@@jamesthompson6557 It's when you get the drug in the form of a solid resin that you crumble into a powder instead of getting it in the form of dried leaves.
The Commodore Amiga has been for many years an alien entity for me, since it never came to Brazil in more official terms... I remember to read about in games magazines and getting screenshots of it for some games... I am very surprised to remember that, at least, the Amiga CD 32-Bit came here, though, but badly advertised. Maybe it was a niche product. And, so, thanks to emulation (and my boredom during the pandemic), I've gotten the chance to really meet the Amiga and play with it. Anyway, when I think about the Amiga, I see that it's a very symbolic machine to understand the Western development of computers... It's an incredible achievement for 1985/86. However, in a worldwide perspective, when I compare with the high advancement of the Sharp X68000 in 1987, I think that maybe the game developers for Amiga were a step behind in not taking full advantage. If I go to technicalities of the hardware, we could see some of the reason why as well. (And the Sharp X68000 was an even more distant machine to me...) Sometimes I think that the Amiga wasn't taken to its full potential many times in its heyday, and it's kinda sad. (Anyway, thanks to homebrew community, it's good to have the opportunity what could be, for example, a Street Fighter II for the Amiga if developed correctly for the machine!)
Problem for the amiga was games like sf2 were sprite based and the amiga only had 8 hardware sprites, many less than the consoles of the time. Lazy game companies made that worse but they didn't have a lot of sprite ability to work with
I got my Amiga 1000 new in November 1986, selling it after getting a used A500 in May '89. I stayed with that - mainly playing games, but also my first dabblings with a modem, what we used to call 'comms' - up until 1994. I got the extra 512k RAM and a second floppy drive, but expansion past that was pricey. In '94 I got an A4000, so was able to use cheaper hard drives and RAM.
I still have a working Amiga 500 (first owner) , but I've recently found out that my A501 trapdoor expansion has broken. I really love the fact that the Amiga community is still living today. There's still Amiga stores active where you can buy Amiga hardware and software for a reasonable price. This week I bought a new trapdoor expansion + RTC with a more commonly used replaceable button cell battery to be expected next week. Can't wait.
The interpretation that Amiga was more Atari than Commodore is often portrayed because Jay Minor was ex Atari. However, Jay created a machine that revolved around two MOS/Commodore CIA IO chips. This architecture has its roots in Commodore's family history of design with either two PIAs (PET), VIAs (VIC20) or CIAs (C64) for the IO components. Also, the Amiga has a MOS 6500 (6502 based microcontroller) in its keyboard. So even if Atari ended up owing Amiga (or anyone else) the machine would have had MOS/Commodore parts in it. There were no Atari ICs or parts used in the design. So, hardware wise, from the outset, it was more Commodore than Atari. Also, the original Atari ST was hampered by its single sided drive. Which was kind of ridiculous in the 16bit world.
Good point, but you could also argue that the Amiga's custom chips are an evolution of the Atari 8-bit's custom chips, which were very much an Atari design and people who stayed at Atari helped develop them.
It's a complex situation no doubt, but rather than think about the Amiga being being more Atari or Commodore I think that it's neither! it was Jay his idea, not some company. And even if Atari had taken possession of the Amiga custom chips (which is all they licensed) all they would have had was unfinished chips to put into a cancelled unfinished system (It had been cancelled before Jack Tramiel even bought Atari). I am of the opinion that had Atari taken possession of the chipset, that would have been the end of any Amiga or Amiga like system.
The AMIGA has ATARI patents which is one reason why ATARI sued . Jack Tramiel was a real penis for trying to rip off the AMIGA developers . He should have made them a fair deal . I don't care what any Commodore 64 fan says , the AMIGA is an ATARI machine with a Commodore LOGO on it .
When I lived in Silicon Valley, I used to live right between the former headquarters of ATARI and Amiga. My heart would shrink and I'd feel a pang of pain any time I passed them both by on my way to work, remembering how great it was to be in Europe in the late 1980's and early 1990's and own an Amiga, and play on the ATARI ST... I'd pass the former Sun Microsystems warehouse in Santa Clara, and my chest would hurt even more. Tears would stream down my cheeks in silence on many an ocassion of traveling to and from work, remembering the good, more innocent times...
Yeah that would make me sad too. The famous Atari building in Borregas Avenue was bought by Google and demolished a few years ago now, which is a huge shame, but they did erect a monument to the site's importance in the shape of a space invader.
The first computer I ever played with. I still have pretty sweet memories of Agony (a huge part of my gaming heart belongs to that game), Darkman and Shadow of the Beast. Not the best games ever of course, but still quite fascinating.
A nice machine to be the first, the speccy was the first I played on (computer) I did play on one of those gaming systems in the kids room of a pub, asteroids and space invaders, I managed to save up find and buy a used 500+ i think it was when I was at school, I now have a 1200.
I loved and still love the amiga, I had a 500 and later a 1200, PC wasn't quite there yet and the amiga was way more interesting, then doom happened and I had to get a pc
I did update my A500 cpu, the 68000 to a 68010 out of my washing machine, the amiga ran about 5% faster with some stuff but my washing machine took about half hour longer to wash.
When the amiga 2000 came out it was a game changer. It had flexibility, power and built in capability that could rival a $7000 apple quadra for a fraction of the cost. The PC platform was woefully behind in terms of GUI, graphics and sound. For the same cost as an a2000, an IBM clone was bare bones. No sound card. You'd be lucky to get 256 color VGA.
I bought an amiga when it was well established due to a mate using his for music production, even getting a recording contract. I had a lot of fun with it for non game related matters but I was very surprised at how crap so many games were compared to what I was playing on the snes at the time. It could do other sorts of games that consoles were not great at but for arcade style titles it was another matter
The joystick had serious limitations due to having one fire button so you would for example have to use up to jump playing on a proper console pad was just a much better experience.
@mr.y.mysterious.video1 While I agree there are a large number of poor games on the Amiga, you are comparing a console to a computer and on top of that the core hardware used in the A500 was originally used from 1985 - 1991 while the SNES was released only in Japan in 1990 and North America 1991, so comparing a a specialized game machine at least 5 years newer. But really what was the biggest improvement for the SNES games was the "Nintendo Seal of quality" that was on every game before it could be sold. The Amiga like most computers of that time was an open system without anyway to really quality assure software. 4148 (according to lemonamiga) is the amount of games released for the OCS (not including the upgraded AGA or ECS) Amiga (a number that is still growing, now racing towards 40 years later) 1757 (that was the largest number I could find) games released for the SNES, which sold tens of millions more systems than the Amiga, shows just how restrictive it was to make games on the SNES. For what Amiga arcade game conversions should have looked like had anyone bothered to put a bit of time, take a look at a look at the more recent Bomb Jack beer edition, Pac Man & Ms Pac Man 500, Devils Temple (Kung-Fu Master upgrade), Tiny Bobble (Bubble Bobble), Tinyus (Gradius/Nemesis), Scramble 500, Wonderboy, Amidar500, Green Beret. Those are the ones I can remember, I bet there are others and doesn't include AGA Amiga games.
@@brendanroberts1310 What is most annoying about the joystick situation is that it wasn't an issue with the Amiga. Even without active circuits it was easy to support 3 buttons (the game Hired Guns supported 3 button controllers with instructions on how to swap two wires in the Megadrive/Genesis controller to make it work). And the 8 button CD32 controllers worked on all Amigas (take a look at the Competition Pro CD32) and realistically with an active circuit it could easily handle more. Many popular joystick designs just weren't conducive of extra buttons. with designs for left and right handed players extra buttons were just copies of the other side. Most of the problem was with the owners who just wanted to buy cheap joysticks which in turn didn't inspire the programmers to support 2/3 buttons as who was going to use it? BTW many games have now been patched to use a second button to jump with WHDLoad
The custom chipset available in the Amiga 500 (OCS) was a great chipset which went way beyond the blitter (fast copy of bitmaps). For instance, the Amiga version of Pacmania (1988) put the Atari ST port to shame with a killer soundtrack and a full-screen, overscan-mode playfield. But this was done with surprisingly relatively little use of the blitter. Most of the animation relied on the Amiga's default capabilities (dual playfield, ease of doing parallax scrolling)
I looked at the different versions of Pac-Mania on the channel recently and while the Amiga version of Pac-Mania looks great being full-screen, it is very slow compared to the ST port and I actually much prefer the soundtrack on the ST too, probably because it sounds more authentic (both the coin-op and the ST have a Yamaha sound chip). There is actually an STe version of Pac-Mania that is full-screen like the Amiga but faster, its a much better version.
@@TheLairdsLair I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. Coming from the Atari ST world (I had one of the very first models in August '85) I was just blown away by the Amiga version. Its speed never bothered me.
If I hadn't already played the ST version then the speed wouldn't have bothered me, but having played the ST version so much growing up I found it hard to cope with the slow speed on the Amiga. The best home versions are the new STe version and the Acorn Archimedes one, which is identical to the Amiga one, only faster.
@@TheLairdsLair you mentioned that the STE has scrolling capabilities on top of having a blitter. Would you know where I can find its API/SDK? I'd like to compare with the Amiga but haven't been able to find anything about programming the STE specifically
Here in the USA, neither the Atari ST nor the Amiga were used with TV sets, and the initial market advantage of the Atari ST only lasted about 1 year. Why? Unfortunately, retailers here in the USA were screwed over so much by Jack that most bailed on Atari when he took over. So, the Atari ST was crippled by a lack of retail presence. You might think ... so what? This was only the USA market! Except ... the USA market was really huge compared to the markets in Europe where the Atari ST was doing okay. And compatibility with Kickstart 1.2/1.3 was not an issue here in the USA, which is why Commodore didn't care about it. Like it or not, both Atari and Commodore were helmed in the USA, so mostly Europe was an afterthought. Commodore Germany did come up with a lot of stuff, though. Anyway, the Amiga 500 here in the USA had a big impact on Japanese animation fandom, along with JACOsub. The Amiga 500 with genlock was by far the least expensive option for subtitling, and it's what made "fansubs" possible. As a result anime fandom exploded here in the USA during the 1990s, as well as spawning the biggest anime conventions outside Japan itself. Early USA anime conventions were a weird wild west dominated by pirated videos, bootlegs, fansubs ... there was a whole code of ethics around fansubs that formed. The Atari ST's role in bringing MIDI computing mainstream is well known, but I suppose the Amiga 500's role in the anime fandom/industry is probably not so well known outside North America (NTSC-land).
Doesn't help that the Amiga had next to no sales in Japan. Not good for a computer designed with gaming heavily in mind, especially if they were specifically trying to get ahead of the Japanese computer market!
you are wrong in many assumptions here. The Europe microcomputer market was actually much bigger then US. In US the mainframe and mini computer market was still leading in mid 80s, the rest was still ruled by 8-bit. And for example the apple Macintosh was outsold by Atari ST 2:1 (world wide) in 1985 and here Atari had the product half of the time on market when compared to Apple. In since the US market was already leaning towards Macintosh and PC XT/AT in 1985, it is clear that Europe (England and Germany especially) was much larger market for micros then US at that time.
2:24 Goddamn that dudes voice is creepy. Its the voice you would expect from an old creepy man who is holding candy in his hand and tries luring kids into the bushes.
What struck me as someone who owned an Atari 800 XL, an Atari Mega ST, and an Amiga 500, and still currently an Amiga 1200 was the better sound that came from the Atari 800 XL compared to ST variant, which I had in the early-mid, 1980s. I didn't stick long with the Atari Mega ST given the monitor was black and white and didn't have much in the way of games to play on it. For doing CAD it was fine and even went shopping for an Atari STE 512 or 1040 but ended up with the Amiga which I always wanted having played my friend's one. I wanted a computer to let me compose music, do graphic design, and play the best games, all of which the Amiga excelled at. I have a ton of Amiga floppies and games boxed, safe in my loft. I just wonder how well they would sell in today's market, given that shops don't stock them any more.
As a child of the 80s, I remember the Amiga was touted to be "Fairlight compatible"... I had dreams of running a Trevor Horn-style studio, with huge orchestral sounds, and top ten hits. Then I bought one, and was quite disappointed.😅
I had an Apple IIGS as a kid. A lot of my friends had an Apple II (or a PC or Mac in later years). I only read about the Amiga and Atari ST but never knew anyone that actually owned one.
Nothing is ever new - when the Atari XL computers came out, some 400/800 programs didn't work on it and Atari issued a disk call the 'Translator' that you could boot first to load the old ROMs and allow the old software to work.
I'm not surprised the Amiga won the survey as the Amiga fanbase is probably the most parochial, one-eyed and bigoted on the retro scene. I don't know why. They share survey's in their FB groups and forums with each other and vote as a group. The Amiga itself was quite a capable and innovative but I can't help hate the machine because of the user community and culture. They have such chips on their shoulders. There have been many rivalries over the years (PS1 vs Saturn, Megadrive vs SNES, NES vs Mastersystem etc etc) but to this day the Amiga users remain the most bent out of shape from the Amiga vs ST war. It wasn't good enough that they won, they still obsess over it. And I remember back in the day in some multiplatform magazine (Ace Magazine?) the classifieds in the back always had fake ads made by Amiga people (i assume) along the lines of "Gay ST user seeks fellow gay, ST using male for friendship and good times"
I have to agree, that's my experience too. Every single time I make a video on the ST I am flooded with comments from Amiga fanboys putting it down or insulting the ST fans, I end up having to delete loads of them. I never get the reverse when I make an Amiga video and that toxicity really puts me off even covering it on the channel. But this is what people wanted so here we are.
@The Laird's Lair not only ST videos, also any game that was also available on the Amiga (e.g Shadow of the beast on Megadrive) will feature many Amiga comments saying it wins when it doesn't, saying at least the music is superior... or if they run out of ammo, they say the game didn't use the Amiga hardware like it should and according to the feats achieved in Lionheart the OCS is superior to the Megadrive and SNES. On the EAB boards I notice even some of the Amiga people are sick of it. Funny story - after getting flamed and banned i thought "if you can't beat them, join them" and I came back to EAB with a new account where I pretended to be a huge Amiga fanboy and just parroted all the usual talking points. Some mods started warning me, but I was getting PM's from Amiga heads saying I was kicking ass, they support me etc. I was being sarcastic, they couldn't tell, and loved it! Omg. I never got that account banned, I just gave up and never posted again. Such a religious, cult-like community
@@tosgem What you don't realise, is that forum communities are places where moderators monitor not just what you say, but how you behave in general. Moderators are tuned to identify trolling behaviours and don't forget that people who are flagged as being banned previously can be identified by their IP address.
I have heard rumours of this but couldn't find anything official. Atari certainly weren't circling the drain in 1988, that was one of their most profitable years. They didn't go out of business until 1996.
@@TheLairdsLair atari's 1988 annual shareholder report states they lost $84m that year. even omitting the federated writeoff ($122m!) which put them massively negative, their net income in 1988 (~39m) was still less than 1987 (49m). they tried to use the dram smuggling operation to hide their losses from the federated disaster.
Ok, fair enough, I hadn't looked at that, happy to admit when I'm wrong. They still weren't circling the drain though, they launched the STe and Lynx the following year.
@@TheLairdsLair the STe and Lynx product launches were not signs of a healthy company. 1988 was the beginning of the end and they never recovered. year on year sales stagnated and then completely collapsed. by 1991 sales were 258m, compared to 452m in 1988. 1992 sales were 127m, and atari posted another massive 74m loss. 1993 sales had all but disappeared, only 29m in sales and 49m in overall losses. 1994 was atari's last profitable year - $9m where a 32m patent settlement in their favor saved them from posting a 23m loss. and in 1996 it was all over - they were sold to JT Storage. atari launched the falcon in 1992 amd jaguar in 1993 in the middle of their death throes. most computing historians mark the federated debacle as the beginning of the end for atari. after that it was all downhill.
Posting losses certainly isn't unusual in that sector, I've always wondered how companies kept sustaining them year after year, modern Atari are going through the same thing now - buying up I.P. and other companies whilst posting huge losses. Sega did the same for many years. I personally see new product launches as a healthy sign, but I suppose the numbers don't lie.
Interesting. In hindsight I heard that most of the STE spec was done before the ST was released, and if that had been done from day 1, things would have been totally different as the Amiga with its fancy chips actually has a lot of bottlenecks compared to the ST/STE.
The STe was designed as a result of the Amiga eclipsing the ST in sales lol. Still only able to display 16 colours and had exact same three resolutions as the STfm, blitter wasn't as capable, no sprites, still no multitasking, sound mixing having to be done by the CPU instead of the sound chip..................the STe wouldn't have changed a damn thing!
@@Galahadfairlight pretty wrong, STE is actually faster then A500, has better audio system then A500, has the same 16 colours limit as A500 if you use blitter or any fast action, does have sprites (BOB), just not HW sprite, multitasking was available on ST in 1989 (geneva f.e.), multitasking was useless on A500 and all TOS versions do have cooperative mutlitasking just the buzzword was never used like on Amiga, same 3 resolutions as ST was actually enough in 1989 it took two more years to VGA get a foothold as a mainstream and OCS was useless for any productivity software and the 640x400 monochrome 71 Hz was much better so why change that... Besides that, Amiga was never eclipsing ST in sales, every Amiga fanboy is just using the already proven falls theory that Atari sold just 2 million STs, while in reality it was 5-7 million units. The blitter was planed from day one, but was realized in 1987 (yes the year when first real Amiga came out) on MegaST and two years later on STE. And yes, Paula can do sound mixing without CPU, but takes the valuable time from CPU if it do so, also STE has two more sound generation possibilities that Amiga is totally lacking of... And yes, STE has 51kHz DMA samples while the A500 not... Amiga fanboys never had a clue about hardware, just gamers.... They still claim that Amiga had 4 voice stereo sound, lol.
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 I only wish I had noticed this wall of waffle sooner, my apologies for not straightening out your nonsense sooner! STE has a slightly faster CPU speed, other than that, it makes no real world difference because the Amiga never relied on just its CPU. Oh, I know, you're now going to claim it was slightly faster at doing vector graphics which actually isn't true. Using the Amiga Blitter to linedraw is faster than the ST CPU, using Amiga Blitter to fill those polygons is again faster than ST CPU. Why isn't this largely the case? Because typically, the ST version was the base version, and it would have been trivial to simply adjust those same CPU plotting routines to Amiga, instead of the more bespoke use of blitter. But you knew that right? I'm trying to see how the STe audio system was "better". Forgetting the AY chip, the "improved" sound on the STe had only 2 sound channels, and a MASTER volume, i.e. it didn't have independent volume on those channels unlike the Amiga, which means the STe not only has to mix in those two extra channels, it means the CPU takes the hit in doing it. Plenty of those "Digi" music playback seemed to lack the smooth fade out of samples, because, again, unlike Amiga, if you adjusted the volume, it would affect all the current playing channels on STe, on Amiga.... independent! But you knew that right? I don't know what Hardware Reference manual you've been reading, evidently it wasn't one on the Amiga. Blitter can be used in any and ALL screen modes, that you think it can't be used beyond a 16 colour display is adorable. Sure, if you give the Blitter less to do, it will appear faster, but to suggest it was limited to just 16 colour modes is laughable nonsense, fast action or not. STe does NOT have hardware sprites, you're kind of showing your ignorance by not knowing the difference, you do know the difference between a blitter object and an actual hardware sprite? Because if you did know the difference, you would know the latter is magnitudes quicker than BOB's and why. Evidently you didn't know that! Multitasking was available to power ST users in 1989, 4mb ram and a hard drive was not the normal ST user. It was available to Amiga owners right from 1985, and its quite something for you to proclaim that "multitasking was useless on A500", but lots of us used it, and it was effectively used, because it was a proper multitasking system that worked, unlike the 6 program restriction TOS had. Yeah, Amiga was useless for productivity software....... it was remembered for its useless Deluxe Paint that was an industry standard in the games industry, it was useless for Video Toaster and Lightwave, useless for Bars and Pipes, even Protracker....... just the plethora of Amiga serious software was just rubbish..... said only the clueless! Chap, the Amiga eclipsed the ST in sales, we know this for a fact. Why? Because if the ST was remotely close to the same Amiga numbers, the games industry wouldn't have been able to drop it as a machine to write games for. We don't have to rely on misty memories of previous higher up's at Atari or Commodore, REALITY shows that by 1989, the Amiga had eclipsed and outsold the Atari ST. How else do we know this? Because Atari ST stalwarts like Wayne Smithson, Steve Bak and others like them that really did like the Atari ST, DISMISSED doing bespoke Atari STe versions, because it would have to prove itself first with sales numbers, which it never achieved. You can pretend otherwise, you can try and revise history here in this TH-cam comments section, but you will singularly FAIL to persuade ANYONE with a functioning brain, that the ST outsold the Amiga. We all accept it outsold the Amiga from 1985-1988, but by 1989, it was all over for the ST series. Paula doesn't need to mix channels with CPU unless it is to mix in additional channels. Some games were 6 channel, some 7 and some 8, the difference is, whilst the CPU does indeed have to mix those additional channels, they still retain the same clarity of sound. And frankly, no Amiga owner is commiserating that their machines lacked the additional sound offered by the AY chip, you're dreaming if you think that's true! STe can playback samples at 51Khz...... I won't point out the Amiga can do it at 55Khz with select video modes that double the DMA bandwith, because you seem so knowledgeable about all things Amiga! And the final missive from you really does make it seem that you had to skim read Google to try and argue with me, and read what you skimmed wrong... "Amiga fanboys never had a clue about hardware, just gamers...." "They still claim that Amiga had 4 voice stereo sound, lol." Oh dear, you really don't know anything about Amiga at all, and thought you could wing it here in this comments section???? You've had a mare here chap.
@@Galahadfairlightblitter works in HAM? So with vector you really mean lines and rectangles (spans), right? If you pick the colors right, most of your vectors only need a single bit plane. For small triangle spans I think unaligned 32 Bit read modify write by the CPU is fastest. With multiple planes maybe copper can help to iterate or so. I still don’t really know if you can give memory access to the custom chips while the CPU transforms the next vertex/ clips / culls back faces using the slow MUL. Chunky memory would really have allowed us to utilize the addressing mode of the 68k to write a span faster than any blitter. Use silicon to buffer read out . When does the 68k request memory access? Is it early enough to inhibit the address out from the shifter?
That woman Banshee howling that Amiga advertisement song is SO cringe brash and unmusical, they didn't want to spend much on music obviously. It reminds me of something I would hear on North Korea as propaganda music
Hi to the The Laild's Lair had a amiga 500 i wish it had a musical key's like with commodore 64 and runs octamed 4 you can listen to some of tracks on youtube muzic molehead happy listening experimental music all best molehaed
Interesting video, but it misses how Commodore's mismanagement helped driving the company into the ground. Like when they fired CEO Thomas Rattigan - the guy who brought Commodore to profitability AND was responsible for the Amiga 500. Or how Commodore took 5 years to come up with a slightly upgraded chipset (an eternity considering the PC was improving fast). Google "Mehdi Ali - The End of Commodore" for further detail.
As I said in the intro, I really wanted to keep the video focused on the A500 and not wander off down other related avenues, they can be covered in another video.
I still have 3 amiga500s in their original boxes..i tend to emulate these days..terrific computer.
Detto
I have an Amiga a500 and it still works great :)
I used to store my cannabis resin in my A500's trapdoor. I knew there was no way my parents would ever find it
Same here 😂
That’s what i call high memory
What the hell is "cannabis resin"?!?
I found a roll and a condom inside my first A1200 when I got it second hand.
@@jamesthompson6557 It's when you get the drug in the form of a solid resin that you crumble into a powder instead of getting it in the form of dried leaves.
I loved my Amiga, especially the Team 17 games - Superfrog, Alien Breed, Project X, Worms etc.
I am 45 years old, I have never seen an Amiga commercial ever in my life, this is awesome!!!
The Commodore Amiga has been for many years an alien entity for me, since it never came to Brazil in more official terms... I remember to read about in games magazines and getting screenshots of it for some games... I am very surprised to remember that, at least, the Amiga CD 32-Bit came here, though, but badly advertised. Maybe it was a niche product. And, so, thanks to emulation (and my boredom during the pandemic), I've gotten the chance to really meet the Amiga and play with it.
Anyway, when I think about the Amiga, I see that it's a very symbolic machine to understand the Western development of computers... It's an incredible achievement for 1985/86. However, in a worldwide perspective, when I compare with the high advancement of the Sharp X68000 in 1987, I think that maybe the game developers for Amiga were a step behind in not taking full advantage. If I go to technicalities of the hardware, we could see some of the reason why as well. (And the Sharp X68000 was an even more distant machine to me...) Sometimes I think that the Amiga wasn't taken to its full potential many times in its heyday, and it's kinda sad. (Anyway, thanks to homebrew community, it's good to have the opportunity what could be, for example, a Street Fighter II for the Amiga if developed correctly for the machine!)
Problem for the amiga was games like sf2 were sprite based and the amiga only had 8 hardware sprites, many less than the consoles of the time. Lazy game companies made that worse but they didn't have a lot of sprite ability to work with
just bought a 1200 and needs work re-cap etc had a 2000 back in the day so cant wait to get it up and running. love your vids keep it up..
I really look forward to these videos, great work mate keep it up !
I had this unit in my tv van for graphics back in the early 90s.
I got my Amiga 1000 new in November 1986, selling it after getting a used A500 in May '89. I stayed with that - mainly playing games, but also my first dabblings with a modem, what we used to call 'comms' - up until 1994. I got the extra 512k RAM and a second floppy drive, but expansion past that was pricey. In '94 I got an A4000, so was able to use cheaper hard drives and RAM.
I still have a working Amiga 500 (first owner) , but I've recently found out that my A501 trapdoor expansion has broken. I really love the fact that the Amiga community is still living today. There's still Amiga stores active where you can buy Amiga hardware and software for a reasonable price. This week I bought a new trapdoor expansion + RTC with a more commonly used replaceable button cell battery to be expected next week. Can't wait.
You just gained a new sub. Thank you for the video it was awesome. I had no idea games looked that good on the Amiga.
Thanks!
The interpretation that Amiga was more Atari than Commodore is often portrayed because Jay Minor was ex Atari. However, Jay created a machine that revolved around two MOS/Commodore CIA IO chips. This architecture has its roots in Commodore's family history of design with either two PIAs (PET), VIAs (VIC20) or CIAs (C64) for the IO components. Also, the Amiga has a MOS 6500 (6502 based microcontroller) in its keyboard. So even if Atari ended up owing Amiga (or anyone else) the machine would have had MOS/Commodore parts in it. There were no Atari ICs or parts used in the design. So, hardware wise, from the outset, it was more Commodore than Atari.
Also, the original Atari ST was hampered by its single sided drive. Which was kind of ridiculous in the 16bit world.
Good point, but you could also argue that the Amiga's custom chips are an evolution of the Atari 8-bit's custom chips, which were very much an Atari design and people who stayed at Atari helped develop them.
It's a complex situation no doubt, but rather than think about the Amiga being being more Atari or Commodore I think that it's neither! it was Jay his idea, not some company. And even if Atari had taken possession of the Amiga custom chips (which is all they licensed) all they would have had was unfinished chips to put into a cancelled unfinished system (It had been cancelled before Jack Tramiel even bought Atari). I am of the opinion that had Atari taken possession of the chipset, that would have been the end of any Amiga or Amiga like system.
Well Amiga was designed by ex Atari Engineers & Atari ST was designed by ex Commodore Engineers!
Weird how things tuned out!
The AMIGA has ATARI patents which is one reason why ATARI sued . Jack Tramiel was a real penis for trying to rip off the AMIGA developers . He should have made them a fair deal . I don't care what any Commodore 64 fan says , the AMIGA is an ATARI machine with a Commodore LOGO on it .
Your Amazing Facts videos are the most interesting you produce. I never used one or played the games, being a console user.
When I lived in Silicon Valley, I used to live right between the former headquarters of ATARI and Amiga. My heart would shrink and I'd feel a pang of pain any time I passed them both by on my way to work, remembering how great it was to be in Europe in the late 1980's and early 1990's and own an Amiga, and play on the ATARI ST... I'd pass the former Sun Microsystems warehouse in Santa Clara, and my chest would hurt even more. Tears would stream down my cheeks in silence on many an ocassion of traveling to and from work, remembering the good, more innocent times...
Yeah that would make me sad too. The famous Atari building in Borregas Avenue was bought by Google and demolished a few years ago now, which is a huge shame, but they did erect a monument to the site's importance in the shape of a space invader.
The first computer I ever played with. I still have pretty sweet memories of Agony (a huge part of my gaming heart belongs to that game), Darkman and Shadow of the Beast.
Not the best games ever of course, but still quite fascinating.
A nice machine to be the first, the speccy was the first I played on (computer) I did play on one of those gaming systems in the kids room of a pub, asteroids and space invaders, I managed to save up find and buy a used 500+ i think it was when I was at school, I now have a 1200.
I loved and still love the amiga, I had a 500 and later a 1200, PC wasn't quite there yet and the amiga was way more interesting, then doom happened and I had to get a pc
Oh the video toaster.....when life was much easier in tv production
I did update my A500 cpu, the 68000 to a 68010 out of my washing machine, the amiga ran about 5% faster with some stuff but my washing machine took about half hour longer to wash.
That's certainly an interesting way to upgrade!
Guru meditation, press cotton+wool+ synthetic to restart😂
Your washing machine had better sound than the Atari ST.
When the amiga 2000 came out it was a game changer.
It had flexibility, power and built in capability that could rival a $7000 apple quadra for a fraction of the cost. The PC platform was woefully behind in terms of GUI, graphics and sound. For the same cost as an a2000, an IBM clone was bare bones. No sound card. You'd be lucky to get 256 color VGA.
I bought an amiga when it was well established due to a mate using his for music production, even getting a recording contract. I had a lot of fun with it for non game related matters but I was very surprised at how crap so many games were compared to what I was playing on the snes at the time. It could do other sorts of games that consoles were not great at but for arcade style titles it was another matter
The joystick had serious limitations due to having one fire button so you would for example have to use up to jump playing on a proper console pad was just a much better experience.
@mr.y.mysterious.video1 While I agree there are a large number of poor games on the Amiga, you are comparing a console to a computer and on top of that the core hardware used in the A500 was originally used from 1985 - 1991 while the SNES was released only in Japan in 1990 and North America 1991, so comparing a a specialized game machine at least 5 years newer. But really what was the biggest improvement for the SNES games was the "Nintendo Seal of quality" that was on every game before it could be sold. The Amiga like most computers of that time was an open system without anyway to really quality assure software. 4148 (according to lemonamiga) is the amount of games released for the OCS (not including the upgraded AGA or ECS) Amiga (a number that is still growing, now racing towards 40 years later) 1757 (that was the largest number I could find) games released for the SNES, which sold tens of millions more systems than the Amiga, shows just how restrictive it was to make games on the SNES.
For what Amiga arcade game conversions should have looked like had anyone bothered to put a bit of time, take a look at a look at the more recent Bomb Jack beer edition, Pac Man & Ms Pac Man 500, Devils Temple (Kung-Fu Master upgrade), Tiny Bobble (Bubble Bobble), Tinyus (Gradius/Nemesis), Scramble 500, Wonderboy, Amidar500, Green Beret. Those are the ones I can remember, I bet there are others and doesn't include AGA Amiga games.
@@brendanroberts1310 What is most annoying about the joystick situation is that it wasn't an issue with the Amiga. Even without active circuits it was easy to support 3 buttons (the game Hired Guns supported 3 button controllers with instructions on how to swap two wires in the Megadrive/Genesis controller to make it work). And the 8 button CD32 controllers worked on all Amigas (take a look at the Competition Pro CD32) and realistically with an active circuit it could easily handle more. Many popular joystick designs just weren't conducive of extra buttons. with designs for left and right handed players extra buttons were just copies of the other side. Most of the problem was with the owners who just wanted to buy cheap joysticks which in turn didn't inspire the programmers to support 2/3 buttons as who was going to use it?
BTW many games have now been patched to use a second button to jump with WHDLoad
Now I have to fire up Aargh. (Ignore spelling)
The custom chipset available in the Amiga 500 (OCS) was a great chipset which went way beyond the blitter (fast copy of bitmaps).
For instance, the Amiga version of Pacmania (1988) put the Atari ST port to shame with a killer soundtrack and a full-screen, overscan-mode playfield. But this was done with surprisingly relatively little use of the blitter. Most of the animation relied on the Amiga's default capabilities (dual playfield, ease of doing parallax scrolling)
I looked at the different versions of Pac-Mania on the channel recently and while the Amiga version of Pac-Mania looks great being full-screen, it is very slow compared to the ST port and I actually much prefer the soundtrack on the ST too, probably because it sounds more authentic (both the coin-op and the ST have a Yamaha sound chip).
There is actually an STe version of Pac-Mania that is full-screen like the Amiga but faster, its a much better version.
@@TheLairdsLair I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. Coming from the Atari ST world (I had one of the very first models in August '85) I was just blown away by the Amiga version. Its speed never bothered me.
If I hadn't already played the ST version then the speed wouldn't have bothered me, but having played the ST version so much growing up I found it hard to cope with the slow speed on the Amiga.
The best home versions are the new STe version and the Acorn Archimedes one, which is identical to the Amiga one, only faster.
@@TheLairdsLair you mentioned that the STE has scrolling capabilities on top of having a blitter. Would you know where I can find its API/SDK? I'd like to compare with the Amiga but haven't been able to find anything about programming the STE specifically
I have no idea sorry, you'd be best of asking in one of the Atari ST Facebook groups or Atari Forum.
Here in the USA, neither the Atari ST nor the Amiga were used with TV sets, and the initial market advantage of the Atari ST only lasted about 1 year. Why? Unfortunately, retailers here in the USA were screwed over so much by Jack that most bailed on Atari when he took over. So, the Atari ST was crippled by a lack of retail presence.
You might think ... so what? This was only the USA market! Except ... the USA market was really huge compared to the markets in Europe where the Atari ST was doing okay. And compatibility with Kickstart 1.2/1.3 was not an issue here in the USA, which is why Commodore didn't care about it. Like it or not, both Atari and Commodore were helmed in the USA, so mostly Europe was an afterthought. Commodore Germany did come up with a lot of stuff, though.
Anyway, the Amiga 500 here in the USA had a big impact on Japanese animation fandom, along with JACOsub. The Amiga 500 with genlock was by far the least expensive option for subtitling, and it's what made "fansubs" possible. As a result anime fandom exploded here in the USA during the 1990s, as well as spawning the biggest anime conventions outside Japan itself.
Early USA anime conventions were a weird wild west dominated by pirated videos, bootlegs, fansubs ... there was a whole code of ethics around fansubs that formed.
The Atari ST's role in bringing MIDI computing mainstream is well known, but I suppose the Amiga 500's role in the anime fandom/industry is probably not so well known outside North America (NTSC-land).
I certainly never knew that - learn something new every day!
Doesn't help that the Amiga had next to no sales in Japan. Not good for a computer designed with gaming heavily in mind, especially if they were specifically trying to get ahead of the Japanese computer market!
you are wrong in many assumptions here.
The Europe microcomputer market was actually much bigger then US. In US the mainframe and mini computer market was still leading in mid 80s, the rest was still ruled by 8-bit. And for example the apple Macintosh was outsold by Atari ST 2:1 (world wide) in 1985 and here Atari had the product half of the time on market when compared to Apple. In since the US market was already leaning towards Macintosh and PC XT/AT in 1985, it is clear that Europe (England and Germany especially) was much larger market for micros then US at that time.
My first computer, loved it. Now I am rocking a Asus Intel PC with a Nvidia video card. :)
2:24 Goddamn that dudes voice is creepy. Its the voice you would expect from an old creepy man who is holding candy in his hand and tries luring kids into the bushes.
Back in my youth, the A500 was the Playstation 5 of the time. Everyone desire one as the Holy Grial of home computer gaming.
The A500 was better than that, it was the Xbox Series X of it's time - more powerful than it's competitors.
What struck me as someone who owned an Atari 800 XL, an Atari Mega ST, and an Amiga 500, and still currently an Amiga 1200 was the better sound that came from the Atari 800 XL compared to ST variant, which I had in the early-mid, 1980s. I didn't stick long with the Atari Mega ST given the monitor was black and white and didn't have much in the way of games to play on it. For doing CAD it was fine and even went shopping for an Atari STE 512 or 1040 but ended up with the Amiga which I always wanted having played my friend's one. I wanted a computer to let me compose music, do graphic design, and play the best games, all of which the Amiga excelled at. I have a ton of Amiga floppies and games boxed, safe in my loft. I just wonder how well they would sell in today's market, given that shops don't stock them any more.
As a child of the 80s, I remember the Amiga was touted to be "Fairlight compatible"... I had dreams of running a Trevor Horn-style studio, with huge orchestral sounds, and top ten hits. Then I bought one, and was quite disappointed.😅
I had an Apple IIGS as a kid. A lot of my friends had an Apple II (or a PC or Mac in later years). I only read about the Amiga and Atari ST but never knew anyone that actually owned one.
I wonder if anyone other than Amiga can make it possible...I sure do hope the video tells me, because I need to know.
Amiga A500 -forever
Nothing is ever new - when the Atari XL computers came out, some 400/800 programs didn't work on it and Atari issued a disk call the 'Translator' that you could boot first to load the old ROMs and allow the old software to work.
Amiga needed a CD drive.
Not the stupid CDTV & CD32
Why would TH-cam unsubscribe me from a retro computer channel? This is just getting weird.
I'm not surprised the Amiga won the survey as the Amiga fanbase is probably the most parochial, one-eyed and bigoted on the retro scene. I don't know why. They share survey's in their FB groups and forums with each other and vote as a group.
The Amiga itself was quite a capable and innovative but I can't help hate the machine because of the user community and culture. They have such chips on their shoulders.
There have been many rivalries over the years (PS1 vs Saturn, Megadrive vs SNES, NES vs Mastersystem etc etc) but to this day the Amiga users remain the most bent out of shape from the Amiga vs ST war. It wasn't good enough that they won, they still obsess over it. And I remember back in the day in some multiplatform magazine (Ace Magazine?) the classifieds in the back always had fake ads made by Amiga people (i assume) along the lines of "Gay ST user seeks fellow gay, ST using male for friendship and good times"
I have to agree, that's my experience too. Every single time I make a video on the ST I am flooded with comments from Amiga fanboys putting it down or insulting the ST fans, I end up having to delete loads of them.
I never get the reverse when I make an Amiga video and that toxicity really puts me off even covering it on the channel. But this is what people wanted so here we are.
@The Laird's Lair not only ST videos, also any game that was also available on the Amiga (e.g Shadow of the beast on Megadrive) will feature many Amiga comments saying it wins when it doesn't, saying at least the music is superior... or if they run out of ammo, they say the game didn't use the Amiga hardware like it should and according to the feats achieved in Lionheart the OCS is superior to the Megadrive and SNES. On the EAB boards I notice even some of the Amiga people are sick of it.
Funny story - after getting flamed and banned i thought "if you can't beat them, join them" and I came back to EAB with a new account where I pretended to be a huge Amiga fanboy and just parroted all the usual talking points. Some mods started warning me, but I was getting PM's from Amiga heads saying I was kicking ass, they support me etc. I was being sarcastic, they couldn't tell, and loved it! Omg. I never got that account banned, I just gave up and never posted again. Such a religious, cult-like community
@@tosgem What you don't realise, is that forum communities are places where moderators monitor not just what you say, but how you behave in general. Moderators are tuned to identify trolling behaviours and don't forget that people who are flagged as being banned previously can be identified by their IP address.
Nice review still some good games and it's old as sh2t
@14:03 atari was actually invoved in a dram smuggling case in 1988! the fbi investigated but by that time atari was already circling the drain.
I have heard rumours of this but couldn't find anything official. Atari certainly weren't circling the drain in 1988, that was one of their most profitable years. They didn't go out of business until 1996.
@@TheLairdsLair atari's 1988 annual shareholder report states they lost $84m that year. even omitting the federated writeoff ($122m!) which put them massively negative, their net income in 1988 (~39m) was still less than 1987 (49m). they tried to use the dram smuggling operation to hide their losses from the federated disaster.
Ok, fair enough, I hadn't looked at that, happy to admit when I'm wrong.
They still weren't circling the drain though, they launched the STe and Lynx the following year.
@@TheLairdsLair the STe and Lynx product launches were not signs of a healthy company. 1988 was the beginning of the end and they never recovered. year on year sales stagnated and then completely collapsed. by 1991 sales were 258m, compared to 452m in 1988. 1992 sales were 127m, and atari posted another massive 74m loss. 1993 sales had all but disappeared, only 29m in sales and 49m in overall losses. 1994 was atari's last profitable year - $9m where a 32m patent settlement in their favor saved them from posting a 23m loss. and in 1996 it was all over - they were sold to JT Storage. atari launched the falcon in 1992 amd jaguar in 1993 in the middle of their death throes.
most computing historians mark the federated debacle as the beginning of the end for atari. after that it was all downhill.
Posting losses certainly isn't unusual in that sector, I've always wondered how companies kept sustaining them year after year, modern Atari are going through the same thing now - buying up I.P. and other companies whilst posting huge losses. Sega did the same for many years.
I personally see new product launches as a healthy sign, but I suppose the numbers don't lie.
Interesting. In hindsight I heard that most of the STE spec was done before the ST was released, and if that had been done from day 1, things would have been totally different as the Amiga with its fancy chips actually has a lot of bottlenecks compared to the ST/STE.
The STe was designed as a result of the Amiga eclipsing the ST in sales lol. Still only able to display 16 colours and had exact same three resolutions as the STfm, blitter wasn't as capable, no sprites, still no multitasking, sound mixing having to be done by the CPU instead of the sound chip..................the STe wouldn't have changed a damn thing!
@@Galahadfairlight pretty wrong, STE is actually faster then A500, has better audio system then A500, has the same 16 colours limit as A500 if you use blitter or any fast action, does have sprites (BOB), just not HW sprite, multitasking was available on ST in 1989 (geneva f.e.), multitasking was useless on A500 and all TOS versions do have cooperative mutlitasking just the buzzword was never used like on Amiga, same 3 resolutions as ST was actually enough in 1989 it took two more years to VGA get a foothold as a mainstream and OCS was useless for any productivity software and the 640x400 monochrome 71 Hz was much better so why change that...
Besides that, Amiga was never eclipsing ST in sales, every Amiga fanboy is just using the already proven falls theory that Atari sold just 2 million STs, while in reality it was 5-7 million units. The blitter was planed from day one, but was realized in 1987 (yes the year when first real Amiga came out) on MegaST and two years later on STE.
And yes, Paula can do sound mixing without CPU, but takes the valuable time from CPU if it do so, also STE has two more sound generation possibilities that Amiga is totally lacking of... And yes, STE has 51kHz DMA samples while the A500 not...
Amiga fanboys never had a clue about hardware, just gamers....
They still claim that Amiga had 4 voice stereo sound, lol.
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 I only wish I had noticed this wall of waffle sooner, my apologies for not straightening out your nonsense sooner!
STE has a slightly faster CPU speed, other than that, it makes no real world difference because the Amiga never relied on just its CPU. Oh, I know, you're now going to claim it was slightly faster at doing vector graphics which actually isn't true. Using the Amiga Blitter to linedraw is faster than the ST CPU, using Amiga Blitter to fill those polygons is again faster than ST CPU. Why isn't this largely the case? Because typically, the ST version was the base version, and it would have been trivial to simply adjust those same CPU plotting routines to Amiga, instead of the more bespoke use of blitter. But you knew that right?
I'm trying to see how the STe audio system was "better". Forgetting the AY chip, the "improved" sound on the STe had only 2 sound channels, and a MASTER volume, i.e. it didn't have independent volume on those channels unlike the Amiga, which means the STe not only has to mix in those two extra channels, it means the CPU takes the hit in doing it. Plenty of those "Digi" music playback seemed to lack the smooth fade out of samples, because, again, unlike Amiga, if you adjusted the volume, it would affect all the current playing channels on STe, on Amiga.... independent! But you knew that right?
I don't know what Hardware Reference manual you've been reading, evidently it wasn't one on the Amiga. Blitter can be used in any and ALL screen modes, that you think it can't be used beyond a 16 colour display is adorable. Sure, if you give the Blitter less to do, it will appear faster, but to suggest it was limited to just 16 colour modes is laughable nonsense, fast action or not.
STe does NOT have hardware sprites, you're kind of showing your ignorance by not knowing the difference, you do know the difference between a blitter object and an actual hardware sprite? Because if you did know the difference, you would know the latter is magnitudes quicker than BOB's and why. Evidently you didn't know that!
Multitasking was available to power ST users in 1989, 4mb ram and a hard drive was not the normal ST user. It was available to Amiga owners right from 1985, and its quite something for you to proclaim that "multitasking was useless on A500", but lots of us used it, and it was effectively used, because it was a proper multitasking system that worked, unlike the 6 program restriction TOS had.
Yeah, Amiga was useless for productivity software....... it was remembered for its useless Deluxe Paint that was an industry standard in the games industry, it was useless for Video Toaster and Lightwave, useless for Bars and Pipes, even Protracker....... just the plethora of Amiga serious software was just rubbish..... said only the clueless!
Chap, the Amiga eclipsed the ST in sales, we know this for a fact. Why? Because if the ST was remotely close to the same Amiga numbers, the games industry wouldn't have been able to drop it as a machine to write games for.
We don't have to rely on misty memories of previous higher up's at Atari or Commodore, REALITY shows that by 1989, the Amiga had eclipsed and outsold the Atari ST.
How else do we know this? Because Atari ST stalwarts like Wayne Smithson, Steve Bak and others like them that really did like the Atari ST, DISMISSED doing bespoke Atari STe versions, because it would have to prove itself first with sales numbers, which it never achieved.
You can pretend otherwise, you can try and revise history here in this TH-cam comments section, but you will singularly FAIL to persuade ANYONE with a functioning brain, that the ST outsold the Amiga. We all accept it outsold the Amiga from 1985-1988, but by 1989, it was all over for the ST series.
Paula doesn't need to mix channels with CPU unless it is to mix in additional channels. Some games were 6 channel, some 7 and some 8, the difference is, whilst the CPU does indeed have to mix those additional channels, they still retain the same clarity of sound. And frankly, no Amiga owner is commiserating that their machines lacked the additional sound offered by the AY chip, you're dreaming if you think that's true!
STe can playback samples at 51Khz...... I won't point out the Amiga can do it at 55Khz with select video modes that double the DMA bandwith, because you seem so knowledgeable about all things Amiga!
And the final missive from you really does make it seem that you had to skim read Google to try and argue with me, and read what you skimmed wrong...
"Amiga fanboys never had a clue about hardware, just gamers...."
"They still claim that Amiga had 4 voice stereo sound, lol."
Oh dear, you really don't know anything about Amiga at all, and thought you could wing it here in this comments section????
You've had a mare here chap.
@@Galahadfairlightblitter works in HAM? So with vector you really mean lines and rectangles (spans), right? If you pick the colors right, most of your vectors only need a single bit plane. For small triangle spans I think unaligned 32 Bit read modify write by the CPU is fastest. With multiple planes maybe copper can help to iterate or so. I still don’t really know if you can give memory access to the custom chips while the CPU transforms the next vertex/ clips / culls back faces using the slow MUL.
Chunky memory would really have allowed us to utilize the addressing mode of the 68k to write a span faster than any blitter. Use silicon to buffer read out . When does the 68k request memory access? Is it early enough to inhibit the address out from the shifter?
That woman Banshee howling that Amiga advertisement song is SO cringe brash and unmusical, they didn't want to spend much on music obviously. It reminds me of something I would hear on North Korea as propaganda music
Hi to the The Laild's Lair had a amiga 500 i wish it had a musical key's like with commodore 64 and runs octamed 4 you can listen to some of tracks on youtube muzic molehead happy listening experimental music all best molehaed
Who else read the title of this video and thought: '500 Facts'? 🤨
0:01 Welcome WHO?
"Welcome STUN Runner" - taken from the Atari Lynx port of the famous arcade game.
Amiga 1000
welcome bum runner xD
Erm, no.
Is this guy a ST fanboy of something.
What is it about the video that makes you say that?
A hardcore ST fanboy would never admit the Amiga is better . . . . . .
@The Laird's Lair cool your jets pal it was a joke.
Interesting video, but it misses how Commodore's mismanagement helped driving the company into the ground. Like when they fired CEO Thomas Rattigan - the guy who brought Commodore to profitability AND was responsible for the Amiga 500. Or how Commodore took 5 years to come up with a slightly upgraded chipset (an eternity considering the PC was improving fast). Google "Mehdi Ali - The End of Commodore" for further detail.
As I said in the intro, I really wanted to keep the video focused on the A500 and not wander off down other related avenues, they can be covered in another video.