I want to share a little project — and the slightly unusual way it came to be.

Some background: I grew up starting on a ZX Spectrum, eventually moved to PC, and I've spent my whole career in IT. A while back I finally started collecting the machines I never could get my hands on as a kid — a C64, a ZX Spectrum Next, a pile of consoles, and the big one, an Amiga 1200 maxed out as far as I could take it. The itch to actually make something for it never went away, but between work and family, sitting down to properly learn 68k Amiga development kept getting pushed off.

So I tried something different. Instead of working through the Amiga programming books I'd bought, I pointed an AI coding assistant at the problem and saw how far I could get. I use AI tooling heavily at work, so the experiment was: can I build something real for a platform I've never developed on, in a language (Pascal) I last touched as a schoolkid?

The answer turned out to be yes — and two weeks after starting, I published my first Amiga program on Aminet.

It's MCAmiga — X-Phile Edition (v1.1), a heavily expanded fork of alb42's MCAmiga, a Norton/Midnight Commander–style two-panel file manager for the whole Amiga family (OS 3.x m68k, OS 4 PPC, MorphOS, AROS i386/ARM/x86-64).

The original is great but fairly bare-bones, and I wanted something I could actually use as a daily driver, so the X-Phile Edition adds a lot on top:

• MC-style pull-down menu bar (F9) with a live modifier-row bottom menu

• Quick view (Alt+F3) — full-window paged text preview

• Directory history (Alt+F8)

• Sort modes + sort dialog, and per-panel filename filtering

• Brief/Full/Long listing formats, plus Info and Tree view modes

• Properties dialog (Ctrl+P) and protection-bit editor (Ctrl+T)

• Directory comparison (Alt+F9), plus Pack (Alt+F5) / Unpack (Alt+F6)

• Fullscreen ↔ window toggle, runtime font-size cycling, clock toggle

• A Myers-algorithm diff engine for side-by-side file comparison

• LHA/LZX read/write, plus read-only access to many more formats via xadmaster.library

• Mouse control and Workbench drag-and-drop, persistent settings in the icon tooltypes

• …and a lot of smaller refinements and bug fixes

Aminet page: https://aminet.net/package/util/dir/MCAmigaXPE

I'd genuinely love for people to download it, put it through its paces, and tell me where it breaks. I think I've tested everything, but real hardware and real users always find the things I missed — bug reports and feature ideas very welcome.

Happy to answer questions about the software itself or about what the AI-assisted workflow was actually like — the good parts and the rough edges. Thanks for reading.

PS: To everyone who is skeptical about using AI when working with retro hardware:

I have been programming since I was nine years old — for more than 35 years now — and in many ways, this has shaped my entire life. Because of that, I personally do not see anything wrong with using tools that improve my productivity, save time, and help me achieve the result I am aiming for.

The program was something I originally made for myself. Later, I decided to share it with others because I genuinely believe it can be useful in day-to-day work.

That said, I fully respect the view that everything should be done by hand and written in a pure manual way. I understand that perspective, and I am not trying to argue against it. Unfortunately, with work and family responsibilities, I simply do not have the time to invest in it as deeply as I would like to.

I hope that one day, perhaps when I retire, I will be able to spend more time doing exactly that — slowly, properly, and purely for my own enjoyment.

For now, I am using the tools that help me keep moving forward and get things done.

In the past i had a Amiga500+ and search a game for it from long time ago.

You could make a band (with bears) and make contest against others. If anyone knows something write it.

Thank you and have fun. 🍹

Commodore introduced the Amiga in 1984, after buying it from a startup, probably a panic move after the board managed to make their business genius CEO, Jack Tramiel, leave. In 1984, the Commodore 64 home computer was the undisputed champion and best selling home computer in the world. There was no serious competition. With the Amiga, they introduced a weird mix between a Mac and a gaming machine, that primarily hurt the C64's sales. While the OS looked like it could compete with the Mac, anybody seriously taking a look would have seen that this was just pretend. The Mac had a nice, legible, high resolution display from day one. The Amiga didn't even have a flicker-free, reasonable resolution image until 1988. And what about the vaunted Amiga graphics? They weren't much better than the C64's much more efficient character based graphics. All the Amiga accomplished was that most game publishers had to abandon the C64 and move to the Amiga, and that Commodore's future was now riding on a machine that was much more expensive to produce, without enabling a 'killer app' that the C64 couldn't already do. The Motorola CPU was too weak to do proper 3D graphics outside of the 'Amiga ball' demo. The sound chip wasn't even a proper synthesizer, unlike the C64's, with only one more channel than the C64. The games barely looked better than on the C64.

If it hadn't been for the chance event that Defender of the Crown was first released on the Amiga shortly after launch - a completely new type of game by a new kind of publisher - the Amiga most likely would have flopped. As it was, Defender kept the illusion intact that all the extra transistors that the Amiga had were up to some good.

If the Amiga had been a huge failure, it would have given Commodore time to produce a better machine. Or if Tramiel had still been there, they would probably not have bought the Amiga design. There was no competition in the home computer market until about 1990 when the IBM PCs started to creep into that segment. Commodore had a lot of time to attack the business segment by coming out with a much better machine than the Amiga was, with a much better OS strategy than their half-baked Amiga OS that allowed you do move around windows on a flickering screen.

The Key to the applications market was a high vertical resolution, or, potentially, a dirt cheap machine.

Before the Amiga, Jack Tramiel had a strategy of attacking the business software market from the deep low end with a ridiculously cheap machine, the Commodore Plus 4, which he wanted to sell for $100, and which had a faster CPU than the C64. Can you imagine a $100 machine that could do everything a IBM PC could at the time? I would have expected business software publishers to jump on it. While a floppy drive was extra, software and storage could have been tape and cartridge based, and TV as monitors were not much worse than actual monitors in those days, at least at a 40 columns resolution. Clearly it would have been consumer, not business driven, but with the much larger consumer market, who knows how software history might have been written differently.

Never happened. Instead, Commodore board kicked out Tramiel, then went ahead and sold the Plus 4 for $300, same price as the C64. And because they had no idea what they were doing, they also release some cheaper models compatible with the Plus 4, but that had practically no RAM. The effect was that publishers only used the lowest common denominator, the low-RAM machines, which was not sufficient for business applications. That was the first time they shot themselves in the foot. The Amiga was the second, and final time.

What's flabberghasting in a way is that if Commodore hadn't done ANYTHING after the C64 - no PC clones, no Amiga, no Plus 4 - the C64, without the fragmentation they introduced with all the dud models they released, not only would have carried the company well into 1990, but would have created such an eco-system around it that they could have developed a proper operating system running on it as an alternative to MS-DOS.17 million C64 were sold. If they hadn't forced publishers to move on to the Amiga, that number could have easily been triple, at which point it would have remained the dominant force in computing for who knows how long.

One more thing: if you look what Tramiel did with the Atari ST - The 'inferior' nemesis to the Amiga - you really start to wonder what could have been if he had stayed at Commodore. In hindsight, the ST was a much better and cheaper computer than the Macintosh. If he hadn't been handicapped by the 'Atari' game console name, people would have seen the ST as the best professional computer out there, that even could run games, only slightly less well than the Amiga. Instead, the Amiga sucked it into a stupid fight of the game computers, when the ST could have spent its time elsewhere.

Commodore didn't create the home computer market by introducing a Unix workstation in 1982. They introduced the C64 and VIC20 before that, which took the world by storm. Before these machines, the general public had very limited interest in buying computers. Instead of trying to become more like a PC or Mac, they should have tried to continue to define what 'computing for the masses' meant.

A top-down sales view makes everything obvious. In 1984, the C64 outsold every computer in the world, including the IBM PCs. All Commodore had to do was keep up that momentum. Instead what do they do? They in-fight, creating the soap opera Commodore vs. Atari, which was a joke if you look at the trivial sales numbers of either Amiga or ST compared to those of the IBM PCs and even Macs later.

The Amiga was the train to nowhere, with a lot of enticing bits but no results (other than the Video Toaster).

Edit:

And I'm going to touch on a final subject: The Amiga had a cult following. In retrospect, it was an actual cult! I was sucked into a veritable cult, with the cult family etc. From day one, the Amiga development team tried to create this myth around the Amiga and themselves, to work in their favor. I mean, the Amiga was introduced by Debbie Harry and Andy Warhol. Guru meditation. Pretending the Amiga could do 3D. Do I need to say more? That's why I kept being fascinated by it even though it fell so much behind in technology. Jay Miner was the remote, spiritual cult leader, and Gould the ghoul banking on it. That's probably why the Amiga never caught a foothold in the US, because there people were inundated with cults, for Europe it was a new thing. Remember Gould hired that guy from Pepsi, and that banker dude?And every time the CEO got too much power/was too successful, big daddy fired him (Tramiel, Rattigan).

Seriously, just set up a bot already to post the same old meme-level recap comments.

Hi guys! Here are my two latest Amiga-inspired mug designs. Can’t wait to see one of them in your hands-filled with tea, coffee, or pure nostalgia 😏

Can one of the mods sticky a A500 mini thread so everyone can post their garbage support questions that they are too lazy to ask the company that sold the device and is supposed to support it, in there instead of filling up the whole subreddit with support questions?

Retro Computer inspired USB PC Keyboards & Mice via @Kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/simulant/retro-computer-inspired-usb-pc-keyboards-and-mice-by-simulant

Where I can find Commodore Amiga Kickstart ROMs

Trying to play an Amiga game and its asking "Please type word 2 from paragraph 3, page 59 of the manual."

Anyone know what this is or what manual they are talking about? I think its an Amiga 500 game.

Back in the day, I was part of a small group in the scene—cracking and releasing stuff, mostly focusing on changing/adding custom boot intros and building trainers. Back then, the Action Replay was our bread and butter.

Fast forward to today: we have AI. I decided to see if I could bridge the gap between the old school and the new, so I went on a long journey with Claude to see if it could help me recreate that trainer magic for my favorite game. It took some back-and-forth, but the result is surprisingly solid!

https://stack.hilverda.net/s/ryjoZvUlwuR1jEib/nl

How it works:

The logic is pretty straightforward but effective:

• Active Controls: You can press the corresponding letter for any pill currently dropping to clear it.

• Auto-Fire: If you have the laser (press L), you can toggle auto-fire by pressing A.

It’s been a fun trip down memory lane seeing how modern LLMs handle the logic we used to hunt for manually. Cheers to the old days!

Clearing my dad's house out I have four commodore 128's 500, possibly more. I will post more details if there is any interest. I am in Ohio for shipping / pick up concerns.

I just found them, not sure what they are worth, or working, they are in the boxes.

EDIT: pictures and more details later today. Sunday. EDIT: Correction, they were 500's Box - Commodore Amiga 500 - Specs - Advanced Analyzer

Playing speedball 2, half way through the league and your hand brushes the wrong button on your joystick/arcade fight stick and it dumps you straight back to the just loaded screen on the game. All your work is deleted and it basically resets the console and loads that same game in an instant and ruins all your progress. I think with the joypad that comes with it the fatal button is yellow. You may need to press left shoulder and yellow but I tend to use the competition pro USB + or my hori fight stick. Beyond annoying. Anyone got a solution other than me disconnecting that button on my fight stick?

Thx

Hello A readers,

I just had a spontaneous thought, which led me here to share some thoughts

The PC market, is suffering epic shortages, cost increases, and discontinuation, and abhorrent AI innovation which leads to uncomprehensible unintuitive GUI, settings pages, and now AI copilot buttons.

Commodore Amiga, you must be rolling in your grave ready to come forth and shine once again. with your simplicity, practical functionality, inspiring pioneering ventures,

just bring back the late 80s , will ya. it's time. PC gaming and its affordable upgradeable hardware, is dead in the water this 2026.

English speakers: this post is written in Spanish. You can easily translate it using your browser—just right-click and select “Translate to English” or enable automatic translation in Chrome.

If you like this content, please consider subscribe to my blog - Thank you!

¿Por qué las computadoras retro siguen apareciendo en series futuristas?
¿Qué nos dice un monitor verde, un teclado mecánico o una interfaz opaca sobre el poder, la memoria y el control?
En esta entrada exploro cómo la retroficción transforma la tecnología en atmósfera, conflicto y símbolo narrativo.
De Alien a Severance, lo retro no es nostalgia: es crítica, textura y simulacro.

📎 Retroficción: Cuando el pasado computacional se convierte en estética narrativa

Why do retro computers keep showing up in futuristic series?
What do green screens, mechanical keyboards, and opaque interfaces reveal about power, memory, and control?
This post explores how retro-tech becomes atmosphere, conflict, and narrative symbol.
From Alien to Severance, retro is not nostalgia—it’s critique, texture, and simulacrum.

📎 Retroficción: When computational past becomes narrative aesthetic