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Amiga Hardware

Happy Birthday, Amiga 385

Posted by CowboyNeal 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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Happy Birthday, Amiga More

Happy Birthday, Amiga

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  • Had my cup o' pedant this morning.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Saturday July 23, 2005 @10:29AM (#13144048) Homepage Journal

    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.
    • Yes but how many could afford to have a Cray in their bedroom?
    • Probably better to say the most advanced home computer then...

    • How are you measuring "advanced"? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by CyricZ ( 887944 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @10:43AM (#13144120)
      The most "advanced" computer at that time depends on what your criteria are. The systems from Cray and Amiga are very different, yet still both very advanced.

      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.

    • I have very fond memories of the Amiga (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sgant ( 178166 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @02:31PM (#13145247) Homepage Journal
      Had a friend that I met through the Amiga that developed Disk Mechanic for the Amiga. Eric Quackenbush. He was independent before he went to Greater Valley Products to develop for them. He was a HELL of a programmer. Last I heard he was doing things for OS/2 but this had to be 10 years ago.

      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.

  • The good old days (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mfloy ( 899187 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @10:32AM (#13144068) Homepage
    I can remember back with the old systems like the Amiga. I was completely amazed when I first got to use one, and I thought that computers had reached perfection. Now if I was to show someone one they would laugh and think it was something a high school kid built in his garage.
    • Too bad Amiga ever hooked up with commode-door. If they had been bought out by anyone else they might be a viable platfor, today. I used to have an Amiga 1200, but sold it when it still had some value, and used that money toward a PC. Sometimes I miss it.

      • Re:The good old days (Score:5, Informative)

        by IntlHarvester ( 11985 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @11:06AM (#13144232) Journal
        The other company fighting for Amiga was Atari, who made Commodore executives look lika a bunch of business geniuses.

        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.

        • Re:The good old days (Score:3, Insightful)

          by cerebis ( 560975 )
          I wouldn't say Commodore tried going into video (and 3d), it was more of an unexpected fluke. For the most part, Commodore the company stumbled around for a decade. They had some great developers, but more often than not, it seemed they were thwarted by bad business processes and/or decision makers up top.

          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

          • They had some great developers, but more often than not, it seemed they were thwarted by bad business processes and/or decision makers up top.

            There is that, yes. Commodore's business people were horribly inept. Remember the TED fiasco? How many dollars went into developing a platform and 2 new systems that didn't even survive a year in the marketplace?

    • Re:The good old days (Score:2, Interesting)

      by McNihil ( 612243 )
      Really? IMHO you have no idea what the heck you are talking about. The Zorro I,II and III busses are a hack job? True Plug and Play before anybody else and it just worked. Engineering when it mattered! It is amazing that your post was deemed interesting but it just shows how Slashnot has become a travesty and a covert front of MS cronies.
      • I really have no idea what your point is. I never badmouthed the engineering at all (I said that by TODAYS tech standards it looks bad, but that is common sense) and where do I make any pro MS comments?
    • They HAD reached perfection, I don't think my PC are even close in perfection. A 20" iMac might be, but I don't know.

  • A great machine indeed. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by AmiNTT ( 539586 ) * on Saturday July 23, 2005 @10:33AM (#13144072) Homepage
    The Amiga was a fantastic computer for its time, and even up until recently, was an excellent platform. An Amiga 3000 was my daily machine for email and web work up until late 2003, when I got a Mac G5, which is pretty much everything the Amiga could have been. AREXX was an extremly handy tool.

    Now, my 3000 is relegated to playing Settlers [classicgaming.com] once in a while.

  • Still alive somehow (Score:4, Informative)

    by rob_squared ( 821479 ) <<rob> <at> <rob-squared.com>> on Saturday July 23, 2005 @10:33AM (#13144074)
    I would expect many here to know, but people still do run Amiga hardware. In fact, when the company that made Fusion, a Macintosh 680x0 emulator, first started making a PPC emulator, they wrote it first to run with Amigas that were upgraded with PPC chips.

  • 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!

  • All that I can say (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 0xdeaddead ( 797696 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @10:35AM (#13144081) Homepage Journal
    is that Commodore snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with this one.

    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)

      by DrXym ( 126579 )
      I can think of a few technical issues that the Amiga suffered from. Bitplanes were horrible to programme, interlaced mode and HAM were just as bad. Decent performance could only be gotten by hitting the hardware. The APIs were okay but no good for serious game writing or even advanced applications like word processors which needed fonts and other stuff it didn't do for a long time. The hardware dependencies seriously hamstrung the platform because it meant future versions had to be register compatible.

      But

  • Guru Meditation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by EQ ( 28372 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @10:38AM (#13144095) Homepage Journal
    What I liked best?

    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.

    • On the other hand, it was also one of the first machines with a serious 'virus' scene (at least as I remember it). Maybe other 'advanced' platform had the same trouble (atari, mac's) but certainly not PC's.

      It took the PC at least 5-20 year until they 'catched up' and had a similar virus thread

      • Since the standard amiga relied on floppy drives rather than hard drives and most software was on bootable disks, boot sector viruses were a big problem. A little bit later someone came out with the disk validator virus which only had to be inserted into a (WB1.3 or earlier) amiga for it to be infected.

        Fortuantely there were some excellent anti-virus tools that were either shareware or freeware.

        In fact the huge amount of freely distributable software was one of its biggest strengths. (Thanks to Fred Fiah
    • Back in 1992, the Preview Channel for at least some of the USA's cable was run on an Amiga, and I used to use my monitor to watch movies through its RCA ports.

      One day, after an afternoon of gaming, I decided to watch a movie to take the edge off. Imagine my shock and horror as I switched off my Amiga 1000, switched to the composite input, and a Guru error was superimposed on top of the Preview Channel. In a moment that was both brief and endless, I thought I'd totally screwed up my computer, VCR, and monit

  • I always thought... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BobWeiner ( 83404 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @10:38AM (#13144096) Homepage Journal
    ..the Amiga was a nice machine for its time. I remember checking an A1000 out at a friends place many, many years ago. The graphics and sound on the machine were quite amazing, compared to what was available on the market. Sad that the Amiga never got the recognition it deserved.

    20 years huh? Wow, I didn't realize it's been that long.

  • The Amiga version was the best version of Simearth ever made. The pc version looked like crap by comparison. Also the original Simcity was best on the Amiga.

    If commodore had stayed in business Id probably still have an Amiga.

  • Memories... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by volsung ( 378 ) <stan@mtrr.org> on Saturday July 23, 2005 @10:42AM (#13144116)
    Man, the red and black Guru Meditation screen is probably the creepiest error message I've ever seen. No soothing blue or green to be found there. :)
    • What was great was the times in the early 90's when I would be flipping through the cable TV channels and catch a Guru Meditation error on one of them (usually the TV guide channel or equivalent).

  • Amiga Signatures (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I don't know if they all had this, but my Amiga 1000 (the one in the room in the original box) had signatures on the inside of the plastic cover. I recall a little dog footprint too.

    I'm not sure what I'm saving the machine for though...if only I could get a variant of Unix to run on it...but its lack of a MMU made the 1000 ill equipped for modern OS's.

    This poses another question- how long will a system last boxed up like that?

  • Best. Easteregg. Evar. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by EQ ( 28372 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @10:46AM (#13144139) Homepage Journal
    I remember this one (and the how-to is still on the net [eeggs.com]!):


    1. Hold Left-Shift, Left-Alt, Right-Shift and right-alt

    2. Press any of the F keys and get a message!

    3. To get a rude message toward Commodore, do this

    4. Hold down the same as step 1 and hold down an f key

    5. Insert a disk and you get the message " We made the amiga... "

    6. Take the disk out and you get " And Commodore Fucked it up! "



    (This was from the site above -but I remember doing this on 1.2, with an original 1000).
    • Reading the comments in your linked article, I'm not sure it mentioned "Commodore" by name, but it being instead "They fucked it up". Anyway, that was indeed working in 1.2 but was later changed to:

      Insert disk - The Amiga, Born a Champion
      Eject disk - Still a Champion ... in Kickstart 1.3, as Commodore found out about this message.

  • Since I put my Amiga 2040 into the basement years ago, I'm wondering what the name of a specific game is. It's about a jumping ball and you had to collect keys for locks. The ball jumped up and down all the time and you where able to direct the ball left and right. I don't remember its name, but maybe one of you know it?

  • Hehe (Score:5, Funny)

    by Turn-X Alphonse ( 789240 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @10:50AM (#13144157) Journal
    The Amiga always seemed to he the rich mans Commadore 64. I have no idea why but them little disks always seemed to be in the hands of rich kids where as us "normal" kids had tapes.

    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)

    by dprice ( 74762 ) <daprice@NOsPam.pobox.com> on Saturday July 23, 2005 @10:53AM (#13144177) Homepage
    I remember seeing the demo model of the Amiga 1000 in a local "mom and pop" computer store before the production shipment. I was blown away. It was so much more advanced than any other home computer at that time, both graphically and OS (AmigaDos). I got on the waiting list for months, and I payed full list price, I believe about $1300. I needed the new high density floppies (1.2 MB) and payed $49.95 for a box of 10 floppies!! For a laugh, I still have that box with the price tag still on it. And I still have the Amiga 1000 sitting in a box somewhere. Later I added a 2 MB memory expansion which was another $450. Ah, the bad old day, which seemed so good 20 years ago.
    • ...payed $49.95 for a box of 10 floppies!!

      Heh. At AmiExpo in 1988 (or 1989) in Chicago, I, too, paid $450 for a 2MB RAM board for an A2000. Full-length card, densely populated with 16-pin DIP packages. :-)

      Also bought CygnusEd Pro for $100...

  • Ah - my Amiga - how I miss thee (Score:4, Interesting)

    by de Bois-Guilbert ( 807304 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @10:56AM (#13144184)
    I used to own an Amiga500 back in the day, and got me a A1200 when they were released. Everyone I knew who were into computers had an Amiga, PC:s were more or less unheard of and generally ridiculed as clunky, ugly and unsexy (to a bunch of greasy-haired computer nerds anyhow :) ).

    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. ...and you know, everything was a hell of a lot more fun back then. ;)

  • Portions written in BCPL. (Score:5, Informative)

    by CyricZ ( 887944 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @10:57AM (#13144189)
    It is interesting to note that parts of AmigaOS were written in BCPL, due to its derivation from TRIPOS. BCPL was the predecessor for C, for those who weren't aware.

    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.

  • Coupla decades eh, damn... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by g0at ( 135364 ) <ben@@@zygoat...ca> on Saturday July 23, 2005 @10:57AM (#13144191) Homepage Journal
    (Chiming in with all fellow retrospectives)

    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
  • If you own a Pocket PC, the popular Amiga emulator UAE was ported some time ago.

    More details at http://www.pocketgamer.org/showthread.php?s=&threa did=4561 [pocketgamer.org]

  • The problem with specialzation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jockm ( 233372 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @11:02AM (#13144215) Homepage
    I loved my Amiga 1000 and even did some professional development for it. I kept it running for a great many years before it finally gave up the ghost. There were many things that contributed to it's demise, but one of them has to be it's over specialized hardware.

    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...
  • I had two A-1000s when they first came out. I remember writing AD&D character generators and dungeon programs using that Microsoft Basic that came with them.
    The Amiga was an awesome box. Too bad Commodore wasn't able to keep innovating. They had a real shot at long-term market share, and blew it. The accompanying article is a great lesson on how NOT to run a technology business.

    Tougher Rules Needed For Airpsace Incursions? [whattofix.com]
  • I used an A3000 up until late 1999, when a near-miss (near-hit?) lightning strike blew out its I/O (and the external modem, and melted the phone line). The A2000 I sold to a friend was in use even longer. Still have an A500 and A1000 (and the dead A3000) in the basement. In the 1980's I used the A2300 Genlock a fair amount (always wanted a NewTek Video Toaster), and then there was the Lightwave software, and the PPS Framegrabber video capture units (still have two of these). These were the heady days of
  • ...my old company after it shut its doors and uncovered an old unclaimed Amiga 500, mouse and monitor. I opened the case, cleaned it up, washed the case itself with soap and water, and it looks and works fine. Using Amiga Explorer I was able to connect it to my PC (via a chain of about 4 serial port adapters and gender benders) and download some classic games. I managed to finish Infocom Enchanter [guetech.org] on it. I think I have every Infocom game for it now. (I don't know whether to think of this as piracy - I own t

  • Part of the houston amiga users group. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Maxo-Texas ( 864189 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @11:10AM (#13144259)
    I had an apple and then went up to the amiga.

    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.
    • I got my first virus on the amiga. My buds didn't believe me...

      Hey, I remember that! I also remember no one in the sysops' association I was in at the time believed there was such a thing as a "computer virus." They said it was just the users screwing up. :-)

      Still have that Amiga virus on a diskette, somewhere...
    • I did all that same stuff as well. I still have my A1000 in my garage.

      My favorite nerd show-off was to do all of the following with my stock A1000, all at the same time:

      1) Compile Code
      2) while downloading files from a BBS (1200 baud, baby!)
      3) while formatting two flopping disks
      4) while playing lunar lander

      All those tasks would execute flawlessly at the same time with Amiga O/S's premptive multitasking and it's sort of impressive even today, but blew people away in 1986. (Ok, it blew nerds away)
    • It had a great networked tank game where you drove around a city blowing it up and hunting for your buddy's enemy tank

      Firepower. I especially liked the "explosion" and "cannon shot" sounds that had obviously been created by someone's mouth next to a microphone.

      When I saved up and bought a 2400 baud modem, I was able to give my 1200 baud model to a friend of mine, and then we were finally able to play it together without one of us carrying his entire A500 over to the other's house.
    • 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

      With cooperative multitasking, context switches are only done when the currently running task voluntarily relinquish control. Usually by programs regularely calling a switch_if_timeslice_spent() function, and sprinkling the OS functions with similar tests (e.g., switch if an IO c
  • Is this kinda like how we still celebrate Shakespeare's birthday? Even though he is dead.

  • big in europe (Score:5, Interesting)

    by joe094287523459087 ( 564414 ) <joe@j[ ]to ['oe.' in gap]> on Saturday July 23, 2005 @11:15AM (#13144275) Homepage
    i never saw one in stores in the US but i went to germany in the US army and they were all over - amiga stores on the US Bases, amiga stores in the local economy. it was very popular

    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]

  • We created a game for it called the Zen Meditation game. The object was to sit in lotus-position on the Joyboard and move as little as possible for as long as possible.

    Sounds great, where can I get a copy of this fun-fest?
  • I should have bought an Amiga.

    It was 1986, and the IBM PC-class machines were expensive and boring. My home PC was a PDP-11 with 8" floppies and a VT52-compatible terminal. Time to upgrade. The Macintosh was out, but far too right-brained for my taste -- I liked a keyboard more than a mouse. Plus I didn't dress well enough to fit into the Mac world. No, Amiga was the slick machine. Nice Motorola CPU, graphics, sound.

    But hey, there was this other machine, the Atari ST. The original 520ST (half megab
    • Actually, the ST-as-a-platform lasted a bit longer in Europe than you think.

      http://www.kingx.com/kingx/medusa/thes.html [kingx.com]
      http://www.milan-computer.de/gb/products/milan01.h tml [milan-computer.de]

      The ST did have a persistant niche for a while as a midi controller/composition tool. I'll agree with you that the Amiga was generally more advanced and had a better OS.
    • While it is true that TOS was much simpler than AMigaDOS, I have to point several inacuracies/ommisions:

      - Atari's RF shield was NOT soldered on. At least not in typical case. I must have serviced/expanded at least 500+ various Atari ST's (ST,STM, STFM, Mega ST etc) and I have NEVER seen soldered-on RF shield on Atari.

      They had hinges in some 10 places ( which needed to be straightened up before separating halves of the shield) ant they were screwed-on to the bottom plastic part of the computer.
      I used to be
    • I used and programmed both the ST and Amiga extensively, and the comparison isn't as clear-cut as you make it sound. They both had their strengths.

      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.
  • I'm going to have to get my 1200HD out of the closet and go for a quick spin again.
  • I finally ended up throwing my A1000 and A2000 away last year. Had been sitting in the closet for many years. Thought about trying to find another home for them but figured no one would know what to do with them. And I did not want to put them in a garage sale and have to answer the question "Does it come with Windows" every time someone looked at them.

    I opened up the A1000 to look at the signatures on the inside of the case one more time. Then set it out on the curb along with the A2000. Got many
  • here [archive.org] is a list of the Computer Chronicles references to the Amiga. For you young whipper snappers out there, Computer Chronicles was the way we got to see all the neat computer stuff we couldn't afford, provided we could pick up the PBS station with the antenna.
  • http://www.modarchive.com/ [modarchive.com]

    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)

      by dmaxwell ( 43234 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @12:34PM (#13144645)
      I still wonder why PC sound cards didn't emulate the amiga sound chip.

      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.
  • Amiwest [sacc.org] is going on today (23rd) in Sacramento, California.

  • A3000UX (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ak3ldama ( 554026 )
    ok, i'm way too uninformed. apparently amiga produced a version of the A3000 that came with UNIX System V. this was the A3000UX, shown here [wikipedia.org] and here [emugaming.com]. If someone has any bits of information in recollection of this machine could you inform us all. This is very interesting, I never knew this existed.
  • It's in a box in the basement, but I have it. I fired it up a couple of years ago when I was reminiscing about the F/A-18 flight sim. I was remembering it as super-realistic, extremely responsive, and smooth to play. I fired it up, and got was looked like a 320x240 ascii art rendition of the Bay Area. Funny how your memory plays tricks on you.

    Still, I remember spending/wasting hours/days flying around san francisco in a fully loaded F/A-18 - flying under the golden gate, buzzing the airport, carpet bombing

  • From five years into the future... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jfoust2 ( 43840 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @01:06PM (#13144843) Homepage
    The Amiga was a fine example of the persistent techie belief that "better" should always win. It doesn't. We whacked our heads against that one for years in the Amiga market.

    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)

    by Malor ( 3658 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @01:07PM (#13144847) Journal
    I have often said that had Apple been selling the Amiga, we'd all be running offshoots of that platform, rather than the PC. It was ten years ahead of its time, and I mean that almost literally; it wasn't until 1994, running Linux, that I could get even CLOSE to what I could do on my Amiga in 1985.

    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)

    by aristotle-dude ( 626586 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @01:29PM (#13144946)
    My first Amiga was an Amiga 500 which I bought in 1989 after selling my Sanyo XT Turbo. I have fond memories of AmigaOS and remember how "easy" it was for me to pickup Unix in college because so much of the syntax was similar. It was funny to watch DOS/Windows guys trying to wrap their heads around it.

    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.

  • A4000 with an accelerator card, both a 68060@50 and a PPC 604@233 MHz mounted on it.

    SCSI disks, BVision. Haven't upgraded the audio stuff yet, but due to the nature of the Amiga, I can still play 16-bit sound etc(That was one nice way to get PC users to shut up, playing their 24 channel 16-bit XM music on a bog-standard A500....)

    Ah, so many fond memories....

  • The Amiga was a good system but so was the Atari ST. The only problem was that both were designed to compete against each other, not the PC and MAC. It didn't matter if the Amiga or ST had superior graphics or sound or multitasking the Mac already had its share of the market as well as the PC.

    I owned an ST and had no problems with Amiga owners. Both systems had great applications as well as games. But the PC ended up as the one who took the games crown from both even though it was inferior for its time

  • Amiga games! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Zobeid ( 314469 ) on Saturday July 23, 2005 @03:11PM (#13145446)
    Does anybody remember when Amiga was the premier platform for computer games? There was a stretch of several years when all the best games appeared first on Amiga, the Atari ST was often right there with it (or a close second), and then some of the games eventually trickled down to MS-DOS PCs. The PC in that era didn't have the graphics or audio capabilities to match Amiga, or even the main processor power for that matter (i.e. 68000 versus 8088).

    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.

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