This is sure to be an unpopular post among the sort of people who adore the old Commodore Amiga computer from the mid 1980's/early 1990's. Now, I count myself part of that group. But, if I have to be honest with myself, my love of the Amiga is better as a nostalgic memory — as a theoretical thing rather than a tangible reality. This honesty is going to be what gets me in hot water with mi amigos.
The Amiga purists want to deal only with original hardware, of course. This means dealing with aging electronics with leaky capacitors, leaky batteries, failing floppy and hard drives, monitors built to some very old standards, and nonexistent cables. And the end result of this hard (and expensive) work is a slow machine from an age when CPU speed was still measured in megahertz, RAM was so precious systems rarely had more than 16Mb of it, and the internet hadn't yet been invented. Chasing this particular dragon can also be an expensive hobby, like collecting gold bars, or a really engrossing heroin addiction.
Guys like me, on the other hand, already had their fill of that kind of fun back in the good old days, and we can now scratch our nostalgia itch with an emulator, like the excellent WinUAE. With the right files (Kickstart ROM, Workbench files, etc) it can give you a pretty reasonable version of whatever Amiga you desire. But that's where we get to what this post is about... What do you do with it once you've got it? Sure, it can be fun to visit the old neighbourhood, but there's nothing to do there.
Just about every single area of computing endeavour the Amiga used to excel at has been surpassed, and then some, by modern computer hardware, operating systems, and software. The fact that you can admirably emulate an Amiga with a Raspberry Pi should tell you everything you need to know. Artwork? 3D Rendering? Design? Publishing? Hey, it was fun to do those things on the Amiga back in the day, but nowadays you'd have to be a masochist to do it. What's left? Games.
Games are unique to a particular era, and usually, to a particular set of hardware. And that's what this all boils down to. Forget all the fancy multitasking and inter-program communication the Amiga could do — you're not going to find Shadow of the Beast on your shiny new iMac Pro. You have an itch for Amiga game playing? Grab a copy of FS-UAE and download a pile of Amiga games off the Internet Archive, and knock yourself out. But otherwise, I just don't see the point in trying to get old software from the 90's working again.
Disagree? Fantastic. Tell me all about it.