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Happy Birthday, Amiga
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Sat Jul 23, 2005 10:28 AM
from the ahead-of-its-time dept.
from the ahead-of-its-time dept.
Sebby writes "Today is the Amiga's 20th anniversary. Commodore officially introduced the Amiga 1000 with much fanfare at the Lincoln Center in New York on July 23, 1985. It was the most advanced computer of its day. The Amiga 1000 was originally conceived a few years earlier by a small California company called Amiga, Inc. and was financed by a group of Florida doctors looking to invest in a killer game machine."
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Had my cup o' pedant this morning.. (Score:4, Insightful)
It was the most advanced computer of its day.
Funny, I always thought the Cray-2 [cray.com], also released in 1985, held that title.
Re:Had my cup o' pedant this morning.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Had my cup o' pedant this morning.. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Had my cup o' pedant this morning.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Had my cup o' pedant this morning.. (Score:3, Informative)
Hardly seems like it. The original Amiga had a 4096 color palette, this has 512. Amigas also had 32 colors in 320x200 mode, and this one has 16. The max interlaced screen resolution was also 640x400.
Both had 4 channel sound. But the Amiga had *stereo* sound by default.
So no, it was most definitively not superior.
Re:Had my cup o' pedant this morning.. (Score:5, Informative)
Here's another site that confirms the Mindset specs. [bytecellar.com]
Parent
Re:Had my cup o' pedant this morning.. (Score:5, Interesting)
As for the 16-bit color, I find that somewhat hard to believe without a daughterboard and new graphics chips. If the claim is correct, the Mindset had a 512 color (9-bit) palette. No amount of video memory would give you 65536 (16-bit) colors. Unless it had another palette mode which seems unlikely.
I have heard of personal computers with better graphics and sound than the Amiga, but they are all posterior to the 1985 A1000 launch. Examples include the 1987 Acorn Archimedes [old-computers.com] which had a 32-bit CPU and better graphics or the 1989 Fujitsu FM Towns [old-computers.com] on which you could have 8-bit colors from a 15-bit palette. Both were superb machines at the time they came out.
Parent
Re:Had my cup o' pedant this morning.. (Score:3, Interesting)
But it is interesting to note that the Mac's predecessor, the Lisa DID have preemptive multitasking.
It's one of the things they stripped out to make the Mac a cheaper computer that could run with less memory overhead.
I'm platform agnostic but use Windows at home for gaming as you do. Prior to OSX it used to really erk me when Mac OS 8 fan boys would laugh at Windows. I mean Windows 98 and NT 4 were a bit dodgey, but they sure multitasked better
Re:Had my cup o' pedant this morning.. (Score:3, Informative)
your own link shows that amigas were higher spec, they could show many more than 2 colours at interlaced res for example.
Re:Had my cup o' pedant this morning.. (Score:3, Interesting)
The Mindset was clearly inferior in every way with the dubious exception of having some IBM PC compatibility.
Though I don't recall when it came out but Amigas did have PC compatibility. There was a daughter board you could install which allowed you to install and run PCDOS/Windows 3.X.
FalconHow are you measuring "advanced"? (Score:5, Insightful)
While the Cray-2 may have been the most efficient number crunching computer in 1985, the Amiga was the top of the line when it came to multimedia and workstation applications. So while the Cray-2 didn't offer the amazing multimedia capabilities of the Amiga, and the Amiga didn't offer the pure crunching power of the Cray-2, it isn't correct to say that either is more "advanced" than the other in all ways.
Parent
I have very fond memories of the Amiga (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember I had lured some guys from Pixar to a Chicago Amigafest to see if they wanted to port Renderman to the Amiga. The Amigafests were small affairs compared to the Apple or Microsoft ones back then, but I got a guy to fly out to it. He was nice and everything, but you could tell he thought it was kinda small-time. He was polite and suggested that we just make a Renderman compliant renderer for the Amiga. And looking back he was right, the Amiga just didn't have the horsepower to run Renderman at the time.
This was when Alan Hastings had just come out with Lightwave for NewTek...having hired Alan after his Videoscape 3D was a semi hit. Videoscape had competition from Sculpt-Animate 4D and Turbo-Silver 3D. But it was Lightwave that really broke through. This was in the days when it was a single guy doing all the programming/developing for the product. Remember them? Alan had very little help when developing Videoscape and I believe he had a partner join him in making the first version of Lightwave. Newtek was the center of the Amiga universe at the show with the VideoToaster and Lightwave.
I miss that really. It was a small group of very rabid fans that loved this machine. I used to go to Amiga user group meetings and met a lot of really friendly people. But all good things come to an end. I just wished the Amiga had a more dignified death.
Parent
The good old days (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The good old days (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The good old days (Score:5, Informative)
The biggest problem with the Amiga, business-wise, was that the profit margins for home computes were terrible. Apple survived by going into DTP and graphics, and Commodore tried video editing -- but for the most part Commodore was stuck trying to keep an entirely custom software/hardware platform alive by selling incredibly cheap machines to the video game crowd.
Parent
Re:The good old days (Score:3, Insightful)
It was the particular hardware design of the Amiga that positioned it for the application area it ended up dominating for a time. However, it was much more the efforts of third party hardware and softwar
A great machine indeed. (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, my 3000 is relegated to playing Settlers [classicgaming.com] once in a while.
Still alive somehow (Score:4, Informative)
Twenty Years? (Score:2)
Wow. Twenty years.
I remember playing with an Amiga 1000 after it got out. An Amiga 500 was my 4th computer, and one of the finest machines I ever owned. I am getting old!
Re:Twenty Years? (Score:2, Interesting)
All that I can say (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problems that plagued the Amiga was the lack of cheap hard disks from Commodore, Later in the Amigas life the lack of memory protection started to plauge the users too... If they actually released, standardized the platform perhaps it would have helped...
On the otherhad the killer is that everyone that has bought the IP has either died, or promised to do something with it, and done nothing.
As a plus Amiga's gave rise to smart GPU's, offloaded IO & a better less cpu centric design of cheap computers.
Re:All that I can say (Score:3, Interesting)
But
Guru Meditation (Score:5, Insightful)
Debugging. Coolest system error name...
Software Failure. Press left mouse button to continue.
Guru Meditation #0100000C0.000FE800 [wikipedia.org]
Sigh.. had they marketed it right, we'd not be talking about MS Windows at all. A machine and OS far ahead of its time.
Re:Guru Meditation (Score:5, Informative)
They ran AmigaDOS [wikipedia.org]... it was a fully pre-emptive multitasking OS, complete with color GUI windowing system and a nice command line shell. Its feel was a lot like BeOS, except without any memory protection (so Amiga programmers had to be very careful not to corrupt memory, or they'd take out the entire OS, not just their own process).
Parent
Re:Guru Meditation (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm another ex-Amigan who like so many others who have posted here, miss it dearly
Re:Guru Meditation (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Guru Meditation (Score:5, Informative)
The whole collection of components was called Kickstart (because it was the low level OS) and the GUI interface component was called the Workbench.
the Amiga OS was largely written from scratch with the exception of the AmigaDOS component (Filesystem/Disk manager) which was written in BCPL based on a legacy DOS that was available. AmigaDOS was a last minute addition which is why it wasn't written from scratch.
The OS was the first desktop computer to use a microkernel approach where all the components of the OS were independent objects which communicated via message passing. It also was the first desktop OS to provide pre-emptive multi-tasking but because it didn't have a "smart" scheduler, the system could still be brought to its knees with busy-loops.
There were many features that made the Amiga's OS a joy. The filesystem layout of a separate library (equiv of DLLs) and font directories made keeping your installation clean a breeze. In fact, in Kickstart/Workbench 2.0 and up, you could do the UNIX trick of specifying an environment variable for your library and font paths so you could have MULTIPLE library and font directories. In fact, the Amiga environment variable system was implemented as a RAM drive so it could have directory structures. Fond memories of setenv "SASC/scoptions" -g.
Device I/O was asynchronous. You passed and received messages to the hardware while your code could go off and do other things. Where this really made a difference was in the Sound device which allowed some fairly inventive sound mixing to go on because while the sound device went off to play your sample, you could mix up the next sample for it to play. In the mid-80s, no one was doing that on a desktop/home PC.
The GUI library, called Intuition, had a nice clean design. Things were properly partitioned into their own libraries/modules and the API was clean and easy to learn. The designer of Intuition said his only regret was he couldn't make it into a pure device for completely asynchronous operation.
The message scheme of the Amiga is still, IMHO, the best there ever was. Based on what amounted to a primitive C-based version of classes, you allocated a structure for your message, filled out the required fields and sent it to a Message Port. You could wait around for a response, or do other things while periodically checking on the message port. This made creating event driven code a dream. With one function call, I could watch a dozen MessagePorts (or just one, actually -- a MessagePort could receive any message). With that one call, I can listen for:
Trying to do the same thing in Windows was a severe pain until very recently, and even now, it's still a pain.
The Amiga had its flaws. For example, by chosing the cheaper 680x0 processors, the Amiga never had memory protection or virtual memory which made for some fun crashes. The memory allocation code was such a piece of crap that if you weren't careful, you could fragment all of the system memory and even other applications would be affected (see the no memory protection or virtual memory flaw). Also as mentioned, the pre-emptive schedule did not adapt to "bad" programs such as programs doing busy loops.
All in all, it was still a dream. I still miss programming it. The NeXTStep OS is the closest I've ever seen any other OS get to it.
Parent
Re:Guru Meditation (Score:4, Informative)
The whole collection of components was called Kickstart (because it was the low level OS) and the GUI interface component was called the Workbench.
Kickstart was (usually) in ROM and contained the low-level stuff. Workbench was loaded from floppy or HD and contained the GUI, extra libraries and other stuff.
Actually, I'm not sure whether 'Workbench' was the GUI only or not - the 'Workbench' floppies did contain more than the GUI but when one said 'Workbench' one usually meant the GUI.
the Amiga OS was largely written from scratch with the exception of the AmigaDOS component (Filesystem/Disk manager) which was written in BCPL based on a legacy DOS that was available. AmigaDOS was a last minute addition which is why it wasn't written from scratch.
The DOS component of AmigaOS (CAOS) was lagging behind the rest of the system, so instead of delaying the introduction of Amiga 1000 to get it finished an outside contractor was signed on to port an existing DOS to AmigaOS. Which is why AmigaDOS has some oddities, like BCPL.
About CAOS [thule.no]
but because it didn't have a "smart" scheduler, the system could still be brought to its knees with busy-loops.
The scheduler was a simple priority round-robin algorithm, meaning that the highest priority runnable task would get the CPU. If there were several runnable tasks at that priority level, the scheduler would round robin between them.
The OS kernel ran at the highest priority, GUI and device drivers a bit lower, user programs at 0 and background tasks below that.
As you mention, the obvious problem was that a busy-looping task at a priority higher than user programs would completely starve them for CPU, effectively locking up the system from the user's point of view.
It did have its perks, tho. Since the GUI was running at high priority it instantly got CPU so the system felt very responsive even when heavily loaded. It was also simple to start a long running task at a lower priority than normal user programs and have it churn on something in the background with close to no impact on system and user program responsiveness - back in those days the ability to have a big compile or render running in the background and hardly noticing it while typing in your editor was mindblowing.
In fact, in Kickstart/Workbench 2.0 and up, you could do the UNIX trick of specifying an environment variable for your library and font paths so you could have MULTIPLE library and font directories. In fact, the Amiga environment variable system was implemented as a RAM drive so it could have directory structures. Fond memories of setenv "SASC/scoptions" -g.
Paths, Labels and env are separate.
The path is where the shell would look for executables. Works just like in Win or *nix.
Environment variables also work like in Win or *nix, except that they were stored and could be accessed as a RAM file system.
Labels, though, is very nifty and very Amiga. Those familiar with MS-DOS can think of them as drive letters on steroids.
Labels could point to a device (DF0:), volume label (WORKBENCH:, GAMEFLOPPY:), pseudo device (SPEECH:), or they could be assigned to a directory.
AmigaOS came with a set of default device labels. DF0: for first floppy, DH0: for first harddrive. The system would look for libraries in LIBS:, fonts in FONTS:, etc. Every floppy and HD had a volume label, so if you had a floppy named games you could access it with GAMES:. If GAMES: could not be found, AmigaOS would prompt you to insert the floppy. In addition you had special labels like SPEECH: which sent any files copied to it through a speech synthesizer.
If you copied the workbench floppy to the HD, you could 'assign WORKBENCH: DH0:st
Parent
I always thought... (Score:4, Insightful)
20 years huh? Wow, I didn't realize it's been that long.
Memories... (Score:4, Interesting)
Best. Easteregg. Evar. (Score:5, Interesting)
(This was from the site above -but I remember doing this on 1.2, with an original 1000).
Re:Art Class (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Hehe (Score:5, Funny)
Then again maybe that's just how I bitterly remember it because everyone with an Amiga had Lemmings and all I had was Flimbo's quest. Although it was quite impressive when it stopped working after an entire year of 12+ hours use a day..
Waiting list (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah - my Amiga - how I miss thee (Score:4, Interesting)
It always bugs me how the Amiga is forgotten when media - mainstream as well as trade press - do pieces on the "history" pf home computing. Back when no one outside universities and the military had heard of the "internet", and computers were considered wierd and anti-social, we were cruising BBS:s on our 1200 baud modems.
Portions written in BCPL. (Score:5, Informative)
AmigaDOS was later rewritten in C for Kickstart/Workbench 2.0. Indeed, it is quite interesting to see that they could create such a fantastic workstation OS (often unmatched feature-wise until the late 1990s by Windows and Mac OS) in a high level language, and running on lower-end hardware.
Re:Portions written in BCPL. (Score:3, Informative)
Coupla decades eh, damn... (Score:3, Insightful)
I grew up on an Amiga 500. It, as well as a friend's A2000 which I bought of of him some years later when I was making the switch to PC, are still sitting in my parents' house somewehre. =) (In fact, probably in almost pristine quality with a snapshot of the BBS that I was running on it some years later until the fateful day I decided to pull the plug and make some more desk space for the new Mac that had infiltrated and upstaged.)
My first introduction to computers was actually the QNX/Unisys ICON system in elementary school (yep, a networked system running a Unix-like operating system... something that *also* ahead of its time, well, kinda). Following that, the Commodore PET and 64 on which I learned BASIC and got my start in software development. =) A few years later, I was back to the ICONS where I started learning C in about grade 8, but through that time we had an Amiga in the house.
Ours was an A500 which Dad bought from the local Canadian Tire (!) and revealed as a surprise family Christmas gift in 1987. It was a phenomenal machine. I can still recall the school-yard conversations with my 286- and Mac SE-toting friends about how many simultaneous colours their computers could display ("16, eh? Howzabout FOUR THOUSAND NINETY SIX, foo'").
Ahh, good times.
Truly a revolutionary force in its day, though. The intervening years (death of Commodore, slow atrophy of the Amiga brand and innovation) were painful but inevitable to watch, kind of like a withering tree you know is past its prime and on its way.
-b
The problem with specialzation (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of what made it so awesome was how incredible it was at graphics. How perfectly tuned it was to making a video signal. Unfortunately that limited the design of the hardware, the speed of the processor. Even if you had a faster processor for it, everything had to slow down to 7.xxxx MHz (IIRC) when you hit the video interface.
Then the PC got better video cards, and I could just upgrade that one part. The Amiga was always playing catchup with custom designed chips tuned to the hardware. After a while it felt like they were always a day late and a dollar short. It was still an amazing machine for video, but for a general purpose system it had seriously lost it's luster.
Still I miss it...
Part of the houston amiga users group. (Score:4, Interesting)
It had "HAM" graphics (hold and modify) so you could finally have real pictures (lots of porn of course).
It had true multi-tasking (not sure if windows has that yet- I think it got it with win2k). By true- I mean if one process dies, the machine didn't hang- that process did and everything else kept running with it's preemptive slice (come to think of it my win2k machine still hangs up for over a minute sometimes in azureus or when the virus scanner runs so win may not have preemptive multi-tasking yet).
It had an incredible battlemech game that we just played to death (probably helped some guys fail college).
It had a great networked tank game where you drove around a city blowing it up and hunting for your buddy's enemy tank- but the atari had one with smily faces that supported more people.
I wrote a shareware game for it (Spaaaaace Aaaace!) which was a space war clone with cool graphics and hit location- got a cease and desist order from "Bluth Enterprises" - they had a video tree game with the name B(. It was right about then that game started requiring 10-15 people to produce (since you needed real artists and musicians and the programs were so large you needed multiple programmers)
I got my first virus on the amiga. My buds didn't believe me until it happened to them- it spread via floppies but tended to make the floppies crash. It said
Something wonderful is happening
Your Amiga has come alive!
Great computer that commodore ruined.
big in europe (Score:5, Interesting)
we had a club of all army guys that would meet once every 2 weeks on base. everyone would bring their games (on 3.5" disks) and some guy would sell stacks of blanks - 50 for $20 i think. and we would spend literally all day copying each other's games. i usually came home with 400 floppies to try out, and usually about 50 new good working games. there were also a few companies that listed every game in their catalog and sold "backup copies" including documentation for as little as $2.
i guess in a way we helped drive them out of business by not supporting the software developers but i made $600 a month. if i had to buy software for $30/title, it just wasn't goign to happen. i DID buy a few titles, mainly from psygnosis, who released just AWESOME games that were a decade ahead of their time. and other guys in the barracks saw me having so much fun, they went and got amigas too. these were totally computer illiterate guys who had never heard of a mouse, back in 1990.
we would set up very rudimentary LAN parties with 2 or 3 amigas connected by serial cable and play roller coaster racer all night... amazing fun. i remember the first time i saw populous. it was at about 8pm, and next thing i new it was 6am and time for exercise. i was tired but excited all day :)
i'm not surprised IBM won the PC race but i am sad and disappointed that the creativity and genius that went into games 15 years ago seems to be gone now. there used to be 20 or 30 new games every year that were totally original. now 1 original game like katamarcy darcy comes out and everyone talks about how great it is :( if only they knew...
actually i just played a (PC port of) an amiga game a couple days ago. i was surfing around and somehow saw a reference to Overlord, which was a great game for the amiga, really fun and creative graphics about taking over planets. anyway i googled around a little and discovered i could download and play it for free! the sound is PC speaker beeps instead of midi quality music and sound samples the amiga had, and the graphics arent quite as good but it still brings back fond memories :) http://www.mirsoft.info/gmb/music_info.php?id_ele= MTEyMDc= [mirsoft.info]
Some musical jewels... (Score:3, Interesting)
I loved MOD music files. Thankfully, winamp can play them, too!
The amiga could do 4-channel music with sampled instruments, when PC's could just do bleeps and tweets. I still wonder why PC sound cards didn't emulate the amiga sound chip.
Re:Some musical jewels... (Score:5, Informative)
There wouldn't have been much point. The Amiga sound hardware was basically a set of 4 8-bit DSPs with about a 28Khz maximum sample rate. There were two DSPs per audio channel. With some trickery you could use both DSPs on one channel to simulate 14 bit audio. There were also some filters and a means to let one channel modulate the other. An SB16 could do most of the things this hardware could do. Most of the vaunted "Amiga sound" was due to good programming and the fact that competing machines of the era had either beeper sound or cut down synthesizer chips for audio.
There were (are?) tracker players that emulate the Amiga CPU+sound chip for playing the Amiga's audio library.
Parent
From five years into the future... (Score:4, Interesting)
So we started out trumpeting the advantage of sound (few PCs had sound; the guys who eventually successfully marketed the original Sound Blaster were refugees from the Amiga market) or color (remember, VGA was rare and expensive when the Amiga was released) or video compatibility with deep color (Targa cards were rather static and very expensive) or windows (GEM? Windows 1.x?) or video manipulation or color desktop publishing or 3D animation or emulation (we had Mac, Win, DOS, Atari, etc.) or persistent RAM drives or hypertext help systems or any number of other whizzy features, and the PC and Mac marketroids would *successfully* say "Who needs that?". Rinse, lather, repeat.
The distillation of my Amiga market experience came from the lips of a drunken Amiga dealer at a party in 1992 or so. Of course, a popular topic of conversation at these events was discussing why the so-obviously-superior-to-us-annointed Amiga wasn't outpacing the Mac and PC in sales.
This dealer said of the past few years (at that time) that "It was like we were all from five years into the future, back in the days of radio."
I did say this guy was drunk, didn't I?
But he was right. It was as if we'd all seen what television was like, but we were trying to sell to people who really liked radio and couldn't imagine the value of audio plus moving pictures.
We all knew they'd want television someday, but it was always hard to hear they didn't want to buy it.
I have a developer A1000, serial number 36 or so.
Happy birthday, Amiga (Score:5, Informative)
In looking back, it is amazing the number of things they absolutely nailed wih the Amiga. It was the first machine to use fully-programmable custom chips for sound and graphics support. That hardware was immensely powerful; it could do memory copies (the blitter), palette shifts (the "copper", and I don't remember why it was called that anymore), sprites, collision detection, four-channel stereo sound, and probably many other things I'm forgetting, without even using the main CPU at all. (well, except to set things up, at any rate.)
The system could display separate programs with separate resolutions and color palettes on the same screen at the same time. You could literally grab the Workbench screen and drag it down, revealing some cool demo running behind it..."Boing!" in the top half, Workbench in the bottom. This was done by some clever copper tricks... on the fly, over the space of about two scanlines, the copper would shift the entire display mode and palette, and start displaying screen data from a different arbitrary program.
Later, a variant on this technique was used to create the best graphics the Amiga could manage...Sliced HAM, or S-HAM. The default 'high color' graphics mode, HAM, could have any 32 base colors out of the palette of 4,096. Any pixel could either have one of the base colors, or it could H)old the color of the previous pixel A)nd M)odify either the red, green, or blue component. S-HAM took this a step further, and swapped the base 32 colors on *every scan line*, so that you could have many more colors available. Some of the S-HAM pictures were absolutely stunning. It did, however, put a huge load on the graphics hardware... the machine really crawled when running that mode. So it was really only useful for slideshows... you couldn't animate that mode, to my knowledge.
Then, on top of that, they mostly nailed the OS. There were three major components to the AmigaOS; Exec, Intuition, and AmigaDOS.
Exec was the multitasking core, what we'd probably think of as the kernel in Linux land. It was immensely efficient. The task switching method that RJ Mical came up with was so fast that it ended up going into the Motorola programming manuals. I can't find the numbers offhand, but I believe the Amiga could task switch in less than twenty clock cycles. Whatever the actual number was, it was FAST.
Intuition provided the windowing libraries; it was what kept windows properly layered and coordinated, and routed user input. That would be roughly the equivalent of X, though much simpler. Workbench, the built-in graphic UI, was an optional load; you could stay in 'console mode' if you wished. The Amiga had no true text-only mode, however. Even if you had just a single CLI window open with nothing else, it was still drawn in graphics mode. (scrolling on the Amiga was never very fast because of this).
AmigaDOS, I believe, did all the disk and file I/O. It was rather Unixish, but it was very slow and had an absolutely horrible user interface. (Fortunately, it was easy to replace the DOS programs with better ones, and most people who really used their machines did so.) Filesystems were abstracted too, which was a good thing.... the early filesystem on the Amiga was very fragile and very slow. Later on, the Fast File System was introduced, which sped things up a heck of a lot. With FFS, hard drives were quite comfortable, but floppies were never very good. There were many special custom loaders that sped things up (much like on the C64), but the floppies were always slow, no matter what.
Of the three major components of the OS, AmigaDOS was the weakest, and was responsible for a lot of the early (justified) griping about the pl
I remember being an Amigan but I'm now a Mac user (Score:3, Interesting)
Sometimes I wish that I had kept at least one of my Amigas but I threw away Amiga 2000HD a year and a half ago and gave my CD32 to a local thrift store.
My progression in computers went from MSDOS->AmigaDOS 1.3-3.1->Windows 95-XP->OS 10.2-10.4.
The Amiga platform is dead but I will always have a warm place in my heart for those days.
Amiga games! (Score:3, Insightful)
Somebody told me a story about going to a computer show and seeing all the PCs struggling to run crummy CGA/EGA games. There were Amigas at the show. . . but they were forbidden from running games! Commodore thought if Amiga was seen running games, it would ruin their reputation with big business customers!
Amiga users got the first crack at classics like Shadow of the Beast, Populous, The Settlers, Lemmings, NY Warriors, Battle Squadron, Stunt Car Racer, Turrican II, Cannon Fodder and too many other great games to list.
As time went by, and Amiga hardware became more outdated without any meaningful upgrades, the PC gradually caught up. I think Wing Commander was the turning point. It was on the PC first, and your basic Amiga couldn't handle it. From that time on, the PC was the top dog of computer gaming, while Amiga and Atari ST faded away.
Re:Last year I was clearing stuff out from... (Score:3, Informative)
You can find a nice step-by-step tutorial here [utilitybase.com].
Re:Amiga Was The Only Computer Ever (Score:3, Informative)
What planet were you living on? If people wanted to run 8086 software it was much cheaper to just buy an 8086 machine. Amiga had lots of selling points, and the sidecar was way down the list.
Oh, wait
Re:Atari's Jackintosh was a weak copy (Score:3, Insightful)
The ST definitely got you a working computer for less money. The Atari monitors (at least the early ones) were high quality. The ST operating system was easy to use, easy to program. It also made efficient use of processor power -- my Amiga wasn't as responsive as my ST until after I dropped in a 68020 card, effectively quadrupling the main processor power.