Amiga took me to gamer's heaven.
The Amiga was also the first machine that allowed me to develop my first CG skills, using Deluxe Paint, which I used for about ten years to create graphics for games, television animation, interactive TV show games, commercials and more. I had a fantastic time thanks to Commodore.
Before the Amiga I loved to play C64 games on my C128, and fiddle around in the C128's BASIC V7.0, which was quite powerful.
Here are my favorite C64 games:
Agent USA
Aztec Challenge
Beach-Head 2
BC's Quest for Tires
Blue Max
Bombjack
Boulderdash (1 & 2)
Bounder
Bruce Lee
Burnin' Rubber
Commando
Commodore Soccer
Crystal Castles
Frank Bruno's Boxing
Ghostbusters
Ghosts ’n’ Goblins
Goonies
H.E.R.O.
Henry's House
Hunchback 2
Impossible Mission
Law of the West
Lazy Jones
Little Computer People
Mario Bros
Master of the Lamps
Monty on the Run
Oil's Well
Pitstop 2
Rambo
Space Taxi
Uridium
Way of the Exploding Fist
Who dares wins (1 & 2)
Yie Ar Kung-Fu
Zorro
And my favorite Amiga games:
Barbarian (Palace Software)
Barbarian (Psygnosis)
Battle Squadron
Borrowed Time
Clockwiser
Crystal Hammer
Defender of the Crown
Déjà Vu
Deluxe Galaga
Deluxe Pac-Man
Emerald Mine
Faery Tale Adventure
Flight Simulator 2
Great Giana Sisters
Hoi
Hybris
Ikari Warriors
Impact
International Karate +
Leander
Lionheart
Lotus Turbo Challenge 2
Marble Madness
Megaball
Mindwalker
Nebulus
New Zealand Story
Pacmania
Phalanx
Pinball Dreams
Pinball Fantasies
Pinball Illusions
Rainbow Islands
Rodland
Scorched Tanks
Shadow of the Beast
Sidewinder
Silkworm
Slam Tilt
Speedball
Starglider 2
Stunt Car Racer
Super Stardust (AGA)
SWIV
Sword of Sodan
Test Drive (1 & 2)
The Pawn
Turrican 2
Uninvited
Xenon
Xenon 2
Speaking about good and streamlined workflow that you can actually find around, always related to CG consumer software of course,
I've played again with Vectary, a cloud based Poly/SDS modeler, and I must say that IMHO it's awesome!
A sort of "tiny" Moi, with the same philosophy, at least for all is related to the UX.
IMHO it's a one of the few cases that reveals how the developers have worked very hard to develop a robust product with a very good UX.
Ok, Vectary in not well suited if you have to deal with large object with tons of polygons, but for small "3D print ready" object
I think that actually it's the best web App and one of the best "easy" Poly/SDS modeler in general.
Hi Metin, I sure did like Deluxe Paint on the Amiga too! Another thing that was fun with the Amiga was all the interesting graphics hardware widgets available, like I remember that frame grabber/scanner where you used red/green/blue filters to get a full color image. And the Video Toaster of course!
I'd have to say my favorite games were the ones from the Bitmap Brothers.
Having done basic and assembly language programming on the C64 when I was a teenager was a big help for me when I got into programming later on.
Wow...what can I say ?
Do you believe me ?
I was moved to read what you have written. Thanks a lot!
You reminded me so many things buried in my deep memory...
So many things that I loved when I was young :)
Jay Miner was one of my biggest hero....
The Amiga platform with ALL its hardware and software features was really an amazing piece of human ingenuity!!!
Agnus, Blitter, Copper, Denise, Paula...these were the names of the magic inside the amazing Amiga... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Chip_Set
How many days and night studying the Amiga system... I was amazed by what Jay and the other guys did!!!
...so many memories.
Ok...it's better that I stop here this conversation...so many memories...
Jay Miner and his guys created the magic.
Speaking about personal computers and computer science I really no longer seen anything like the Commodore Amiga.
So lot's of us are kids of the Amiga ? , that explains a lot about the mood here !
I too started with deluxepaint, then I did my first 'sphere on checkerboard" with Imagine.
One day I manage to get a copy of lightwave 4 or 5 (mmm not a very legal version :S), and there was this scene in the content directory :
For sure, i started with an Atari 800XL and had also a graphics tablet for it. Later then
i switched to an ATARI 512 ST.
What probably a lot people don't know is that the Amiga from the Amiga Company
was conceived at Atari. I still have somewhere in my basement the original Amiga
Joysticks from the Amiga Company, long before the Amiga Computer came out.
I got interested in 3D in 1984, when in Germany they aired a documentation
about the big CA Studios in America and Japan and all the cool guys and girls
from that time, like Jim Blinn, Ed Catmull etc. I still have that VHS tape! :-)
Should i find a Youtube link i post it.
And one cool guy, Tom Hudson who published his code in Atari Magazines became
later the father of the popular 3dsMax Software.
Well a little story... when i made a slide show with a couple of images
(including logos of various computer brands), for our Atari Dealer
i got my first job offer in this field from a big Pharmaceutic Company
in Germany. :-) But at that time i worked in shift and did not do it.
Maybe i should have started to do freelancing, then i would be
probably no hobbyist today.
It warms my heart to read that a number of MoI forum participants as well as Michael himself have an Amiga history. It sure was a special, revolutionary system that has helped many people to develop digital skills.
Michael, the Newtek Digi-View video digitiser with the red, green and blue filters, yes, that felt like some kind of magic. It initially puzzled me as a youngster how some isolated color filters could turn a black and white image into a full-color image. :)
And Newtek's Video Toaster, definitely! There was a TV series called Babylon 5 at the time, all its 3D space effects and spacecraft were completely created using Lightwave on a Video Toaster.
I also loved the Bitmap Brothers games. One of my all-time favorite pixel artists was Mark Coleman. He did the graphics for about half of the Bitmap Brothers games, including both Xenon games, and the first Speedball.
Assembly on the C64: supercool! If you really wanted to make use of the C64's capacities, you had to use machine language. I remember magical discoveries such as border sprites. Based on a graphics chip bug, border sprites were sprites that could be detected inside the border of the C64 screen.
Stefan, the first Amiga prototypes were indeed created under the wing of Atari. Jay Miner wanted the machine to be a next-generation games machine, with an emphasis on his favorite games: flight sims (hence the Copper for air color gradients, and the Blitter for fast vector graphics). But when Commodore bought the project, they wanted to turn the Amiga into a business machine, in an attempt to become an IBM competitor. Luckily, the Amiga was way too audiovisually potent to end up as a dull business machine, and it was soon adopted by the audiovisual industry as a machine that could do what was previously only possible on much more expensive systems.
Tom Hudson was one of the fathers of 3D Studio Max, but in the early 1990s, Daniel M. Silva, the genius coder behind Deluxe Paint, was one of the creators of the original 3D Studio, the basis of 3ds Max.
Marco, yes, Agnus, Denise and Paula. They were my first girlfriends, haha. Here's a YouTube playlist featuring a number of our Amiga games and demos, and a Dutch television interview from early 1993 where I'm very nervously telling something about our game development on an Amiga 2000: :D
I was working with 3D on PC first (needed an external frame buffer in those days) using software called Cubicomp which did the first commercial Phong rendering I believe-- probably an 8086 in the very early 80's.
Then I switched to Mac as soon as Jobs introduced it. Of course at first it was only 1 bit, but soon found 8-bit and Super3D and was in heaven, even though the render quality was only flat shading.
Then one day I picked up a Macworld and saw Sculpt 3D, a ray tracer on the Amiga was coming to the Mac. I called the company, Byte by Byte, and went to visit them and the president gave me an Amiga to run it on as the Mac version was a way off. Sculpt3D was a pretty amazing piece of software and I remember creating ray-traced water pitchers for my client Igloo (we were designing products for them). This was before any ray-tracing was on either the PC or Mac. Wickedly exciting at that time.
What fun the Amiga was back then! Next for us, Electric Image came along for the Mac with 640x480 AA Phong shading in under 5 min and things got really interesting. We created a design for the initial lunar habitat for NASA, then a Mars habitat and built 3d walkthroughs and full scale models all back in the late 80's. A couple years later we would standardize our shop on Lightwave on PC (I believe it was V3 or 4), which of course also came from the Amiga. Who can forget the Video Toaster? Newtek eventually moved to San Antonio, just up the road from our shop in Austin. A few years later, using Lightwave, we had fun creating the first cell-shaded TV show: Mission to Avalon. Got it funded, then bad luck with the distribution. An early trailer:
All good and fun memories.
Just released our first AR museum installation at the Witte Museum in San Antonio this past weekend. The full Alamo Reality project will be released later this month. And the better news is we're starting a 3 year AR project on Gettysburg in the next month. 3D has come a long way, but not surprisingly, many of the main issues are still very similar.
Here's one of the mobile AR scenes without final lighting, but there are still the same challenges of bandwidth, polycount, texture sizes, etc..
Dataplay.png
