This is awesome. I was the VFX Director of Photography on both Apollo 13 and Titanic (the guy with the buzz cut and beard in the photo at the beginning), and seeing that old Amiga and the video tap footage after all these years brought many memories rushing back. Thanks for all the effort to bring the machine back to life and for posting this video. Tell Chris that Erik Nash said hello.
Erik, thank you for reaching out, for your kind words, for your contribution to motion picture history, and for identifying yourself in that photo! I'm a bit speechless (typeless) to have heard from people who actually brought these movies to life. Michael Karp (the motion control guru) reached out recently also. So all I'll say is I am humbled that you saw my little video about your big video. Thank you. Christian Simpson aka Perifractic perifractic.com
@@RetroRecipes Hi You have left out in 1992 from a book I read at Myers Australia. Speilberg used 52 Amiga's to the do the graphics in Jurassic Park. Retro investigate this amazing story!
@@danilko1 Exactly, a friend of mine did a music cover a few years ago on YT just for some friends & family and it somehow got recognized by the original artist and he put it on his FB page and that post saw a producer and she got a record deal out of it. Always give your best you'll never know who's watching . ;-)
As a Titanic and Amiga aficionado, this video was a home run on many levels for me... a few minor timeline clarifications: This specific machine wouldn't have been on the set of The Abyss. The Abyss was shot in 1988/89 and the A4000 didn't appear until 1992. Apollo 13 and the Amiga 4000 are both relics of the 90s, not the 80s. Production on Titanic began in 1996, which was a couple of years after Commodore's ship sank, but of course these machines continued to be used in cool places like the film industry and NASA well beyond the death of the company that created them.
In my last comment I said something about Peri having done a deal with the devil to land his stunning girl freind since the general laws of the universe do not tend match Amiga nerds with beautiful women who also happen to be computer nerds . But then the truth finally outs ...he flys a freaking star fighter in star wars meaning he has a considerable advantage lol good stuff. This was a truly titanic historic episode news worthy really
My ol' mum did some screenwriting, she was mentored at Bournemouth Uni for her degree by Tony Scott and Matt Frewer and did some good stuff before the big C claimed her, a shame as she had a genius in writing and we were all surprised at the floral tributes from quite a lot of ppl in the industry for her funeral.
I came here not knowing what to expect. In the end. I was awestruck! that is some amazing footage you've stumbled upon! and we all are much richer from experiencing this!
If that machine contained behind the scenes of the infamous salad bowl drop scene, or when Tom Hanks Corvette stalled, or when Blanch said "Are you SCARED?!", I would have offered $1,000,000,000 for it. Those are by far the best scenes in all of movie history.
That video input card with the ribbon cable connected to the PAR is the DPS TBC 3 (Time base corrector) in case you wanted to know. I totally forgot about the ARexx implementation in my software. Good memories. LOL
Reminds me of an incident back in my publishing days. One of the ancient web presses went down during an important print job because the i80486 based controller died. My friend in IT traced it back to a finally failed power supply, but couldn't get her hands on a matching one soon enough to finish printing in time to collate and ship by the due date. I remembered I had a 486 pc sitting in the basement I hadn't used in years and lent them the power supply. My IT friend and the facility engineer got it installed and plugged everything back in, but forgot the outlets were industrial 220 rather than the 110 the power supply was designed for. It blew up and the engineer had to borrow one from his son's vintage computer collection. Fortunately, it didn't damage the controller and they were able to get the press back up and running.
Two thoughts after watching this. One: Love it when data is backed up and made publicly available like this. Seen too many cases where "collectors" refuse to back up game data because it "might hurt the value" of the physical vessel of that data. Two: Now I looking at getting a copy of Battle for Naboo and wondering if I can get it signed somehow...
23:22 I have to say I'm truly deeply touched. I had (and still have) an Amiga, I loved Apollo XIII and also Titanic and in this right moment I said to myself: Oh my GOD! Thanks so much dudes...
The company I work for in France used Amiga 1200 in interactive kiosk. The last one was pulled out of service in 2012. Theses kiosk lived outside. I've seen board with corrosion, so much rust and yet they still boot to kickstart !
The London Transport Museum used Amiga CD32s for interactive kiosks. I read about so many other weird uses in the years of reading Amiga magazines in its heyday, sadly forgot them all though.
I actually saw one guy trying to run Babylon 5 models on IRIX machine. Of course it didn't work as routes to textures and other stuff were different on Amiga and Irix and guy actually told so, but this was an experiment. I believe you can find those 3D models relatively easily as a single guy in Russia managed to do that without much of an issue
Dr. Terra as someone who built a lot of those seaQuest models I can tell you that by today’s standards they’re not at all impressive. What surprises me the most was how many we actually made at the time, and how we were basically making them as we built them. Also we didn’t use 4000s for seaQuest. We used 2000s with 040 accelerator cards, 32 mb of ram, which was a considered a fast machine back then. We had two workstations each and we’d model on one and render on the other, and then switch back and forth since rendering a still image to see your model could upwards of an hour depending on complexity.
@@teealso Now the computer I have would be like magic to you back then. You couldn't conceive of the rendering power my system has. Shit, you were still using VHS tape and standard definition at the time. 🤣
@@teealso This is actually really cool to read this from someone who actually worked on one of 90's shows. I loved Seaquest when I was a kid, so it's interesting to get information on how it was made.
The Amiga 4000 was the last of the Amiga line and more specifically it was purposefully designed to run NewTek's Video Toaster, which was an incredible piece of video editing hardware and software. In the later years NewTek used to sell the machine branded as Video toaster with a very colorful graphic badge on the front of the box. The computer used the Motorola 68040 processor, there were some third party company's who utilized the Motorola 68060 processor and for a brief time the PowerPC processor and sold these computer on a board to slide into the Amiga to make it more powerful.Once Apple decided to use Intel chip processors it was game over for those processor lines. Amiga's were very sensitive to electrostatic discharges and even sometimes pulling out a monitor cable or even a joystick out of the back port incorrectly would cause the controller port to blow out. So you always had to power off your Amiga before doing such foolhardy things. The Amiga 500 and later on the Amiga 1200 were more robust. Maybe because their cases were plastic and the 2000, 3000 and 4000 were metal.
I miss my Amiga 1200. The day of the Northridge earthquake I made a call to the company that made the 12 gauge math co processor board. I mis-dialed and got an old timer who laughed his ass off when I called and asked about his 12 gauge.
I'll repeat some previous comments but watching all off your videos and a lot of other retro channels (being it Amiga, C=, Atari, Sinclair, Nintendo, whatever) this is your's best video ever and probably one of the best if not The best one in retro computers scene this year! Period! Wow! what a treasure! Thanks for showing this to us - the retro community!
One computer that I built in 1980, was shown on Disney's original TRON (1982). It was in the scene where Flynn is zapped into the 'Grid'. I assume they used it (Version 2 case that we made) because it did not resemble anybody else's models (big boys of the era) and our company was a victem of the high interest rates by 1982. Only a few hundred were produced, But I still have one in the version 3 case. I was it's designer.
I visited two colleagues when they worked on the film. For everyone who thinks they didn't use cgi in 1996: They had a (windows) NT department and an sgi (silicon graphics) department (and apparently some amiga's). The NT department was mainly lightwave3d, at the sgi department they used wavefront and nuke which was their in house compositing software, later sold to the foundry. If I remember correctly they didn't film the scale models under water, they just used a lot of smoke to get the right effect. They had 2 models at the same scale to film the transition from the wreck to the version of the ship before it sunk. For the live shots they built the decks at 3/4 scale somewhere in the desert. They composited the falling people after the ship broke in half from actor to 3D dummy to a splash they filmed by throwing rocks in the harbor. Feel free to correct me and add more info!
forton nope you pretty much nailed it. The live set was in Rosarito, Mexico. They only made one side of the ship though, and depending on the side it was meant to be they printed all the signage backwards and then flopped the print.
Wow, what a epic find. You guys are so entertaining when you do these kind of videos but to find movie history like that is on another level and so well presented. 👏
@@RetroRecipes No problem, i enjoy watching your videos a lot , Just never commented in the past as my channel is about model planes, Incidentally their is a young lady that seems to be trying your style of commentary when talking about her C64 very strange indeed.
Wow. I am very impressed by Lady F's skills around electronics. In HS, my girl-friend told me she picked out the best Christmas gift for me. I was sooo psyched, I could hardly wait. The gift, however, turned out to be a green sweater. It felt like a gift for her. In turn, I bought her about 8 games for the Atari 8 bit which I wrapped and gave her. I was not our finest hour.
Video Assist History Alert - Gerry Anderson, he of Thunderbirds, Stingray, Captain Scarlet etc, was a huge user and pioneer of the role of video assist. They also shot on film so had to be completely confident they got the takes before moving onto the next shots. The puppets were apparently such a pain to sync the mouths with the dialogue track that they couldn't wait for the dailies to come back, they needed to know there and then. It's detailed in the excellent documentary Filmed In Supermarionation that came out 5 or 6 years ago and is a must-watch for any fan of those programmes!
what a great and historic Vedio you create here, as if it not just enough to have the Amiga 400 ,but also the same one that used to make the movie it self. This is like A dream come true for anyone, how luke you are Perifractics's Retro. It's so exciting and full of memory that you find original material from the movies that considers to be one of the best in the film industry. Thank you very much for this Nice clip.
TRULY TRULY..... EPIC!!!!!!!!!!!!! *Almost no one else* could have done as good a job of it as you have!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AMIGA....... FOR... THE... WIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This is the second episode I've seen of your data archeology work. Thank you so much for this. I hope that y'all are fulfilled with more opportunities to do this kind of thing.
Amiga made a good product for its time. Even the old Commodore 64 with it's interchangeable cartridges worked well and was simple to operate. Just because they are considered obsolete doesn't mean they were junk. I think I still have an Amiga system in the basement. My children played games constantly growing up.
Actually the desktop A4000 was a piece of junk. It was cheaply made, and far too cramped. We had a 4000 with PAR like the one in the video (internal 1gb par drive) and we had to run it with the cover off or it would overheat. The 2000 though, that thing was a tank!
Great story. Watching a recording of a recording of a recording of the video of the titanic was cool. I would have thought it would be possible to transcode those videos into MPEG, AVI or whatever. I can't imagine it would be too difficult because it's likely to be a very rudimentary proprietary format that just serialized the data in each frame along with a timestamp so it would be a simple matter to re-write it to MPEG because there are open-source libraries for writing to these newer formats.
I have stunningly nostalgic feelings for Battle for Naboo. Wow. It's not the greatest game by any means (at least the version we played) but one of my friends picked up 6 copies of it at 50 cents a pop before a LAN party and we all had a wail of a time with it. Best value for money short of sailing the high seas I tell you.
Ah movies when the directors had to have talent to even make a B movie, and computers used in the movies required talent to use! Found my PC port of Battle for Naboo that was packed with the PC port of Rogue Squadron. Not everyday the IRL Gavyn Sykes hold a game that helped define one's childhood and commitment to Star Wars.
Watching your videos are always a pleasure. I grew up with these machines in the 80s. Your videos bring back great memories. Thank you! Looking forward to seeing you cross subscribe thresholds as the channel grows.
Funny how these “ieku ieku” sounds Ladyfractic makes actually have a meaning in Germany because there was a scene in the famous “Werner” cartoons where they searched for a special lubricant because the car they were driving made exactly these sounds... Maybe other viewers from Germany recognise that cartoon.
Who knew computer nerds could be so cute! I like her funky Santa hat too! LOL Won't say where I worked, but we backed everything up on CD-ROM, DLT Tape AND DAT Tape for security. BUT - they were all kept within 50ft. from one another. Go figure? LOL
So many vids in my "watch later" because of Christmas, I hand picked this one too watch with lunch today. So glad I did. Wow at your Star Wars story mate. That's fantastic! And the A4000 find.... Ah crap at the 240v goof. Dude nooooo :( good job you have the wife to fix it :D. Fantastic find on the HDD. WOW! Mate to see that footage rolling so smoothly on such a relic of a machine is testament to how awesome the Amiga was for it's time, and how far ahead of the game it was. Where was apple back then in the movie business? No where. On a production note, great work on the music composition too. Uplifting tones at just the right moment I'm the right quantity. Loving your work more and more! All the best for 2020 mate.
I won't spoil it for you guys, but this is probably the most interesting Retro Recipes video of the year....period. Taking her to sea Mr.Simpson!! ;) Cheerio.
Interesting. The hard disk that appears at 27:44 looks like a SCSII model, used on a PVR Perception board, the hardware that replaced the PAR board, from the same manufacturer. I worked with a PAR on an Amiga 4000 and then started using a PVR on a windows PC, later. Very nice video, by the way.
Amazing find! I heard you mention the AREXX scripting language. I used to program that for my Amiga BBS using TransAmiga BBS software back in the '90s. It was a really nice, easy to use scripting language. Powerful as well. I had entire online games (BBS doors) written using nothing but AREXX. The Amiga 4000 was always my dream machine back then, but out of my price range. I owned an A500, A1200 and A2000HD and still miss them to a certain extent. They were used quite a bit in TV videos at the time. I remember the weather network used one for all it's weather displays. I knew this because one day, live on the air, their Amiga crashed and when I turned the channel, there was that famous GURU MEDITATION ERROR flashing on my cable TV. And I was like, kewl, they use an Amiga! I use an Amiga! ;) Love your wife by the way. Quite a talented gal.
This brought back memories. I had a PAR card in ‘98 when I was just getting started in 3D animation with Lightwave 3D. I’d wait days to render a scene then playback to a BetaSP deck to record it. The PAR card was all there was back then unless you forked over big money for SGI systems.
I'm sure sooner or later someone will figure out how to play back the files without the card. And as someone who is a *HUGE* Titanic nerd (and the movie is one of my favs), this was an amazing end-of-the-year gift!
@@Marius-vw9hp The old lower capacity drives seem to live on, likely due to the data being spread over a larger surface area. Some say after 30 years the data would be lost, others say up to 70 years. There are magnetic tapes from the early 70s that have been read with ease. I still have floppy disks from 1987 that read just fine. As for SSD's I've had one become totally unreadable after sitting in a draw for 6 years powered off, after formatting I could write new data to it. .
Let's not forget that HD's back in the days cost as much as a computer today and the materials and build quality was next to none compared to modern standards, i.e. quantity before quality. Take apart an old SCSI HD and do the same with a modern SATA and you'll be surprised how simplified they are today - and why old HD's will still work even after sitting idle for 30 years. When IDE overtook SCSI as standard in home computers this is when we begun experiencing catastrophic HD failures, but they were much cheaper so we all went for quantity... Most mechanical HD's today seems to last 3-5 years depending on use. Have lost too many during the years...
24 years later.... We see exclusive content from titanic (I include time for realize this movie) now Dicaprio is old amiga not exist anymore as computer manufacturer... Sillicon graphics models are "has been" and we have thousands time power of this 20 kilos computer ... In pocket smartphone or even in a smart watch.... Time go too fast... I feel little bit nostalgic...
Talk about coincidence...My first 1 GIG drive was a Quantum Fireball (1996). I sorted out my nostalgic harddive storage box the other day and came across it. And I hadn't had it in my hands for 10 years...
I asked my brother, who has been an Engineer in the "biz" for a long time to watch this video and here are some insights/comments from him. “Just watched the video. Lightstorm Entertainment (which you see in the footage on the Amiga) effects division was owned by James Cameron and did the effects for Apollo 13 and of course his film Titanic. He sold it off and it shut down shortly thereafter. As far as Apollo 13 goes, the pre-visualization effects were done on video so Ron Howard could see the dailies from his home in Connecticut. The equipment was from RE America and Turner used the same equipment for the Nagano Olympics. Imagine entertainment was a reference we used prior to using for the Olympics on TNT.”
Those DPS boards were amazing! One HD for R-Y, and the other HD for B-Y, the other HD contains the system disk. I've repaired a lot of amiga computers, video toaster, and DSK Genlock cards over the years!
Really? I'm trying to recover the data from the hard drive dump. And there is only one hard drive. I was assuming that the PAR-card hardware encoded the images and streamed them onto the hard drive, and was hoping on some non-proprietary format, not completely jumbled up. So far I haven't been able to extract anything. (Apart from some ASCII-strings) Do you have any ideas what file formats it could be?
@@dm98bero, if memory serves it was proprietary. some sort of YUV CCIR-601 variant encoding scheme, the data was stored on the hard disks as compressed digital 4:2:2 image file, pretty sure it wasn't MPEG, and if it was, it had a non-standard GOP. Every system I worked on had two drives, one for R-Y and the other for B-Y. Sorry, I know that's not much help. DPS was sold to Leitch, and they incorporated the IP into the ASC VR-440 and Nexio servers. amiga.resource.cx/exp/par
This is awesome. I was the VFX Director of Photography on both Apollo 13 and Titanic (the guy with the buzz cut and beard in the photo at the beginning), and seeing that old Amiga and the video tap footage after all these years brought many memories rushing back. Thanks for all the effort to bring the machine back to life and for posting this video. Tell Chris that Erik Nash said hello.
Erik, thank you for reaching out, for your kind words, for your contribution to motion picture history, and for identifying yourself in that photo! I'm a bit speechless (typeless) to have heard from people who actually brought these movies to life. Michael Karp (the motion control guru) reached out recently also. So all I'll say is I am humbled that you saw my little video about your big video. Thank you.
Christian Simpson aka Perifractic
perifractic.com
@@RetroRecipes Hi You have left out in 1992 from a book I read at Myers Australia. Speilberg used 52 Amiga's to the do the graphics in Jurassic Park. Retro investigate this amazing story!
This, right here, is why we have the Internet.
@@danilko1 Exactly, a friend of mine did a music cover a few years ago on YT just for some friends & family and it somehow got recognized by the original artist and he put it on his FB page and that post saw a producer and she got a record deal out of it.
Always give your best you'll never know who's watching . ;-)
What are we seeing here then? All I am seeing is a piece of incredibly fuzzy video at cinema aspect ratio. What am I missing?
As a Titanic and Amiga aficionado, this video was a home run on many levels for me... a few minor timeline clarifications: This specific machine wouldn't have been on the set of The Abyss. The Abyss was shot in 1988/89 and the A4000 didn't appear until 1992. Apollo 13 and the Amiga 4000 are both relics of the 90s, not the 80s. Production on Titanic began in 1996, which was a couple of years after Commodore's ship sank, but of course these machines continued to be used in cool places like the film industry and NASA well beyond the death of the company that created them.
I like your pun.
Would you be happy to know both a NASA Amiga and this 4000 are side to side soon?
@@marvindroogsma7989 You better believe it!
Being an Amiga user for so many years. I thought, i saw everything. This film proved it wrong. Fantastic discovery!
one of the coolest video of the year. period
Thank you for your kind words! Means a lot 👍🕹️
In my last comment I said something about Peri having done a deal with the devil to land his stunning girl freind since the general laws of the universe do not tend match Amiga nerds with beautiful women who also happen to be computer nerds . But then the truth finally outs ...he flys a freaking star fighter in star wars meaning he has a considerable advantage lol good stuff. This was a truly titanic historic episode news worthy really
Kiki !
According to these rules, Ladyfractic could have easily teamed up with Wil Wheaton. I digress...
When you've got a gal that replaces the powersupply for you - that's a keeper!
My wife is a goalie, she's a keeper.
@@anotheruser9876 So you scored? ;)
@@macartm She'd be a rubbish goalie, then. :)
@@anotheruser9876 I hear she's good with ba... I'll get my coat.
Like a charm. 😉⚘
Absolutely stunning. Footage from the Amiga was pretty good too...
Heh heh heh
This is simply awesome. Those Amigas keep on giving! I also love how happy you guys are on finding the Titanic footage.
"I'm literally breathing in Tom Hanks right now" hahaha, that made me laugh!! GREAT video!
Only it turned out he was actually breathing in James Cameron.
With a side a of Bacon, the Kevin type.
My ol' mum did some screenwriting, she was mentored at Bournemouth Uni for her degree by Tony Scott and Matt Frewer and did some good stuff before the big C claimed her, a shame as she had a genius in writing and we were all surprised at the floral tributes from quite a lot of ppl in the industry for her funeral.
Thanks, Chris (and supporting cast). This was truly amazing - As my mate in the pub said, "Lucky Bastards!!!"
I can't even find a broken Amiga up here in Canada. And here you are, exploring unicorns! Thank you!
I come here for the retro computers, but absolutely love you guys' sense of humor ❤️ Eee uuu eee uuu 😂
Thank you for your kind words! Means a lot 👍🕹️
Same here. My wife and I often get silly like that at times.
"Looking at this machine, it is very clear to see just what it's been through."
Yup, 240 volts.
I noticed the way Puppyfractic’s ears perked up every time you said “treat.”
I hope that you gave that poor, deprived pooch a treat.
Yup, she knows her British English! And she got too many!
I'm deeply amazed, this is one of the most relevant Amiga discoveries so far... wish there were more details abou the ARexx part :)
I came here not knowing what to expect. In the end. I was awestruck! that is some amazing footage you've stumbled upon! and we all are much richer from experiencing this!
Due to the amount of porn found previously on Team17 computers, should we be concerned about how sticky this Amiga 4000 is?
AAAHHH, this is so cool. This is history. I had and loved my Amiga, cannot ell you how much this video makes me happy.
If that machine contained behind the scenes of the infamous salad bowl drop scene, or when Tom Hanks Corvette stalled, or when Blanch said "Are you SCARED?!", I would have offered $1,000,000,000 for it. Those are by far the best scenes in all of movie history.
That video input card with the ribbon cable connected to the PAR is the DPS TBC 3 (Time base corrector) in case you wanted to know. I totally forgot about the ARexx implementation in my software. Good memories. LOL
Reminds me of an incident back in my publishing days. One of the ancient web presses went down during an important print job because the i80486 based controller died. My friend in IT traced it back to a finally failed power supply, but couldn't get her hands on a matching one soon enough to finish printing in time to collate and ship by the due date. I remembered I had a 486 pc sitting in the basement I hadn't used in years and lent them the power supply. My IT friend and the facility engineer got it installed and plugged everything back in, but forgot the outlets were industrial 220 rather than the 110 the power supply was designed for. It blew up and the engineer had to borrow one from his son's vintage computer collection. Fortunately, it didn't damage the controller and they were able to get the press back up and running.
Two thoughts after watching this.
One: Love it when data is backed up and made publicly available like this. Seen too many cases where "collectors" refuse to back up game data because it "might hurt the value" of the physical vessel of that data.
Two: Now I looking at getting a copy of Battle for Naboo and wondering if I can get it signed somehow...
Thank you for your kind words. Means a lot! 👍🕹 Feel free to email me (link in description) for getting that cool game signed ;-)
Thank you for your kind words. Means a lot! 👍🕹 Feel free to email me (link in description) for getting that cool game signed ;-)
Heh, I still have to buy it first.... but you may get an email after the holiday postal crush is over.
23:22 I have to say I'm truly deeply touched. I had (and still have) an Amiga, I loved Apollo XIII and also Titanic and in this right moment I said to myself: Oh my GOD! Thanks so much dudes...
Amazing stuff. Really makes me wish I'd gotten to know the Amiga better back when it was current.
That was AMAZEBALLS! Thanks so much for showing us the journey of that 'found footage'.
This was one of your best videos ever, PF. Good work. Also, Lady Fractic needs her own retro channel.
Thanks!!
And this is her channel ;-)
I almost bought that A4000 on ebay. I would have spent whatever it took. Glad you guys got it!
How much did the Amiga sell for?
Wicked cool to see the many things Amiga's were used for. Everyone just looks at them and thinks games but there is more to the story than just games.
The company I work for in France used Amiga 1200 in interactive kiosk. The last one was pulled out of service in 2012. Theses kiosk lived outside. I've seen board with corrosion, so much rust and yet they still boot to kickstart !
Granada Studios in Manchester, UK used Amigas to allow guests to record scenes in the Rover's Return pub in Coronation Street using blue screen.
The London Transport Museum used Amiga CD32s for interactive kiosks. I read about so many other weird uses in the years of reading Amiga magazines in its heyday, sadly forgot them all though.
Now please find the Amigas they used for "Babylon 5" or "Seaquest DSV" ... If there are Lightwave models ... would be awesome
I actually saw one guy trying to run Babylon 5 models on IRIX machine. Of course it didn't work as routes to textures and other stuff were different on Amiga and Irix and guy actually told so, but this was an experiment. I believe you can find those 3D models relatively easily as a single guy in Russia managed to do that without much of an issue
This isn't exactly new. Samuel Cockings, who does trekyards, somehow got his hands on the CGI models they used in stargate.
Dr. Terra as someone who built a lot of those seaQuest models I can tell you that by today’s standards they’re not at all impressive. What surprises me the most was how many we actually made at the time, and how we were basically making them as we built them. Also we didn’t use 4000s for seaQuest. We used 2000s with 040 accelerator cards, 32 mb of ram, which was a considered a fast machine back then. We had two workstations each and we’d model on one and render on the other, and then switch back and forth since rendering a still image to see your model could upwards of an hour depending on complexity.
@@teealso Now the computer I have would be like magic to you back then. You couldn't conceive of the rendering power my system has. Shit, you were still using VHS tape and standard definition at the time. 🤣
@@teealso This is actually really cool to read this from someone who actually worked on one of 90's shows. I loved Seaquest when I was a kid, so it's interesting to get information on how it was made.
Some fondly memories are made, that you’ll never forget. Thanks for sharing!
The Amiga 4000 was the last of the Amiga line and more specifically it was purposefully designed to run NewTek's Video Toaster, which was an incredible piece of video editing hardware and software. In the later years NewTek used to sell the machine branded as Video toaster with a very colorful graphic badge on the front of the box.
The computer used the Motorola 68040 processor, there were some third party company's who utilized the Motorola 68060 processor and for a brief time the PowerPC processor and sold these computer on a board to slide into the Amiga to make it more powerful.Once Apple decided to use Intel chip processors it was game over for those processor lines.
Amiga's were very sensitive to electrostatic discharges and even sometimes pulling out a monitor cable or even a joystick out of the back port incorrectly would cause the controller port to blow out.
So you always had to power off your Amiga before doing such foolhardy things. The Amiga 500 and later on the Amiga 1200 were more robust. Maybe because their cases were plastic and the 2000, 3000 and 4000 were metal.
Apple had to switch to Intel. Microsoft purchased all the PowerPC chips for the X-box. I had one of the first Toasters.
I miss my Amiga 1200. The day of the Northridge earthquake I made a call to the company that made the 12 gauge math co processor board. I mis-dialed and got an old timer who laughed his ass off when I called and asked about his 12 gauge.
I'll repeat some previous comments but watching all off your videos and a lot of other retro channels (being it Amiga, C=, Atari, Sinclair, Nintendo, whatever) this is your's best video ever and probably one of the best if not The best one in retro computers scene this year! Period!
Wow! what a treasure!
Thanks for showing this to us - the retro community!
Thank you SO much. It means the world to know you guys get what I'm doing here. :-D
One computer that I built in 1980, was shown on Disney's original TRON (1982). It was in the scene where Flynn is zapped into the 'Grid'. I assume they used it (Version 2 case that we made) because it did not resemble anybody else's models (big boys of the era) and our company was a victem of the high interest rates by 1982. Only a few hundred were produced, But I still have one in the version 3 case. I was it's designer.
Very cool!
I visited two colleagues when they worked on the film. For everyone who thinks they didn't use cgi in 1996: They had a (windows) NT department and an sgi (silicon graphics) department (and apparently some amiga's). The NT department was mainly lightwave3d, at the sgi department they used wavefront and nuke which was their in house compositing software, later sold to the foundry. If I remember correctly they didn't film the scale models under water, they just used a lot of smoke to get the right effect. They had 2 models at the same scale to film the transition from the wreck to the version of the ship before it sunk. For the live shots they built the decks at 3/4 scale somewhere in the desert. They composited the falling people after the ship broke in half from actor to 3D dummy to a splash they filmed by throwing rocks in the harbor. Feel free to correct me and add more info!
forton nope you pretty much nailed it. The live set was in Rosarito, Mexico. They only made one side of the ship though, and depending on the side it was meant to be they printed all the signage backwards and then flopped the print.
Epic find! Congratulations, and thanks for taking us along on the adventure!
Wow, what a epic find. You guys are so entertaining when you do these kind of videos but to find movie history like that is on another level and so well presented. 👏
Thank you for your kind words! Means a lot 👍🕹️
@@RetroRecipes No problem, i enjoy watching your videos a lot , Just never commented in the past as my channel is about model planes, Incidentally their is a young lady that seems to be trying your style of commentary when talking about her C64 very strange indeed.
@@RcAircraft Thanks. Well they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery 😊
@@RetroRecipes Too True. ;-)
WOW. It's not everyday you come across a find like that! SUPER cool. Hope you all have a merry Christmas!
I just love how jank the power buttons are on these older machines XD
So you basically managed to find lost footage? That's amazing
"If you aim for the stars..." you might end up at the bottom of the ocean.
Wow. I am very impressed by Lady F's skills around electronics. In HS, my girl-friend told me she picked out the best Christmas gift for me. I was sooo psyched, I could hardly wait. The gift, however, turned out to be a green sweater. It felt like a gift for her. In turn, I bought her about 8 games for the Atari 8 bit which I wrapped and gave her. I was not our finest hour.
Haha OMG
Seeing Puppyfractic is a treat for us all.
This video was excellent! Thank you very much for sharing the content. I hope someone is able to read the data from the last drive. Thanks again.
I just logged on to watch the power supply fix. WINNING.
Video Assist History Alert - Gerry Anderson, he of Thunderbirds, Stingray, Captain Scarlet etc, was a huge user and pioneer of the role of video assist. They also shot on film so had to be completely confident they got the takes before moving onto the next shots. The puppets were apparently such a pain to sync the mouths with the dialogue track that they couldn't wait for the dailies to come back, they needed to know there and then. It's detailed in the excellent documentary Filmed In Supermarionation that came out 5 or 6 years ago and is a must-watch for any fan of those programmes!
This is so cool to see one of the developers of the old games.. i love Chris, like Ron Gilbert for example.
what a great and historic Vedio you create here, as if it not just enough to have the Amiga 400 ,but also the same one that used to make the movie it self. This is like A dream come true for anyone, how luke you are Perifractics's Retro. It's so exciting and full of memory that you find original material from the movies that considers to be one of the best in the film industry. Thank you very much for this Nice clip.
Someone found the harddrives from Amigas that had renderings from Babylon 5
TRULY TRULY..... EPIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*Almost no one else* could have done as good a job of it as you have!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
AMIGA....... FOR... THE... WIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I saw this machine on display in the Home Computer Museum in Helmond, the Netherlands. Very interesting story!
I imagine first question to Chris Blythe: "So, Chris, where did you first learn to swear like a politician caught in a brothel?" 🤣
Came to this channel for the Retro PCs, came out of it realizing I've seen his face in some Star Wars movies and a Harry Potter film. Damn!
But it was also the The Phantom Menace. Atleast though he wasn't Jar Jar.
Amiga is your best AMIGO from now on I think...
I'm thinking did you intentionally fry the power supply to get Ladyfractic on the video lol.
The Amiga didn't only saved Apollo 13, but the earth in the 2009 movie "Quantum Apocalypse", not bad.
This is the second episode I've seen of your data archeology work. Thank you so much for this. I hope that y'all are fulfilled with more opportunities to do this kind of thing.
As soon as I saw Lightstorm Entertainment, I thought "that's James Cameron's production company. They weren't involved with Apollo 13!"
Amazing video!!! And the repair by Lady Fractic was a pleasure to watch!!!!
Only the Amiga makes it possible. Absolute awesome find.
Apollo 13 was released in 1995 in theaters what a great film it was
Seven Of Nine fixing computers... nothing unusual to report :D
Loool! No wonder her face was familiar. She totally is Seven of Nine!
More like ezri dax tbh
Thank you for sharing. The Titanic on the Amiga is beyond amazing.
Thank you for this. I really enjoyed this and your music is literally perfect for this too. Thank you!
Amiga made a good product for its time. Even the old Commodore 64 with it's interchangeable cartridges worked well and was simple to operate. Just because they are considered obsolete doesn't mean they were junk. I think I still have an Amiga system in the basement. My children played games constantly growing up.
so sad to see a glorious A4000 treated as a common old "piece of hw". ;(
It deserved a much better care
Nah, it would be much better if they'd been ubiquitous like commodity hardware. Then the company might still be alive.
Actually the desktop A4000 was a piece of junk. It was cheaply made, and far too cramped. We had a 4000 with PAR like the one in the video (internal 1gb par drive) and we had to run it with the cover off or it would overheat. The 2000 though, that thing was a tank!
Great story. Watching a recording of a recording of a recording of the video of the titanic was cool. I would have thought it would be possible to transcode those videos into MPEG, AVI or whatever. I can't imagine it would be too difficult because it's likely to be a very rudimentary proprietary format that just serialized the data in each frame along with a timestamp so it would be a simple matter to re-write it to MPEG because there are open-source libraries for writing to these newer formats.
I have stunningly nostalgic feelings for Battle for Naboo. Wow.
It's not the greatest game by any means (at least the version we played) but one of my friends picked up 6 copies of it at 50 cents a pop before a LAN party and we all had a wail of a time with it.
Best value for money short of sailing the high seas I tell you.
Gavyn Sykes says the Force is with you
Ah movies when the directors had to have talent to even make a B movie, and computers used in the movies required talent to use!
Found my PC port of Battle for Naboo that was packed with the PC port of Rogue Squadron.
Not everyday the IRL Gavyn Sykes hold a game that helped define one's childhood and commitment to Star Wars.
Watching your videos are always a pleasure. I grew up with these machines in the 80s. Your videos bring back great memories. Thank you! Looking forward to seeing you cross subscribe thresholds as the channel grows.
Thank you for your kind words! Means a lot 👍🕹️
Funny how these “ieku ieku” sounds Ladyfractic makes actually have a meaning in Germany because there was a scene in the famous “Werner” cartoons where they searched for a special lubricant because the car they were driving made exactly these sounds... Maybe other viewers from Germany recognise that cartoon.
ruclips.net/video/IDV-T4OfPTs/видео.html for reference
Dagegen _nur_ originohl Oldsmobile 98 Regency andikwietsch!
this comment is more important that the whole video. thanks for sharing
huh huhuhuh You said, "Special lubricant!"
Na, IEKU IEKU IEKU eben!
Wow!!!!! How incredible ... so many memories.
Who knew computer nerds could be so cute! I like her funky Santa hat too! LOL Won't say where I worked, but we backed everything up on CD-ROM, DLT Tape AND DAT Tape for security. BUT - they were all kept within 50ft. from one another. Go figure? LOL
So many vids in my "watch later" because of Christmas, I hand picked this one too watch with lunch today. So glad I did. Wow at your Star Wars story mate. That's fantastic! And the A4000 find.... Ah crap at the 240v goof. Dude nooooo :( good job you have the wife to fix it :D. Fantastic find on the HDD. WOW! Mate to see that footage rolling so smoothly on such a relic of a machine is testament to how awesome the Amiga was for it's time, and how far ahead of the game it was. Where was apple back then in the movie business? No where. On a production note, great work on the music composition too. Uplifting tones at just the right moment I'm the right quantity. Loving your work more and more! All the best for 2020 mate.
Cheers mate!
I won't spoil it for you guys, but this is probably the most interesting Retro Recipes video of the year....period.
Taking her to sea Mr.Simpson!! ;)
Cheerio.
The Amiga that saved the "ship". Geddit? ;-)
@@RetroRecipes LOL XDDDD ;-)
Interesting. The hard disk that appears at 27:44 looks like a SCSII model, used on a PVR Perception board, the hardware that replaced the PAR board, from the same manufacturer. I worked with a PAR on an Amiga 4000 and then started using a PVR on a windows PC, later. Very nice video, by the way.
You're right it is! I didn't realize until after.
Amazing find! I heard you mention the AREXX scripting language. I used to program that for my Amiga BBS using TransAmiga BBS software back in the '90s. It was a really nice, easy to use scripting language. Powerful as well. I had entire online games (BBS doors) written using nothing but AREXX. The Amiga 4000 was always my dream machine back then, but out of my price range. I owned an A500, A1200 and A2000HD and still miss them to a certain extent. They were used quite a bit in TV videos at the time. I remember the weather network used one for all it's weather displays. I knew this because one day, live on the air, their Amiga crashed and when I turned the channel, there was that famous GURU MEDITATION ERROR flashing on my cable TV. And I was like, kewl, they use an Amiga! I use an Amiga! ;)
Love your wife by the way. Quite a talented gal.
This brought back memories. I had a PAR card in ‘98 when I was just getting started in 3D animation with Lightwave 3D. I’d wait days to render a scene then playback to a BetaSP deck to record it. The PAR card was all there was back then unless you forked over big money for SGI systems.
What an amazing find! Thanks for sharing!
I immediately destroyed my power supply, in hope she will appear to fix it.
If only she was single.
We'll keep dreaming my friend, let's have a drink ;)
@@Blue_Noah when she said here's one for the dogs, I was already thinking about the 2 she gave us already 😲
Nobody cares that you have a penis
I'm sure sooner or later someone will figure out how to play back the files without the card.
And as someone who is a *HUGE* Titanic nerd (and the movie is one of my favs), this was an amazing end-of-the-year gift!
Yay!
Come here for the retrogaming on old computers, stay for the dog :) (more seriously, love your videos :) )
All You need now is James Cameron to offer to come on an episode on your channel to discuss the footage further
I'm down!!
Retro Recipes that would be amazing, try your best to get him on here
Amazing. I'd have had sleepless nights with excitement getting that machine! :-D
Guys that is absolutely amazing! Only Amiga makes it possible :-)
Fantastic disk backup job and psu repair! Happy holidays!
"Such an impressive heatsink. If only we'd had such heatsinks at the Battle Of Trafalgar!"
Thank you for taking the time to make images of the drives and making them available or downlload! Very cool. Thanks!!
Wow. Yes I will be playing that on my 4000 with par card. I am really excited!! Thanks so much. Keep up your good work.
If you manage to get it working drop me an email via perifractic.com as I have a request! 👍🕹️
This is mind blowing! Easily my favourite vid of yours yet!!!!
Incredible how the data is still intact on the harddrive after all these years.
If that was an SSD the data would have leaked away by now after so long not being powered on.
@@The65c02 I dont understand how a magnetic surface can retain its information over such long timeperiod though.
@@Marius-vw9hp There are plenty of 8 tracks still in working order.
@@Marius-vw9hp The old lower capacity drives seem to live on, likely due to the data being spread over a larger surface area. Some say after 30 years the data would be lost, others say up to 70 years. There are magnetic tapes from the early 70s that have been read with ease. I still have floppy disks from 1987 that read just fine. As for SSD's I've had one become totally unreadable after sitting in a draw for 6 years powered off, after formatting I could write new data to it. .
Let's not forget that HD's back in the days cost as much as a computer today and the materials and build quality was next to none compared to modern standards, i.e. quantity before quality. Take apart an old SCSI HD and do the same with a modern SATA and you'll be surprised how simplified they are today - and why old HD's will still work even after sitting idle for 30 years. When IDE overtook SCSI as standard in home computers this is when we begun experiencing catastrophic HD failures, but they were much cheaper so we all went for quantity... Most mechanical HD's today seems to last 3-5 years depending on use. Have lost too many during the years...
I thought only Commodore management could give me that sinking feeling...
24 years later.... We see exclusive content from titanic (I include time for realize this movie) now Dicaprio is old amiga not exist anymore as computer manufacturer... Sillicon graphics models are "has been" and we have thousands time power of this 20 kilos computer ... In pocket smartphone or even in a smart watch.... Time go too fast... I feel little bit nostalgic...
For a while TVNZ in New Zealand used, an amiga system for weather graphics and was considered ahead of its time when they used it.
Talk about coincidence...My first 1 GIG drive was a Quantum Fireball (1996). I sorted out my nostalgic harddive storage box the other day and came across it. And I hadn't had it in my hands for 10 years...
This is so cool. Every time I ever get hold of a trash computer it just ends up being full of porn :)
Back in 1989, I did the animation graphics on, Murder by Moonlight with Brigitte Nielsen using an Amiga 500 and Dpaint. Good times!
Haha cool...?...!
I did the "Image enhancement" of the guy's butt in Point Break on Dpaint. We did two versions. Thank You and F... You.
I asked my brother, who has been an Engineer in the "biz" for a long time to watch this video and here are some insights/comments from him.
“Just watched the video. Lightstorm Entertainment (which you see in the footage on the Amiga) effects division was owned by James Cameron and did the effects for Apollo 13 and of course his film Titanic. He sold it off and it shut down shortly thereafter. As far as Apollo 13 goes, the pre-visualization effects were done on video so Ron Howard could see the dailies from his home in Connecticut. The equipment was from RE America and Turner used the same equipment for the Nagano Olympics. Imagine entertainment was a reference we used prior to using for the Olympics on TNT.”
Nice! I think Lightstorm are still going BTW...
Nice video. Being subscribed for a while now, and didn't know you were a film "star".
Wait, I am?! ;-)
Those DPS boards were amazing! One HD for R-Y, and the other HD for B-Y, the other HD contains the system disk. I've repaired a lot of amiga computers, video toaster, and DSK Genlock cards over the years!
Really? I'm trying to recover the data from the hard drive dump. And there is only one hard drive. I was assuming that the PAR-card hardware encoded the images and streamed them onto the hard drive, and was hoping on some non-proprietary format, not completely jumbled up. So far I haven't been able to extract anything. (Apart from some ASCII-strings) Do you have any ideas what file formats it could be?
@@dm98bero, if memory serves it was proprietary. some sort of YUV CCIR-601 variant encoding scheme, the data was stored on the hard disks as compressed digital 4:2:2 image file, pretty sure it wasn't MPEG, and if it was, it had a non-standard GOP. Every system I worked on had two drives, one for R-Y and the other for B-Y. Sorry, I know that's not much help. DPS was sold to Leitch, and they incorporated the IP into the ASC VR-440 and Nexio servers.
amiga.resource.cx/exp/par