I recall the sensation of transitioning to the PC in around 1994. The Amiga felt better, it was a solid user experience, even though its hardware specs had been superseded. I couldn't get my head around the fact the Amiga had fallen behind. It didn't make any sense at the time.
Yeah had a lot to do with Mehdi Ali, he destroyed Commodore, he did so many dumb stuff, i think he was put there (Commodore), to destroy it, The Amiga computers were just to good, and absolutely for there price in the 80s (Amiga 500), one of the stupid thing they did was not putting the AAA graphics chip in the Amiga 1200 and 4000, same with 16bit audio, but no they went for the AGA graphics chip, and many more dumb stuff that happened thanks to the CEO Mehdi Ali.
Yeah the post-Tramiel management treated C= just as a money-cow with so many horrible decisions. The Amiga was seen as just a console, the dev team was even dissolved early after release and only re-established later.
Could'nt agree more. One was forced over to PC but it was lacking so much from the Amiga when it came to functionality, like real multitasking and plug'n play like behaviours and all.. but mostly, PC lacked the personality that the Amiga had, and it still does.
I was sad that amiga crashed and burned. In the 80's, it could do anything an $8000 Apple quadra could, but for 1/4 the price. Amiga needed a Steve Jobs. It could have been king.
One use of the blitter that may not be well-known is that it was used to do the MFM encoding and decoding for floppy disk read/write. I actually had to make my own custom implementation of the MFM encoder/decoder when I wrote "Dino Wars" because I had the game take over the hardware and do its own disk I/O. And that whole bit of code had to fit inside the floppy boot sector. I also used that same code in "Bill 'n' Ted's Excellent Adventure" too. As a result, both of these games would break on the faster Amigas from the 2000 onward.
"Excellent" - That's pretty cool (I've just been watching some of your "I coded Bill & Ted" video), I didn't go into the blitter too much in the video as it was long enough, but it was pretty versatile. Also, I didn't really mention about the floppy drive and that it was basically programmable. Nowadays, a game would be "patched" to fix a problem like that (the incompatibility with the newer Amgia), but back in those days, bugs that were created in the 90's stayed in the 90's
Yeah, they scrapped the filled polygon feature, but instead included MFM decoding. Floppies are slow .. you could do that using the CPU. How often do you want to access a floppy? It is noisy and has problems with dust. So your App better loads completely into RAM and the CPU decodes and decompresses it. Yeah, the computer freezes.
Isn't that why it was possible for people to come up with alternate floppy filesystems? Not only was there OFS and FFS as provided by Commodore, but there were a few others that were able to cram even more data on the floppy. Or were those filesystems done using other tricks/techniques?
@@Sembazuru - The Amiga was pretty much the only platform of the time that could read floppies formatted for other systems (hardware permitting - in the sense that a DD drive could not physically read an HD floppy) for that reason.
The Amigas audio was soo way ahead of anything else. To get the equivalent sampling capability in professional sampling synthesizer keyboards would cost an absolute fortune by comparison!
As a funny side story, Guiness Book of Records didn't have a way of correctly checking the worlds fastest talking man. So they bought an Amiga and a sampler so that they could time and slow down the recording to check.
@@epicon6Amiga had 4 hardware channels (2 left 2 right) so yeah whilst sound effects happened you’d often hear half the music sounds disappear but less noticeable in some games
Amiga 500 was my childhood. Monkey island, Arabian nights, cruise for a corpse, Ben e factor, walker, odyessy. So many classics you just never get the same feeling from current games
I loved Monkey Island on the Amiga, I still have my Amiga but misplaced or sold my copy of MI so i don't have that anymore. I think there have been many great games since the Amiga years (Doom, Half-Life, Halo, Assasins Creed, Minecraft ...), it's just a shame that those games never existed on an Amiga.
@@DavePoo2 I managed to grab a physical copy of monkey island 1 from limited run games though its the Sega cd version. Never had boxed version as a kid, my version was of course being on the amiga, cracked :D But it's still amazing having that big box now. Its still my favourite game of all time
I was a computer obsessed kid in the 80s with an Atari XE. A friend of the family gave me all his old Compute! magazine, and for some time, this was my only look at other systems (apart from the C64 - everyone had those). My memory from those magazines was a Commodore ad showing an Amiga with Deluxe Paint on the screen, with a an illustration of a shimmering waterfall. Even today, when I think about the Amiga, that waterfall picture comes to mind and how amazing that was to me at the time. I never owned an Amiga in it's heyday (we became a Mac family), but I remember at the time just the ads in Compute! gave me a sense that there was something magical about that computer.
Deluxe Paint was so far ahead of its time. That program alone made the Amiga worth buying. There was also this amazing program (I can't remember the name) that used USGS topographical data to render scenery. I used it to render scenes around Olympus Mons on Mars. You could choose any spot, any camera direcrion and angle, and any time of day and it rendered a lifelike scene. You could also set a path and it rendered the frames for a lifelike fly through as good as NASA had at the time. I flew around on the surface of Mars in 1988. LOL
I remember coming into a computer shop demoing an Amiga 500 back in the days. I was so struck by the quality of the music playing out of the system that I looked behind the computer and tracked the audio leads out of it and into the monitor... I even plugged them out for a second as I was so convinced it was a trick and the sound was coming out of a tape player or something... It wasn't! A few months later, I got all my savings out of the bank and came back to buy one!
So many things about the Amiga from a user's perspective that I miss today. The organization of the OS support files such as device drivers in the devs: folder and software libraries in the libs: folder, instead of both being combined together as cryptically named .dll files. The ability to use folder aliases so, for example, the root path devs: could reside anywhere in the filesystem. I miss the ram disk (though I started using the rad disk that would survive reboots), especially for truly temporary files. The way environment variables and settings were done where when you clicked "Save" the setting was stored on a disk, but if you clicked "Use" it was only stored to the ram disk. That way if you wanted to temporarily change a setting but wanted it to revert back to your preferred default on the next power-up it would. The way that ARexx was embraced by programs. I had written several ARexx scripts that controlled several programs. My most used one would take me online by first controlling the TCP/IP stack, check for new email and send any queued outgoing emails with my email program, and then take me offline. My script was smart enough to figure out if it needed to launch the programs, and if I started the script when I was already online it would remember that and not take me offline after the email transfers. Very important back in the day when the internet connection was via modem so I didn't tie up the phone line any longer than I needed, but was able to keep the connection when I was playing online when the rest of the family was asleep. I'm sure there are a few more that I can't think of off the top of my head.
The Amiga truly was/is(?) a dream machine. I greatly enjoyed playing and also programming on it (machine language and C). I don't consider myself a very talented programmer. Still, one of my personal programming highlights was a blitter algorithm for a simple cellular automaton to emulate 2D oscillating chemical reactions (Belousov-Zhabotinsky type). If I remember well the Blitter algorithm was around 3-5x times faster when compared to the CPU machine language version of the same algorithm in comparison. Just imagine how this feat of a geeked teenager made him feel both excited and proud! Anyways, the Amiga creators and developers will always be my heroes! Thank you for this video!
One thing I always remember about the Amiga was how it 'felt' to use one... This is probably difficult for younger computer users to understand, but back in the day when I used a Windows PC I always felt somewhat disconnected from the underlying hardware compared to the Amiga.. The best analogy I can think of is like driving a formula 1 car compared to driving big family saloon car... Using the Amiga I felt 'connected' to the road so to speak, whereas with the PC running Windows I never really felt in control and didn’t know what the wheels were doing underneath. A fun little thing I always remember, one day I timed my accelerated (68030) A1200 booting into Workbench 3.0 OS from hard drive, it took just 7 seconds! Compare that to PCs and Macs from the same year 1992-1994, where a PC would take a minute plus, and with a Mac you could easily go away and make a coffee or tea and return and still need to wait for it to finish loading.
It's funny how as computers got "faster" that boot up times actually got slower. The C64 booted up in less than a second, and it only got slower from there. I think we hit rock bottom in the Win Vista days, when your computer would take a lifetime to boot up, and then once you even got to the desktop, it would be several minutes before it was actually responsive. I think with the age of SSD's, we are not only actually getting back towards those good old days when you didn't have to wait a week for your computer to boot.
"One thing I always remember about the Amiga was how it 'felt' to use one" Amiga fandom is the archetypical "feels over reals" argument. "This is probably difficult for younger computer users to understand" It's easy for me to understand, but impossible for me to advocate. It'd probably feel good to drive over the Australian desert in a 4x4 it wouldn't imply the vehicle is a great computer. Amiga fans confuse their childhood excitement and adult nostalgia for performance. "but back in the day when I used a Windows PC I always felt somewhat disconnected from the underlying hardware compared to the Amiga" It was. It had a far more sophisticated OS (yes, I know Amiga fans won't believe this. It just goes against the grain for them) it had a far more sophisticated Hardware Abstraction Layer. Including device independent graphics from Windows 1.0 in 1985. Amiga fans thought RTG was a novelty in the 1990s, long after it was too late to be interesting. "The best analogy I can think of is like driving a formula 1 car compared to driving big family saloon car" That isn't a terrible analogy. I'd say comparing riding a CBR 125 to driving a Bentley is more accurate. Sure, the latter isn't so exciting, but it's just a better vehicle. "Using the Amiga I felt 'connected' to the road so to speak, whereas with the PC running Windows I never really felt in control and didn’t know what the wheels were doing underneath. A fun little thing I always remember, one day I timed my accelerated (68030) A1200 booting into Workbench 3.0 OS from hard drive, it took just 7 seconds! Compare that to PCs and Macs from the same year 1992-1994, where a PC would take a minute plus" Same as before.... the Amiga had almost no operating system compared to the PC. It was also one of the reasons more applications developers flocked to the PC than the Amiga. You don't have to write your ow device drivers for every graphics card you want to support when writing for Windows, you just write to the GDI and the user can plug in anything they like from graphics cards to monitors to printers and it works, the application programmer doesn't care what output device you're using. Your difference in experience is explained by differences in underlying complexity. With my SSD today I can go from power-up to logon screen in ten seconds.
Totally agree. Pc when reading from floppy the system paused. Not on the amiga. Little things like that made difference. True multitasking verses hard timeslicing. Yah it matters when you actually work with something. Like rendering graphics (lightwave 5.0), music etc. You could do that and it feelt good back then. On PC 8088, 8086 up to 80286 - you had windows 3.1 later or DOS early on. Horrible...clunky and awkward to work with. Well on Win3.11 it started to get better and then came Win95. On that point PC took over more and more and got "usable". And finally when Win XP came out and Nvidia Geforce was standard with DX9. They won the gaming war. Kind of. :-) Its a timeline compacted with a lot of stuff over just 30 odd years. Amazingly fast evolution...from no home computers to computers everywhere on the planet. It just exploded. And we were along on that journey...well some of us.
@@cloerenjackson3699 "Amiga had almost no operating system compared to the PC" Not true at all. It had a full OS. Or do you have another definition on OS:es?? It also had SHELL which is DOS but much better. And look at the broad spectrum of products in the box for Amiga that existed. You could do anything on an Amiga. Very advanced stuff too. BUT Amiga "failed" to compete with IBM and "PC" (clones) and Apple to really take over office programs etc. THAT is the key. Did you know that Commodore actually had PC's? PC-60 III were the latest one...they sold poorly though, too expensive I think,. Commodore failed to "win" that war about commercial and common enterprises to stop using "ordinary" PC clones from IBM etc. And microsoft was a player too ofc. I tried to be short here but its hard to explain. A chain of events happened and it was unstoppable. Actually plug and play didnt exist on PC before Windows 98. So i think you out of bounds here. What you see today in Windows...is a big difference from what windows could actually do early on. It was hardware dependent to a much higher degree. And installing drivers and get new hardware to work were sometimes very complicated. You had memory patches emm.sys, Xmm.sys or what not to fiddle with to get things going. PC were limited to use 640K. But you needed to fix that because it was not sufficient. EVEN under windows you could run into issues that were DOS dependant. Today there is no DOS. Only a virtual one but you can do without it. It took very long time for that change to happen. I think it was Win 2000 or XP. But well its not important. I suggest you fire up VMWARE and install Windows 3.1 and look for your self. Its quite a limited OS. Remember it ran on very simple hardware. Then compare it to lets say Amiga OS 3.1. Im not quite sure about the years here so dont hold me too it. Maybe Amiga OS 2.04 or 1.3. You will if you install it on real hardware and then run them in parallell you see many differences in look and feel and then try to do some real work. Then come back and tell me you were right and I will laugh . :)
We went from Amiga 500 to an average IBM (Amiga to my room then) to a full-blown Gateway special in about 1997 or so that I was like yup I'm going to playing on that now because the new titles were PC-exclusive. Then later on I got into Quake and Half Life (wasn't allowed graphical games as a younger teen) and for convenience it's been pc's ever since. I would run internet demo discs from AOL (thanks guys) and get free internet every month. I had the Amiga in my room for a while and that was bliss. It really gave me so many happy memories. So many amazing games. Stoo from Sensible Software is still doing design stuff. Now I have a 3070 RTX with an i7 and no idea what games to get. Great video. Thanks for the memories.
The Amiga was incredible for 1985, but the lack of proper updates really screwed it when the 90s rolled around. More sprite capabilities, more sound channels, more blitter features were needed, but it relied too much on fantastic programmers manipulating the out of date hardware to make it seem like it was more powerful than it actually was. Way more work for what other systems were doing by design at that time.
We had an ST when I was a kid, and even I wanted an Amiga so badly. I still remember walking around the software store admiring the luscious Amiga games on the demo computers they had running.
A lot of people had the Atari ST because it came out first and more importantly it was cheaper than the Amiga. I've got say that I could never actually afford a brand new Amiga, every Amiga I have ever owned (even the ones I had back in the day) were second hand.
In the USA, there never really was an affordable Amiga until we had moved from he ST to the PC. I absolutely love and still love my ST and STE, but the architecture and brilliance of the Amiga was so far ahead of its time, and it's a machine that is remembered fondly for many reasons, including the brilliant games. I use my "PIMIGA" now and love it.
My friend had an ST (520?) when I was a kid. I remember playing King's Quest and not getting far. The graphics were admittedly worse than on my 386SX (which I hated, it was a terrible machine) but it had charm and I've wanted one for a while now.
Yes the Amiga was impressive tho too expensive not value for money when games we’re just as enjoyable on the Atari ST, tho as a programmer I found the Atari STe a more fun exiting platform to develop for, as programmers like a challenge we’re the Amiga was like it did it for ya, felt left out of a job.
I had an st 520 then 1040ste ..I would argue with other kids at school that st was better than amiga lol .. now 30 years later I brought an amiga 1200 ..its better..I don't mind admitting it now lol
I was 14 when I first saw the 1000 in a magazine, and I was smitten. I finally got a 2000 for a small video production business I started. I added the Toaster, and was pumped about the potential of the Flyer, but had to jump to Media100 on the Mac. I still have my 2000 + toaster and boot it every so often. ❤️
The video Toaster was a pretty cool piece of kit. I kind of feel like the Toaster was the TH-cam of it's day, where people could now make their own high quality videos at home (they just didn't really have a place to self publish them), something that previously had only been possible in a studio environment.
@@ButterfatFarms I think it would have been expensive but certainly possible if you had some money to invest. I think the equivalent pro studio equipment might have been utterly unobtainium.
@@DavePoo2 Well, obviously that's not true because pro studios obtained it. Also, the VT was useless without at least semi pro decks. The main thing the VT Flyer (the most powerful VT edition ever released) did was produce Edit Decision Lists in an industry standard format. These would then be used to compile a second generation copy of the edit from A and B -roll decks. It's very basic and is predated by far better dedicated equipment. The only thing the Amiga brought to this setup is transitions. Yet again though, why bother to do transitions on computer when again it is predated by far more powerful dedicated DVE hardware? This is where the Amiga fan bait-and-switch goalpost moving kicks in and they immediately pivot from power to price. What they also do is without bothering to do any reading or fact finding they then insist that anything with similar performance cost about twenty times as much money. It thus creates a fallacious argument which insists on refusing to consider anything but computers from the same date, with the same specification for the same price. Obviously pre-rejecting anything which is not an Amiga and using an argument which can be respawned for almost any piece of hardware. What else was there besides the Commodore 64, Atari 800 or ZX81, when you pick one and then accept only computers of the same date, which the same spec *at the same price*? People who liked the 64 can reject the Amiga from consideration using the same proforma argumentation strategy "Well, the Amiga may have been better than a 64 in some ways, but it was also later and more expensive so it doesn't count". The trouble with all that argument is the same as it always has been: You cannot police or invalidate other people's interests or purchases based on specification or price for the simple reason other people have differing needs and budgets from you. The paradox of the whole "yeah but studio equipment was far more expensive" is: So what? Far more studios used dedicated video equipment rather than desktop computers, especially not the Amiga, because the dedicated studio equipment was far better. It wasn't until the late 1990s, long after the Amiga story was over, that remotely professional video editing became a credible proposition for desktop computers. The VT didn't pave the way. Desktop video editing came to the PC and Mac before the Amiga, the 1993 VT Flyer, the best ever Video Toaster was, except for wipes, essentially a carbon copy of the PC EMC2 system from 1989. the first academy award winning films to use digital NLEs were edited on Macs. The idea the Amiga was ahead for video is pure Amiga fanbase fantasy and on par the Amiga itself, that and the VT, given what they actually did, are probably the two most boringly overhyped devices in all computing history. To this day dedicated editing equipment is still manufactured and sold to studios and it still represents the high-end of editing set ups. Once again: The fact you can't afford it is bullshit. So what about your pauper budget? It doesn't apply to people with more money and more demanding needs and you can't make it apply. "Yeah, a Mercedes business class is far more a luxury car than my VW Polo.... but it's so much more expensive than my VW Polo so it doesn't count! Also, my Polo can do almost everything a Mercedes can, just for far less money". So what? Not everybody else is a pauper. Try applying the Amiga fan favourite "Yeah but I can't afford it" argument to somebody who actually owns the thing you are pretending is invalidated based on price.
Yeah the Amiga 2000 was a great machine, i played a lot with it at end of the 80s, my father bought one back then, i was crazy about the Amiga, it was so easy to use, and the games and sound was great, i had it connected to a receiver. I really miss does times, it was great, my father still have his Amiga 2000, and still works, even his old 5.25" HDD of 110MB.
This was a fantastic breakdown of what made the Amiga so special. Makes me miss my old A500+ with it's amazing A530 turbo expansion. Also makes me appreciate the fact that I managed to copy all my old programs, anims, music, etc. off off of it and onto my PC. I still sometimes boot up WinUAE just so I can play around with all my old stuff.
@@DavePoo2 I'm not sure it's common today. While I accept Windows as my OS (sorry Linux I have my issues with you on the desktop) the vast sway of hardware that is in use (take a look at the Steam Hardware & Software Survey) shows a serious lack of compliance. I think it is how it has always been on the PC "put up and shut up" those with hardware that give a poor experience just "put up" with it knowing that their system is just under powered, while programs (games) come out that are beyond what the market average is currently at. This is how the PC beat the Amiga by making everyone think it's their fault that the programs didn't work efficiently and Commodore not producing even minor upgrades along the way.
It had a feeling. In a dark room my best mate, who owned an A500, put the disk in, and the sound (on a fairly good speaker) went on, then the animation started (f.e. Platoon). Goosebumps, man. Like a cinematic trailer. My next machine that could reach NEARLY the same effect, was an Xbox 360. But still, that wasn't unique. The Amiga was 'the one', like Neo in Matrix.
I still have mine next to the STE and the C64. Love that machine, love its soul, it’s magic. Great vid btw, very interesting. Nice work, nice memories!
I remember the strange hostility against the Amiga users from the media back in the days where the users were called cult members and other nice things. A technology magazine ran a piece about a meeting for Amiga users and there was no end to the descriptions of what a bunch of idiots they were. This goes on to this day and every time they bring up the history of personal computers the Amiga is not there and it is basically erased from history.
I noticed that's a thing that happens, like in this TH-cam Originals video about the Macintosh, where they decide to look at some of the competitors to the Mac th-cam.com/video/VJI88QIW7H4/w-d-xo.html Even though they have a Commodore VIC-20 on the shelf in front of them, they completely skip over it in the video, even though the VIC-20 was the first personal computer to sell over a million units, they don't even mention it ... like Doc Brown would say "erased .... from existence"
The "idiot" part was about Amiga users in 1996, that still prefered it over PC, and telling everyone, that it has even future, and should pick Amiga instead PC. They all found out in 1998, after Celeron 300A was released, that they were delusional, and it's over forever.
@@warrax111 I can understand them. Companies like Escom were taking over commodore and promising to keep the Amiga going. Even I fell for that one, i thought "it's ok, they will keep it going", and they did even get an Amiga 1200 out. But if I had just looked into a little bit, then it was clearly over, the R&D teams were all gone, there was nothing left of Commodore but the Logo, the old stock, the debts and the bad credit with their suppliers. Even though I didn't like the PC, once i saw what it could do, I was willing to put up with it. Once I saw Quake and the true 3D graphics that the was being done by the processors on the PC's of the time, I didn't even think about the Amiga again after that, it was ancient history. The other problem was that even if you used an Amiga at home, if you got any job that involved using a computer, it wasn't going to be an Amiga, so you weren't learning anything you could take with you into your career.
@@warrax111 It was truly over before it began. The Amiga was a terribly flawed design and although this video is rare in daring to discuss some of the flaws it doesn't go nearly far enough. An awkward combination of strengths with attendant weaknesses which limited the computer's range. An awkward design which basically dropped a desktop GUI on top of console hardware. A console hardware base which lacked common games console features such as tiled screen mode or a packed pixel mode and had bitplane graphics instead. The support hardware receives overwhelmingly unreasonable support from fans. The Blitter was only about twice as fast as the CPU for Blitter operations. So slow was it that in later Amigas the Blitter was redundant except for compatibility purposes. Meanwhile the Amiga sprite capability is unremarkable compared to other consoles. The 68000, despite fan eulogies, when instruction timings are considered has far more in common with 8bit technology than the 32bit tech fans always try to link it to, compatible with the 1970s technology it is. The copper is basically useless for most purposes except extending the palette for games. Despite claims of extended palettes most Amiga screens are in 16 colours. The Amiga didn't have much industry support either from key application developers or key Japanese games studios. It wasn't cheap initially. It had very few interesting software applications until the 1990s. Multitasking isn't a selling point. Amiga owners can't avoid talking about it but nobody cared. Most people to this day use apps sequentially, one.at a time. Other systems, like Windows, used cooperative multitasking which, for users, is indistinguishable from preemptive multitasking when programmed correctly and has advantages over preemptive systems for real time apps because of advantages app developers accrue by being able to finish micro tasks before releasing the CPU. Digital sound is probably a matter of taste but what is basically 4 concurrent 8bit sample events has its limitations including the number of concurrent voices and real time sound shaping. Talk about DMA sound is somewhat superfluous given it is obviated by synth systems which don't need memory access. Almost none of the popularly cited hardware advantages have any relevance to anything outside of games and their limitations meant it was always going to lose against consoles for the games market into which far more consoles were sold than Amigas. Amiga fans like to blame "marketing". This is fanciful as almost no computer except the Mac ever had good marketing. People buy on spec not campaigns. Look at the 64: Awful marketing but sold millions of units on spec anyway. Amiga fans also complain Commodore didn't iterate well, failing to observe though that most of the Amigas flaws were present in the very first Amiga. They also ignore the fact the Amiga was already failing in the marketplace before the new management they blame it on was installed. There was not a point later in the Amiga's life when it began to fail, the Amiga began to fail immediately it was launched. In sum you have a machine which ultimately tries to please everyone but isn't as desirable as a dedicated console for games and isn't as desirable as a PC for apps. So in real terms it pleased nobody except its fan base who are typically way too easily swept away by its niche but largely useless and novelty graphics software.
I was with the Amiga from the very beginning. Started with A2000 with two disk drives, then A3000 and ended up with really beefed up A4000 Tower. I tried to be faithful to my beloved computer as long as I could but when it struggled to play simple mp3s that was the moment I said to myself "it is over". Still I've had the best days of my life, the best friends and the best moments thanks to Amiga.
Seems like a familiar story. We all wanted to keep our Amiga and continue to use it as it had been so good to us, but eventually it just couldn't do what we wanted.
I never had issues with mp3, but I owned a Blizzard 1260, PicassoIV and all other extensions of the PIV (sound, tv, ...). It was running Pagestream and lightwave with a breeze of 128MB ram and 2GB SCSI HD. Those were the days :D
I knew the writing was on all the wall for my Amiga when all the major magazines starting dropping off. When "Amiga Format" closed, that was it - I knew I was holding on to something that didn't have a future. It was hard to let go, and now I've downloaded dozens of Amiga magazines as PDFs to read and get nostalgic over.
@@barryguff6893 Yeah, i remember back then naively thinking that the companies that bough the Commodore brand would be able to keep it going, but it was never going to happen.
It was a machine way ahead of its time. The games were incredible. Then it fell way behind. I laughed at the seemingly underpowered DOS machines of the time, and after a while, the PC caught up. I still want an Amiga, but the prices are insane! So I bought Amiga Forever, but getting software is not easy, or I am not looking hard enough.
When I bought my first A500 back in early 1988, I just wanted to play Hack 1.0 and play music and graphics with computer. Had c128 and zx48k before, but with Amiga I entered into different world.
It really really was a huge step up from the 8-bit computers. And I feel like the computers we have today bear a close resemblance to the 16-bit computers like the Amiga.
Excellent overview of the Amiga and what made it superior. Very accurate and well researched! I hope you do more Amiga Videos in the future! There is still a very active Amiga Community out here with new products and software all the time!
I subscribed to your channel yesterday, I watched your video you made on Cannon Fodder and why it was such an awesome game. Funnily enough, I never really got too into that game for w/e reason but it was a game I recall playing on my A500 nonetheless. This channel amongst many others are a god send to guys my age who grew up owning an Amiga in the late 80s early 90s. The time and effort you ladies and gents have invested into your channels is appreciated. Keep up the great work m8.
Thanks. I'm currently playing through Cannon Fodder 2 on live stream on Saturday nights (on this YT channel). I can say they have made it about as hard as the 1st game.
It was way ahead of its time. I was doing digital imaging, 3d animation, modeling and ray tracing back in the late 80s early 90s with the Amiga. The games were pretty cool also but I was in love with the graphics arts part of the Amiga. If you had the Video Toaster add on then you were doing moving grade video editing and computer animation back then. I always wanted a Video Toaster but couldn't afford one back then.
Yeah, i never really saw what Lightwave could do until recently, i was really impressed at how fully featured it was for such an old program running on the poor little Amiga
@@cloerenjackson3699it's difficult to explain in comparison to what we have today. But this video explains it really well. Compared to what PCs and Macs were doing at the same or even higher price point at the time the Amiga was so far ahead. And the user base totally maxed out its already advanced architecture. The power these machines had compared to their rivals was astounding. And the software made it the best machine ever made in context of its time.
@@cloerenjackson3699 are you even old enough to comment? I have an A500 and an A1200 sat around still. If you are older than 12 what were you? An ST fanboy?
This week I will take ownership of a custom a500, recapped, sonic cleaned, gotek drive internal, HDMI converter and I am sooo looking forward to playing through all the old games from my past.
The reason we're not using Amiga's today is because of Commodore. Commodore fell "ass-backwards" into TWO amazing computers. The C64 and the Amiga. The C64 put Commodore on the map and many at Commodore thought they could do no wrong at that point. The problem then became that Commodore didn't understand their own technology (they purchased Amiga...they didn't design it from the ground up). Commodore didn't understand they had a powerhouse of a "multimedia PC" at the time. No one really knew what a multimedia PC really was until other companies started doing it. Say what you will about Steve Jobs...he believed in good marketing and he was right. My kids know Apple. None of them know Commodore. Commodore always had terrible marketing. It's a shame, really. But to be fair, what would a modern, 2022 Amiga be like today anyway? I doubt it would have the same revolutionary design but instead be like any other PC like HP or Toshiba. At least it won't be dead anytime soon. I've been an Amiga user since I was 16 and there are many more like me. 🙂
I totally agree. Have you seen the video of Jobs using the NeXT system (when he had left Apple), he really showed off to everyone how good the computer was and what it could do. There was never anything like that from Commodore.
Without Commodore there probably wouldn't have been an Amiga computer. They bought the technology but also had their own chip fabs and sold their own computers. Not many companies could have done that. But yes, marketing wasn't their strong suit to say the least.
@@davidste60 It's not a case of probably, it definitely wouldn't have existed. Atari owned the stock in the Amiga company and Amiga were about to go bust. So Atari were willing to let it go bust so that they didn't have any competition for their own products. Commodore bailed them out and bought the Atari stock.
Bill what did you do!!! Yep, Win98 sucked quite a bit, I refused to use it at my work back in the day, I used Win NT 4.0 instead which was way more stable (and is now the basis for modern Windows).
I was a beta tester for Windows 95. You would not believe how often it died, and how often I had to reinstall from scratch it prior to the actual release (probably about once per week).
"I remember my Windows 98 machine doing that blue thing quite a lot. So, they actually shipped it with that feature intact." The blue screen was a feature of the OS because it stopped rogue application which would have done damage if they were allowed to continue. It is technically incorrect to portray it as a fault with Windows, it was a Windows failsafe to protect your system against rogue apps. Not only did you also have the infamous Guru meditation on the Amiga, which I have seen substantially more frequently during that same time frame than I have ever seen PC blue screens of death in my life, you also didn't have the sort of serious system integrity breach protection the "blue screen of death" was designed to provide. Your complaint is like moaning about the alarm going off in your new car when people tampered with it whereas you liked your previous car more because when thieves tried to break in to your previous car it would just sit around and let the thieves get on with it. You didn't get memory protection faults on Amigas because you didn't' have memory protection.
A few minor points. Pallet layout was not only common but typical back then. What made amiga a bit special was a wide palet and also a wide pallet array. Most systems at the day was 2 or 4 bit pallet and a 6-8 bit array, while amiga was 5+1 and 12 if i don´t miss remember. About the memory, they way it was set up on amiga it was pretty much time shared between CPU and GPU/sound. Typically at this day, the graphic would have dedicated memory. Amiga used a ROM-OS and not a Disc-OS saving a bunch of memory in loading up stuff like Workbench. A version of copper does exist on EGA, but nobody ever used it because it was really buggy. Generally, the main problem with EGA was that it was buggy. About overlay. From EGA forward (and more so on VGA) there was a 1 or 2 bit overlay graphics shell. That was what moved both the pointer and the outline as well as the Icons, Also the reason why the icons become monochrome when you moved them. In EGA game that use smooth scrolling they usually use a overlay for scoreboard. In theory they could use different pallets, as far as i know, nobody ever did that (because.. well buggy). I do think that Amiga got the overlay function to, but i´m unsure exactly to what degree.
The moment I first saw an Amiga in a shop running a Newtek demo, while owning a ZX Spectrum, has never been exceeded. It was a HUGE leap. I scrimped and borrowed to get one.
You weren't the only one. Somebody I knew who also owned a speccy did exactly the same thing. I was very jealous by the time he finally got an Amiga as he got one, as I still had the C64
yes I went round to my mates house and saw stunt car racer / rick dangerous. that step up from spectrum etc to Amiga was huge ! I remember the moment clearly
People never really knew what the Amiga could do. I used my A4000 all the way until 2002 as my main computer, doing lots of DTP as an example. The only real reasons I felt I needed to move over to another platform was to play movies and games like GP2. I still kept using the Amiga for lots of stuff and both my A4k and my older A500 are still sitting here beside me and are frequently used. Nothing beats playing Settlers and Colonization on a real Amiga.
Same here. I used my A4000 till about 2004-5 with XCad and did Cad drawings 100 times faster than AutoCad back in the day of 286/386 processors. Whenever AutoCad at work did a 'redraw' of the screen, if it was lunch time, we just got up and went to lunch! Sometimes the redraw would be done when we got back and sometimes it wouldn't be. Still have my 4000 and turn it on now and then. Been thinking I should get a cap kit before you can't find them and replace all the caps. Replaced the on board battery a few yrs ago with a board that takes a coin cell.
I've seen a comment on TH-cam somewhere that some of the Amiga musicians carried on using the Amiga until about 2010 to do MIDI stuff. But ultimately I think now that are no Amiga's in left in service today in any professional capacity.
People did knew, but with the advent of cheap 486 and later Pentium processors Amiga 4000 simply could not compete. Back in the day Amiga thousand series (2000, 3000, 4000) were serious professional computers - powerful but expensive and rare. Realistically, they were never Commodore's main business.
@@DavePoo2 I believe that. Some of my friends performed using Amiga's around 2004. I was pleasantly surprised to see them and the crowd loved the music.
"It's eight cycles per instruction buddy" That was so incredibly charged with snarc but in the geekiest way possible, I love it so much I want it on a t-shirt
The 1000/500 was the best home computer / pc gaming rig ever designed. Incredible thought was put into how everything works together. If you want to find out just how, grab a copy of AMOS and see how easy it is to write a really nice game with it.
@@groenevinger3893 In later games you can see the difference of the two16 colors independent screens used for easy Parallax. You mean against the ST? I am an ST/STE fan first, and I think the STE, when used correctly, can pretty much match the OCS capabilities 1 for 1 with some tricky programming.
"The 1000/500 was the best home computer / pc gaming rig ever designed" This claim by any reasonable measure of "good" is quite patently untrue. The Amiga cannot run anything like the kind of games which appear on a modern PC and the modern PC can run anything which ever appeared on the Amiga. Everything of significance the Amiga ever did has been entirely subsumed into the fabric of the PC. If you are in any doubt then you need only to download WinUAE after which you will then own a PC which literally does everything a base Amiga ever did, including the emulation of many example of graphics cards and other plug in boards.
The Amiga truly amazed me as kid, no other computer since gave me that 'voodoo magic' feeling ever again. As time moved on I always kept using and upgrading Amiga's as a hobby to this day and brings me joy and can still be amazed how 'modern' it feels all those decades later. The buttery smooth multitasking OS that's simple but so elegantly designed and easy to manipulate via shell script and Arexx. As we speak my A1200 equipped with a PiStorm32 is playing internet radio while being connected to 5Ghz wifi and Paula in 14 bit mode still sounds good even by today's standards. It's amazing to see such an old computer being able to talk and take control of modern hardware, yes it still gives me that 'voodoo magic' feeling!
The next time I got the 'voodoo magic' feeling after the Amiga was gone was literally when the 3Dfx Voodoo showed up. Like the Amiga, that really was a huge shift in capability in the computers we had at the time.
it is funny you say this because i was an amiga user from the late 80s and i didnt feel the "voodo" magic amiga had until i got a "voodo card" for a PC. I had the playstation in the middle but i never felt that "magic" with it...
@@DavePoo2 loool, i just wrote the same thing before i even read your comment. Yeah, i had the playstation in the middle and it didnt feel "magic", i got the "voodo" magic when i actually got a voodo banshee...
@@Trikipum The voodoo cards where a big step up at the time for sure but this was only one area, the Amiga had so many new features back then we take for granted today. A bit over 1,5 years ago the Amiga gave me that feeling again when I installed a PiStorm32 accelerator card in my A1200, it took me weeks to get used to the fact it was that fast. A modern computer is obviously much faster but for an Amiga it's a whole new level of crazy fast.
In an era when RAM was much faster than the CPU accesses, DMA was an excellent way to take advantage of that. After the 90s with pipelined CPUs all memory cycles were used by the CPU. Graphics became its own processor with its own memory and eventually, had its own pipelined process. But a DMA engine was the stepping stone. Also, about the time of 1985-87 SGI machines used bit planes even to do 24bit color but cost in excess of 50x the price.
Yeah, one of the problems as time went on was the increasing Mhz. If you look at a modern motherboard, the RAM needs to be as close to the CPU as possible as a 4000+ Mhz, even at the speed of light, a photon can only move about 7cm during a single clock tick, so the laws of physics start to limit what is possible. I didn't mention the cost of the Amiga in the video as I didn't want to go too much in to the history but stick to the hardware capabilities but you are right, at the time of release the Amiga was expensive but other computers that could do similar things (like SGI) were in a completely different price league.
@@DavePoo2 Also, at the same time, Apple were making black and white 68000 Macs. Commodore marketing should have been all over that! Black and White was a sixties or seventies thing not for a cutting-edge, mid eighties, 16 bit era.
Yeah, the Amiga marketing was a mess. That whole Jay Miner talk on the Guru Meditation channel is basically him trying to promote the features of the Amiga because Commodore weren't doing it.
Thing is you could draw a solid line between the chipset and the CPU. DMA drives video and sound output on it's own. The only problem is the limited bandwidth CPU chipset RAM and accessible RAM size itself (2MB max). Too bad they didn't go chunky pixel when designing the chips in the 80's - at first it would limit graphics, but as time went on and RAM prices dropped Amiga would have slain PC.
Yeah, who knows, it could have been a totally different story. The 16bits per pixel would certainly have been an advantage when the AGA computers came out, software would just run faster on the same hardware without having to re-code the game, the disadvantage might have been that the early Amiga's might have been too slow and because of that and maybe the Amiga would not have gained the popularity at all.
True, and backwards compatibility is a double edged sword, in that you get your back catalogue of software, but its hard to evolve into something new and still keep that. But, Apple & IBM PC managed it, as have more modern games consoles. This is a quote from Jay Miner somewhere all about this. He said that in the end, when the backwards compatibility becomes more of a hindrance than a help, you just make your new computer but also include the old chipset to be able to use the older software. You could see this in the playstation 2, where they included a PS1 on the board to get backwards compatibility, and Apple how now moved to a whole new processor architecture and are keeping compatibility as well.
@@wimwiddershins The only thing any two PCs need to have in common is an x86 instruction set. Apart from that the CPU, FPU, GPU, bus, RAM, motherboard, monitor, input devices, case, cooling and peripherals can all the different between one PC and the next. Even across CPUs the instruction set may be different and each CPU can be supplied by a different manufacturer. It's interesting you should describe it as "open-ish" because it is very hard to imagine how anything could be any more "open", not to mention more versatile, than that.
@@murasaki848 That is just the sort of overly bombastic response I expect. Actually, no. The 8088 was a carefully considered and wise choice. IBM knew of the 8086 at the time and they could have chosen it. They chose the 8088 for multiple reasons and one of them was for the very reason the 8088 was derived from the 8086 design: Internally the 8088 was the same as the 16bit 8086 with only one exception: An 8 bit data bus meant the chip could be used with 8bit motherboards. This made manufacturing computers based on the 8088 far cheaper than they would have been had they used the 8086 and it did so without sacrificing software compatibility with anything written for either the 8088 or the 8086. Like all people who launch these bombastic scathing responses to the PC platform I feel it's necessary to remind you: We aren't conducting a post-mortem here as we are with the Amiga. We're reviewing by far the most successful computer architecture ever produced which now forms the basis of almost every computing platform sold at any level. Today even supercomputers run the Intel instruction set. Must I remind you also that from news reports of its day the PC was successful immediately. It sold sold more units in just the single year before the Amiga was released than the Amiga sold in the entire duration of its manufacture, even when the sum total of all Amiga variations made and sold are added together. The PC won and therefore the only realistic discussion we can have about the PC is the discussion of why it won. Sitting there lambasting it for fun is to clearly be missing something: The PC didn't fail, it thrived from the very beginning of its availability. It is probably also worth a quick reminder that the 8088 PCs were the ones available before the Amiga was. 8088 PCs date back to 1981. By the time the Amiga was released the 16bit IBM PC/AT 286 was available, customarily sold with an integrated hard drive. Within a year of the Amiga being released the fully 32bit 386 was brought to market when the Compaq Deskpro 386 PC compatible became the first fully 32bit personal desktop computer. The entire time the Amiga was being manufactured the PC was iterating much faster and this iteration process ballooned after the clone market started to appear permitting a Darwinian process of evolution to take over with many manufacturers coming into being, trying and often failing without the wider PC marketplace ever being placed in danger. Look at how many different types of PC you can buy today. There are tens of thousands of different models with varying tweaks and features and price points. You can pay from about £200 to easily over £50,000 for a new PC of your choice with thousands of examples to choose from. That's the legacy of the iteration process: Choice. The legacy of the reverse compatibility promise is I can still run DOS programs from the 1980s on the desktop I have today, as well as software released yesterday and it will run software which hasn't yet been released. Some software is released to outstrip what is available today so to find their full implementation on PCs yet to be released. Hardware and software enjoys considerable future proofing. Today you can buy a desktop PC more powerful than any desktop released just a few years ago and it will still run 8086 software if you want to. Does that come with caveats? Yes it does, but they are clearly far outweighed by the benefits, just as with the choice of the 8088. The 8088 has binary compatibility with the 8086 which was in turn made to escape the legacy of the 8080 without making it hard for developers to migrate. The 8080 CPU was the CPU of the previously successful MIT Altair so the 8088 PC was delivered ready to be exploited by already experienced programmers. In 1981 the first PC was a new computer for which experienced programmers would not have to start afresh. For this reason useful pre-existing software was quickly ported to the earliest PCs. VisiCalc which turned the desktop computer from an electronics enthusiasts curio into a serious tool of business was the prompt for IBM to produce the PC and it was ported to the PC in the same year the PC was released. Lotus 1-2-3 considered the fist ever killer app, an app people bought PCs to use, was ported to the PC in 1983. Following 1982 the only computer to compete with the PC in sales was the Commodore 64. By the time the Amiga was released the PC was the biggest selling desktop computing platform with sales which the Amiga never approached in any year. Before the Amiga came into existence in 1985 the PC had already sold more units than the total number of Amigas manufactured in sum across all its various incarnations over its entire life. So.... yeah..... crap idea using the 8088, eh? We can see how that worked out. It opened the first chapter in... the most successful computing history ever.
@@murasaki848 Yes, economy of scale was one of my arguments but it was not the only one. Your talk about 16bit designs does not respond to my slightly less lengthy explanation for why IBM didn't use one. It is known that IBM did consider the 8086 and the 68000. It is also known that after careful consideration they discarded both designs. They discarded both for the reason the 8088 was made after the 8086: To enable the internally 16bit CPU to be placed in an 8 bit motherboard, thereby substantially reducing motherboard design complexity and to pass on reduced cost to the consumer while maintaining binary compatibility with 16bit software written for the 8086. This choice also smoothed experienced developer transition from the 8080 which had previously been used in the popular 8080 based MIT Altair. This produced a path of reduced resistance to developers and customers, the result being that a consumer and software base for the PC emerged rapidly. You also ignored the fact that this choice worked. I am not confusing popularity for performance I am however stating that sales are crucial to success and indeed in this sense the IBM PC platform was successful from the very beginning. The biggest problem with the PC cited by early computer suppliers was being able to get enough PC units to satisfy demand. They could hardly be manufactured fast enough. Hence why I cite the fact that the PC sold more units in the year before the Amiga was released than the Amiga sold in its entire lifetime. All else aside, the success of the PC is explained by its ubiquity and popularity. I can get on to cost and performance next... When citing other 16bit designs the date of inception must be taken into account when considering the cost of implementation. Naming Sun microsystems, as you did, perhaps you need to be reminded that the 68000 based Sun system 1 cost $8900 when it was released in 1982, weighing it in at almost 6 times the cost of the IBM PC at introduction. Accounting for inflation, a Sun 1 cost the then equivalent of over $33,000 each. Hence the reason IBM did not consider it. Apart from that, you are appealing to "better", as Amiga fans do, an abstract term which demands qualification in real terms. In real terms, the 68000, especially in the Amiga implementation which was slow even by 68000 standards, did not offer significant performance advantage. In fact, Amiga fan claims the Amiga 68000 implementation was far "better" than the 8088 are the stuff of pure shared myth making. Cross platform benchmarks repudiate the claim. In fact, there was hardly a PC ever made, not even the ones released in 1981, which were not computationally faster than a 68000 based Amiga. The instruction throughout of the 68000 was odorously slow with 4 cycles being the fastest instruction time it had and placing its performance more in common with 8bit micros of the 1970s when it was made. You can of course return to your abstract and claim "Faster doesn't necessarily mean better!". The PC was cheaper than the first Amigas. It was a close call for the price of blue-badge products but for example the Tandy 1000 at under $1000 was already available for less than the cost of an Amiga by the time the Amiga was released. So, sure, you can even now still turn to you abstract and claim "Computationally faster, lower cost and more popular doesn't necessarily mean better!", but, alongside the fact the PC also had a far larger suite of software to choose from among which were those examples already established as industry standards by the time the Amiga was released, versus almost no software availability for the inaugural Amiga, you now have a substantial hill to climb in terms of identifying factors more important than those we should consider in qualifying any claim the Amiga was ever overall somehow a "better" choice. I'm going to try to deal with your points one at a time, so I will now refrain despite the fact I could continue and go on to point out your appeal to easy interfacing is clearly contradicted by industry history: The PC anointed a plethora of cottage and small industry with almost anybody with some electronics expertise, a few thousand in cash and access to manufacturing able to begin to launch PC card-based products, and there were hundreds of them to choose from. These included the first ever desktop 24bit graphics accelerator, released before the Amiga was, and a 68000 CPU daughtercard, also released before the Amiga. Interestingly the 68000 PC daughtercard appeared in a design which was, ironically, a faster implementation of the 6800 than the Amiga was. This, again, before the Amiga was even launched. With that said, there are not, as far as I can see, many compelling reasons remaining to buy an Amiga over a PC, not even on the Amigas dawning day, especially not on the Amigas dawning day, back when it was more expensive, computationally slower, had no third party products including no networking and few peripherals, had no integral hard drive, no users and no software.
I miss my Amiga 2000, I had a card in it that made it a 2500, digi view gold, used a camera to scan objects, had a tablet for my cell animation that I did, colour printer to print out graphics that I worked on. At the time the Macs were in black and white. I had full colour, stereo sound, just an amazing machine. Oh almost forgot that I was able to record to a VHS any animation or graphics that I created on it. Just a shame what happened to that company.
@@DavePoo2 you have no idea! It was amazing. Not to mention all the BBS sites from around the globe. Good times I wonder what it would have become if it was still around today
@@bmovie27 I suspect that if it was around today it would actually be very similar to the PC's we have now, and probably running some UNIX derived OS. It would have been nice to have a 3rd horse in the Mac/PC desktop war. Who knows where it could have gone. I don't think Commodore had the management to be able to survive, it was already a dying company in the early 90's as they had cut the R&D budget so much, that they were not innovating in what was a really fast moving industry.
@@DavePoo2 "I suspect that if it was around today it would actually be very similar to the PC's we have now" I don't see where the "If only it was around today" fantasy comes from? First of all, you can still get it today, can't you? Multiple AmigaOS derived or inspired OSs are available. Multiple emulator platforms which run the original OS/GUI, typically far faster than the original hardware, are still available. It is out there still being kept on life support by enthusiasts and, for the most part ,not even Amiga fans are using it. What exactly do you think an Amiga platform is going to give you today that you don't get from the PC you are using? Meanwhile, with all the vague fantasy what-if questions Amiga fans ask, you may as well ask what if a completely different system existed? Many other different CPUs, OSs and hardware platforms have existed which didn't survive. What if any of them had survived? What if there were a new completely different system? What is it that rides on the survival of some specific Amiga feature that couldn't or doesn't arrive just as easily some other way? There is nothing more left of the "Amiga" than the trademark. There isn't anything about the Amiga which Needs to survive, is there? Which probably goes some way towards explaining why it has not survived, or rather, that it is still out there, if you really want it, but you don't migrate to it for anything but recreational purposes because, even as an Amiga evangelist, the truth is, there isn't really anything for which anybody, not even Amiga fans, need an Amiga to do. As I have said before, Amiga fans who today use something other than an Amiga for non-reactional purposes now know why people didn't use the Amiga in the first place because the reasons Amiga fans have for not using the Amiga today is the same reason people had for not adopting it in the first place: It isn't needed or necessary. What you actually use a computer to do is better answered through something else other than the Amiga. If you want to actually get some work done you are better off using something else. So, it's a very different era today but applicability to what you are actually doing with your desktop computer is same motive for Not using Amigas today as people who bought PCs had for Not using them in 1985. The Amiga indeed may have been the last-gasp of sandbox home-computing which began with the (far more exciting) 8bits, but in the end, you need your desktop to do something useful. Except perhaps to a few users the Amiga never did shine compared to the PC when it came to getting some actual serious work done. That is why cries of multitasking are hollow, alongside cries of blitters, games and copperlists and even the Video Toaster. None of those feature claims get you out of the fact the Amiga is still basically a borderline useless toy whose main professional use was developing Amiga applications, a purpose which does not meaningfully separate it from any other home computer for which you can develop your own games and applications. Look at games and applications on the PC now. Unless you are strenuously eager to be dishonest about it the PC and its games and applications today are in a different class. Just as easily as any Amiga fan I can sit here enumerating the things I liked about the Amiga and the things I dislike about Windows PS5 or any other platform. What I can also do, which Amiga fans refuse to do, is do the reverse too and thereby accept that the benefits of using a PC far outweigh the challenges, that being the single crucial thing I cannot say about migrating to the Amiga platform. I can list what I liked about the Amiga but I cannot overcome the fact that the shortcomings of using one far outweigh the benefits.... exactly the same reason I abandoned the Amiga far earlier than other fans who refused to relinquish a flawed platform and still refuse to see its limitations as a platform and as a personal computer. Also then and now Amiga fans still refuse to acknowledge there were and are more important benefits of using a PC - especially for those who have always used PCs in preference to Amigas, even throughout the 1980s. Much of that reason is, if you want to actually do any work, get a PC. With all its substantial flaws the PC was then and is still the best at getting most kinds of work done, even when it had a phosphor display and a beep. Even then the PC also had a random access ASCII screen making data entry and results tabulation easy it had a fast CPU (despite Amiga fan claims almost all PCs have faster processing than a comparable generation Amiga, Especially when the Amiga was launched with a 7Mhz 68000 and no FPU (which could make maths up to 20x as fast)). The PC also had a very large number of general and niche applications suitable for a very large number of industries. The Amiga and its varying OSs are still out there on various forms. You really still want it? You go use it. You don't want to? Great, now you know why other people don't and didn't use the Amiga then. You know what video I would like to see? I'd like to see one made by somebody familiar with the Amiga and far more familiar with the the PC than the average Amiga fan being truly honest at last about the disadvantages of using an Amiga and the advantages of using a PC while giving attention to what at which the PC has always excelled against the Amiga. As I have also said before, if you really want to know why the PC was more successful all you really need to do is drop the Amiga evangelism and start being honest about what you are saying about both platforms. I genuinely think hanging your hat and being honest about is enough to have the answers on the tip of your tongue: For computing the PC was always a better computer.
Yeah, I think the fact that so many people kept their Amiga's even when they had moved on to other computers like the PC & Mac shows how much of a beloved computer it was.
"Yeah, I think the fact that so many people kept their Amiga's even when they had moved on to other computers like the PC & Mac shows how much of a beloved computer it was" @@DavePoo2 Once again, the same can be said of almost any platform that ever existed. I can't think of any where that isn't true or even that development hasn't continued ever since in some ways. I am a member of owners groups for the PDP series, most of the 8 bits including the ZX81, Spectrum, Atari series, Dragon 32, Oric 1, NewBrain A, BBC Model A & B, Acorn Electron and Archimedes, TRS-80 and MITS Altair. All the platforms I can recall still have owner-enthusiasts and on all of them development still continues in some small way. The only thing that separates them is the pervasive and perpetual evangelising and dishonesty of the Amiga user base. Of the platforms I have known, the one which least needs even more evangelising because it receives by far the bulk of it is the Amiga. There is also the paradox that despite the Amiga fanbase being the Jehovas Witnesses of computer enthusiasm, knocking on the door of every possible person to eulogise the Amiga, they *still* appear to think the Amiga is some sort of underground undiscovered widely misunderstood anomalous mystery to others. This, despite the fact there is probably no other computer for which information promotion and pamphleting is more more widely publicised, prevalent and easily available.
Thank you very much for the video down memory lane. I think the highlight for me was when you put in the floppy. That sound snapped me right back to when I was kid. Awesome!
I would say that my A500 has the most satisfying "clunk" when the floppy disk goes in. I think that's because the A500 drive has a much more solid mounting to the inside of the cast than that of the A600 and A1200.
The Amiga was basically the true descendent of the Atari 800, much of the hardware concepts, particularly copper, sprites and scrolling are 16bit and enhanced versions of what was in the 800, which Miner also largely designed.
Had Atari given him the go ahead when he asked to design a new 68000 based system, instead of Commodore vs Atari it would have just been Atari. Commodore basically had nothing which is evident that they needed to buy Amiga.
@@daishi5571 - Yep. That's the depressing story about Atari, before it collapsed in 1983. What I've heard from Atari engineers was that they had an R&D lab working on amazing stuff for the time. Atari used this lab to come up with the Atari 2600 and the 400/800 computers, but after that, they used hardly anything it produced. This was one of the reasons Atari engineers got frustrated with management, and left to form their own companies, Amiga being one of them. The design for the Amiga started at Atari, with some of the same people who developed the 400 and 800 computers, but management wasn't interested in it. So, they left to form their own company. Atari footed some money to them, nevertheless, and got an agreement to license the chipset, but before the chipset was ready, Atari collapsed. So, there was no chance for them to use it. One engineer said the basic problem was that from 1977 to 1984, Atari was owned by an entertainment company, Warner Communications. He said their business model was to come out with a hit movie, market the hell out of it, until people lost interest, toss it aside, and try to come up with another hit. They didn't understand that a technology company can't do that and be successful. You have to be continually innovating with new, sellable products. Atari was making tons of money with the 2600 video game console. They rode that wave until it crashed, and then the whole company collapsed. Warner not wanting to be tied to a sinking ship sold off the company.
I remember coming into a computer shop demoing an Amiga 500 back in the days. I was so struck by the quality of the music playing out of the system that I looked behind the computer and tracked the audio leads out of it and into the monitor... I even plugged them out for a second as I was so convinced it was a trick and the sound was coming out of a tape player or something... It wasn't! A few months later, I got all my savings out of the bank and came back to buy one!
Yeah 👍 l remember something similar, l saw it demoed in my local computer store and instantly knew I had to get one. Although it took some time before I came up with the money to get one of my own.
Back in the day when the Amiga first surfaced it was really something special. I was working in Fremont, California for a company called Telesys who started life making games for the Atari 2600. At the time I was a product manager and we had developed printer, interfaces and memory expansion for the commodore vic20 and commodore c64. We were invited to Amiga to see the very first computer of theirs and we had to sign NDAs. We also went to see the creator of the chips where he presented how he came up with these chips. It was really truly amazing. But then they were purchased by commodore and maybe that was not such a good thing for the Amiga. I don't know. Also at this time the IBM PC was released and the Amiga sort of fell into the shadows. It was truly exciting to see one of my favorite apps on the Amiga was this program that created a three-dimensional landscape in another was a pirating software that used the Disney yoho yoho song.
Cool story. I think if Commodore hadn't bought them, then the Amiga wouldn't have actually come to market. I believe Atari owned the most stock in Amiga at the time, but they were willing to let the Amiga project just dissapear so they didn't compete with their own line of computers. Commodore bought Amiga and actually got the computer out to the public.
@@DavePoo2 I believe that Atari (now owned by Ex Commodore boss Jack Tramiel) leant Amiga Corp £500,000 with the proviso that it had to be paid back on a certain date or all assets and IP would revert to Atari. Literally at the last moment, Commodore bought Amiga and they paid Atari the $500k.
@@micksmithson6724 - As I understand it, the deal struck between Amiga Inc. and Atari happened when Atari was still owned by Warners, shortly before Jack Tramiel bought what amounted to Atari's consumer division (which would later become Atari Corporation - a completely different company to Atari Games, the old arcade division). If I recall correctly, the deal Warner!Atari struck with Amiga was that $500k bought them the sole rights to use the Amiga chipset for a specific period of time - every other aspect was open. When Tramiel bought up the consumer division, he chose to leverage the deal as a way of strong-arming the Amiga engineers - using it as a threat to take their technology and cut them loose if they didn't accept his terms (by many accounts typical Jack, for better or worse). CBM's offer to step in and buy Amiga Inc. outright was a mutually beneficial arrangement for both parties - replenishing CBM's engineering expertise (ironically, many of their best had quit as a result of how Jack had treated them), and guaranteeing future employment security for the Amiga people if they wanted it. It goes without saying that Jack would have reacted badly to receiving that notification and payment had it come from any company; he was an absolute master at leveraging contractual loopholes and small print to his advantage - infamously (in some circles) taking the fledgling Microsoft to the cleaners with the 1977 deal supplying BASIC for the PET... But to have had it come from CBM - and understanding that they'd beaten him at his own game - must have driven him completely bananas!
Amiga was a great achievement of computing. It was the most advanced machine people could buy back then. But it was great not because it's capabilities but because of huge community that made tons of amazing stuff for this computer even when Commodore was already a cold corpse. Amount of freeware stuff is still mindblowing and Amiga spawned many of the most ambitious games that were made between 1985 and 1994. When people try to compare Amiga with anything else they always choose arcade games, but Amiga was more than that with adventure, RPG and strategy games that made it better than any console back then.
I agree, it brought a highly capable machine to many people because it was (or at least it became) somewhat affordable. I suppose the inclusion of the mouse made adventure, strategy and RPG etc more viable on the Amiga. You would never see an arcade game like "Monkey Island". I thought back in the day that arcade conversions tended to be disappointing anyway. If you purchased the conversion of your favorite arcade machine, it never stood up to be anywhere near as good as the actual machine, which had the advantage of being a much run on more expensive hardware that was sometimes customised specifically for the games needs.
@@DavePoo2 Some arcade ports were pretty good on the Amiga, but I can agree that most of them were actually pretty poor and weren't using the Amiga hardware. Also some multiplatform games were stripped down for some reason. Still Amiga had tons of awesome stuff to forget about these disappointments. Also the insane floppy piracy helped a lot. 😅
Very good sum of the reasons why the hardware was awesome! The software however is what made it a classic that still stands. The demoscene, the games, the operating system.
Well, I suppose a "PC style" computer with not software is just a brick. It the unison of good hardware and good software that brings it all together into something bigger than the sum of it's parts.
Today I fired up my old Amiga 4000 040/25. It just started and havent been running since 2004/2005. No problems....it just works. And oboy its quite fast and you can do work on it today. Quite workable on a 27" LCD. I just have to figure out how the networking was done....because I remember transfering files between my PC and the A4000 somehow over tcp/ip. Im very happy - because I was worried if it would start...or not. But it booted up under 20 odd seconds. Thats faster than any of my PC's. And all drives were working just fine. :)
Pretty cool, and Amiga 4000 is a treasure. I didn't mention it in the video (as I only have my own anecdotal evidence) but I have found the Amiga's to be pretty reliable computers. I've had the one Amiga 600 that I got from eBay that had a blown RAM chip, but none of the other Amigas (including my own from the 90's) have any bad chips. The floppy drives seem to be pretty unreliable, as they used a few different brands, but some of those still work. The Amiga's with surface mount caps do seem to leak, but they are not too difficult to replace (your 4000 probably has them), and I don't know if the 4000 had the battery backed up clock built in with one of those terrible Varta style batteries, but if it does then you should check it to make sure it hasn't leaked on the board as they are quite good at destroying computers (if its a 2032 coin cell battery, then they tend not to leak).
@@DavePoo2 Oh yes before I started it I quickly checked if it had the infamous battery for the clock mounted but nope, that spot is empty. Seemed unused. But recapping other components may be a good idea. I cant wrap my head around the fact that the harddrives are working...(!). I mean they usually dont like to be unpowered for too long like this. They are probably not originals but could be. Have to look that up too. I bought it in 2004 for a mere 2700 kr (around 250-270 dollars) but it was cheap even then. Today, I cant find any Amigas on the market almost...they are rare and very expensive. My old A500 maybe will work too...but that is for another day I think :) So we have to cherish what we got but preserving old hardware is not easy. If unused they break, if used they can break too...if unlucky. But I rather see people using old tech. Im amazed that so many Amiga lovers still dig up old and even invent new hardware today. Take care of your A600 - its a gem too. Happy new years and thanks for the good video you made. Superinteresting!
@@daweiisgood2392 All A4000's came with the battery installed for the RTC. Either you or someone else had removed it, or you checked the wrong place. So many A4000's have been destroyed by those batteries. Since you bought it in 2004, it would make sense that the battery could have been removed by a previous owner. I recall that it was a known destructive force before that time--my friend's Amiga 4000 was rendered inoperable before then.
When you said the Amiga audio never advanced I had a knee-jerk reaction of "What about AGA?" You're right the Paula didn't change in any ways meaningful for sound quality from revision to revision including the jump to AGA. That's something I haven't really considered. Great video. I enjoyed the trip down memory land and appreciated your well thought out presentation of what it was like to live 5 or more years in the future with Amiga.
Yeah, Amiga audio was ahead of its time when it first appeared, but as the years progressed it fell behind. I think there was a plan for a more advanced audio chip but it never saw the light of day.
No problem. Interesting fact, I captured that Cannon Fodder footage myself on my Amiga and the disk never worked again afterwards as it was too old and crusty.
Re. the 68000 had multiply and divide instructions - Yes, it did, but there was a catch. While it had 32-bit add and subtract instructions, the multiply and divide instructions only worked with 16-bit values. I took a college course in assembly language, and we used the 68000. One of our assignments was to write 32-bit multiply and divide routines, using the 68000's multiply and divide instructions to work on two 16-bit values (a low and high word).
@@DavePoo2 - Badly, it turns out. I recently dug out my old course folder, and looked over some of my assembly programs. Strangely, my memory was I did well on this, but I looked at my grade, and it was not good! I was a bit shocked. I was sure I had done it correctly, until I saw that. While I was still in college, I remember a friend looked over what I had written, and he said, "I found some mistakes you made," but we didn't get into discussing them. I remember our professor even laid out the algorithm for doing the 32-bit operations, but I still didn't do it right. On seeing this, I was a bit tempted to try to debug it. I found a modern 68000 CPU emulator that I tried to compile on my Mac, but I couldn't get that to work. I've thought, "You know, you have a working emulator..." I have an Atari ST emulator where I can get to the desktop, and run programs off disk images. All I need is an assembler, which I'm sure I can find. I just haven't gotten around to it yet. :)
Great to see a video made on why the Amiga was (and still is) great. There were, of course, a few errors. The biggest one in my mind was saying that the Sound Blaster 1.0 had 8 digital audio channels. It actually only had 1 digital audio channel with no volume register (critical for MODs without CPU sound processing) and only up to 23KHz output sample rate vs the Amiga's 28KHz or 56KHz in double scan rate graphics modes, along with 11 FM synth voices, Game Blaster-compatible 12 PSG voices (very similar in capability to Atari ST's AY voices), and was mono rather than stereo. Even the SB Pro and SB 16 only had 2 digital audio channels--one for each side in stereo--although they removed the barely supported Game Blaster-compatible 12 PSG voices. Amiga music was in general far better sounding than Sound Blaster music, which typically used the FM voices. MODs could be played on the SB, but they required a high amount of CPU usage to process both the volume and frequency of each voice and mix them together in realtime, unlike the Amiga, where the Paula had hardware support for these features, including 4 stereo voices (2 on left and 2 on right channel). And sound and music were in mono on the SB, except in the Pro and later models.
Yes you are correct, i gave the Sound Blaster more credit than it was due there. But ultimately what I was getting at is that the Amiga was ahead in the 80's but the PC was catching up while the Amiga was standing still.
I'm happy that you've mentioned how Amiga's sound capabilities were so ahead of the competition. I can easily say that the first time I had experienced anything that was sonically as impressive as in my Amiga was 15 years later, on a windows 98 pc. Like, to this day I have a whole collection of game music from my Amiga and I can listen to it like it was actual music. Platform wise, I hate PC's and Intel+Microsoft with a passion, dislike Apple's consumer practices and so I feel I've been homeless for the last 20 years. I'm tempted to switch to some Linux OS with an AMD cpu, but I really wish there was a whole new personal computing platform that would give me that feeling of having a machine that I can connect with on an emotional level, like I did with Amiga. If I had a billion dollars lying around, I would attempt at slapping together something like that, or would just buy every Amiga/AmigaOne license and try to make it up to date...
@@Wolf-Spirit_Alpha-Sigma I 100% agree. No PC game music compares to the best Amiga and even C64 and Atari 800-series game music, IMHO. I started using Linux in early 93, a year before 1.0, and was an SGI IRIX (Unix graphics workstations/visualization supercomputers/servers) dev from 93-97. I have to say that the SGI's were a good replacement for the Amiga for me, and then Linux PC's after that. I could recommend some Linux distros and desktops, if you're interested. Have you looked into the Vampire? I have the V2, which is great. The V4 standalone is even more powerful. You can use a Vampire as a modern 68K Amiga. I assume you don't like AmigaOS 4 nor MorphOS, right? You can always install AROS on a PC... I hear you on the billion $/invent a new Amiga idea. I would do the same! Even if I had much less! That's what I would definitely do with my money! The Vampire guys are essentially doing just that, though. With a million $ it could definitely be greatly advanced, though!
@@RetroDawn "Right. It just took the PC a lot longer to pass or even catch up on the audio front than you had stated" Yes...... but the difference between the Amiga and PC is the PC was quick to lead where it matters. Consumer grade digital sound in the 1980s is one area where it's possible to give the point to the Amiga, even though technically digital sound was available for he PC first via professional digital devices. This parallels the fact that the Amiga led also for computer games, especially arcade style sprite based platformers and shooting games. The crucial point to make about it though is: Sound isn't a crucial point to make. One trouble with the Amiga fan base is their obsession for playing computer games blinds them to the fact that, before Doom, the PC was NOT a games machine. It wasn't sold as a games machine, it wasn't bought as a games machine, its users didn't buy the PC to play games so.... the PC had no games-oriented hardware but..... nobody cares. Boasting the Amiga has better sprite and sound hardware than the PC, at least for a little while, is as effective as boasting Roger Federer is a better tennis player than Lewis Hamilton, and from that assuming Roger Federer wins the debate. Look at the context of the present day: Today a top spec PC will grant the user access to undoubtedly the most powerful games hardware money can buy, but here's the thing: Even today in this context of their being the most powerful games machines you can buy Most PCs are still NOT bought or sold as games machines. Even now games are still considered niche for the PC and most PC OEMs today have a separate annexe on their website for games PCs and most of their products are NOT in it. I think if you want to play games, than and now, you are probably better off with a console bought and sold as a pure games machine and that is by far what the most actually people do. Most PCs were then and are still sold as workhorses, not entertainment platforms. This fact primarily explains why Amiga fans prefer Amigas to PCs. It also explains why the Amiga failed and the PC succeeded because the PC massively outsold the Amiga for being the go-to platform for far more important applications than games. Today even the PC marketplace itself has split into three sectors: Home, business and workstations, and even today the business machines far outsell PC games machines. In that sense it's an irrelevance how powerful the Amigas games hardware was, it probably would still have eventually lost. So in the final analysis arguing over whether Amiga or the PC had better sound is like arguing if a Nissan Micra or a Fiat 500 has a better 0-60 time: It just doesn't matter and talking about it represents a total failure to recognise what motivates people to buy cars at that level. The Amiga v PC debate, from the Amiga fan side, is made up of phoney declarations of power which when you look at their content are utterly superfluous and appeal to features that don't really matter. Remember amongst all this smack talk the Amga is the platform which LOST the argument. What's more even within the context of computer games of the 1980s which is the environment which favours the Amiga, a good PC game soundtrack from the first AdLib sound cards is definitely still good enough to sell the game. Even earlier point and click games often don't even need sound at all to deliver the important content of what they had to offer users. Sam & Max hit the road can be played with the sound off and it's still a watertight game experience. I think it's perfectly safe to divide PC history into BC (Before Carmack) and AD (After Doom). I think it is entirely suitable to concede the games market to the Amiga in the BC era, but the Amiga has to concede the games market to the PC in the AD era. What Amiga fans forget is this: In that BC era.... nobody gives a shit about PC games, especially not people actually buying PCs. It's like watching Roger Federer boast to Lewis Hamilton about how is the better tennis player. It's petty, it doesn't matter, and nobody cares. The PC *massively* outsold the Amiga even when it was crap for games because it was the best at what it did do. The PC wasn't fighting for the entertainment space so it is irrelevant it didn't win in that field. Even early PC graphics accelerators and the earliest PC digital sound cards were designed for professional artists not people who play games. The *professional* sound and graphics market was arguably always better on the PC than the Amiga. Amiga fans always cite cost as if it's some kid of trump card but it isn't. A professional doesn't care if they have to spend $5000 on a piece of equipment. Look at the price of synthesisers: The Oberheim OB-x cost $5,000-$6,000 *in 1980*. People didn't go "Oh but it's so expensive the average person in the home couldn't afford them" like Amiga fans do because it does not matter. Pro gear is not marketed towards the average person in the home, they are sold to businesses and pros in studios with higher budgets and to them it's an irrelevance that they can't play games on it. In the end, the Amiga digital sound supremacy argument is stillborn because nobody cares now and nobody buying PCs cares then or now. It's a case of "barking up the wrong tree". We have all the business and industrial software and hardware. So you go and listen to a SoundTracker MOD or play with Imagine 3D, we don't care. Sincerely, PC supremacists.
I glanced through all these comments and it warms the heart to see how many people loved the Amiga. I'm also amazed at how much discussion this video has generated. Full disclosure, I had a second row seat to the Commodore show. I was also among many investors who filed a class action suit against Commodore and in particular their board of directors who purposely killed the machine. They wanted to make a quick buck and move on. There was nothing the matter with the Amiga. I can't even begin to imagine what the development team must have seen.
"I was also among many investors who filed a class action suit against Commodore and in particular their board of directors who purposely killed the machine. " Which is an Amiga fan conspiracy theory. You will have lost your case. You can't take action against somebody because your investment doesn't perform well, although trying to is exactly what people with money would do. There was lots wrong with the Amiga. You will have a hard time making the management argument stick to anybody who lives in the real world because NO amiga performed well. It wasn't that it started out well and was then ruined, it started out badly and continued badly. Fewer people bought the Amiga 1000 than almost any other model. That terrible management you're talking about released the A500 which was the only one to sell in any quantity. The trouble with Amiga fans is they live in a world of confirmation bias where having decided for absolutely no good reason that the Amiga is immaculate they then have to search elsewhere to find a scapegoat to blame for its failure. It's literally a religious cult. It has the same character as belief in God: Apologists begin by believing a benevolent all loving all knowing God exists who answers prayers.... and from that point on they have to invent a whole canon of argumentative waffle to explain away the fact that there is no reason to believe the claims they started out with. Get real: The Amiga wasn't very successful simply because it wasn't a very good choice of purchase. That's literally it.
@@cloerenjackson3699 Actually the suit was filed at the appropriate time during the bankruptcy proceedings. You'll have to look up when that is for any company. We tried to get back even a few cents on the dollar if I recall correctly. It was a long time ago. I would love to see someone do a documentary of that whole part of Commodore's demise from the investors point of view.
@@rklein I didn't say you timed it badly, I said you would not have won your case. The mismanagement argument is one of Amiga fan base mythology: The platform was unsuccessful in all its incarnations. That is not something you can litigate against.
Another very well produced video! I envy your skills and time. Heh. I just…can’t. This was great info. Keep it up and you got yourself huge channel potential! Now for that channel name of yours…hmmmm. ;)
Well the time I won't always have. This kind of video was only really possible due to a Christmas break from work. It took quite a while to compile all this stuff together. Next time I will go for something more underproduced/poorlyproduced.
Yeah, I didn't mention those as I have no experience using them on the Amiga. The only one I know about is Lightwave and I only really saw that in videos recently thanks to th-cam.com/users/HoldandModify where he shows off lots of stuff on Lightwave. I was quite surprised at how good it looks for such an old application.
@@DavePoo2 the most impressive one was Realsoft 2.0 it had everything modern 3D software has, in a less powerful version. It had physic simulation and physically correct rendering.
@@MarquisDeSang I was like WTH is Realsoft 2.0?? I think I used every 3D program on the Amiga at the time so was thinking I missed something. I didn't know that Real 3D had been renamed.
@@MarquisDeSang "Realsoft 2.0 it had everything modern 3D software has" It absolutely did not. "...and physically correct rendering" Wrong. Nothing has that. You know, I know a former Amiga fanatic who now uses Blender and what's annoying watching hi use it is, he uses it having gained previous experience with Amiga rendering programs. He uses it just like you'd use a program which has no powerful animation or object creation features.
@@cloerenjackson3699 Kids now don't know how to make 3D animation, the software does everything for them. The thing that is lacking is special effects, everything else is there. Just like you can do everything with stop motion. If you can move points around, you can model everything. Of course they are 100x less powerful than what we have today, but most of the stuff is already there, just not in an easy fashion (no SDS modeling tools and no programmable shaders).
IMHO: Amiga is still ahead of it's time. We will never catch up with her! The simplicity of the OS is overwhelming. No time wasting on the social media craptalkies... Just beautiful.
I agree the Amiga was ahead of its time, but to say it still is I would disagree. For one thing there is a total lack of security in the operating system, which in today's connected computers world renders it totally unusable for any real business use. If Commodore had carried on, then it would have moved with the times but as it stands it got left behind.
@@DavePoo2 Look at the OS for what it was in it's time, don't look at it with modern eyes that will never work. What i mean is that the basic design is still quite modern 37 years later, not many OS's can say that, many concepts it uses are still being used today like the GUI,multitasking, shared library system just to name a few. Sure it lacks all kind of modern features and security that never got developed because real development ended decades ago.
@@EdgeOfPanic I agree with your comment about the OS being effective and flexible, I honestly think it was the best OS of the day. I was replying to the original comment for this thread that said it is "still" ahead of it's time, which in 2022 it clearly is not.
@@EdgeOfPanic None of the attributes you list about the Amiga OS were introduced with the Amiga OS. The GUI, multitasking and shared libraries all existed prior to the Amiga. I don't think anything in the Amiga hardware represented a concept which first appeared with the Amiga.
My favourite computer of all time was the a1000. I saved up my money and it was worth every cent. Revolutionised the home pc industry…and the commercial graphics industry for that matter… great video, thank you.
Wow, you actually had the 1000 at time of release? I don't think it actually sold that well at release and they probably didn't make that many so it seems to be quite rare now. Do you still have it?
@@DavePoo2 I wish. I also got a sidecar for it, which was damn amazing. I then went to a a2000 with an a2286 card. The a1000 form factor was the best though.
@@sulrich70 Pretty amazing also that you could run a PC on a card inside the big box Amgia. I didn't know until recently that something like that was even possible.
@@sulrich70 The Amiga sidecar is incredibly slow. Also, it says something: If PCs are so crap.... why would you need a sidecar? Meanwhile, you could also get 68000 daughtercards for the PC. You could even run operating systems from them. Not the Amiga OS though. You could get 68000 PC daughtercards before the Amiga was released. Slow? No. The cards had their own RAM so they didn't need to use the bus except to transfer software on to them.
the Amiga pre-emptive multi-tasking was looked askance at, though, because the 68000 didn't have memory protection features nor was such added externally (the lowly 6809-based Tandy Coco3, in contrast, did page mapping via its GIME chip and could thereby protect the OS9 kernel and user processes from each other via private address spaces); then the business market looked askance at the interleaved display as something that would cause eye strain for their workers if they had to deal all day with such a display
I'm not sure you can call the Amiga's multitasking pre-emptive, one wrong call to Exec.Forbid() and you soft lock the whole system. A bigger problem was lack of memory protection between tasks.
@@SerBallister I can still call it pre-emptive multitasking, as the call you mentioned is not required to make a program schedule properly, wheras in co-op multitasking, calls like that are required to be used by the program to make it work at all. That said, it does seem like rather a dangerous call to have in the library, so i wonder how many programs actually used that? hopefully not many. It was a bit of weird time in computing as you could still write a program that would completely take over the OS (games did this). As for the memory protection, the lack of it doesn't stop it being pre-emptive multitasking. There is a distinct lack of security across the whole OS, it just wasn't a thing at the time. The OS doesn't even have the concept of different user logins (it doesn't even have any login), and yes any program can read/write any section of memory anywhere. It really was the wild-west days of home computing, but none of that stopped it from being pre-emptive multitasking, but definitely as reason why you can't use an Amiga today for anything serious (don't do your internet banking on an Amiga!).
@Paul Irvine - I'm a little younger than you (currently 43, for what it's worth), so I was in my last year of primary school when I got my first Amiga - but I absolutely get what you mean. Based on my reading when I was younger and over the years, my belief is that what set the Amiga apart was that it was clearly a passion project for the team who designed it - all of them from Jay Miner on down apparently put their heart and soul into giving life (of a sort) to those little bits of silicon despite the occasionally troubled business situation Amiga Inc. found themselves in during the early days - I think the same was true of the earlier Atari 400/800 (led by Jay again) and the C64 (the effort that Al Charpentier, Bob Yannes and Charles Winterble led was nigh-on superhuman given the deadlines they faced). Another thing common to the C64 and Amiga was that when some of the original designers left CBM (due to being unhappy with how the company treated them) those initial efforts inspired equally gifted engineers within CBM (for example - and in both cases - Dave Haynie) to continue and improve on their work with the same level of dedication. As with any technology, there were teething problems and compromises that had to be made during development and preparing for production, but by all accounts the team really cared about making the best possible choices. And one result of that was - while the Amiga did have some flaws - as you say, from a user's perspective it just "felt 'right'". In other words, a lot of love was put into that machine, and as a user I have to say I (vicariously) felt it. Another outcome of that dedication (and this is true of the C64 as well) was that the resulting machine/platform ended up being far more capable in reality than it appeared on paper. The enthusiast user base and demoscenes for both platforms are not only still going strong, but continue to discover genuinely stunning capabilities that go way beyond even the designers' expectations (I was blown away recently when I saw a C64 demo include what looked like a pukka 3D raycasting engine that was not only running, but doing so at a decent framerate!). However in the case of the Amiga this is occasionally bittersweet; for example a rash of practically arcade-perfect conversions released by enthusiasts in the last few years shows just how badly and how often the platform was short-changed by some games publishers. Specifically by making their dev teams focus primarily on the less-capable ST versions, then porting those across to the Amiga towards the end of the project with little or no time to make improvements. Speaking specifically of the UK here, I wonder how many sales were lost to the Mega Drive because kids and teens of my generation saw them running the same games in shops or visiting friends and couldn't help but notice how much better many of the MD's games and conversions looked. Of course, to my mind what made the Amiga special over and above the consoles was that it didn't just play games; as a creative platform it was absolutely unparalleled - while myself (and I'm sure many others around my age) started off playing games, it enticed us with the potential for making our own stuff and crucially, unlike its 8-bit predecessors, being able to code was not a prerequisite... DPaint (still IMO one of the most powerful and intuitive pixel-art editors in history) came with the machine, music trackers were freeware (and often included on magazine coverdisks), and you could start teaching yourself coding if you liked while still creating tangible results. Not only was this unprecedented in general terms, but it could do all of this "*out of the box*", meaning that kids like me (whose families weren't particularly well-off) were able to discover capabilities *we* didn't know we had just using the base machine. I'm certain that among my generation there are thousands (at least) of us who wouldn't be doing what we're doing now if it weren't for the Amiga, and I think that's one reason the platform is as beloved as it is. To come back around to what I was saying in the beginning in response to your post, you said "sometimes you felt little towards a machine (the ST in my case)". Maybe it's coincidental, but unlike the Amiga, the ST was not so much a passion project as the result of a business-driven attempt to design and build a 16-bit platform both to a very short deadline and down to a price point. What Shiraz Shivji and his team achieved despite those limitations was remarkable, but there's no getting around the fact that the design came more out of necessity than desire. Over and above that, Jack Tramiel's motivation in green-lighting the ST was specifically to spite both CBM (who had unceremoniously defenestrated him as CEO) and Amiga Inc. (who reneged on his offer to buy their chipset in favour of CBM buying them outright). The IBM PC and compatibles were essentially the embodiment of faceless corporate "design by committee", and while Apple's Macintosh was presented slickly, it was also underpowered and overpriced (plus ca change). On top of that, initially Steve Jobs was never enamoured with the project - he was essentially forced to make it the flagship platform after his true passion project, the Lisa, flopped. I guess what I'm saying is that the Amiga was probably the last major platform released where the team who made it truly loved it. From my perspective, I think that made all the difference.
Yeah, I think to put it succinctly, the Amiga had a heart and soul, something that many machines back then had too, the Apple II, the C64, the Atari 8-bit line. Modern machines, as marvelous as they are, I just don't get that feeling from them. On your point about the shoddy arcade conversions, i would say that certainly some publishers were guilty of pushing out poor software back then, but it is true to say that software/game development has moved on leaps and bounds since then, and we know things now that we didn't back then, and we have better and faster tools for game dev, so modern games for retro platforms should always be better than what was made back then, but the games from back then were certainly more of an achievement to behold. With regards to your learning to code etc on the Amiga, well that's what I did and it's where I first really started to understand how computers and software worked. So the Amiga is and always will be special to me (and others), regardless of it's capabilities and flaws.
@@DavePoo2 - Thank you ever so much for the reply; much appreciated! I agree with almost all of what you're saying; my one minor quibble is with regard to "we know things now that we didn't back then, and we have better and faster tools for game dev" - which is both absolutely correct and a valid point; however at the same time I don't think that excuses things entirely... For example, consider the conversion of "Super Hang-On" - the 8-bit and Atari ST conversions were reviewed and released in late 1988 (Electric Dreams neither planned nor intended an Amiga conversion). Zareh Johannes (aka ZZKJ) worked on both the CPC and ST conversions, and being somewhat of a hardware design geek, he wanted to get hold of an Amiga to see what it could do and (I believe) used his earnings from that work to buy one. In order to teach himself what the Amiga might be capable of, he took his ST conversion of SHO as a baseline, got it working as a straightforward port and then got stuck into figuring out how he could use the Amiga's capabilities to improve it. Working off his own back for several months, he figured out how to use the Copper to drive the background gradients and road drawing routine, how to use the Blitter to draw the other bikes and roadside objects more efficiently, and how to use the hardware sprites to draw the nitro flames from the exhaust. He took his work to Electric Dreams, and they offered him a fairly paltry sum to finish it in the next couple of months (along with minor graphical improvements and having someone convert the music). The end result was released and reviewed in early 1989 - about 6 months after the ST release - and it set the standard for 2.5d racing games on the Amiga for about a year and a half (until Lotus 1 came out). Setting aside games designed specifically for the Amiga, the only reason there was an arcade conversion which even began to exploit what it could do in 1989 was because the developer chose to start the project out of curiosity, with no guarantee of being paid by the publisher. IMO that level of cynicism and laziness was inexcusable.
Wonderful video. Even considering all the computers that came out afterwards the Amiga was special in so many ways. PCs are so fast now that they can get away with the software being layers upon layers of cruft.
Yes, that's worth mentioning actually, that back when you made a game for the Amiga, you actually programmed the hardware, not for any software layer (DirectX, Winsock, Windows File API etc ... ). So basically when you think about it, every game contained it's own OS and did stuff as fast as possible because of it. Nowadays, a they are now trying to get rid of the overhead in API's for games, things like Mantle API came out for graphics, and the same game with just a different API was just running 10% faster just because of the lack of overhead. Cruft indeed!
There were a lot of comments re the C64 comparisons, which for me is a bit naughty as it should have been the Atari 8 bit line which was it's closest cousin, also designed by Jay Miner. The Amiga had copper lists while the Atari had Display List interrupts, the Atari had sprites, a custom sound chip etc etc, all Miners excellent work. So simply connecting it to another Commodore machine is a little naughty.
It was the C64's successor for Commodore, if they hadn't have acquired Amiga then they would have need to develop something to succeed it. I compare it to that as it was then Commodore's replacement for the C64. However, you are right, the Atari 8-bit is the Amiga's bloodline so to speak. If you want to trace computer bloodlines via their designers then I'm sure there will be a lot of interbreeding going on.
@@DavePoo2 Just so you know, my comment wasn't a slight at you, I just wanted to introduce at least a mention of where the Amiga started from, while it is in company terms an update to the C64 line, it actually had a genuine family link elsewhere. As for interbreeding, yes, totally, and much needed for growth but thankfully there's also fresh thinkers like Jay was (RIP) out there too. Happy video'ing..
@@Mclaneinc Thats cool. I did put in the stuff about the 2600 at the start. A mention about the Atari hardware would have been a good thing to add in retrospect.
My dad still owns an amiga today. We play stuff like Swos, Treasure Island, Monkey island, Dynablaster, Insectoids(mentioning the professional moves my sister somehow got with 4yo my god) SSF, 2 Lotus Turrican and other stuff this list is getting too long. I kinda grew up with that stuff since i was like 6-7. We also owned a gamecube (fun times) and of corse the Computer where i watched my dad play metroid. I grew up with gaming and i am glad i did. Incase you think that i am like an adult now remembering my childhood. I am a 14 yo that has a dad who still loves old games and tbh i dont blame him. Theyre great fun :) I think its also kinda funny to see so many modern games based on them and alot of the players dont even realise. Sorry for long text nostalgia kicked in i had to emtpy that bucket of emotions somewhere
That's awesome, I think there are a lot of mums/moms and dads now who are showing their children the computers that they grew up with. Many of the games are still very fun today (some not so much), and it's really good to see how we got to where we are today in modern gaming (many of the people who wrote those old games are still in the industry today).
@@satanslovechild8082 Yeah, the Falcon. It's shame that the original ST didn't have better specs (but then it did come out before the Amiga and it was much cheaper). The Falcon came very late in the game.
17:00 to add my 2 cents, Unix was already multitasking and multiusers since the beginning in 1972. However, the ressource demanded made Unix almost inaccessible to desktop computers at the time...
@@DavePoo2 Maybe. Anyway, the correct move for Commodore would have been to: licence pro softwares like Excel, the Amiga was wayyyyy faster than the Mac, and also licence production to chinese makers, to get affordable clones using the original chipset and eventually flood the market
@@CaptainDangeax "Maybe. Anyway, the correct move for Commodore would have been to: licence pro softwares like..." I object to "what if..." scenarios on the grounds that you can make any case for anything you want on the grounds of what it would be like if it was like something it wasn't like. You can make the case for the PC by listing all the things you didn't like about it and saying "What if...."... whatever that thing was you didn't like was removed and things you liked were added. What if the PC had 32 channel digital stereo sound, QHD resolution 120Hz graphics, an Intel Pentium Pro level CPU and cost $500 with a colour monitor on the day of its release in 1981? It's just stupid, isn't it? Via "What if..." scenarios you can imagine anything happened any way you can imagine. It just doesn't mean anything because that ultimately is Not what things were like.
@@cloerenjackson3699 It's not stupid as long as it is possible. Your scenario about the 1981 IBM PC IS stupid indeed because the technology you mentionned didn't exist. Let me give you another one to work on: instead of 4,77 MHz 1MB addressable ram 8bit bus 8088, what if IBM had choosen the 68000 (possible because it was already on the market) which can address 16MB of RAM (instead of one) and in one chunck (8086/88 had to use segments). You have 4 hours, 4000 words minimum. No, let me shorten it for your education. The Atari ST is actually the reference design for the 68000. If IBM had choosen the 68000 in 1981, you'd have had a professionnal equivalent of the Atari ST, more expensive with no sound (and maybe no color) but able to go up to 16MB of Ram
@@CaptainDangeax My example is stupid, but it's merely to highlight the stupidity of Amiga fan fantasy timelines where they pretend things were not how they obviously were. Especially if, as you did, you fantasise an outcome was substantially more or less realistic than it obviously was: At the time of the release of the Amiga sprite scaling hardware wasn't realistic in a consumer level device of the same date and price and complexity. There isn't even any sign Commodore had the talent or resources to achieve bitmap rotation in an ASIC.. Your implication of "It would be just a simple matter of..." is the stuff of fiction. What if IBM had used a 68000? As you said, in 1981 it would have been expensive. The 8088 meant cheaper simpler motherboards and it also meant much more industry support arriving from developers who'd previously developed software for the 8080. The software base for the PC evolved rapidly and the platform itself was affordable to businesses of all sizes. ISA board manufacturer was easy and a large third party base of industrial hardware and exotic add in boards arrived plentifully and rapidly. So by the time the Amiga appeared the PC already had more than five million users making it attractive to developers whereas the A1000 had none and it also supported a raft of industry standard software applications while the A1000 had none. A cut price PC was also already cheaper than an A1000. So again, for most people buying a computer the Amiga A1000 was not a no brainer choice over the PC, not even based on audio sample playback hardware and a blitter and copper and marketing, and hoping buyer stupidity is solely to blame is obviously just silly. The truth is far simpler: The Amiga simply wasn't an attractive choice given what people actually wanted from a desktop PC purchase and most of the Amiga features fans cite are basically irrelevant to what people who bought PCs want a PC to do for them.
As a note on the Amiga using planar vs chunky what Jay miner was quoted against was years later when memory bandwidth became less of a problem. Back in 1985 chunky (1 bytes/8bits) was more than any reasonable hardware was capable of. Even the PC was using planar on some graphics systems. If you look at the hardware the PC VGA (256 colour/1 byte) systems were using, it becomes apparent what obstacles they were overcoming. Cards cost more than an A500 just to display graphics and you also needed a new monitor. hindsight is 20/20 and maybe Jay had an idea how to overcome the issues. To put it into car terms :- VGA required a big block V8 but Amiga planar required an eco drive. They both have there upside, Power vs efficiency but it's what you want to put in to get to the destination.
Yes, Jay stated he wished he had gone with pixel graphics instead of bitplane graphics, but I suspect that at the time the Amiga was designed, bitplane graphics were probably the correct choice to get the speed required. As time went by, the Amiga should have incorporated a pixel graphics mode, but it didn't advance enough to do that, and may somewhat of been held back by hardware compatiblity (however the Atari ST I believe did later introduce pixel graphics into their hardware).
A great and informative video. It's amazing to see how far ahead of time the Amiga really was! And that said from an Atari fanboy (see my channel ^^)! Actually I also had an A500 for some years back then. 😁 A really interesting detail in Workbench (since which version, or is it an additional program?) is the support for the scroll wheel of a modern mouse. Just checking an option and it works? That's what I really still miss on my STs and Falcon!
Thanks, I hope I didn't come across as too much of an Amiga fanboy, I was trying to be reasonable objective. It's interesting if you watch the Jay Miner videos that Atari had actually funded the Amiga development, and as Amiga nearly went bust, the entire chipset would have been owned by Atari if Commodore hadn't stepped in. The scroll wheel support has been added in Amiga OS 3.2 which was released this year!! (2021), it's amazing to think that they would still updating the OS in 2021.
@@DavePoo2 Yes, it's really amazing what some people still do for our old hardware. Also for the Atari ST there are still developments for the OS (TOS), like EmuTOS which also got an update this year.
well, even on Amiga the scrollwheel is just a thing for emulators, dont think you can connect scrollwheel mouse to OG Amiga (maybe via RS232?), but same EmuTOS supports scrollwheel. BTW, TPau65 I do like and hate your channel. I like it due to your content and I hate it since you own the Falcon I never got in 90s, and always wanted.
When I first got one of these as a young teenager it felt like I had Deep Thought sat on my desk. It stayed with me all the way to university and did all of my desktop publishing. It was great.
Very nice video and great coverage of the strengths this amazing machine had. There's one feature that I've never seen anyone mention though, it was a true multi-user machine as well. I had three Amiga 2000s in my office and a very powerful Amiga 4000 tower system in another building that would sit idle for certain times of each day. I was importing and manipulating huge AutoCad files in Pagestream for creating mapping/engineering documents and even though the A2000s could do it, they were very slow. So, I would simply remote login to the A4000 and send it's display back to my computer while leveraging all the horsepower of the A4000! As a matter of fact, the Amigas could do anything my $50k Sun Sparc pizza box could do. Best damn computer ever!!! :-)
I think the multitasking capabilities were very far ahead of their time. The Mac was honestly a pile of crap (didn't Steve Jobs do a funeral for that OS on stage when they got rid of it?), and DOS was well, it was DOS and windows was just built on top of that for years to come. The Amiga had a huge head start in the race to get a decent OS.
@@DavePoo2 the Amiga was WAY ahead of the others by many years. Sometimes I think Dale and the gang decided that if the Sun and HP workstations could do it then the Amiga could do it too. Here's another thing, how many people remember the Amiga Key + M? I would run each machine in it's own screen and simply toggle between them. I could even toggle to an Xwindows session running on other Unix workstations! All from my little Amiga. Oh, and one Amiga had a Video Toaster. I would build a scene in Lightwave 3D and while it rendered would toggle to another machine. I'm not even sure any machine can do that stuff today. I guess using Teamviewer. LOL
@@cloerenjackson3699 yes, I used one program to remotely display Amiga to Amiga, then used an Xwindow client to remote into any of the Unix based machines, used a Telnet client as well. The ability to run stuff in stacked screens and toggling between them is built into the Amiga OS. Also, the release of a networking program/hardware is what made all this possible, probably the original TCP/IP program. I can't remember the actual names of these programs but if you just put "Ami" in front of the subject that was the general naming convention back then! I guess the old adage, "only the good die young" applied to the amazing Amiga. LOL
@@rklein I understand the Xwindows part, Xwindows was built as a networkable GUI on Unix, it's the bits which are specific to the Amiga I don't understand. I don't know what you mean by "stacked screens". What are the things you were doing with the Amiga you were unable to do on other systems?
People seem to forget Miner's work on the Atari 8bit line architecture. They were the first home machines with co processors designed to shift work from the cpu (hardware scrolling and sprites), the first home computer with svideo output and the first machine with a "USB" type of peripheral connecting port. Tones of colors (actually 256) and polyphonic sound(4 channels). He and his team produced masterpieces well ahead of their time.
Yep, all the computers he did were always pushing the home computing forward in leaps and bounds. The Atari 8-bit was actually my first home computer, I didn't find out until a lot later that it was basically designed by the Amiga designer. Masterpieces indeed!
@@DavePoo2 They were so ahead of their time that Amiga(2 years delay!) almost didn't get the recognition it deserved during its commercial life while the limits of the Atari 8bit line are still in search by home-brew projects.
I didn't own a 1200 until recently, I always wanted one back in the day, but by the time I could actually afford one ..... well there was "Doom", so it was time for a PC.
@@DavePoo2 The Amiga did later get an actual _Doom_ port (I remember _Amiga Format_ reviewing it circa 1999). Unfortunately I guess it was a classic case of “too little, too late”, as many people (developers and gamers alike) had already called it a day as far as the Amiga was concerned, and (like its PC counterpart) you needed a fairly souped-up/accelerated Amiga to run it. What does make me sad is that, during the Amiga’s heyday, people who used PCs for their work frequently refused to see the Amiga as anything other than a games machine even though there was serious software released for it (and it seemed like a lot of it was pretty good, too), yet when _Doom_ came out and became the phenomenon that it ultimately did, suddenly the PC was no longer just the uncool grey box for office/business use and suddenly became the must-have machine for gaming.
@@Texy88 Again it does show how ahead of it's time the Amiga was. A machine that wanted to be considered as both a games machine and an business machine. Something that wasn't a thing back then, but nowadays you would expect any PC or Mac to be capable of gaming even if you bought it for business purposes.
@@DavePoo2 To me, Amiga was - whether you were a gamer or used it for serious purposes - the go-to machine for those who “wanted it hot for not a lot”. Back in its heyday even for games PC users quite often had to fulfil certain graphics-card and/or memory requirements, whereas for the Amiga the vast majority of games would run without the need for graphics cards, accelerator cards and lots of additional RAM (and whenever additional RAM was required it tended to be only a requirement of one megabyte in total within the computer).
@@Texy88 I agree, you got a huge bang for your buck with the Amiga. I didn't go into the cost in this video as I wanted to just concentrate on the hardware, but the Amiga was not the cheapest, but I don't think there were any other computers at it's price point that could do what it could do
Amiga, the best home computer system ever made. :) On the subject of A500 RAM expansion slot... it was actually possible to convert those extra 512KB of RAM from CHIP to FAST, and vice versa, by cutting one line, and connecting two lines, directly on the motherboard. Instructions on how to do that had appeared in a local gaming magazine, and as any adventurous teenage boy would've done, I immediately got to work on it. I even improved upon it by taking an auto-fire switch from a broken joystick I had lying around, and turned it into a CHIP/FAST RAM switch sticking out on the side of my Amiga like it was always meant to be a part of her design. Some older games just wouldn't work with 1MB of CHIP RAM, so that was a perfect solution to the problem. On the subject of the awesomeness of the Copper chip... if I remember correctly, each Copper instruction would take a couple of screen pixels to execute, so the obvious thing to do was to take one of those awesome level-loading screens from the Agony game, turn them into a Copper instruction list, and then... display that as a background image while working in the Workbench. Ah, the good old days of Amiga... when you could load an application into AsmOne disassembler, change it so that it did what you actually wanted it do, and then recompile the whole thing into your own home-brewed version to use to your pleasure. Never again will there be a system like Amiga...
I think the 1Mb chip on the A500 was only possible depending on which version of Agnus you had right? It wouldn't have converted it to fast, it would have converted it from slow memory to real chip memory. Yeah, people made demos that just made images by changing a single color value in the copper, pretty cool stuff.
A very clever guy and it's a shame he died before his time. From what I can tell from the videos and quotes, he also seemed like a very likeable and approachable person, not really what you would expect from the stereotypical grey bearded hardware designer.
If Amiga makes a come back with modern hardware and software, I will be first inline !!! Brilliant Video thanks. Would love to see a series on making games on the Amiga....
I hate to say it, but if it made a comeback with modern hardware & software, it would probably be very much like the PC/Mac we have today, but who knows what could have been if Commodore could have carried on without making a mess of the company. In the future I might do some videos where I program the blitter a little, but I doubt I will have time outside my day job to program a full game. I'd like to do some tests to show off what the blitter could do, and possibly show why it didn't advance as much as it should in the later Amigas.
I used to use midi on the Amiga 500, you just needed a peripheral to do it. I always thought it was weird that music seemed to be the Atari ST domain, but I suppose that the Atari had just accumulated lots of good music software due to it's affiliation with music (although i thought Bars & Pipes on the Amiga was excellent).
@@DavePoo2 " I always thought it was weird that music seemed to be the Atari ST domain" I don't. It's just the path of least resistance: The ST had integrated MIDI. Same as the Amiga being used in some video applications such as the titles for The Chart Show because the base model was easily programmed and genlock compatible. C'est ca, viola.
@@DavePoo2 True.... .. But it's not completely true though. Faster Amigas use the CPU to software mix to more channels. I used 24 channels on my 060 when using Digibooster Pro ;) Fasttracker 2 also used software mixing on the PC to get more than the two channels the PC soundcards had :)
Well, you could mix audio on the CPU on the slower Amigas as well if required. But that's not really an advancement in hardware capability. It was pretty cool that you could use the CPU to do stuff like that, it made the Amiga very versitile, but ultimately, video games would have liked to have been able to play more sfx & music (or both at the same time), without stealing any more CPU from the game.
On the subject of the "slow fast RAM" on the A500 expansion bus, there was a hack you could do that made it true fast RAM, I remember doing it on my first A500 (KS1.3), it was a case of cutting some tracks on the Mainboard. Sadly this worked which meant I was soon putting my A1200 in a Microniks Tower case complete with a GBP 68030 and 6882 with 2MB of RAM, and a Zorro 2 board and additional hard drives (whopping 80MB), Then I got the Siamese system (Anyone remember them? an ISA card that linked a PC and an Amiga,) then finally I had saved enough for my A3000 and a 17" CRT.... Soon a 68060, CV643D GFX card, and a 486SX bridge board was in that A3000, together with Shapeshifter, I had an AmigaMacPC........ Then Command & Conquer & Doom was released and a Pentium 120MHz arrived and the A3000 was either sold or put in the loft (Dune 2 and Alien Breed 3D no longer seemed so good) . I am hoping its in the loft! together with the Microniks A1230 and my Atari 800XL!) The Amiga is still my favourite computer. It was so ahead of its time, being multi-media before the term even existed. It could do all the Mac could do, better and faster, and had GFX and sound that a monochrome or CGA PC could only dream of. Sadly the Mac had Steve Jobs and the Amiga had Irving Gould. The rest was history, it will always be computings "what if?" .
Wow, you had some real kit there, and you think you may still have some of it in the loft! Well worth checking out, maybe it all still works? Did the A500 mod just turn the slow ram into chip RAM? and then only if you had a certain Agnus in the board? I'm not up on my A500 board mods. Oh and DOOM and C&C, those were the days I remember after the Amiga was put to rest. I think my first PC might have been a P133.
@@DavePoo2 Hi Dave, From memory it was a Fat Agnus that was required (but they were socketed so easy to change?) and it turned it into genuine Fast RAM, so a slight increase (Though now I am wondering if it turned it into genuine Chip RAM, it was a long time ago), I also experimented with a 68010 in the A500, though that didnt last long and also a 14MHz 68000? Well thats what I remember but its a long, long time ago. I used to like hacking around with hardware back then. I do remember as the Amiga that was genuinely for those that "thought different". It wasn't a marketing slogan, it was a genuine feeling. Our local Amiga group was a fun little bunch, always trying new things. It was before everything got locked down, hell I still recall getting my first modem and discovering BBS, and the awesome Demo scene, Fred Fish Floppies and Aminet CDs. The Amiga was about so much more than the hardware, I guess the whole Jay Miner, RJ Mical, Dave Haynie philosophy just rubbed off on users. I have had many Computers since then, but the one I feel love for is the Amiga. As soon as they released that little A500 Mini, I got one, discovered you could load workbench on it, as well as lots of others games and I haven't left it alone. (I have used it more than the new Mac Studio that I bought last month, I fact I have been looking at getting an A600 case and putting it in there.... Oh and Superfrog , Pinball Fantasies, Sensible Soccer, Cannon Fodder and Ratsoft's Defender are just as great as I remember. I genuinely feel lucky to have been a part of that scene, before computers got commercialised and homogenised. Long live the Amiga I say. :)
@@DavePoo2 I will give you a brief synopsis I am 57, (hell I'm younger than Brad Pitt, but you wouldn't believe it) I'm from Uk and when I was at secondary school (The old "Comprehensive"), we got to pick "Computer studies", so I did, in those days we programmed with punch cards that went once a week to a local mainframe operated by the county council and we got some run time. and a print out. Then suddenly a Commodore Pet arrived, paid for by the PTA. We finally had a "PC" shared between 1280 pupils, we had arrived! At this time I was spending a lot of time in the arcades, (I still recall my fist encounter with Space Invaders, that last bugger was hard to hit) , I learnt the "pattern" to many games (I could "walk " and "clock" invaders, knew the secret hiding space on Pacman, where the monsters would glide right past) but my greatest love back then (apart from a certain girl called Debbie ;)) was Eugene Jarvis's seminal masterpiece Defender, how the hell he fitted all that into 16K is a mystery. I was one of the best back then, and 10P could last hours. I was soon banned from playing it in the local arcade. So I moved to Phoenix, the game not the place :) In 1982 I dropped out of college and had to get a job, having the gift of the gab I went to work in the City of London at an Ad agency and was earning a fair crack, so I sold my ZX80 (the one with 1K RAM with the additional 16K RAM pack that would disconnect if a fly landed on a feather pillow in Outer Mongolia), and bought an Atari 800XL from Dixons.... (With the cassette deck and 10 shite titles!) for £79.99 I loved that little beast, Star Raiders was awesome, and I literally crapped my pants playing Rescue on Fractalus late one night when the alien attacked!), I then got hooked on Microprose titles like F15-Strike Eagle and Silent Service, a game so good I decided to buy the 1050 Floppy disk drive just to speed up loading times...at £139 it was a lot more than the Atari 800XL but I was hooked. Anyway while I was in Silica Systems in Oxford Street's Selfridges buying the 1050 , they had an Amiga A1000 playing the Juggler demo...I remember looking at it, it was graphically in a different league to the 800XL (Despite both having chipsets designed by Jay Miner), within a couple of months I had stopped seeing Debbie and started saving for an Amiga, luckily the A500 came out and I soon had one. I saw Debbie a few years ago, lucky escape I reckon ;)
Seeing the bit about how the 68000 is, in reality, no faster in carrying out operations than a 6502 is really interesting to me. I remember hearing one other source comment about this, but it didn't make sense to me. Hearing Ed Logg talk about "8 clock cycles per instruction" helped, because I've looked at the clock cycles for 6502 instructions, and some of them are quite a bit faster than that, like 2 or 3. Like Logg said, "larger registers is really all you get." I had the thought that the programming experience is a lot nicer, since I had the opportunity to program in 68000 assembly, and I've since done some 6502 programming. I have nicer memories of programming on the 68000. But the question has remained on my mind, "So, that's really all that was gained? A nicer programming model, more opcodes, larger registers?..." I had an Atari Mega STe in the early '90s, and I recall that running it at 8 Mhz, the screen updates in the GUI were a bit sluggish (I could up it to 16 Mhz with a soft-switch, at which point the updates became a bit faster). I've been thinking that I wonder if someone had brought out a 6502 machine with the same graphics and sound capabilities, with bank-switched memory to enable it to get up to a couple megabytes, would it have run just as fast? Logg seemed to say so. Interesting... It also makes me wonder about Miner's motivations, because in a history I read on why he founded Amiga, it said that when he was at Atari, he wanted to develop a 68000 system, but Atari was only interested in developing things for the 6502. So, he left, and worked at a hearing aid company for a bit (as I recall), and then was approached by another former Atari engineer, who talked him into founding his own company. What did he, or anyone else for that matter, think they were gaining by developing a 68000 system (this includes Atari under Tramiel, and while we're at it, Apple's engineers, with the Lisa and Macintosh)? I'm not asking rhetorically. I figure Miner, and these other people, must've had a good reason. I have my own reasons for preferring it, but what was it that attracted them to it?
Well, the 68000 had a 16-bit data bus and a greater than 16-bit address bus. So the big advantage there is that you can address larger amounts of memory without the need for banking or any kind of MMU, this basically means the computer is both cheaper and ultimately much more friendly to program. The next advantage is then that it becomes much easier to do more revisions of the machine that move to a larger address bus (e.g the A1200 which had a 24-bit address bus and a full 32-bit address bus, yet could still run all the same software as it's predecessor). The 6502 was always going to be stuck with a 8-bit data bus as it's just part of it's design. The Commodore 128 managed to get 128Kb of memory working on it, but it had to jump through a lot of hoops to get that. The other thing worthy of note is that the 68000 does have more registers as Ed Logg points out, and that is actually quite valuable. The 6502 only had 3 registers and only one of them could actually be used for math (it did have the zero page as well, but that isn't quite as fast as the registers), the 68000 had 8 data registers, all of which are capable of doing math operations (plus 7 address registers as well). So ultimately, the 68000 is a better processor than it's 8-bit predecessors, but I think it's just important to realise, that it isn't better because it clocks higher, it's better because it had more features, it's a much easier to use from a software programming point of view, it can access lots of memory without banking and extra chips, and it left the door open for future hardware upgrades to 32-bit, and later to get coupled with the 68881 floating point processor.
@@DavePoo2 - What about the 65816, though, which was the 16-bit successor to the 6502 (featured in the Apple IIGS)? Looking up its spec's, it was backward-compatible with the 6502, but could switch modes between 8- and 16-bit registers, and effectively had a 24-bit address bus, able to access up to 16 MB of memory (though, it sounds like it in fact had a 16-bit address bus, with the upper 8 bits used to do bank-switching). It did not become available until 1985, though, which was the same year the Amiga came out. So, it was a new, relatively untested technology (the 68000 had been around since 1979), and Amiga started developing its computer in 1982, as I recall. I guess too little, too late for Western Digital. I had a friend in college who had a IIGS, and I thought it stacked up well against 16-bit machines. The graphics and sound capabilities were very impressive compared to the older Apple II's. I looked at its GUI. It compared well with the ST's GEM interface, and I'd say its sound capabilities easily beat the ST's. And it was running at 2.8 Mhz. Thinking about the bank switching on the 6502, it reminds me of the segmented memory model that used to be the bane of PC programmers' existence. I didn't use it (much), but what I heard about that was addressing on the 8086 had two parts: You'd have a segment address, and then an offset (a relative address) you'd use to access memory within the segment. This was why programmers tended to rave about using the 68000, because you didn't need to deal with any of that. I ran into the segmented memory model a bit when I programmed for MS-DOS in one of my first jobs out of school, in the mid-1990s. I was programming in C, and when I'd look at memory values, the IDE (Borland C++) portrayed it as a flat memory model. I ended up using a 286 DOS extender, because the tool I was developing was running up against the 640K limit of DOS. I thought the extender was going to give me enough memory to complete the project, but no... Even with that, all global variables and string constants (which I had a lot of) were stored in a single 64K segment, and I ran out of that... It was only then I learned that the only way out of that was to store all string literals in a resource file, which would cause the compiler to store them outside this segment. I was SO glad to get away from DOS! Working with bank-switching does seem difficult, because you can't just program the way you want to. For transferring state between banks, you have to do two steps: transfer what you want into a portion of main memory that isn't bank-selected, so you can turn the first bank off, and the other one on, and then transfer the state to where you actually want it to go. Likewise, if you want to branch between two banks, you effectively need a jump table, because you can't just branch to the address you want. You need to jump out of the bank you're using, into a portion of main memory, into a routine that will turn off the bank you're branching from, turn on the bank you're going into, and then branch you to where you need to go. And it's all effectively relative addressing, because all banks start at the same address. So, yes, it involves jumping through some hoops. :)
@@DavePoo2 - Re. the 68000, I know what you mean about the registers. When I started doing some 6502 programming several years ago, I was struck by there only being 3 of them, with the accumulator (A) being the one you used for just about *everything*. As I got more into it, I saw some code examples where programmers used the stack to temporarily store A, X, and Y, because the programmer needed those registers for something else for a little bit, but they didn't want to lose the state, and they didn't want to set up temporary addresses to store the values. As I learned about the 65C02, I learned that the designer(s) added a few instructions for doing just this (transferring X and Y register values to and from the stack, in addition to transferring A), since programmers were doing this often. Once you learn what you need to do to keep everything working, it's not a big deal, because you can manage with the processor's limited registers, but I remember it felt luxurious on the 68000 that it had as many address and data registers as it did. It seemed like the instruction set was also very well-designed. I've felt fortunate that it was the first processor on which I learned assembly.
Possibly, but I picked on the C64 & C128 as they were Commodores own product (even though they were developed by a completely different team). The Atari 8-bits were technically Jay Miner's predecessor computer, and actually my first computer was the Atari 65XE (what i most remember about that computer was the super long loading times for games on cassette)
What a fantastic overview. Cheers Dave. A truly, truly stunning computer, light years ahead of it's time. Unfortunately, badly let down by poor management. Then again, the PC was catching up fast and 3rd party audio and GFX cards would make the PC's 'win' inevitable. Of course, the consoles applied a wee bit of pressure too. Still, it's legacy will live forever. I still have my A500 and A1200, but have taken the source code and assets from the software, including several games, that I wrote waay back then, and transferred them into VSCode. Adding the fantastic Amiga Assembly extension (+ UAE emulator), I now have a development system equally light years ahead of what I was using on the real Amiga (ASM-One). The only 'hard bit' is trying to read that old source code and remember exactly what the code is doing. Still, I now have the internet infinite library to help....info overload!
The Amiga was great and it held up until around 1992 (which is pretty amazing). The Mega Drive was about on par, but the SNES and 1992/1993s PC games really showed that the Amiga wasn't leading anymore. The A1200 was certainly better than the A500, but it wasn't the leap that was needed. It's not only Doom, but at the end of 1993 the fate of the Amiga (and also CBM) was sealed. Still Amiga games (and the music) aged amazingly well and I'm sure I'll play Turrican 2, Gods, Populous and Mega-Lo-Mania on an emulator in 10, 20 and maybe even 30 years :)
I agree about the 1200, it's a better computer but it isn't really much of a generational leap (although what computers do you buy nowadays where the clock speed literally doubles each time you upgrade, those days are gone). The had just slightly improved the hardware (more colors), but because of the way the Amiga was programmed, you couldn't really take advantage of that in a game without re-coding it. Also the disk drive as the same, so if you made a game for it, you were being asked to provide more colorful graphics but still had the same space to fit them in on the disk.
The gaming oriented hardware in the mega drive made it overall a better gaming device than Amiga aside from the color palette so don't be a fanboy trying to put the snes on a different category with pcs.
I used to own them all the C64 the Amgia 500 and my last Computer from Commodore an Amiga 1200 wich was a very good Machine for low budget money.2MB Ram memory with 14 Mhz 16bit Chip system.compatible with all Programs and Games released for the Amiga Family.Memories of good times.
I didn't get an A1200 until recently. I had the 500 & 600 back in the day. I think the 1200 was a good computer but it never really got the support it needed and it probably came out too late in the Amiga's life. But all in all, I loved the Amigas
While I think Doom was certainly a nail in the coffin, Commodore had already put the lid on it. And had they bothered at the time to develop Doom for the Amiga it runs fine.
@@daishi5571 Commodore had botched it up. But I think Id software made the right choice with the PC, it was the right platform for Doom given than the Amiga was really languishing at that time. I remember being so naive back in the day when Commodore went bust and then got sold to Company X, and I thought "cool, they will just take over and the Amiga will continue". If I had just done a little research into it, then it would have been clear that the Amiga was dying and the PC was the way forward.
@@DavePoo2 No doubt Doom was ideal for PC, playing to it's strengths with VGA and not so much for the Amiga. But when you look and see that they did versions for the SGI and Next and they play like dirt, I find it disingenuous of JC to claim that the Amiga couldn't do it when there were systems being sold that could play a decent Doom game as time has proven. When Commodore went bust and saw the months tick by I saw that as the end (I had already been though that before with another system) I bought a PC and sold my Amiga. But truthfully I have never been as happy as I was with my Amiga which I why I bought it back about 2 years later. And for perspective, I had worked with PC and Mac's for a few years before Commodore went bust but had not owned one because they were crap. And in fact at the time of Commodore going bust I was a PC engineer, I didn't like the machine but it paid me well.
@@daishi5571 This story is so familiar, we all loved the Amiga, but we all ended up with a PC. The PC to me felt like a big kludge of stuff put together, and that's really what it was, just buy any old parts and slap them together and make your own PC. I think it was kludge of parts approach that made the PC so bad, but ultimately was also responsible for it's success as the years went by.
The one thing I really wished the Amiga 500 would have had is an internal Fast Ram slot. The Amiga 1200 while being too little too late because of bad management had it right when it came to expansion slots.
Yep, you could connect fast RAM to the side expansion bus. I think the choice of slow ram for the internet card was a cost reduction thing. I would have liked it to ship with a small amount of fast RAM directly on the board, it would have been a huge advantage to games etc (but again the machine would have cost more, so pushing the price up might have priced it out of the market).
68000 is great processor for programming compared to the 6502,8086/8088/286. 6502 makes you want to bash your head into a wall. I like my Amiga emulator and am looking forward to the retro Amiga 500 (Maxi not the Mini, hopefully.)
I agree, the 68000 was very easy to program for and I suspect contributed a lot to the success of the Amiga (and the other systems that used that processor).
@@murasaki848 It sometimes does the same with mine. Try to think of how you can reword it. It's usually because it thinks you're writing something insensitive. Try again making sure it's all nice and calm. TH-cam will usually accept a careful rewording.
You have to buy with what was in competition at the time, on the pc side we had the 386 DX which is already years old from the Amiga at the time even though EGA is still not as good as the amiga video system.. Windows at the time wasn't multitasking but the 386 itself is better prepared for multitasking than the amiga processor.
You have to remember that Windows & the 386 didn't even exist yet on the day the Amiga 1000 was released. But Yeah, i think that the PC had a slow start but was always moving forwards towards a better computer. It didn't take long before it had surpassed the Amiga. The tragedy really is that the Amiga if it had kept up could have been so much better I think. If you went back in time and showed me an original IBM PC, there is no way I would believe I would still be using a derivative of that computer in 2022, but here we are.
@@DavePoo2 We had 286 was cold use at 16 MB ram it self was better machine for alot of tings than amiga.and also dont forget Mac classic was the about the same machina than amiga.. In october 1985 at 386 was realese.
@@DavePoo2 I dunno, man. As a gaming computer, sure, it pushed pixels far far faster. But did you ever actually try to use Windows 95 for productivity? Or even 98? Even with eight times the RAM running on a 66 MHz Pentium, the thing was a shitshow. You could use it, but only grudgingly.
I joined the PC master race at about the P133 era, so I missed out on the PC being that slow. When I was working at a computer company around the 2000's I refused to use Win98 as it was such an unreliable piece of crap, I used Windows NT 4.0 as it just seemed to be much more stable (and Win 2000 wasn't quite there yet). Well, MS seemed to agree with that and the current windows lineup is all based on that platform and the 95/98 got scrapped.
@@DavePoo2 Yeah, the NT kernel was the turning point. I still don't like parts of the post-win98 UX, and there's still room to complain, but it's no longer an intrinsically bad system (I have a separate rant in place regarding why today's systems are bloated and slow, but surprisingly enough, it ain't solely the fault of Microsoft). A 133 MHz Pentium would be fast, yeah. I suspect the classic 16 MB setup would be slow on NT, but I may be misremembering things. Regardless, for roughly same price, you should be able to towerify an A1200 with an 040 accelerator and the same amount memory. It'd be slower in benchmarks (*very* noticeably slower, frankly), but the OS would probably be a far better, more fluid experience. Until NT, which made it bearable. I guess that's my main point of contention; I think 15 years is a pretty long time to overtake someone who's pretty much standing still. :-)
Speaking of HAM-mode not being used in games, there was a game that attempted this, DDT - Dynamic Debugger promised to use it in a side scrolling platformer, they even took out full page ads in computer magazines, but the game never materialized. Imagine paying for those expensive ads when the game is not even running as a demo.
Far ahead of its time, yet it had no applications when it launched, and it was marketed as a business machine, which completely failed. It's first real "killer application" was Deluxe Paint, and the first game that showed off the Amigas real capabilities was Defender of the Crown - before that, there was really nothing besides a few demos and half-assed ST ports. So in hindsigth, it wasn't really awesome at all. The Amiga had potential.
I didn't want to go to much into the all the crap that Commodore did with the marketing etc as I wanted to focus on the machine from the hardware perspective. But yes, you are right, they really screwed the inital marketing and the didn't make deals with software companies like MS to secure a good suite of software for the machine at launch. I think the fac that the ST had just arrived prior didn't help as developers had got used to programming that system and just ported to the Amiga. So a catalogue of errors that really hindered the launch of the machine.
Amiga 500 solved all those problems and sold like hot cakes. It was almost perfect 16-bit machine - 512 kB RAM, solid graphics and sound, floppy disks and ability to be hooked to a TV. Latter versions upgraded memory to 1 MB and added support for some HDD. Alas, by the time Amiga 1200 came out PC got upgraded with VGA, Sound Blaster and now had games that needed to be installed on HDD but were much better than anything Amiga could do .
@@aleksazunjic9672 What do you mean "alas"? You'd prefer it if we lived in a backward age just so the Amiga could survive? The only way it could remain competitive is if the competition agreed to stop competing? VGA was launched in 1987, the same year at the Amiga A500. VGA offered no-nonsense 8bit 256 colour screens from a palette of 262,144 colours. The Amiga A1200 didn't appear for another five years in 1992. The very next year Doom was released.
@@cloerenjackson3699 Alas, because it would be far better for consumers if Amiga somehow survived as alternative home computer platform with affordable price . As for VGA, it was prohibitively expensive when launched, especially considering that you needed monitor for it . Amiga could use TVs that people already had. What killed Amiga 1200 was lack of HDD out of the box , and lack of high-density floppy . Games like Doom or X-Wing could not be packed to run from floppies, especially not 880 KB Amiga floppies.
@@aleksazunjic9672 "Alas, because it would be far better for consumers if Amiga somehow survived as alternative home computer platform with affordable price" Why? Competition hasn't ceased. Intel didn't stop making new CPUs, computing didn't come to a standstill. Progress has continued without the Amiga. Competition still exists. Intel don't have a monopoly, Nvidia don't have a monopoly, Microsoft don't have a monopoly. New products are released all the time. It doesn't always produce better devices too. Look at keyboards and printers. There is plenty of competition in those markets but quality has gone down, not up. In active markets manufacturers learn to design to spec and when consumers don't demand quality they don't get it, even when there is a lot of competition. Consumers often don't want things to be great as much as they want them to be cheap to buy. I do prefer the time of there being greater choice but that time had faded even by the 16bit era. It was during the 8bit era when we had most choice. This seems like a consequence of complexity. During the 8bit era one smart guy could design an entire computer. Today one smart guy can't write a competitive OS. Again, the competition is there, other operating systems exist, they just can't compete. That is what killed the Amiga: It couldn't compete. For that reason I don't see the point of being too sorry about it. The PC won through its rate of iteration. Any advantage the Amiga had on the day of the release of the A1000 in 1985 was quickly eroded or beaten by PC technology. Today the whole Amiga platform has been subsumed into Windows via WinUAE. Not only does that provide access to all its software features the hardware features are faster under emulation today than they were when implemented in real hardware in the 1980s and 1990s. There isn't really a defence for the Amiga anymore, it is simply another legacy system. What are you longing for when there is nothing it could do you can't now do under Windows with an Amiga emulator? "As for VGA, it was prohibitively expensive when launched, especially considering that you needed monitor for it . Amiga could use TVs that people already had. What killed Amiga 1200 was lack of HDD out of the box , and lack of high-density floppy . Games like Doom or X-Wing could not be packed to run from floppies, especially not 880 KB Amiga floppies." Amiga fans typically massively overestimate the price of competing products. I've seen prices of $25,000 or $250,000 quoted for anything implied to offer better performance than the Amiga by people who clearly haven't even bothered to check. When the A1000 was released it cost $100 more than a PC with a monitor. VGA cards could be bought for under $500 the same year VGA was released. This is not "prohibitively expensive". Furthermore it's bogus to appeal to expense because what's "expensive" is entirely subjective. What about those for whom the Amiga was "prohibitively expensive"? In fact, one of the reasons consoles and Commodore 64s massively outsold the Amiga was because they offered most of what people wanted from a home computer and were cheaper than the Amiga. So the problem with objecting to things more expensive than Amigas on price is that most people buying home computes and games machines had that same objection to buying the Amiga. It's easy then to argue as far as the market was concerned the Amiga was too expensive for what it offered and what they cold justify buying. Even an A500 was a luxury rather than commodity purchase. The PC for many people was considered a practical necessity rather than a luxury. I don't think just HDD and HD floppies explain why the Amiga was unsuccessful. I think there is a long list of reasons, most of its shortcomings its fans are unwilling to accept or admit, which is why they have so much trouble coming to a realistic evaluation of why the computer was a failure. It's even paradoxical that amidst the lauding of the platform they seem to have forgotten, it actually lost. Whatever explains the failure of the Amiga it clearly can't be what its fans usually say and want to talk about. It perhaps is true that some games couldn't work well from floppies. I think it is a thing that PCs were compatible with HDDs and usually had them almost from the very beginning. I just don't think that's at all where the advantages of PC ownership end and I can't be the only one because despite all the bombastic claims made by Amiga fans it was massively outsold by the PC for the duration of its entire life until it eventually gave up the ghost. Clearly against what Amiga fans attest the Amiga was receiving significant ordinance from the PC the entire time it was available. I don't think the usual "marketing" reason holds any part of the explanation. Every computer ever sold except the Macintosh has enjoyed absolutely diabolical marketing. People buy on spec not marketing campaigns. The history of computing says the winners and losers are separated by platform practicality, not marketing, and the PC always had been an ultimately practical computer on its side. That is literally the explanation for why we all use them now and not Amigas. It's also the reason the PC sold well and the Amiga didn't. Hard drives alone just doesn't cover it. The PC always far better satisfied a far greater range of popular practical interests than the Amiga did. H
The Amiga was the first multimedia machine, before the concept really existed. If the internet had been available/affordable a few years earlier, or indeed if CD-ROM drives had hit the market just a few years earlier, then in both cases the Amiga would likely have been the best-placed machine to take advantage.
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I recall the sensation of transitioning to the PC in around 1994. The Amiga felt better, it was a solid user experience, even though its hardware specs had been superseded. I couldn't get my head around the fact the Amiga had fallen behind. It didn't make any sense at the time.
Yeah had a lot to do with Mehdi Ali, he destroyed Commodore, he did so many dumb stuff, i think he was
put there (Commodore), to destroy it, The Amiga computers were just to good, and absolutely for there price
in the 80s (Amiga 500), one of the stupid thing they did was not putting the AAA graphics chip in the Amiga
1200 and 4000, same with 16bit audio, but no they went for the AGA graphics chip, and many more dumb
stuff that happened thanks to the CEO Mehdi Ali.
Yeah the post-Tramiel management treated C= just as a money-cow with so many horrible decisions. The Amiga was seen as just a console, the dev team was even dissolved early after release and only re-established later.
I felt the same about it at the time... still do not understand how come this advanced machine could fall behind :(
Could'nt agree more. One was forced over to PC but it was lacking so much from the Amiga when it came to functionality, like real multitasking and plug'n play like behaviours and all.. but mostly, PC lacked the personality that the Amiga had, and it still does.
I was sad that amiga crashed and burned. In the 80's, it could do anything an $8000 Apple quadra could, but for 1/4 the price. Amiga needed a Steve Jobs. It could have been king.
More then anything it is the sound and music of Amiga games that hit me with nostalgia.
To me it's both the C64 and the Amiga.
First computer focused on Art !
"More Than" learn english
@@WayneStark626 Shatt up BlayStation Normie
One use of the blitter that may not be well-known is that it was used to do the MFM encoding and decoding for floppy disk read/write. I actually had to make my own custom implementation of the MFM encoder/decoder when I wrote "Dino Wars" because I had the game take over the hardware and do its own disk I/O. And that whole bit of code had to fit inside the floppy boot sector. I also used that same code in "Bill 'n' Ted's Excellent Adventure" too. As a result, both of these games would break on the faster Amigas from the 2000 onward.
"Excellent" - That's pretty cool (I've just been watching some of your "I coded Bill & Ted" video), I didn't go into the blitter too much in the video as it was long enough, but it was pretty versatile. Also, I didn't really mention about the floppy drive and that it was basically programmable. Nowadays, a game would be "patched" to fix a problem like that (the incompatibility with the newer Amgia), but back in those days, bugs that were created in the 90's stayed in the 90's
Yeah, they scrapped the filled polygon feature, but instead included MFM decoding. Floppies are slow .. you could do that using the CPU. How often do you want to access a floppy? It is noisy and has problems with dust. So your App better loads completely into RAM and the CPU decodes and decompresses it. Yeah, the computer freezes.
The floppy was incredibly fast for the period.
Isn't that why it was possible for people to come up with alternate floppy filesystems? Not only was there OFS and FFS as provided by Commodore, but there were a few others that were able to cram even more data on the floppy. Or were those filesystems done using other tricks/techniques?
@@Sembazuru - The Amiga was pretty much the only platform of the time that could read floppies formatted for other systems (hardware permitting - in the sense that a DD drive could not physically read an HD floppy) for that reason.
The Amigas audio was soo way ahead of anything else. To get the equivalent sampling capability in professional sampling synthesizer keyboards would cost an absolute fortune by comparison!
As a funny side story, Guiness Book of Records didn't have a way of correctly checking the worlds fastest talking man. So they bought an Amiga and a sampler so that they could time and slow down the recording to check.
Yeah except too many games couldn’t run music and sound effects at the same time but you had to choose one of them 😂
@@epicon6Amiga had 4 hardware channels (2 left 2 right) so yeah whilst sound effects happened you’d often hear half the music sounds disappear but less noticeable in some games
Amiga 500 was my childhood. Monkey island, Arabian nights, cruise for a corpse, Ben e factor, walker, odyessy. So many classics you just never get the same feeling from current games
I loved Monkey Island on the Amiga, I still have my Amiga but misplaced or sold my copy of MI so i don't have that anymore. I think there have been many great games since the Amiga years (Doom, Half-Life, Halo, Assasins Creed, Minecraft ...), it's just a shame that those games never existed on an Amiga.
@@DavePoo2 I managed to grab a physical copy of monkey island 1 from limited run games though its the Sega cd version. Never had boxed version as a kid, my version was of course being on the amiga, cracked :D
But it's still amazing having that big box now. Its still my favourite game of all time
@@themarchinggoblin8294 I think my brother still has the copy protection wheel that was in the box!
Nice games bro 😎👌
I'd clap for you, but I got one hand on my big willy, I'm peeing in my back garden atm m8 I'm sorry.
I was a computer obsessed kid in the 80s with an Atari XE. A friend of the family gave me all his old Compute! magazine, and for some time, this was my only look at other systems (apart from the C64 - everyone had those). My memory from those magazines was a Commodore ad showing an Amiga with Deluxe Paint on the screen, with a an illustration of a shimmering waterfall. Even today, when I think about the Amiga, that waterfall picture comes to mind and how amazing that was to me at the time. I never owned an Amiga in it's heyday (we became a Mac family), but I remember at the time just the ads in Compute! gave me a sense that there was something magical about that computer.
Atari 65XE was actually my first computer. I never knew back in the day that the Atari 8-bit line and the Amiga were related by Jay Miner.
Deluxe Paint was so far ahead of its time. That program alone made the Amiga worth buying. There was also this amazing program (I can't remember the name) that used USGS topographical data to render scenery. I used it to render scenes around Olympus Mons on Mars. You could choose any spot, any camera direcrion and angle, and any time of day and it rendered a lifelike scene. You could also set a path and it rendered the frames for a lifelike fly through as good as NASA had at the time. I flew around on the surface of Mars in 1988. LOL
I remember coming into a computer shop demoing an Amiga 500 back in the days. I was so struck by the quality of the music playing out of the system that I looked behind the computer and tracked the audio leads out of it and into the monitor... I even plugged them out for a second as I was so convinced it was a trick and the sound was coming out of a tape player or something... It wasn't!
A few months later, I got all my savings out of the bank and came back to buy one!
So many things about the Amiga from a user's perspective that I miss today. The organization of the OS support files such as device drivers in the devs: folder and software libraries in the libs: folder, instead of both being combined together as cryptically named .dll files. The ability to use folder aliases so, for example, the root path devs: could reside anywhere in the filesystem. I miss the ram disk (though I started using the rad disk that would survive reboots), especially for truly temporary files. The way environment variables and settings were done where when you clicked "Save" the setting was stored on a disk, but if you clicked "Use" it was only stored to the ram disk. That way if you wanted to temporarily change a setting but wanted it to revert back to your preferred default on the next power-up it would. The way that ARexx was embraced by programs. I had written several ARexx scripts that controlled several programs. My most used one would take me online by first controlling the TCP/IP stack, check for new email and send any queued outgoing emails with my email program, and then take me offline. My script was smart enough to figure out if it needed to launch the programs, and if I started the script when I was already online it would remember that and not take me offline after the email transfers. Very important back in the day when the internet connection was via modem so I didn't tie up the phone line any longer than I needed, but was able to keep the connection when I was playing online when the rest of the family was asleep. I'm sure there are a few more that I can't think of off the top of my head.
The Amiga truly was/is(?) a dream machine. I greatly enjoyed playing and also programming on it (machine language and C). I don't consider myself a very talented programmer. Still, one of my personal programming highlights was a blitter algorithm for a simple cellular automaton to emulate 2D oscillating chemical reactions (Belousov-Zhabotinsky type). If I remember well the Blitter algorithm was around 3-5x times faster when compared to the CPU machine language version of the same algorithm in comparison. Just imagine how this feat of a geeked teenager made him feel both excited and proud! Anyways, the Amiga creators and developers will always be my heroes! Thank you for this video!
One thing I always remember about the Amiga was how it 'felt' to use one... This is probably difficult for younger computer users to understand, but back in the day when I used a Windows PC I always felt somewhat disconnected from the underlying hardware compared to the Amiga.. The best analogy I can think of is like driving a formula 1 car compared to driving big family saloon car... Using the Amiga I felt 'connected' to the road so to speak, whereas with the PC running Windows I never really felt in control and didn’t know what the wheels were doing underneath.
A fun little thing I always remember, one day I timed my accelerated (68030) A1200 booting into Workbench 3.0 OS from hard drive, it took just 7 seconds! Compare that to PCs and Macs from the same year 1992-1994, where a PC would take a minute plus, and with a Mac you could easily go away and make a coffee or tea and return and still need to wait for it to finish loading.
It's funny how as computers got "faster" that boot up times actually got slower. The C64 booted up in less than a second, and it only got slower from there. I think we hit rock bottom in the Win Vista days, when your computer would take a lifetime to boot up, and then once you even got to the desktop, it would be several minutes before it was actually responsive. I think with the age of SSD's, we are not only actually getting back towards those good old days when you didn't have to wait a week for your computer to boot.
"One thing I always remember about the Amiga was how it 'felt' to use one"
Amiga fandom is the archetypical "feels over reals" argument.
"This is probably difficult for younger computer users to understand"
It's easy for me to understand, but impossible for me to advocate. It'd probably feel good to drive over the Australian desert in a 4x4 it wouldn't imply the vehicle is a great computer. Amiga fans confuse their childhood excitement and adult nostalgia for performance.
"but back in the day when I used a Windows PC I always felt somewhat disconnected from the underlying hardware compared to the Amiga"
It was. It had a far more sophisticated OS (yes, I know Amiga fans won't believe this. It just goes against the grain for them) it had a far more sophisticated Hardware Abstraction Layer. Including device independent graphics from Windows 1.0 in 1985. Amiga fans thought RTG was a novelty in the 1990s, long after it was too late to be interesting.
"The best analogy I can think of is like driving a formula 1 car compared to driving big family saloon car"
That isn't a terrible analogy. I'd say comparing riding a CBR 125 to driving a Bentley is more accurate. Sure, the latter isn't so exciting, but it's just a better vehicle.
"Using the Amiga I felt 'connected' to the road so to speak, whereas with the PC running Windows I never really felt in control and didn’t know what the wheels were doing underneath. A fun little thing I always remember, one day I timed my accelerated (68030) A1200 booting into Workbench 3.0 OS from hard drive, it took just 7 seconds! Compare that to PCs and Macs from the same year 1992-1994, where a PC would take a minute plus"
Same as before.... the Amiga had almost no operating system compared to the PC. It was also one of the reasons more applications developers flocked to the PC than the Amiga. You don't have to write your ow device drivers for every graphics card you want to support when writing for Windows, you just write to the GDI and the user can plug in anything they like from graphics cards to monitors to printers and it works, the application programmer doesn't care what output device you're using. Your difference in experience is explained by differences in underlying complexity. With my SSD today I can go from power-up to logon screen in ten seconds.
Great points. Amiga was a great name in hindsight. It truly felt like a friend, unlike anything after amiga.
Totally agree. Pc when reading from floppy the system paused. Not on the amiga. Little things like that made difference.
True multitasking verses hard timeslicing. Yah it matters when you actually work with something.
Like rendering graphics (lightwave 5.0), music etc. You could do that and it feelt good back then. On PC 8088, 8086 up to 80286 - you had windows 3.1 later or DOS early on. Horrible...clunky and awkward to work with. Well on Win3.11 it started to get better and then came Win95. On that point PC took over more and more and got "usable". And finally when Win XP came out and Nvidia Geforce was standard with DX9. They won the gaming war. Kind of. :-) Its a timeline compacted with a lot of stuff over just 30 odd years. Amazingly fast evolution...from no home computers to computers everywhere on the planet. It just exploded. And we were along on that journey...well some of us.
@@cloerenjackson3699 "Amiga had almost no operating system compared to the PC"
Not true at all. It had a full OS. Or do you have another definition on OS:es?? It also had SHELL which is DOS but much better.
And look at the broad spectrum of products in the box for Amiga that existed. You could do anything on an Amiga. Very advanced stuff too.
BUT Amiga "failed" to compete with IBM and "PC" (clones) and Apple to really take over office programs etc. THAT is the key. Did you know that Commodore actually had PC's? PC-60 III were the latest one...they sold poorly though, too expensive I think,. Commodore failed to "win" that war about commercial and common enterprises to stop using "ordinary" PC clones from IBM etc. And microsoft was a player too ofc. I tried to be short here but its hard to explain. A chain of events happened and it was unstoppable.
Actually plug and play didnt exist on PC before Windows 98. So i think you out of bounds here. What you see today in Windows...is a big difference from what windows could actually do early on. It was hardware dependent to a much higher degree. And installing drivers and get new hardware to work were sometimes very complicated.
You had memory patches emm.sys, Xmm.sys or what not to fiddle with to get things going. PC were limited to use 640K. But you needed to fix that because it was not sufficient. EVEN under windows you could run into issues that were DOS dependant.
Today there is no DOS. Only a virtual one but you can do without it. It took very long time for that change to happen. I think it was Win 2000 or XP. But well its not important.
I suggest you fire up VMWARE and install Windows 3.1 and look for your self. Its quite a limited OS. Remember it ran on very simple hardware. Then compare it to lets say Amiga OS 3.1. Im not quite sure about the years here so dont hold me too it. Maybe Amiga OS 2.04 or 1.3. You will if you install it on real hardware and then run them in parallell you see many differences in look and feel and then try to do some real work. Then come back and tell me you were right and I will laugh . :)
We went from Amiga 500 to an average IBM (Amiga to my room then) to a full-blown Gateway special in about 1997 or so that I was like yup I'm going to playing on that now because the new titles were PC-exclusive. Then later on I got into Quake and Half Life (wasn't allowed graphical games as a younger teen) and for convenience it's been pc's ever since. I would run internet demo discs from AOL (thanks guys) and get free internet every month. I had the Amiga in my room for a while and that was bliss. It really gave me so many happy memories. So many amazing games. Stoo from Sensible Software is still doing design stuff. Now I have a 3070 RTX with an i7 and no idea what games to get. Great video. Thanks for the memories.
Yeah, once I saw Quake, the Amiga got pushed to the back of my mind.
Back in the early 90s, when I'd look at gaming magazines, an Amiga was some far off untouchable machine that produced unbelievable graphics.
The Amiga was incredible for 1985, but the lack of proper updates really screwed it when the 90s rolled around. More sprite capabilities, more sound channels, more blitter features were needed, but it relied too much on fantastic programmers manipulating the out of date hardware to make it seem like it was more powerful than it actually was. Way more work for what other systems were doing by design at that time.
We had an ST when I was a kid, and even I wanted an Amiga so badly. I still remember walking around the software store admiring the luscious Amiga games on the demo computers they had running.
A lot of people had the Atari ST because it came out first and more importantly it was cheaper than the Amiga. I've got say that I could never actually afford a brand new Amiga, every Amiga I have ever owned (even the ones I had back in the day) were second hand.
In the USA, there never really was an affordable Amiga until we had moved from he ST to the PC. I absolutely love and still love my ST and STE, but the architecture and brilliance of the Amiga was so far ahead of its time, and it's a machine that is remembered fondly for many reasons, including the brilliant games. I use my "PIMIGA" now and love it.
My friend had an ST (520?) when I was a kid. I remember playing King's Quest and not getting far. The graphics were admittedly worse than on my 386SX (which I hated, it was a terrible machine) but it had charm and I've wanted one for a while now.
Yes the Amiga was impressive tho too expensive not value for money when games we’re just as enjoyable on the Atari ST, tho as a programmer I found the Atari STe a more fun exiting platform to develop for, as programmers like a challenge we’re the Amiga was like it did it for ya, felt left out of a job.
I had an st 520 then 1040ste ..I would argue with other kids at school that st was better than amiga lol .. now 30 years later I brought an amiga 1200 ..its better..I don't mind admitting it now lol
I was 14 when I first saw the 1000 in a magazine, and I was smitten. I finally got a 2000 for a small video production business I started. I added the Toaster, and was pumped about the potential of the Flyer, but had to jump to Media100 on the Mac. I still have my 2000 + toaster and boot it every so often. ❤️
The video Toaster was a pretty cool piece of kit. I kind of feel like the Toaster was the TH-cam of it's day, where people could now make their own high quality videos at home (they just didn't really have a place to self publish them), something that previously had only been possible in a studio environment.
Lucky you!
@@ButterfatFarms I think it would have been expensive but certainly possible if you had some money to invest. I think the equivalent pro studio equipment might have been utterly unobtainium.
@@DavePoo2 Well, obviously that's not true because pro studios obtained it. Also, the VT was useless without at least semi pro decks. The main thing the VT Flyer (the most powerful VT edition ever released) did was produce Edit Decision Lists in an industry standard format. These would then be used to compile a second generation copy of the edit from A and B -roll decks. It's very basic and is predated by far better dedicated equipment. The only thing the Amiga brought to this setup is transitions. Yet again though, why bother to do transitions on computer when again it is predated by far more powerful dedicated DVE hardware?
This is where the Amiga fan bait-and-switch goalpost moving kicks in and they immediately pivot from power to price. What they also do is without bothering to do any reading or fact finding they then insist that anything with similar performance cost about twenty times as much money. It thus creates a fallacious argument which insists on refusing to consider anything but computers from the same date, with the same specification for the same price. Obviously pre-rejecting anything which is not an Amiga and using an argument which can be respawned for almost any piece of hardware. What else was there besides the Commodore 64, Atari 800 or ZX81, when you pick one and then accept only computers of the same date, which the same spec *at the same price*? People who liked the 64 can reject the Amiga from consideration using the same proforma argumentation strategy "Well, the Amiga may have been better than a 64 in some ways, but it was also later and more expensive so it doesn't count".
The trouble with all that argument is the same as it always has been: You cannot police or invalidate other people's interests or purchases based on specification or price for the simple reason other people have differing needs and budgets from you. The paradox of the whole "yeah but studio equipment was far more expensive" is: So what? Far more studios used dedicated video equipment rather than desktop computers, especially not the Amiga, because the dedicated studio equipment was far better. It wasn't until the late 1990s, long after the Amiga story was over, that remotely professional video editing became a credible proposition for desktop computers. The VT didn't pave the way. Desktop video editing came to the PC and Mac before the Amiga, the 1993 VT Flyer, the best ever Video Toaster was, except for wipes, essentially a carbon copy of the PC EMC2 system from 1989. the first academy award winning films to use digital NLEs were edited on Macs. The idea the Amiga was ahead for video is pure Amiga fanbase fantasy and on par the Amiga itself, that and the VT, given what they actually did, are probably the two most boringly overhyped devices in all computing history.
To this day dedicated editing equipment is still manufactured and sold to studios and it still represents the high-end of editing set ups. Once again: The fact you can't afford it is bullshit. So what about your pauper budget? It doesn't apply to people with more money and more demanding needs and you can't make it apply.
"Yeah, a Mercedes business class is far more a luxury car than my VW Polo.... but it's so much more expensive than my VW Polo so it doesn't count! Also, my Polo can do almost everything a Mercedes can, just for far less money". So what? Not everybody else is a pauper. Try applying the Amiga fan favourite "Yeah but I can't afford it" argument to somebody who actually owns the thing you are pretending is invalidated based on price.
Yeah the Amiga 2000 was a great machine, i played a lot with it at end of the 80s, my father bought one back then,
i was crazy about the Amiga, it was so easy to use, and the games and sound was great, i had it connected to a receiver.
I really miss does times, it was great, my father still have his Amiga 2000, and still works, even his old 5.25" HDD of 110MB.
This was a fantastic breakdown of what made the Amiga so special. Makes me miss my old A500+ with it's amazing A530 turbo expansion. Also makes me appreciate the fact that I managed to copy all my old programs, anims, music, etc. off off of it and onto my PC. I still sometimes boot up WinUAE just so I can play around with all my old stuff.
Yeah, I started writing a game for the Amiga which I never finished. I don't know where any of the files went. I wish I had done the same.
"Why was the Amiga so awesome?" because it was the best all round system!
It really was. A great gaming machine and a great personal computer in one. Something that is common today but wasn't so common back then.
@@DavePoo2 I'm not sure it's common today. While I accept Windows as my OS (sorry Linux I have my issues with you on the desktop) the vast sway of hardware that is in use (take a look at the Steam Hardware & Software Survey) shows a serious lack of compliance. I think it is how it has always been on the PC "put up and shut up" those with hardware that give a poor experience just "put up" with it knowing that their system is just under powered, while programs (games) come out that are beyond what the market average is currently at. This is how the PC beat the Amiga by making everyone think it's their fault that the programs didn't work efficiently and Commodore not producing even minor upgrades along the way.
Daishi, please take your meds.
It had a feeling. In a dark room my best mate, who owned an A500, put the disk in, and the sound (on a fairly good speaker) went on, then the animation started (f.e. Platoon).
Goosebumps, man.
Like a cinematic trailer.
My next machine that could reach NEARLY the same effect, was an Xbox 360. But still, that wasn't unique.
The Amiga was 'the one', like Neo in Matrix.
I still have mine next to the STE and the C64. Love that machine, love its soul, it’s magic. Great vid btw, very interesting. Nice work, nice memories!
Yeah, it was a much beloved computer, as many people like you (and me) kept it even long after it's usefulness had expired.
I remember the strange hostility against the Amiga users from the media back in the days where the users were called cult members and other nice things. A technology magazine ran a piece about a meeting for Amiga users and there was no end to the descriptions of what a bunch of idiots they were. This goes on to this day and every time they bring up the history of personal computers the Amiga is not there and it is basically erased from history.
I noticed that's a thing that happens, like in this TH-cam Originals video about the Macintosh, where they decide to look at some of the competitors to the Mac th-cam.com/video/VJI88QIW7H4/w-d-xo.html Even though they have a Commodore VIC-20 on the shelf in front of them, they completely skip over it in the video, even though the VIC-20 was the first personal computer to sell over a million units, they don't even mention it ... like Doc Brown would say "erased .... from existence"
The "idiot" part was about Amiga users in 1996, that still prefered it over PC, and telling everyone, that it has even future, and should pick Amiga instead PC. They all found out in 1998, after Celeron 300A was released, that they were delusional, and it's over forever.
@@warrax111 I can understand them. Companies like Escom were taking over commodore and promising to keep the Amiga going. Even I fell for that one, i thought "it's ok, they will keep it going", and they did even get an Amiga 1200 out. But if I had just looked into a little bit, then it was clearly over, the R&D teams were all gone, there was nothing left of Commodore but the Logo, the old stock, the debts and the bad credit with their suppliers. Even though I didn't like the PC, once i saw what it could do, I was willing to put up with it. Once I saw Quake and the true 3D graphics that the was being done by the processors on the PC's of the time, I didn't even think about the Amiga again after that, it was ancient history. The other problem was that even if you used an Amiga at home, if you got any job that involved using a computer, it wasn't going to be an Amiga, so you weren't learning anything you could take with you into your career.
The journalists were right. The Amiga fan base is a cult populated mainly by unintelligent people.
@@warrax111
It was truly over before it began. The Amiga was a terribly flawed design and although this video is rare in daring to discuss some of the flaws it doesn't go nearly far enough. An awkward combination of strengths with attendant weaknesses which limited the computer's range. An awkward design which basically dropped a desktop GUI on top of console hardware. A console hardware base which lacked common games console features such as tiled screen mode or a packed pixel mode and had bitplane graphics instead.
The support hardware receives overwhelmingly unreasonable support from fans. The Blitter was only about twice as fast as the CPU for Blitter operations. So slow was it that in later Amigas the Blitter was redundant except for compatibility purposes.
Meanwhile the Amiga sprite capability is unremarkable compared to other consoles.
The 68000, despite fan eulogies, when instruction timings are considered has far more in common with 8bit technology than the 32bit tech fans always try to link it to, compatible with the 1970s technology it is.
The copper is basically useless for most purposes except extending the palette for games.
Despite claims of extended palettes most Amiga screens are in 16 colours.
The Amiga didn't have much industry support either from key application developers or key Japanese games studios.
It wasn't cheap initially. It had very few interesting software applications until the 1990s.
Multitasking isn't a selling point. Amiga owners can't avoid talking about it but nobody cared. Most people to this day use apps sequentially, one.at a time. Other systems, like Windows, used cooperative multitasking which, for users, is indistinguishable from preemptive multitasking when programmed correctly and has advantages over preemptive systems for real time apps because of advantages app developers accrue by being able to finish micro tasks before releasing the CPU.
Digital sound is probably a matter of taste but what is basically 4 concurrent 8bit sample events has its limitations including the number of concurrent voices and real time sound shaping. Talk about DMA sound is somewhat superfluous given it is obviated by synth systems which don't need memory access.
Almost none of the popularly cited hardware advantages have any relevance to anything outside of games and their limitations meant it was always going to lose against consoles for the games market into which far more consoles were sold than Amigas.
Amiga fans like to blame "marketing". This is fanciful as almost no computer except the Mac ever had good marketing. People buy on spec not campaigns. Look at the 64: Awful marketing but sold millions of units on spec anyway. Amiga fans also complain Commodore didn't iterate well, failing to observe though that most of the Amigas flaws were present in the very first Amiga. They also ignore the fact the Amiga was already failing in the marketplace before the new management they blame it on was installed. There was not a point later in the Amiga's life when it began to fail, the Amiga began to fail immediately it was launched.
In sum you have a machine which ultimately tries to please everyone but isn't as desirable as a dedicated console for games and isn't as desirable as a PC for apps. So in real terms it pleased nobody except its fan base who are typically way too easily swept away by its niche but largely useless and novelty graphics software.
I was with the Amiga from the very beginning. Started with A2000 with two disk drives, then A3000 and ended up with really beefed up A4000 Tower. I tried to be faithful to my beloved computer as long as I could but when it struggled to play simple mp3s that was the moment I said to myself "it is over". Still I've had the best days of my life, the best friends and the best moments thanks to Amiga.
Seems like a familiar story. We all wanted to keep our Amiga and continue to use it as it had been so good to us, but eventually it just couldn't do what we wanted.
I never had issues with mp3, but I owned a Blizzard 1260, PicassoIV and all other extensions of the PIV (sound, tv, ...). It was running Pagestream and lightwave with a breeze of 128MB ram and 2GB SCSI HD. Those were the days :D
Well, I still have my A1000... And it still works... And it has the signatures and paw print on the inside of the cover...
I knew the writing was on all the wall for my Amiga when all the major magazines starting dropping off. When "Amiga Format" closed, that was it - I knew I was holding on to something that didn't have a future. It was hard to let go, and now I've downloaded dozens of Amiga magazines as PDFs to read and get nostalgic over.
@@barryguff6893 Yeah, i remember back then naively thinking that the companies that bough the Commodore brand would be able to keep it going, but it was never going to happen.
It was a machine way ahead of its time. The games were incredible. Then it fell way behind. I laughed at the seemingly underpowered DOS machines of the time, and after a while, the PC caught up. I still want an Amiga, but the prices are insane! So I bought Amiga Forever, but getting software is not easy, or I am not looking hard enough.
When I bought my first A500 back in early 1988, I just wanted to play Hack 1.0 and play music and graphics with computer. Had c128 and zx48k before, but with Amiga I entered into different world.
It really really was a huge step up from the 8-bit computers. And I feel like the computers we have today bear a close resemblance to the 16-bit computers like the Amiga.
When we were shopping for a home computer in 1989, an A500 was the OBVIOUS choice in the bang-for-the-buck dept.
It certainly was. Even then, my Amigas were all second hand, I couldn't afford a brand new one.
Fantastic Guy with the late Jay Miner with graphic designer Amiga 500, 500+, 600, 1200 also designed the Atari 2600 with amazing 1986-1990s.
My first home computer was the Atari 8-bit, I didn't know for many years that the Amiga and that Atari had a shared history.
Excellent overview of the Amiga and what made it superior. Very accurate and well researched! I hope you do more Amiga Videos in the future!
There is still a very active Amiga Community out here with new products and software all the time!
Yeah, I still find it unbelievable that the OS got an update in 2021!
@@DavePoo2 I bought it. Cloeren did not. 🙂
I subscribed to your channel yesterday, I watched your video you made on Cannon Fodder and why it was such an awesome game. Funnily enough, I never really got too into that game for w/e reason but it was a game I recall playing on my A500 nonetheless. This channel amongst many others are a god send to guys my age who grew up owning an Amiga in the late 80s early 90s. The time and effort you ladies and gents have invested into your channels is appreciated. Keep up the great work m8.
Thanks. I'm currently playing through Cannon Fodder 2 on live stream on Saturday nights (on this YT channel). I can say they have made it about as hard as the 1st game.
It was way ahead of its time. I was doing digital imaging, 3d animation, modeling and ray tracing back in the late 80s early 90s with the Amiga. The games were pretty cool also but I was in love with the graphics arts part of the Amiga. If you had the Video Toaster add on then you were doing moving grade video editing and computer animation back then. I always wanted a Video Toaster but couldn't afford one back then.
Yeah, i never really saw what Lightwave could do until recently, i was really impressed at how fully featured it was for such an old program running on the poor little Amiga
"It was way ahead of its time"
How?
@@cloerenjackson3699it's difficult to explain in comparison to what we have today. But this video explains it really well. Compared to what PCs and Macs were doing at the same or even higher price point at the time the Amiga was so far ahead. And the user base totally maxed out its already advanced architecture.
The power these machines had compared to their rivals was astounding. And the software made it the best machine ever made in context of its time.
@@fukyutube2279
Well, not to put too fine a point it, none of that is true, is it?
@@cloerenjackson3699 are you even old enough to comment? I have an A500 and an A1200 sat around still. If you are older than 12 what were you? An ST fanboy?
This week I will take ownership of a custom a500, recapped, sonic cleaned, gotek drive internal, HDMI converter and I am sooo looking forward to playing through all the old games from my past.
The reason we're not using Amiga's today is because of Commodore. Commodore fell "ass-backwards" into TWO amazing computers. The C64 and the Amiga. The C64 put Commodore on the map and many at Commodore thought they could do no wrong at that point. The problem then became that Commodore didn't understand their own technology (they purchased Amiga...they didn't design it from the ground up). Commodore didn't understand they had a powerhouse of a "multimedia PC" at the time. No one really knew what a multimedia PC really was until other companies started doing it. Say what you will about Steve Jobs...he believed in good marketing and he was right. My kids know Apple. None of them know Commodore. Commodore always had terrible marketing. It's a shame, really. But to be fair, what would a modern, 2022 Amiga be like today anyway? I doubt it would have the same revolutionary design but instead be like any other PC like HP or Toshiba. At least it won't be dead anytime soon. I've been an Amiga user since I was 16 and there are many more like me. 🙂
I totally agree. Have you seen the video of Jobs using the NeXT system (when he had left Apple), he really showed off to everyone how good the computer was and what it could do. There was never anything like that from Commodore.
Without Commodore there probably wouldn't have been an Amiga computer. They bought the technology but also had their own chip fabs and sold their own computers. Not many companies could have done that. But yes, marketing wasn't their strong suit to say the least.
@@davidste60 It's not a case of probably, it definitely wouldn't have existed. Atari owned the stock in the Amiga company and Amiga were about to go bust. So Atari were willing to let it go bust so that they didn't have any competition for their own products. Commodore bailed them out and bought the Atari stock.
@@DavePoo2 Right, so Commodore are the reason we ARE using Amigas today :)
@@davidste60 Well, when you put it like that, it would seem so
I still own 3 amiga500s and intend to get more...Terrific machine which made my teenage years so much more enjoyable.
I remember my Windows 98 machine doing that blue thing quite a lot. So, they actually shipped it with that feature intact.
Bill what did you do!!! Yep, Win98 sucked quite a bit, I refused to use it at my work back in the day, I used Win NT 4.0 instead which was way more stable (and is now the basis for modern Windows).
I was a beta tester for Windows 95. You would not believe how often it died, and how often I had to reinstall from scratch it prior to the actual release (probably about once per week).
@@stevewheeler6672 I remember that if you put a TCP/IP and IPX network protocol on the same card, it wouldn't boot!
"I remember my Windows 98 machine doing that blue thing quite a lot. So, they actually shipped it with that feature intact."
The blue screen was a feature of the OS because it stopped rogue application which would have done damage if they were allowed to continue.
It is technically incorrect to portray it as a fault with Windows, it was a Windows failsafe to protect your system against rogue apps.
Not only did you also have the infamous Guru meditation on the Amiga, which I have seen substantially more frequently during that same time frame than I have ever seen PC blue screens of death in my life, you also didn't have the sort of serious system integrity breach protection the "blue screen of death" was designed to provide.
Your complaint is like moaning about the alarm going off in your new car when people tampered with it whereas you liked your previous car more because when thieves tried to break in to your previous car it would just sit around and let the thieves get on with it.
You didn't get memory protection faults on Amigas because you didn't' have memory protection.
@@cloerenjackson3699 "Guru Meditation" was way cooler than "blue screen of death".
A few minor points.
Pallet layout was not only common but typical back then. What made amiga a bit special was a wide palet and also a wide pallet array. Most systems at the day was 2 or 4 bit pallet and a 6-8 bit array, while amiga was 5+1 and 12 if i don´t miss remember.
About the memory, they way it was set up on amiga it was pretty much time shared between CPU and GPU/sound. Typically at this day, the graphic would have dedicated memory.
Amiga used a ROM-OS and not a Disc-OS saving a bunch of memory in loading up stuff like Workbench.
A version of copper does exist on EGA, but nobody ever used it because it was really buggy. Generally, the main problem with EGA was that it was buggy.
About overlay. From EGA forward (and more so on VGA) there was a 1 or 2 bit overlay graphics shell. That was what moved both the pointer and the outline as well as the Icons, Also the reason why the icons become monochrome when you moved them. In EGA game that use smooth scrolling they usually use a overlay for scoreboard. In theory they could use different pallets, as far as i know, nobody ever did that (because.. well buggy).
I do think that Amiga got the overlay function to, but i´m unsure exactly to what degree.
The moment I first saw an Amiga in a shop running a Newtek demo, while owning a ZX Spectrum, has never been exceeded. It was a HUGE leap. I scrimped and borrowed to get one.
You weren't the only one. Somebody I knew who also owned a speccy did exactly the same thing. I was very jealous by the time he finally got an Amiga as he got one, as I still had the C64
That moment for me was seeing the F/A 18 demo in a shop display. I had a C64 and then got an A500, and I still keep an A1200.
yes I went round to my mates house and saw stunt car racer / rick dangerous.
that step up from spectrum etc to Amiga was huge !
I remember the moment clearly
Thank you for this video. I really enjoyed it. A very exciting time in computing.
People never really knew what the Amiga could do. I used my A4000 all the way until 2002 as my main computer, doing lots of DTP as an example. The only real reasons I felt I needed to move over to another platform was to play movies and games like GP2. I still kept using the Amiga for lots of stuff and both my A4k and my older A500 are still sitting here beside me and are frequently used. Nothing beats playing Settlers and Colonization on a real Amiga.
Same here. I used my A4000 till about 2004-5 with XCad and did Cad drawings 100 times faster than AutoCad back in the day of 286/386 processors. Whenever AutoCad at work did a 'redraw' of the screen, if it was lunch time, we just got up and went to lunch! Sometimes the redraw would be done when we got back and sometimes it wouldn't be. Still have my 4000 and turn it on now and then. Been thinking I should get a cap kit before you can't find them and replace all the caps. Replaced the on board battery a few yrs ago with a board that takes a coin cell.
I've seen a comment on TH-cam somewhere that some of the Amiga musicians carried on using the Amiga until about 2010 to do MIDI stuff. But ultimately I think now that are no Amiga's in left in service today in any professional capacity.
People did knew, but with the advent of cheap 486 and later Pentium processors Amiga 4000 simply could not compete. Back in the day Amiga thousand series (2000, 3000, 4000) were serious professional computers - powerful but expensive and rare. Realistically, they were never Commodore's main business.
@@DavePoo2 I believe that. Some of my friends performed using Amiga's around 2004. I was pleasantly surprised to see them and the crowd loved the music.
@@Fastbikkel That's pretty cool. If the music so good, nobody cares how you made it.
"It's eight cycles per instruction buddy"
That was so incredibly charged with snarc but in the geekiest way possible, I love it so much I want it on a t-shirt
It's a really good talk, well worth the watch if you like this old tech.
The 1000/500 was the best home computer / pc gaming rig ever designed. Incredible thought was put into how everything works together. If you want to find out just how, grab a copy of AMOS and see how easy it is to write a really nice game with it.
Does not make much difference, amiga has better sound, but that's the only difference..
@@groenevinger3893 In later games you can see the difference of the two16 colors independent screens used for easy Parallax. You mean against the ST? I am an ST/STE fan first, and I think the STE, when used correctly, can pretty much match the OCS capabilities 1 for 1 with some tricky programming.
Its a lie.. Look at Japanise side MSX 2+ e PC nec was much better machines than Amiga
@@Martincic2010 hahaha the msx couldn't hold a candle to the amiga 1000
"The 1000/500 was the best home computer / pc gaming rig ever designed"
This claim by any reasonable measure of "good" is quite patently untrue. The Amiga cannot run anything like the kind of games which appear on a modern PC and the modern PC can run anything which ever appeared on the Amiga. Everything of significance the Amiga ever did has been entirely subsumed into the fabric of the PC. If you are in any doubt then you need only to download WinUAE after which you will then own a PC which literally does everything a base Amiga ever did, including the emulation of many example of graphics cards and other plug in boards.
The Amiga truly amazed me as kid, no other computer since gave me that 'voodoo magic' feeling ever again.
As time moved on I always kept using and upgrading Amiga's as a hobby to this day and brings me joy and can still be amazed how 'modern' it feels all those decades later.
The buttery smooth multitasking OS that's simple but so elegantly designed and easy to manipulate via shell script and Arexx.
As we speak my A1200 equipped with a PiStorm32 is playing internet radio while being connected to 5Ghz wifi and Paula in 14 bit mode still sounds good even by today's standards.
It's amazing to see such an old computer being able to talk and take control of modern hardware, yes it still gives me that 'voodoo magic' feeling!
The next time I got the 'voodoo magic' feeling after the Amiga was gone was literally when the 3Dfx Voodoo showed up. Like the Amiga, that really was a huge shift in capability in the computers we had at the time.
it is funny you say this because i was an amiga user from the late 80s and i didnt feel the "voodo" magic amiga had until i got a "voodo card" for a PC. I had the playstation in the middle but i never felt that "magic" with it...
@@DavePoo2 loool, i just wrote the same thing before i even read your comment. Yeah, i had the playstation in the middle and it didnt feel "magic", i got the "voodo" magic when i actually got a voodo banshee...
@@Trikipum The voodoo cards where a big step up at the time for sure but this was only one area, the Amiga had so many new features back then we take for granted today.
A bit over 1,5 years ago the Amiga gave me that feeling again when I installed a PiStorm32 accelerator card in my A1200, it took me weeks to get used to the fact it was that fast.
A modern computer is obviously much faster but for an Amiga it's a whole new level of crazy fast.
In an era when RAM was much faster than the CPU accesses, DMA was an excellent way to take advantage of that. After the 90s with pipelined CPUs all memory cycles were used by the CPU. Graphics became its own processor with its own memory and eventually, had its own pipelined process. But a DMA engine was the stepping stone.
Also, about the time of 1985-87 SGI machines used bit planes even to do 24bit color but cost in excess of 50x the price.
Yeah, one of the problems as time went on was the increasing Mhz. If you look at a modern motherboard, the RAM needs to be as close to the CPU as possible as a 4000+ Mhz, even at the speed of light, a photon can only move about 7cm during a single clock tick, so the laws of physics start to limit what is possible.
I didn't mention the cost of the Amiga in the video as I didn't want to go too much in to the history but stick to the hardware capabilities but you are right, at the time of release the Amiga was expensive but other computers that could do similar things (like SGI) were in a completely different price league.
@@DavePoo2 Also, at the same time, Apple were making black and white 68000 Macs. Commodore marketing should have been all over that! Black and White was a sixties or seventies thing not for a cutting-edge, mid eighties, 16 bit era.
Yeah, the Amiga marketing was a mess. That whole Jay Miner talk on the Guru Meditation channel is basically him trying to promote the features of the Amiga because Commodore weren't doing it.
Thing is you could draw a solid line between the chipset and the CPU. DMA drives video and sound output on it's own. The only problem is the limited bandwidth CPU chipset RAM and accessible RAM size itself (2MB max).
Too bad they didn't go chunky pixel when designing the chips in the 80's - at first it would limit graphics, but as time went on and RAM prices dropped Amiga would have slain PC.
Yeah, who knows, it could have been a totally different story. The 16bits per pixel would certainly have been an advantage when the AGA computers came out, software would just run faster on the same hardware without having to re-code the game, the disadvantage might have been that the early Amiga's might have been too slow and because of that and maybe the Amiga would not have gained the popularity at all.
I still have my 2000 model and all of the software so glad I kept it...
The 2000 is a "keeper". Does it still work? Did you get rid of the Varta battery of doom inside?
Great video!
I guess the things that made the Amiga so great, were also the things that made it tricky to evolve, hardwarewise.
True, and backwards compatibility is a double edged sword, in that you get your back catalogue of software, but its hard to evolve into something new and still keep that. But, Apple & IBM PC managed it, as have more modern games consoles. This is a quote from Jay Miner somewhere all about this. He said that in the end, when the backwards compatibility becomes more of a hindrance than a help, you just make your new computer but also include the old chipset to be able to use the older software. You could see this in the playstation 2, where they included a PS1 on the board to get backwards compatibility, and Apple how now moved to a whole new processor architecture and are keeping compatibility as well.
Agreed. The IBM PC ecosystem benefited from having an open-ish architecture with multiple hardware providers, competition drove innovation.
@@wimwiddershins The only thing any two PCs need to have in common is an x86 instruction set. Apart from that the CPU, FPU, GPU, bus, RAM, motherboard, monitor, input devices, case, cooling and peripherals can all the different between one PC and the next. Even across CPUs the instruction set may be different and each CPU can be supplied by a different manufacturer. It's interesting you should describe it as "open-ish" because it is very hard to imagine how anything could be any more "open", not to mention more versatile, than that.
@@murasaki848
That is just the sort of overly bombastic response I expect.
Actually, no. The 8088 was a carefully considered and wise choice. IBM knew of the 8086 at the time and they could have chosen it. They chose the 8088 for multiple reasons and one of them was for the very reason the 8088 was derived from the 8086 design: Internally the 8088 was the same as the 16bit 8086 with only one exception: An 8 bit data bus meant the chip could be used with 8bit motherboards. This made manufacturing computers based on the 8088 far cheaper than they would have been had they used the 8086 and it did so without sacrificing software compatibility with anything written for either the 8088 or the 8086.
Like all people who launch these bombastic scathing responses to the PC platform I feel it's necessary to remind you: We aren't conducting a post-mortem here as we are with the Amiga. We're reviewing by far the most successful computer architecture ever produced which now forms the basis of almost every computing platform sold at any level. Today even supercomputers run the Intel instruction set. Must I remind you also that from news reports of its day the PC was successful immediately. It sold sold more units in just the single year before the Amiga was released than the Amiga sold in the entire duration of its manufacture, even when the sum total of all Amiga variations made and sold are added together.
The PC won and therefore the only realistic discussion we can have about the PC is the discussion of why it won. Sitting there lambasting it for fun is to clearly be missing something: The PC didn't fail, it thrived from the very beginning of its availability.
It is probably also worth a quick reminder that the 8088 PCs were the ones available before the Amiga was. 8088 PCs date back to 1981. By the time the Amiga was released the 16bit IBM PC/AT 286 was available, customarily sold with an integrated hard drive. Within a year of the Amiga being released the fully 32bit 386 was brought to market when the Compaq Deskpro 386 PC compatible became the first fully 32bit personal desktop computer. The entire time the Amiga was being manufactured the PC was iterating much faster and this iteration process ballooned after the clone market started to appear permitting a Darwinian process of evolution to take over with many manufacturers coming into being, trying and often failing without the wider PC marketplace ever being placed in danger. Look at how many different types of PC you can buy today. There are tens of thousands of different models with varying tweaks and features and price points. You can pay from about £200 to easily over £50,000 for a new PC of your choice with thousands of examples to choose from. That's the legacy of the iteration process: Choice.
The legacy of the reverse compatibility promise is I can still run DOS programs from the 1980s on the desktop I have today, as well as software released yesterday and it will run software which hasn't yet been released. Some software is released to outstrip what is available today so to find their full implementation on PCs yet to be released. Hardware and software enjoys considerable future proofing. Today you can buy a desktop PC more powerful than any desktop released just a few years ago and it will still run 8086 software if you want to. Does that come with caveats? Yes it does, but they are clearly far outweighed by the benefits, just as with the choice of the 8088.
The 8088 has binary compatibility with the 8086 which was in turn made to escape the legacy of the 8080 without making it hard for developers to migrate. The 8080 CPU was the CPU of the previously successful MIT Altair so the 8088 PC was delivered ready to be exploited by already experienced programmers. In 1981 the first PC was a new computer for which experienced programmers would not have to start afresh. For this reason useful pre-existing software was quickly ported to the earliest PCs.
VisiCalc which turned the desktop computer from an electronics enthusiasts curio into a serious tool of business was the prompt for IBM to produce the PC and it was ported to the PC in the same year the PC was released. Lotus 1-2-3 considered the fist ever killer app, an app people bought PCs to use, was ported to the PC in 1983. Following 1982 the only computer to compete with the PC in sales was the Commodore 64. By the time the Amiga was released the PC was the biggest selling desktop computing platform with sales which the Amiga never approached in any year. Before the Amiga came into existence in 1985 the PC had already sold more units than the total number of Amigas manufactured in sum across all its various incarnations over its entire life.
So.... yeah..... crap idea using the 8088, eh? We can see how that worked out. It opened the first chapter in... the most successful computing history ever.
@@murasaki848
Yes, economy of scale was one of my arguments but it was not the only one.
Your talk about 16bit designs does not respond to my slightly less lengthy explanation for why IBM didn't use one. It is known that IBM did consider the 8086 and the 68000. It is also known that after careful consideration they discarded both designs. They discarded both for the reason the 8088 was made after the 8086: To enable the internally 16bit CPU to be placed in an 8 bit motherboard, thereby substantially reducing motherboard design complexity and to pass on reduced cost to the consumer while maintaining binary compatibility with 16bit software written for the 8086. This choice also smoothed experienced developer transition from the 8080 which had previously been used in the popular 8080 based MIT Altair. This produced a path of reduced resistance to developers and customers, the result being that a consumer and software base for the PC emerged rapidly.
You also ignored the fact that this choice worked. I am not confusing popularity for performance I am however stating that sales are crucial to success and indeed in this sense the IBM PC platform was successful from the very beginning. The biggest problem with the PC cited by early computer suppliers was being able to get enough PC units to satisfy demand. They could hardly be manufactured fast enough. Hence why I cite the fact that the PC sold more units in the year before the Amiga was released than the Amiga sold in its entire lifetime. All else aside, the success of the PC is explained by its ubiquity and popularity. I can get on to cost and performance next...
When citing other 16bit designs the date of inception must be taken into account when considering the cost of implementation. Naming Sun microsystems, as you did, perhaps you need to be reminded that the 68000 based Sun system 1 cost $8900 when it was released in 1982, weighing it in at almost 6 times the cost of the IBM PC at introduction. Accounting for inflation, a Sun 1 cost the then equivalent of over $33,000 each. Hence the reason IBM did not consider it. Apart from that, you are appealing to "better", as Amiga fans do, an abstract term which demands qualification in real terms. In real terms, the 68000, especially in the Amiga implementation which was slow even by 68000 standards, did not offer significant performance advantage. In fact, Amiga fan claims the Amiga 68000 implementation was far "better" than the 8088 are the stuff of pure shared myth making. Cross platform benchmarks repudiate the claim. In fact, there was hardly a PC ever made, not even the ones released in 1981, which were not computationally faster than a 68000 based Amiga. The instruction throughout of the 68000 was odorously slow with 4 cycles being the fastest instruction time it had and placing its performance more in common with 8bit micros of the 1970s when it was made. You can of course return to your abstract and claim "Faster doesn't necessarily mean better!".
The PC was cheaper than the first Amigas. It was a close call for the price of blue-badge products but for example the Tandy 1000 at under $1000 was already available for less than the cost of an Amiga by the time the Amiga was released.
So, sure, you can even now still turn to you abstract and claim "Computationally faster, lower cost and more popular doesn't necessarily mean better!", but, alongside the fact the PC also had a far larger suite of software to choose from among which were those examples already established as industry standards by the time the Amiga was released, versus almost no software availability for the inaugural Amiga, you now have a substantial hill to climb in terms of identifying factors more important than those we should consider in qualifying any claim the Amiga was ever overall somehow a "better" choice.
I'm going to try to deal with your points one at a time, so I will now refrain despite the fact I could continue and go on to point out your appeal to easy interfacing is clearly contradicted by industry history: The PC anointed a plethora of cottage and small industry with almost anybody with some electronics expertise, a few thousand in cash and access to manufacturing able to begin to launch PC card-based products, and there were hundreds of them to choose from. These included the first ever desktop 24bit graphics accelerator, released before the Amiga was, and a 68000 CPU daughtercard, also released before the Amiga. Interestingly the 68000 PC daughtercard appeared in a design which was, ironically, a faster implementation of the 6800 than the Amiga was. This, again, before the Amiga was even launched.
With that said, there are not, as far as I can see, many compelling reasons remaining to buy an Amiga over a PC, not even on the Amigas dawning day, especially not on the Amigas dawning day, back when it was more expensive, computationally slower, had no third party products including no networking and few peripherals, had no integral hard drive, no users and no software.
I miss my Amiga 2000, I had a card in it that made it a 2500, digi view gold, used a camera to scan objects, had a tablet for my cell animation that I did, colour printer to print out graphics that I worked on. At the time the Macs were in black and white. I had full colour, stereo sound, just an amazing machine. Oh almost forgot that I was able to record to a VHS any animation or graphics that I created on it. Just a shame what happened to that company.
You must have felt like an absolute Wizard, being able to do all that stuff back in the day.
@@DavePoo2 you have no idea! It was amazing. Not to mention all the BBS sites from around the globe. Good times
I wonder what it would have become if it was still around today
@@bmovie27 I suspect that if it was around today it would actually be very similar to the PC's we have now, and probably running some UNIX derived OS. It would have been nice to have a 3rd horse in the Mac/PC desktop war. Who knows where it could have gone. I don't think Commodore had the management to be able to survive, it was already a dying company in the early 90's as they had cut the R&D budget so much, that they were not innovating in what was a really fast moving industry.
@@DavePoo2 you're probably right. Marketing is a key factor, its too bad. Because at the time they were way ahead of everyone.
@@DavePoo2
"I suspect that if it was around today it would actually be very similar to the PC's we have now"
I don't see where the "If only it was around today" fantasy comes from?
First of all, you can still get it today, can't you? Multiple AmigaOS derived or inspired OSs are available. Multiple emulator platforms which run the original OS/GUI, typically far faster than the original hardware, are still available. It is out there still being kept on life support by enthusiasts and, for the most part ,not even Amiga fans are using it. What exactly do you think an Amiga platform is going to give you today that you don't get from the PC you are using?
Meanwhile, with all the vague fantasy what-if questions Amiga fans ask, you may as well ask what if a completely different system existed? Many other different CPUs, OSs and hardware platforms have existed which didn't survive. What if any of them had survived? What if there were a new completely different system? What is it that rides on the survival of some specific Amiga feature that couldn't or doesn't arrive just as easily some other way? There is nothing more left of the "Amiga" than the trademark.
There isn't anything about the Amiga which Needs to survive, is there? Which probably goes some way towards explaining why it has not survived, or rather, that it is still out there, if you really want it, but you don't migrate to it for anything but recreational purposes because, even as an Amiga evangelist, the truth is, there isn't really anything for which anybody, not even Amiga fans, need an Amiga to do.
As I have said before, Amiga fans who today use something other than an Amiga for non-reactional purposes now know why people didn't use the Amiga in the first place because the reasons Amiga fans have for not using the Amiga today is the same reason people had for not adopting it in the first place: It isn't needed or necessary. What you actually use a computer to do is better answered through something else other than the Amiga. If you want to actually get some work done you are better off using something else. So, it's a very different era today but applicability to what you are actually doing with your desktop computer is same motive for Not using Amigas today as people who bought PCs had for Not using them in 1985. The Amiga indeed may have been the last-gasp of sandbox home-computing which began with the (far more exciting) 8bits, but in the end, you need your desktop to do something useful. Except perhaps to a few users the Amiga never did shine compared to the PC when it came to getting some actual serious work done. That is why cries of multitasking are hollow, alongside cries of blitters, games and copperlists and even the Video Toaster. None of those feature claims get you out of the fact the Amiga is still basically a borderline useless toy whose main professional use was developing Amiga applications, a purpose which does not meaningfully separate it from any other home computer for which you can develop your own games and applications. Look at games and applications on the PC now. Unless you are strenuously eager to be dishonest about it the PC and its games and applications today are in a different class.
Just as easily as any Amiga fan I can sit here enumerating the things I liked about the Amiga and the things I dislike about Windows PS5 or any other platform. What I can also do, which Amiga fans refuse to do, is do the reverse too and thereby accept that the benefits of using a PC far outweigh the challenges, that being the single crucial thing I cannot say about migrating to the Amiga platform. I can list what I liked about the Amiga but I cannot overcome the fact that the shortcomings of using one far outweigh the benefits.... exactly the same reason I abandoned the Amiga far earlier than other fans who refused to relinquish a flawed platform and still refuse to see its limitations as a platform and as a personal computer. Also then and now Amiga fans still refuse to acknowledge there were and are more important benefits of using a PC - especially for those who have always used PCs in preference to Amigas, even throughout the 1980s. Much of that reason is, if you want to actually do any work, get a PC. With all its substantial flaws the PC was then and is still the best at getting most kinds of work done, even when it had a phosphor display and a beep. Even then the PC also had a random access ASCII screen making data entry and results tabulation easy it had a fast CPU (despite Amiga fan claims almost all PCs have faster processing than a comparable generation Amiga, Especially when the Amiga was launched with a 7Mhz 68000 and no FPU (which could make maths up to 20x as fast)). The PC also had a very large number of general and niche applications suitable for a very large number of industries.
The Amiga and its varying OSs are still out there on various forms. You really still want it? You go use it. You don't want to? Great, now you know why other people don't and didn't use the Amiga then.
You know what video I would like to see? I'd like to see one made by somebody familiar with the Amiga and far more familiar with the the PC than the average Amiga fan being truly honest at last about the disadvantages of using an Amiga and the advantages of using a PC while giving attention to what at which the PC has always excelled against the Amiga. As I have also said before, if you really want to know why the PC was more successful all you really need to do is drop the Amiga evangelism and start being honest about what you are saying about both platforms. I genuinely think hanging your hat and being honest about is enough to have the answers on the tip of your tongue: For computing the PC was always a better computer.
Fantastic video! Loved it! Loved the Amiga (and still do!). Thank you!
Yeah, I think the fact that so many people kept their Amiga's even when they had moved on to other computers like the PC & Mac shows how much of a beloved computer it was.
"Yeah, I think the fact that so many people kept their Amiga's even when they had moved on to other computers like the PC & Mac shows how much of a beloved computer it was"
@@DavePoo2 Once again, the same can be said of almost any platform that ever existed. I can't think of any where that isn't true or even that development hasn't continued ever since in some ways. I am a member of owners groups for the PDP series, most of the 8 bits including the ZX81, Spectrum, Atari series, Dragon 32, Oric 1, NewBrain A, BBC Model A & B, Acorn Electron and Archimedes, TRS-80 and MITS Altair.
All the platforms I can recall still have owner-enthusiasts and on all of them development still continues in some small way.
The only thing that separates them is the pervasive and perpetual evangelising and dishonesty of the Amiga user base.
Of the platforms I have known, the one which least needs even more evangelising because it receives by far the bulk of it is the Amiga.
There is also the paradox that despite the Amiga fanbase being the Jehovas Witnesses of computer enthusiasm, knocking on the door of every possible person to eulogise the Amiga, they *still* appear to think the Amiga is some sort of underground undiscovered widely misunderstood anomalous mystery to others. This, despite the fact there is probably no other computer for which information promotion and pamphleting is more more widely publicised, prevalent and easily available.
Thank you very much for the video down memory lane. I think the highlight for me was when you put in the floppy. That sound snapped me right back to when I was kid. Awesome!
I would say that my A500 has the most satisfying "clunk" when the floppy disk goes in. I think that's because the A500 drive has a much more solid mounting to the inside of the cast than that of the A600 and A1200.
The Amiga was basically the true descendent of the Atari 800, much of the hardware concepts, particularly copper, sprites and scrolling are 16bit and enhanced versions of what was in the 800, which Miner also largely designed.
Had Atari given him the go ahead when he asked to design a new 68000 based system, instead of Commodore vs Atari it would have just been Atari. Commodore basically had nothing which is evident that they needed to buy Amiga.
@@daishi5571 - Yep. That's the depressing story about Atari, before it collapsed in 1983.
What I've heard from Atari engineers was that they had an R&D lab working on amazing stuff for the time. Atari used this lab to come up with the Atari 2600 and the 400/800 computers, but after that, they used hardly anything it produced. This was one of the reasons Atari engineers got frustrated with management, and left to form their own companies, Amiga being one of them.
The design for the Amiga started at Atari, with some of the same people who developed the 400 and 800 computers, but management wasn't interested in it. So, they left to form their own company. Atari footed some money to them, nevertheless, and got an agreement to license the chipset, but before the chipset was ready, Atari collapsed. So, there was no chance for them to use it.
One engineer said the basic problem was that from 1977 to 1984, Atari was owned by an entertainment company, Warner Communications. He said their business model was to come out with a hit movie, market the hell out of it, until people lost interest, toss it aside, and try to come up with another hit. They didn't understand that a technology company can't do that and be successful. You have to be continually innovating with new, sellable products.
Atari was making tons of money with the 2600 video game console. They rode that wave until it crashed, and then the whole company collapsed. Warner not wanting to be tied to a sinking ship sold off the company.
I remember coming into a computer shop demoing an Amiga 500 back in the days. I was so struck by the quality of the music playing out of the system that I looked behind the computer and tracked the audio leads out of it and into the monitor... I even plugged them out for a second as I was so convinced it was a trick and the sound was coming out of a tape player or something... It wasn't!
A few months later, I got all my savings out of the bank and came back to buy one!
Yeah 👍 l remember something similar, l saw it demoed in my local computer store and instantly knew I had to get one. Although it took some time before I came up with the money to get one of my own.
Back in the day when the Amiga first surfaced it was really something special. I was working in Fremont, California for a company called Telesys who started life making games for the Atari 2600. At the time I was a product manager and we had developed printer, interfaces and memory expansion for the commodore vic20 and commodore c64. We were invited to Amiga to see the very first computer of theirs and we had to sign NDAs. We also went to see the creator of the chips where he presented how he came up with these chips. It was really truly amazing. But then they were purchased by commodore and maybe that was not such a good thing for the Amiga. I don't know. Also at this time the IBM PC was released and the Amiga sort of fell into the shadows. It was truly exciting to see one of my favorite apps on the Amiga was this program that created a three-dimensional landscape in another was a pirating software that used the Disney yoho yoho song.
Cool story. I think if Commodore hadn't bought them, then the Amiga wouldn't have actually come to market. I believe Atari owned the most stock in Amiga at the time, but they were willing to let the Amiga project just dissapear so they didn't compete with their own line of computers. Commodore bought Amiga and actually got the computer out to the public.
@@DavePoo2 I believe that Atari (now owned by Ex Commodore boss Jack Tramiel) leant Amiga Corp £500,000 with the proviso that it had to be paid back on a certain date or all assets and IP would revert to Atari. Literally at the last moment, Commodore bought Amiga and they paid Atari the $500k.
@@DavePoo2 when we met with Amiga, they had just been bought by Commodore.
@@micksmithson6724 - As I understand it, the deal struck between Amiga Inc. and Atari happened when Atari was still owned by Warners, shortly before Jack Tramiel bought what amounted to Atari's consumer division (which would later become Atari Corporation - a completely different company to Atari Games, the old arcade division). If I recall correctly, the deal Warner!Atari struck with Amiga was that $500k bought them the sole rights to use the Amiga chipset for a specific period of time - every other aspect was open. When Tramiel bought up the consumer division, he chose to leverage the deal as a way of strong-arming the Amiga engineers - using it as a threat to take their technology and cut them loose if they didn't accept his terms (by many accounts typical Jack, for better or worse). CBM's offer to step in and buy Amiga Inc. outright was a mutually beneficial arrangement for both parties - replenishing CBM's engineering expertise (ironically, many of their best had quit as a result of how Jack had treated them), and guaranteeing future employment security for the Amiga people if they wanted it.
It goes without saying that Jack would have reacted badly to receiving that notification and payment had it come from any company; he was an absolute master at leveraging contractual loopholes and small print to his advantage - infamously (in some circles) taking the fledgling Microsoft to the cleaners with the 1977 deal supplying BASIC for the PET... But to have had it come from CBM - and understanding that they'd beaten him at his own game - must have driven him completely bananas!
Amiga was a great achievement of computing. It was the most advanced machine people could buy back then. But it was great not because it's capabilities but because of huge community that made tons of amazing stuff for this computer even when Commodore was already a cold corpse. Amount of freeware stuff is still mindblowing and Amiga spawned many of the most ambitious games that were made between 1985 and 1994. When people try to compare Amiga with anything else they always choose arcade games, but Amiga was more than that with adventure, RPG and strategy games that made it better than any console back then.
I agree, it brought a highly capable machine to many people because it was (or at least it became) somewhat affordable. I suppose the inclusion of the mouse made adventure, strategy and RPG etc more viable on the Amiga. You would never see an arcade game like "Monkey Island". I thought back in the day that arcade conversions tended to be disappointing anyway. If you purchased the conversion of your favorite arcade machine, it never stood up to be anywhere near as good as the actual machine, which had the advantage of being a much run on more expensive hardware that was sometimes customised specifically for the games needs.
@@DavePoo2 Some arcade ports were pretty good on the Amiga, but I can agree that most of them were actually pretty poor and weren't using the Amiga hardware. Also some multiplatform games were stripped down for some reason. Still Amiga had tons of awesome stuff to forget about these disappointments. Also the insane floppy piracy helped a lot. 😅
Awesome video this mate, really interesting stuff. Love my Amiga!
Very good sum of the reasons why the hardware was awesome! The software however is what made it a classic that still stands. The demoscene, the games, the operating system.
Well, I suppose a "PC style" computer with not software is just a brick. It the unison of good hardware and good software that brings it all together into something bigger than the sum of it's parts.
Today I fired up my old Amiga 4000 040/25. It just started and havent been running since 2004/2005.
No problems....it just works. And oboy its quite fast and you can do work on it today. Quite workable on a 27" LCD.
I just have to figure out how the networking was done....because I remember transfering files between my PC and the A4000 somehow over tcp/ip. Im very happy - because I was worried if it would start...or not. But it booted up under 20 odd seconds. Thats faster than any of my PC's. And all drives were working just fine. :)
Pretty cool, and Amiga 4000 is a treasure. I didn't mention it in the video (as I only have my own anecdotal evidence) but I have found the Amiga's to be pretty reliable computers. I've had the one Amiga 600 that I got from eBay that had a blown RAM chip, but none of the other Amigas (including my own from the 90's) have any bad chips. The floppy drives seem to be pretty unreliable, as they used a few different brands, but some of those still work. The Amiga's with surface mount caps do seem to leak, but they are not too difficult to replace (your 4000 probably has them), and I don't know if the 4000 had the battery backed up clock built in with one of those terrible Varta style batteries, but if it does then you should check it to make sure it hasn't leaked on the board as they are quite good at destroying computers (if its a 2032 coin cell battery, then they tend not to leak).
@@DavePoo2 Oh yes before I started it I quickly checked if it had the infamous battery for the clock mounted but nope, that spot is empty. Seemed unused. But recapping other components may be a good idea.
I cant wrap my head around the fact that the harddrives are working...(!). I mean they usually dont like to be unpowered for too long like this. They are probably not originals but could be. Have to look that up too. I bought it in 2004 for a mere 2700 kr (around 250-270 dollars) but it was cheap even then. Today, I cant find any Amigas on the market almost...they are rare and very expensive. My old A500 maybe will work too...but that is for another day I think :)
So we have to cherish what we got but preserving old hardware is not easy. If unused they break, if used they can break too...if unlucky. But I rather see people using old tech. Im amazed that so many Amiga lovers still dig up old and even invent new hardware today. Take care of your A600 - its a gem
too. Happy new years and thanks for the good video you made. Superinteresting!
Amazing the HDD's still work. That said, probably back them up if you want to preserve them, as the laws of physics are against you always.
@@daweiisgood2392 All A4000's came with the battery installed for the RTC. Either you or someone else had removed it, or you checked the wrong place. So many A4000's have been destroyed by those batteries. Since you bought it in 2004, it would make sense that the battery could have been removed by a previous owner. I recall that it was a known destructive force before that time--my friend's Amiga 4000 was rendered inoperable before then.
When you said the Amiga audio never advanced I had a knee-jerk reaction of "What about AGA?" You're right the Paula didn't change in any ways meaningful for sound quality from revision to revision including the jump to AGA. That's something I haven't really considered.
Great video. I enjoyed the trip down memory land and appreciated your well thought out presentation of what it was like to live 5 or more years in the future with Amiga.
Yeah, Amiga audio was ahead of its time when it first appeared, but as the years progressed it fell behind. I think there was a plan for a more advanced audio chip but it never saw the light of day.
It went from the "AAA" chipset to the AGA chipset ... Paula was never upgraded as planned.
Thanks man, so many memories, forgot about those games and visuals.
No problem. Interesting fact, I captured that Cannon Fodder footage myself on my Amiga and the disk never worked again afterwards as it was too old and crusty.
Re. the 68000 had multiply and divide instructions - Yes, it did, but there was a catch. While it had 32-bit add and subtract instructions, the multiply and divide instructions only worked with 16-bit values.
I took a college course in assembly language, and we used the 68000. One of our assignments was to write 32-bit multiply and divide routines, using the 68000's multiply and divide instructions to work on two 16-bit values (a low and high word).
Still, having a "word * word = long word" capability in a single instruction was certainly a big plus. How did you do on your assignment?
@@DavePoo2 - Badly, it turns out. I recently dug out my old course folder, and looked over some of my assembly programs. Strangely, my memory was I did well on this, but I looked at my grade, and it was not good! I was a bit shocked. I was sure I had done it correctly, until I saw that. While I was still in college, I remember a friend looked over what I had written, and he said, "I found some mistakes you made," but we didn't get into discussing them.
I remember our professor even laid out the algorithm for doing the 32-bit operations, but I still didn't do it right.
On seeing this, I was a bit tempted to try to debug it. I found a modern 68000 CPU emulator that I tried to compile on my Mac, but I couldn't get that to work. I've thought, "You know, you have a working emulator..." I have an Atari ST emulator where I can get to the desktop, and run programs off disk images. All I need is an assembler, which I'm sure I can find. I just haven't gotten around to it yet. :)
Great to see a video made on why the Amiga was (and still is) great. There were, of course, a few errors. The biggest one in my mind was saying that the Sound Blaster 1.0 had 8 digital audio channels. It actually only had 1 digital audio channel with no volume register (critical for MODs without CPU sound processing) and only up to 23KHz output sample rate vs the Amiga's 28KHz or 56KHz in double scan rate graphics modes, along with 11 FM synth voices, Game Blaster-compatible 12 PSG voices (very similar in capability to Atari ST's AY voices), and was mono rather than stereo. Even the SB Pro and SB 16 only had 2 digital audio channels--one for each side in stereo--although they removed the barely supported Game Blaster-compatible 12 PSG voices.
Amiga music was in general far better sounding than Sound Blaster music, which typically used the FM voices. MODs could be played on the SB, but they required a high amount of CPU usage to process both the volume and frequency of each voice and mix them together in realtime, unlike the Amiga, where the Paula had hardware support for these features, including 4 stereo voices (2 on left and 2 on right channel). And sound and music were in mono on the SB, except in the Pro and later models.
Yes you are correct, i gave the Sound Blaster more credit than it was due there. But ultimately what I was getting at is that the Amiga was ahead in the 80's but the PC was catching up while the Amiga was standing still.
I'm happy that you've mentioned how Amiga's sound capabilities were so ahead of the competition. I can easily say that the first time I had experienced anything that was sonically as impressive as in my Amiga was 15 years later, on a windows 98 pc. Like, to this day I have a whole collection of game music from my Amiga and I can listen to it like it was actual music. Platform wise, I hate PC's and Intel+Microsoft with a passion, dislike Apple's consumer practices and so I feel I've been homeless for the last 20 years. I'm tempted to switch to some Linux OS with an AMD cpu, but I really wish there was a whole new personal computing platform that would give me that feeling of having a machine that I can connect with on an emotional level, like I did with Amiga. If I had a billion dollars lying around, I would attempt at slapping together something like that, or would just buy every Amiga/AmigaOne license and try to make it up to date...
@@Wolf-Spirit_Alpha-Sigma I 100% agree. No PC game music compares to the best Amiga and even C64 and Atari 800-series game music, IMHO. I started using Linux in early 93, a year before 1.0, and was an SGI IRIX (Unix graphics workstations/visualization supercomputers/servers) dev from 93-97. I have to say that the SGI's were a good replacement for the Amiga for me, and then Linux PC's after that. I could recommend some Linux distros and desktops, if you're interested.
Have you looked into the Vampire? I have the V2, which is great. The V4 standalone is even more powerful. You can use a Vampire as a modern 68K Amiga. I assume you don't like AmigaOS 4 nor MorphOS, right? You can always install AROS on a PC... I hear you on the billion $/invent a new Amiga idea. I would do the same! Even if I had much less! That's what I would definitely do with my money! The Vampire guys are essentially doing just that, though. With a million $ it could definitely be greatly advanced, though!
@@DavePoo2 Right. It just took the PC a *lot* longer to pass or even catch up on the audio front than you had stated.
@@RetroDawn
"Right. It just took the PC a lot longer to pass or even catch up on the audio front than you had stated"
Yes...... but the difference between the Amiga and PC is the PC was quick to lead where it matters.
Consumer grade digital sound in the 1980s is one area where it's possible to give the point to the Amiga, even though technically digital sound was available for he PC first via professional digital devices. This parallels the fact that the Amiga led also for computer games, especially arcade style sprite based platformers and shooting games.
The crucial point to make about it though is: Sound isn't a crucial point to make.
One trouble with the Amiga fan base is their obsession for playing computer games blinds them to the fact that, before Doom, the PC was NOT a games machine. It wasn't sold as a games machine, it wasn't bought as a games machine, its users didn't buy the PC to play games so.... the PC had no games-oriented hardware but..... nobody cares.
Boasting the Amiga has better sprite and sound hardware than the PC, at least for a little while, is as effective as boasting Roger Federer is a better tennis player than Lewis Hamilton, and from that assuming Roger Federer wins the debate.
Look at the context of the present day: Today a top spec PC will grant the user access to undoubtedly the most powerful games hardware money can buy, but here's the thing: Even today in this context of their being the most powerful games machines you can buy Most PCs are still NOT bought or sold as games machines. Even now games are still considered niche for the PC and most PC OEMs today have a separate annexe on their website for games PCs and most of their products are NOT in it. I think if you want to play games, than and now, you are probably better off with a console bought and sold as a pure games machine and that is by far what the most actually people do. Most PCs were then and are still sold as workhorses, not entertainment platforms. This fact primarily explains why Amiga fans prefer Amigas to PCs. It also explains why the Amiga failed and the PC succeeded because the PC massively outsold the Amiga for being the go-to platform for far more important applications than games. Today even the PC marketplace itself has split into three sectors: Home, business and workstations, and even today the business machines far outsell PC games machines. In that sense it's an irrelevance how powerful the Amigas games hardware was, it probably would still have eventually lost.
So in the final analysis arguing over whether Amiga or the PC had better sound is like arguing if a Nissan Micra or a Fiat 500 has a better 0-60 time: It just doesn't matter and talking about it represents a total failure to recognise what motivates people to buy cars at that level.
The Amiga v PC debate, from the Amiga fan side, is made up of phoney declarations of power which when you look at their content are utterly superfluous and appeal to features that don't really matter. Remember amongst all this smack talk the Amga is the platform which LOST the argument.
What's more even within the context of computer games of the 1980s which is the environment which favours the Amiga, a good PC game soundtrack from the first AdLib sound cards is definitely still good enough to sell the game. Even earlier point and click games often don't even need sound at all to deliver the important content of what they had to offer users. Sam & Max hit the road can be played with the sound off and it's still a watertight game experience.
I think it's perfectly safe to divide PC history into BC (Before Carmack) and AD (After Doom). I think it is entirely suitable to concede the games market to the Amiga in the BC era, but the Amiga has to concede the games market to the PC in the AD era.
What Amiga fans forget is this: In that BC era.... nobody gives a shit about PC games, especially not people actually buying PCs. It's like watching Roger Federer boast to Lewis Hamilton about how is the better tennis player. It's petty, it doesn't matter, and nobody cares. The PC *massively* outsold the Amiga even when it was crap for games because it was the best at what it did do. The PC wasn't fighting for the entertainment space so it is irrelevant it didn't win in that field. Even early PC graphics accelerators and the earliest PC digital sound cards were designed for professional artists not people who play games. The *professional* sound and graphics market was arguably always better on the PC than the Amiga. Amiga fans always cite cost as if it's some kid of trump card but it isn't. A professional doesn't care if they have to spend $5000 on a piece of equipment. Look at the price of synthesisers: The Oberheim OB-x cost $5,000-$6,000 *in 1980*. People didn't go "Oh but it's so expensive the average person in the home couldn't afford them" like Amiga fans do because it does not matter. Pro gear is not marketed towards the average person in the home, they are sold to businesses and pros in studios with higher budgets and to them it's an irrelevance that they can't play games on it.
In the end, the Amiga digital sound supremacy argument is stillborn because nobody cares now and nobody buying PCs cares then or now. It's a case of "barking up the wrong tree". We have all the business and industrial software and hardware. So you go and listen to a SoundTracker MOD or play with Imagine 3D, we don't care. Sincerely, PC supremacists.
I glanced through all these comments and it warms the heart to see how many people loved the Amiga. I'm also amazed at how much discussion this video has generated. Full disclosure, I had a second row seat to the Commodore show. I was also among many investors who filed a class action suit against Commodore and in particular their board of directors who purposely killed the machine. They wanted to make a quick buck and move on. There was nothing the matter with the Amiga. I can't even begin to imagine what the development team must have seen.
"I was also among many investors who filed a class action suit against Commodore and in particular their board of directors who purposely killed the machine. "
Which is an Amiga fan conspiracy theory. You will have lost your case. You can't take action against somebody because your investment doesn't perform well, although trying to is exactly what people with money would do.
There was lots wrong with the Amiga. You will have a hard time making the management argument stick to anybody who lives in the real world because NO amiga performed well. It wasn't that it started out well and was then ruined, it started out badly and continued badly. Fewer people bought the Amiga 1000 than almost any other model. That terrible management you're talking about released the A500 which was the only one to sell in any quantity.
The trouble with Amiga fans is they live in a world of confirmation bias where having decided for absolutely no good reason that the Amiga is immaculate they then have to search elsewhere to find a scapegoat to blame for its failure. It's literally a religious cult. It has the same character as belief in God: Apologists begin by believing a benevolent all loving all knowing God exists who answers prayers.... and from that point on they have to invent a whole canon of argumentative waffle to explain away the fact that there is no reason to believe the claims they started out with.
Get real: The Amiga wasn't very successful simply because it wasn't a very good choice of purchase. That's literally it.
I think Dave Haynie's video where they burn an effigy of Mehdi Ali says it all about what the development team thought.
@@cloerenjackson3699 Actually the suit was filed at the appropriate time during the bankruptcy proceedings. You'll have to look up when that is for any company. We tried to get back even a few cents on the dollar if I recall correctly. It was a long time ago. I would love to see someone do a documentary of that whole part of Commodore's demise from the investors point of view.
@@rklein
I didn't say you timed it badly, I said you would not have won your case. The mismanagement argument is one of Amiga fan base mythology: The platform was unsuccessful in all its incarnations. That is not something you can litigate against.
Another very well produced video! I envy your skills and time. Heh. I just…can’t. This was great info. Keep it up and you got yourself huge channel potential! Now for that channel name of yours…hmmmm. ;)
Well the time I won't always have. This kind of video was only really possible due to a Christmas break from work. It took quite a while to compile all this stuff together. Next time I will go for something more underproduced/poorlyproduced.
@@DavePoo2 haha! Well, good work sir!
Rip Jay we miss you a brilliant mind gone to soon
It had tons of 3D CG animation software like Real3D, Sculpt4D, Turbo Silver, Imagine 2.0, Lightwave, Caligar, povray, scene generator…
Yeah, I didn't mention those as I have no experience using them on the Amiga. The only one I know about is Lightwave and I only really saw that in videos recently thanks to th-cam.com/users/HoldandModify where he shows off lots of stuff on Lightwave. I was quite surprised at how good it looks for such an old application.
@@DavePoo2 the most impressive one was Realsoft 2.0 it had everything modern 3D software has, in a less powerful version. It had physic simulation and physically correct rendering.
@@MarquisDeSang I was like WTH is Realsoft 2.0?? I think I used every 3D program on the Amiga at the time so was thinking I missed something. I didn't know that Real 3D had been renamed.
@@MarquisDeSang
"Realsoft 2.0 it had everything modern 3D software has"
It absolutely did not.
"...and physically correct rendering"
Wrong. Nothing has that.
You know, I know a former Amiga fanatic who now uses Blender and what's annoying watching hi use it is, he uses it having gained previous experience with Amiga rendering programs. He uses it just like you'd use a program which has no powerful animation or object creation features.
@@cloerenjackson3699 Kids now don't know how to make 3D animation, the software does everything for them. The thing that is lacking is special effects, everything else is there. Just like you can do everything with stop motion. If you can move points around, you can model everything. Of course they are 100x less powerful than what we have today, but most of the stuff is already there, just not in an easy fashion (no SDS modeling tools and no programmable shaders).
The 68000 had also been used in the first grouping of Lisa and Mac Computers as well from the Lisa to the Mac Plus.
IMHO: Amiga is still ahead of it's time. We will never catch up with her! The simplicity of the OS is overwhelming. No time wasting on the social media craptalkies... Just beautiful.
I also really like how simple the OS is but yet extremely effective and flexible, at the time of it's conception simply brilliant (and still is).
I agree the Amiga was ahead of its time, but to say it still is I would disagree. For one thing there is a total lack of security in the operating system, which in today's connected computers world renders it totally unusable for any real business use. If Commodore had carried on, then it would have moved with the times but as it stands it got left behind.
@@DavePoo2 Look at the OS for what it was in it's time, don't look at it with modern eyes that will never work.
What i mean is that the basic design is still quite modern 37 years later, not many OS's can say that, many concepts it uses are still being used today like the GUI,multitasking, shared library system just to name a few.
Sure it lacks all kind of modern features and security that never got developed because real development ended decades ago.
@@EdgeOfPanic I agree with your comment about the OS being effective and flexible, I honestly think it was the best OS of the day. I was replying to the original comment for this thread that said it is "still" ahead of it's time, which in 2022 it clearly is not.
@@EdgeOfPanic
None of the attributes you list about the Amiga OS were introduced with the Amiga OS. The GUI, multitasking and shared libraries all existed prior to the Amiga. I don't think anything in the Amiga hardware represented a concept which first appeared with the Amiga.
My favourite computer of all time was the a1000. I saved up my money and it was worth every cent. Revolutionised the home pc industry…and the commercial graphics industry for that matter… great video, thank you.
Wow, you actually had the 1000 at time of release? I don't think it actually sold that well at release and they probably didn't make that many so it seems to be quite rare now. Do you still have it?
@@DavePoo2 I wish. I also got a sidecar for it, which was damn amazing. I then went to a a2000 with an a2286 card. The a1000 form factor was the best though.
@@sulrich70 Pretty amazing also that you could run a PC on a card inside the big box Amgia. I didn't know until recently that something like that was even possible.
@@sulrich70 The Amiga sidecar is incredibly slow. Also, it says something: If PCs are so crap.... why would you need a sidecar?
Meanwhile, you could also get 68000 daughtercards for the PC. You could even run operating systems from them. Not the Amiga OS though. You could get 68000 PC daughtercards before the Amiga was released. Slow? No. The cards had their own RAM so they didn't need to use the bus except to transfer software on to them.
the Amiga pre-emptive multi-tasking was looked askance at, though, because the 68000 didn't have memory protection features nor was such added externally (the lowly 6809-based Tandy Coco3, in contrast, did page mapping via its GIME chip and could thereby protect the OS9 kernel and user processes from each other via private address spaces); then the business market looked askance at the interleaved display as something that would cause eye strain for their workers if they had to deal all day with such a display
Yeah, those days were the wild west of computing. Nowadays, even if you could, you should never do your internet banking on an Amiga.... never.
And I agree, the interlaced display was horrible, I never used it in Workbench, i just couldn't deal with it.
I'm not sure you can call the Amiga's multitasking pre-emptive, one wrong call to Exec.Forbid() and you soft lock the whole system. A bigger problem was lack of memory protection between tasks.
@@SerBallister I can still call it pre-emptive multitasking, as the call you mentioned is not required to make a program schedule properly, wheras in co-op multitasking, calls like that are required to be used by the program to make it work at all. That said, it does seem like rather a dangerous call to have in the library, so i wonder how many programs actually used that? hopefully not many. It was a bit of weird time in computing as you could still write a program that would completely take over the OS (games did this). As for the memory protection, the lack of it doesn't stop it being pre-emptive multitasking. There is a distinct lack of security across the whole OS, it just wasn't a thing at the time. The OS doesn't even have the concept of different user logins (it doesn't even have any login), and yes any program can read/write any section of memory anywhere. It really was the wild-west days of home computing, but none of that stopped it from being pre-emptive multitasking, but definitely as reason why you can't use an Amiga today for anything serious (don't do your internet banking on an Amiga!).
@@SerBallister exactly - any manner of multi-programming - pre-emptive or cooperative - is fraught with peril without having memory protection too
@Paul Irvine - I'm a little younger than you (currently 43, for what it's worth), so I was in my last year of primary school when I got my first Amiga - but I absolutely get what you mean. Based on my reading when I was younger and over the years, my belief is that what set the Amiga apart was that it was clearly a passion project for the team who designed it - all of them from Jay Miner on down apparently put their heart and soul into giving life (of a sort) to those little bits of silicon despite the occasionally troubled business situation Amiga Inc. found themselves in during the early days - I think the same was true of the earlier Atari 400/800 (led by Jay again) and the C64 (the effort that Al Charpentier, Bob Yannes and Charles Winterble led was nigh-on superhuman given the deadlines they faced). Another thing common to the C64 and Amiga was that when some of the original designers left CBM (due to being unhappy with how the company treated them) those initial efforts inspired equally gifted engineers within CBM (for example - and in both cases - Dave Haynie) to continue and improve on their work with the same level of dedication. As with any technology, there were teething problems and compromises that had to be made during development and preparing for production, but by all accounts the team really cared about making the best possible choices. And one result of that was - while the Amiga did have some flaws - as you say, from a user's perspective it just "felt 'right'". In other words, a lot of love was put into that machine, and as a user I have to say I (vicariously) felt it.
Another outcome of that dedication (and this is true of the C64 as well) was that the resulting machine/platform ended up being far more capable in reality than it appeared on paper. The enthusiast user base and demoscenes for both platforms are not only still going strong, but continue to discover genuinely stunning capabilities that go way beyond even the designers' expectations (I was blown away recently when I saw a C64 demo include what looked like a pukka 3D raycasting engine that was not only running, but doing so at a decent framerate!). However in the case of the Amiga this is occasionally bittersweet; for example a rash of practically arcade-perfect conversions released by enthusiasts in the last few years shows just how badly and how often the platform was short-changed by some games publishers. Specifically by making their dev teams focus primarily on the less-capable ST versions, then porting those across to the Amiga towards the end of the project with little or no time to make improvements. Speaking specifically of the UK here, I wonder how many sales were lost to the Mega Drive because kids and teens of my generation saw them running the same games in shops or visiting friends and couldn't help but notice how much better many of the MD's games and conversions looked.
Of course, to my mind what made the Amiga special over and above the consoles was that it didn't just play games; as a creative platform it was absolutely unparalleled - while myself (and I'm sure many others around my age) started off playing games, it enticed us with the potential for making our own stuff and crucially, unlike its 8-bit predecessors, being able to code was not a prerequisite... DPaint (still IMO one of the most powerful and intuitive pixel-art editors in history) came with the machine, music trackers were freeware (and often included on magazine coverdisks), and you could start teaching yourself coding if you liked while still creating tangible results. Not only was this unprecedented in general terms, but it could do all of this "*out of the box*", meaning that kids like me (whose families weren't particularly well-off) were able to discover capabilities *we* didn't know we had just using the base machine. I'm certain that among my generation there are thousands (at least) of us who wouldn't be doing what we're doing now if it weren't for the Amiga, and I think that's one reason the platform is as beloved as it is.
To come back around to what I was saying in the beginning in response to your post, you said "sometimes you felt little towards a machine (the ST in my case)". Maybe it's coincidental, but unlike the Amiga, the ST was not so much a passion project as the result of a business-driven attempt to design and build a 16-bit platform both to a very short deadline and down to a price point. What Shiraz Shivji and his team achieved despite those limitations was remarkable, but there's no getting around the fact that the design came more out of necessity than desire. Over and above that, Jack Tramiel's motivation in green-lighting the ST was specifically to spite both CBM (who had unceremoniously defenestrated him as CEO) and Amiga Inc. (who reneged on his offer to buy their chipset in favour of CBM buying them outright). The IBM PC and compatibles were essentially the embodiment of faceless corporate "design by committee", and while Apple's Macintosh was presented slickly, it was also underpowered and overpriced (plus ca change). On top of that, initially Steve Jobs was never enamoured with the project - he was essentially forced to make it the flagship platform after his true passion project, the Lisa, flopped.
I guess what I'm saying is that the Amiga was probably the last major platform released where the team who made it truly loved it. From my perspective, I think that made all the difference.
Yeah, I think to put it succinctly, the Amiga had a heart and soul, something that many machines back then had too, the Apple II, the C64, the Atari 8-bit line. Modern machines, as marvelous as they are, I just don't get that feeling from them. On your point about the shoddy arcade conversions, i would say that certainly some publishers were guilty of pushing out poor software back then, but it is true to say that software/game development has moved on leaps and bounds since then, and we know things now that we didn't back then, and we have better and faster tools for game dev, so modern games for retro platforms should always be better than what was made back then, but the games from back then were certainly more of an achievement to behold. With regards to your learning to code etc on the Amiga, well that's what I did and it's where I first really started to understand how computers and software worked. So the Amiga is and always will be special to me (and others), regardless of it's capabilities and flaws.
@@DavePoo2 - Thank you ever so much for the reply; much appreciated! I agree with almost all of what you're saying; my one minor quibble is with regard to "we know things now that we didn't back then, and we have better and faster tools for game dev" - which is both absolutely correct and a valid point; however at the same time I don't think that excuses things entirely...
For example, consider the conversion of "Super Hang-On" - the 8-bit and Atari ST conversions were reviewed and released in late 1988 (Electric Dreams neither planned nor intended an Amiga conversion). Zareh Johannes (aka ZZKJ) worked on both the CPC and ST conversions, and being somewhat of a hardware design geek, he wanted to get hold of an Amiga to see what it could do and (I believe) used his earnings from that work to buy one. In order to teach himself what the Amiga might be capable of, he took his ST conversion of SHO as a baseline, got it working as a straightforward port and then got stuck into figuring out how he could use the Amiga's capabilities to improve it. Working off his own back for several months, he figured out how to use the Copper to drive the background gradients and road drawing routine, how to use the Blitter to draw the other bikes and roadside objects more efficiently, and how to use the hardware sprites to draw the nitro flames from the exhaust. He took his work to Electric Dreams, and they offered him a fairly paltry sum to finish it in the next couple of months (along with minor graphical improvements and having someone convert the music). The end result was released and reviewed in early 1989 - about 6 months after the ST release - and it set the standard for 2.5d racing games on the Amiga for about a year and a half (until Lotus 1 came out).
Setting aside games designed specifically for the Amiga, the only reason there was an arcade conversion which even began to exploit what it could do in 1989 was because the developer chose to start the project out of curiosity, with no guarantee of being paid by the publisher. IMO that level of cynicism and laziness was inexcusable.
Wonderful video. Even considering all the computers that came out afterwards the Amiga was special in so many ways. PCs are so fast now that they can get away with the software being layers upon layers of cruft.
Yes, that's worth mentioning actually, that back when you made a game for the Amiga, you actually programmed the hardware, not for any software layer (DirectX, Winsock, Windows File API etc ... ). So basically when you think about it, every game contained it's own OS and did stuff as fast as possible because of it. Nowadays, a they are now trying to get rid of the overhead in API's for games, things like Mantle API came out for graphics, and the same game with just a different API was just running 10% faster just because of the lack of overhead. Cruft indeed!
There were a lot of comments re the C64 comparisons, which for me is a bit naughty as it should have been the Atari 8 bit line which was it's closest cousin, also designed by Jay Miner. The Amiga had copper lists while the Atari had Display List interrupts, the Atari had sprites, a custom sound chip etc etc, all Miners excellent work. So simply connecting it to another Commodore machine is a little naughty.
It was the C64's successor for Commodore, if they hadn't have acquired Amiga then they would have need to develop something to succeed it. I compare it to that as it was then Commodore's replacement for the C64. However, you are right, the Atari 8-bit is the Amiga's bloodline so to speak. If you want to trace computer bloodlines via their designers then I'm sure there will be a lot of interbreeding going on.
@@DavePoo2 Just so you know, my comment wasn't a slight at you, I just wanted to introduce at least a mention of where the Amiga started from, while it is in company terms an update to the C64 line, it actually had a genuine family link elsewhere. As for interbreeding, yes, totally, and much needed for growth but thankfully there's also fresh thinkers like Jay was (RIP) out there too. Happy video'ing..
@@Mclaneinc Thats cool. I did put in the stuff about the 2600 at the start. A mention about the Atari hardware would have been a good thing to add in retrospect.
My dad still owns an amiga today. We play stuff like Swos, Treasure Island, Monkey island, Dynablaster, Insectoids(mentioning the professional moves my sister somehow got with 4yo my god) SSF, 2 Lotus Turrican and other stuff this list is getting too long. I kinda grew up with that stuff since i was like 6-7. We also owned a gamecube (fun times) and of corse the Computer where i watched my dad play metroid. I grew up with gaming and i am glad i did. Incase you think that i am like an adult now remembering my childhood. I am a 14 yo that has a dad who still loves old games and tbh i dont blame him. Theyre great fun :) I think its also kinda funny to see so many modern games based on them and alot of the players dont even realise. Sorry for long text nostalgia kicked in i had to emtpy that bucket of emotions somewhere
That's awesome, I think there are a lot of mums/moms and dads now who are showing their children the computers that they grew up with. Many of the games are still very fun today (some not so much), and it's really good to see how we got to where we are today in modern gaming (many of the people who wrote those old games are still in the industry today).
@@DavePoo2I'm 50 and showing my 5 year old daughter. Had an A500 originally, sold it to get the A1200 in late 1992 and still have it now :)
I remember looking at those schematics back then. Such memories.
Try to find a schematic for your modern computer!
Never mind was , it still is the best home computer ever made.
Not if you ask an Atari ST owner
I think so also. Atari ST had the music studio - fair enough but the Amiga had everything else covered. :)
@@daweiisgood2392 I used "Bars & Pipes" on my Amiga and I really loved it.
I'll see your Amiga 1200 and raise you an Atari Falcon
@@satanslovechild8082 Yeah, the Falcon. It's shame that the original ST didn't have better specs (but then it did come out before the Amiga and it was much cheaper). The Falcon came very late in the game.
I loved my Amiga 500 so much ! I have never loved a computer since 💔
17:00 to add my 2 cents, Unix was already multitasking and multiusers since the beginning in 1972. However, the ressource demanded made Unix almost inaccessible to desktop computers at the time...
I think there was a plan to move the Amiga to Unix eventually.
@@DavePoo2 Maybe. Anyway, the correct move for Commodore would have been to: licence pro softwares like Excel, the Amiga was wayyyyy faster than the Mac, and also licence production to chinese makers, to get affordable clones using the original chipset and eventually flood the market
@@CaptainDangeax
"Maybe. Anyway, the correct move for Commodore would have been to: licence pro softwares like..."
I object to "what if..." scenarios on the grounds that you can make any case for anything you want on the grounds of what it would be like if it was like something it wasn't like. You can make the case for the PC by listing all the things you didn't like about it and saying "What if...."... whatever that thing was you didn't like was removed and things you liked were added. What if the PC had 32 channel digital stereo sound, QHD resolution 120Hz graphics, an Intel Pentium Pro level CPU and cost $500 with a colour monitor on the day of its release in 1981?
It's just stupid, isn't it? Via "What if..." scenarios you can imagine anything happened any way you can imagine. It just doesn't mean anything because that ultimately is Not what things were like.
@@cloerenjackson3699 It's not stupid as long as it is possible. Your scenario about the 1981 IBM PC IS stupid indeed because the technology you mentionned didn't exist. Let me give you another one to work on: instead of 4,77 MHz 1MB addressable ram 8bit bus 8088, what if IBM had choosen the 68000 (possible because it was already on the market) which can address 16MB of RAM (instead of one) and in one chunck (8086/88 had to use segments). You have 4 hours, 4000 words minimum. No, let me shorten it for your education. The Atari ST is actually the reference design for the 68000. If IBM had choosen the 68000 in 1981, you'd have had a professionnal equivalent of the Atari ST, more expensive with no sound (and maybe no color) but able to go up to 16MB of Ram
@@CaptainDangeax
My example is stupid, but it's merely to highlight the stupidity of Amiga fan fantasy timelines where they pretend things were not how they obviously were. Especially if, as you did, you fantasise an outcome was substantially more or less realistic than it obviously was: At the time of the release of the Amiga sprite scaling hardware wasn't realistic in a consumer level device of the same date and price and complexity. There isn't even any sign Commodore had the talent or resources to achieve bitmap rotation in an ASIC.. Your implication of "It would be just a simple matter of..." is the stuff of fiction.
What if IBM had used a 68000? As you said, in 1981 it would have been expensive. The 8088 meant cheaper simpler motherboards and it also meant much more industry support arriving from developers who'd previously developed software for the 8080. The software base for the PC evolved rapidly and the platform itself was affordable to businesses of all sizes. ISA board manufacturer was easy and a large third party base of industrial hardware and exotic add in boards arrived plentifully and rapidly. So by the time the Amiga appeared the PC already had more than five million users making it attractive to developers whereas the A1000 had none and it also supported a raft of industry standard software applications while the A1000 had none. A cut price PC was also already cheaper than an A1000.
So again, for most people buying a computer the Amiga A1000 was not a no brainer choice over the PC, not even based on audio sample playback hardware and a blitter and copper and marketing, and hoping buyer stupidity is solely to blame is obviously just silly.
The truth is far simpler: The Amiga simply wasn't an attractive choice given what people actually wanted from a desktop PC purchase and most of the Amiga features fans cite are basically irrelevant to what people who bought PCs want a PC to do for them.
As a note on the Amiga using planar vs chunky what Jay miner was quoted against was years later when memory bandwidth became less of a problem. Back in 1985 chunky (1 bytes/8bits) was more than any reasonable hardware was capable of. Even the PC was using planar on some graphics systems. If you look at the hardware the PC VGA (256 colour/1 byte) systems were using, it becomes apparent what obstacles they were overcoming. Cards cost more than an A500 just to display graphics and you also needed a new monitor. hindsight is 20/20 and maybe Jay had an idea how to overcome the issues.
To put it into car terms :-
VGA required a big block V8 but Amiga planar required an eco drive. They both have there upside, Power vs efficiency but it's what you want to put in to get to the destination.
Yes, Jay stated he wished he had gone with pixel graphics instead of bitplane graphics, but I suspect that at the time the Amiga was designed, bitplane graphics were probably the correct choice to get the speed required. As time went by, the Amiga should have incorporated a pixel graphics mode, but it didn't advance enough to do that, and may somewhat of been held back by hardware compatiblity (however the Atari ST I believe did later introduce pixel graphics into their hardware).
A great and informative video. It's amazing to see how far ahead of time the Amiga really was!
And that said from an Atari fanboy (see my channel ^^)! Actually I also had an A500 for some years back then. 😁
A really interesting detail in Workbench (since which version, or is it an additional program?) is the support for the scroll wheel of a modern mouse. Just checking an option and it works? That's what I really still miss on my STs and Falcon!
Thanks, I hope I didn't come across as too much of an Amiga fanboy, I was trying to be reasonable objective. It's interesting if you watch the Jay Miner videos that Atari had actually funded the Amiga development, and as Amiga nearly went bust, the entire chipset would have been owned by Atari if Commodore hadn't stepped in. The scroll wheel support has been added in Amiga OS 3.2 which was released this year!! (2021), it's amazing to think that they would still updating the OS in 2021.
@@DavePoo2 Yes, it's really amazing what some people still do for our old hardware. Also for the Atari ST there are still developments for the OS (TOS), like EmuTOS which also got an update this year.
"It's amazing to see how far ahead of time the Amiga really was"
How was it "ahead"?
@@cloerenjackson3699 Graphics, sound, multitasking OS, to an (relative) affordable price!
well, even on Amiga the scrollwheel is just a thing for emulators, dont think you can connect scrollwheel mouse to OG Amiga (maybe via RS232?), but same EmuTOS supports scrollwheel.
BTW, TPau65 I do like and hate your channel. I like it due to your content and I hate it since you own the Falcon I never got in 90s, and always wanted.
When I first got one of these as a young teenager it felt like I had Deep Thought sat on my desk. It stayed with me all the way to university and did all of my desktop publishing. It was great.
Nice. I wonder how many had a similar experience. I assume you ended up with a PC or Mac in the end (like we all did)
@@DavePoo2 Yep I'm now part of the Apple collective!
@@Yewbzee Resistance was futile
Very nice video and great coverage of the strengths this amazing machine had. There's one feature that I've never seen anyone mention though, it was a true multi-user machine as well. I had three Amiga 2000s in my office and a very powerful Amiga 4000 tower system in another building that would sit idle for certain times of each day. I was importing and manipulating huge AutoCad files in Pagestream for creating mapping/engineering documents and even though the A2000s could do it, they were very slow. So, I would simply remote login to the A4000 and send it's display back to my computer while leveraging all the horsepower of the A4000! As a matter of fact, the Amigas could do anything my $50k Sun Sparc pizza box could do. Best damn computer ever!!! :-)
I think the multitasking capabilities were very far ahead of their time. The Mac was honestly a pile of crap (didn't Steve Jobs do a funeral for that OS on stage when they got rid of it?), and DOS was well, it was DOS and windows was just built on top of that for years to come. The Amiga had a huge head start in the race to get a decent OS.
@@DavePoo2 the Amiga was WAY ahead of the others by many years. Sometimes I think Dale and the gang decided that if the Sun and HP workstations could do it then the Amiga could do it too. Here's another thing, how many people remember the Amiga Key + M? I would run each machine in it's own screen and simply toggle between them. I could even toggle to an Xwindows session running on other Unix workstations! All from my little Amiga. Oh, and one Amiga had a Video Toaster. I would build a scene in Lightwave 3D and while it rendered would toggle to another machine. I'm not even sure any machine can do that stuff today. I guess using Teamviewer. LOL
That's interesting. Did you need additional software or a non standard OS? How did you do it?
@@cloerenjackson3699 yes, I used one program to remotely display Amiga to Amiga, then used an Xwindow client to remote into any of the Unix based machines, used a Telnet client as well. The ability to run stuff in stacked screens and toggling between them is built into the Amiga OS. Also, the release of a networking program/hardware is what made all this possible, probably the original TCP/IP program. I can't remember the actual names of these programs but if you just put "Ami" in front of the subject that was the general naming convention back then! I guess the old adage, "only the good die young" applied to the amazing Amiga. LOL
@@rklein I understand the Xwindows part, Xwindows was built as a networkable GUI on Unix, it's the bits which are specific to the Amiga I don't understand. I don't know what you mean by "stacked screens". What are the things you were doing with the Amiga you were unable to do on other systems?
People seem to forget Miner's work on the Atari 8bit line architecture. They were the first home machines with co processors designed to shift work from the cpu (hardware scrolling and sprites), the first home computer with svideo output and the first machine with a "USB" type of peripheral connecting port. Tones of colors (actually 256) and polyphonic sound(4 channels). He and his team produced masterpieces well ahead of their time.
Yep, all the computers he did were always pushing the home computing forward in leaps and bounds. The Atari 8-bit was actually my first home computer, I didn't find out until a lot later that it was basically designed by the Amiga designer. Masterpieces indeed!
@@DavePoo2 They were so ahead of their time that Amiga(2 years delay!) almost didn't get the recognition it deserved during its commercial life while the limits of the Atari 8bit line are still in search by home-brew projects.
Yes but what's more interesting about that is both the Amiga and Atari 8bits were initially interesting but turned out to be deeply flawed.
Turrican 2❤ Chris Huelsbeck
When people ask me why the Commodore Amiga was a great computer, I am now going to share this video with them. Thank you for making it.
Thanks. Unfortunately, the Amiga was a bit like a party - "You just had to be there at the time"
Awesome machine , had a 500 then 1200 in the early 90's , got a 1200 on my shipping list 👍
I didn't own a 1200 until recently, I always wanted one back in the day, but by the time I could actually afford one ..... well there was "Doom", so it was time for a PC.
@@DavePoo2 The Amiga did later get an actual _Doom_ port (I remember _Amiga Format_ reviewing it circa 1999). Unfortunately I guess it was a classic case of “too little, too late”, as many people (developers and gamers alike) had already called it a day as far as the Amiga was concerned, and (like its PC counterpart) you needed a fairly souped-up/accelerated Amiga to run it.
What does make me sad is that, during the Amiga’s heyday, people who used PCs for their work frequently refused to see the Amiga as anything other than a games machine even though there was serious software released for it (and it seemed like a lot of it was pretty good, too), yet when _Doom_ came out and became the phenomenon that it ultimately did, suddenly the PC was no longer just the uncool grey box for office/business use and suddenly became the must-have machine for gaming.
@@Texy88 Again it does show how ahead of it's time the Amiga was. A machine that wanted to be considered as both a games machine and an business machine. Something that wasn't a thing back then, but nowadays you would expect any PC or Mac to be capable of gaming even if you bought it for business purposes.
@@DavePoo2 To me, Amiga was - whether you were a gamer or used it for serious purposes - the go-to machine for those who “wanted it hot for not a lot”. Back in its heyday even for games PC users quite often had to fulfil certain graphics-card and/or memory requirements, whereas for the Amiga the vast majority of games would run without the need for graphics cards, accelerator cards and lots of additional RAM (and whenever additional RAM was required it tended to be only a requirement of one megabyte in total within the computer).
@@Texy88 I agree, you got a huge bang for your buck with the Amiga. I didn't go into the cost in this video as I wanted to just concentrate on the hardware, but the Amiga was not the cheapest, but I don't think there were any other computers at it's price point that could do what it could do
Amiga, the best home computer system ever made. :)
On the subject of A500 RAM expansion slot... it was actually possible to convert those extra 512KB of RAM from CHIP to FAST, and vice versa, by cutting one line, and connecting two lines, directly on the motherboard. Instructions on how to do that had appeared in a local gaming magazine, and as any adventurous teenage boy would've done, I immediately got to work on it. I even improved upon it by taking an auto-fire switch from a broken joystick I had lying around, and turned it into a CHIP/FAST RAM switch sticking out on the side of my Amiga like it was always meant to be a part of her design. Some older games just wouldn't work with 1MB of CHIP RAM, so that was a perfect solution to the problem.
On the subject of the awesomeness of the Copper chip... if I remember correctly, each Copper instruction would take a couple of screen pixels to execute, so the obvious thing to do was to take one of those awesome level-loading screens from the Agony game, turn them into a Copper instruction list, and then... display that as a background image while working in the Workbench.
Ah, the good old days of Amiga... when you could load an application into AsmOne disassembler, change it so that it did what you actually wanted it do, and then recompile the whole thing into your own home-brewed version to use to your pleasure.
Never again will there be a system like Amiga...
I think the 1Mb chip on the A500 was only possible depending on which version of Agnus you had right? It wouldn't have converted it to fast, it would have converted it from slow memory to real chip memory.
Yeah, people made demos that just made images by changing a single color value in the copper, pretty cool stuff.
I wonder if Jay Miner ever had an i.q test?. Probly be 200+ or some crazy shit.
A very clever guy and it's a shame he died before his time. From what I can tell from the videos and quotes, he also seemed like a very likeable and approachable person, not really what you would expect from the stereotypical grey bearded hardware designer.
If Amiga makes a come back with modern hardware and software, I will be first inline !!! Brilliant Video thanks. Would love to see a series on making games on the Amiga....
I hate to say it, but if it made a comeback with modern hardware & software, it would probably be very much like the PC/Mac we have today, but who knows what could have been if Commodore could have carried on without making a mess of the company. In the future I might do some videos where I program the blitter a little, but I doubt I will have time outside my day job to program a full game. I'd like to do some tests to show off what the blitter could do, and possibly show why it didn't advance as much as it should in the later Amigas.
You got the PC, didn't you? What would an Amiga do that you can't already do with a PC?
Always wanted an A2400 16-bit sound/midi-ports/additional memory/faster 68040 processor speed. That CD32 thing just didn't exist.
I used to use midi on the Amiga 500, you just needed a peripheral to do it. I always thought it was weird that music seemed to be the Atari ST domain, but I suppose that the Atari had just accumulated lots of good music software due to it's affiliation with music (although i thought Bars & Pipes on the Amiga was excellent).
@@DavePoo2 " I always thought it was weird that music seemed to be the Atari ST domain"
I don't. It's just the path of least resistance: The ST had integrated MIDI. Same as the Amiga being used in some video applications such as the titles for The Chart Show because the base model was easily programmed and genlock compatible. C'est ca, viola.
Such a great video! Thanks for producing 😄👍
No problem, glad you enjoyed it. It took quite a bit longer than I expected to put it together.
@@DavePoo2 the good ones always do 🤷♂️
Ironically the ones I’ve thrown together on a whim are my highest performing videos 🤦♂️
Actually, on ECS and AGA Amigas you can do twice the frequency range of the audio.
But still only 4 channels. More channels would have been a bigger win.
@@DavePoo2 True....
.. But it's not completely true though. Faster Amigas use the CPU to software mix to more channels. I used 24 channels on my 060 when using Digibooster Pro ;)
Fasttracker 2 also used software mixing on the PC to get more than the two channels the PC soundcards had :)
Well, you could mix audio on the CPU on the slower Amigas as well if required. But that's not really an advancement in hardware capability. It was pretty cool that you could use the CPU to do stuff like that, it made the Amiga very versitile, but ultimately, video games would have liked to have been able to play more sfx & music (or both at the same time), without stealing any more CPU from the game.
On the subject of the "slow fast RAM" on the A500 expansion bus, there was a hack you could do that made it true fast RAM, I remember doing it on my first A500 (KS1.3), it was a case of cutting some tracks on the Mainboard. Sadly this worked which meant I was soon putting my A1200 in a Microniks Tower case complete with a GBP 68030 and 6882 with 2MB of RAM, and a Zorro 2 board and additional hard drives (whopping 80MB), Then I got the Siamese system (Anyone remember them? an ISA card that linked a PC and an Amiga,) then finally I had saved enough for my A3000 and a 17" CRT.... Soon a 68060, CV643D GFX card, and a 486SX bridge board was in that A3000, together with Shapeshifter, I had an AmigaMacPC........ Then Command & Conquer & Doom was released and a Pentium 120MHz arrived and the A3000 was either sold or put in the loft (Dune 2 and Alien Breed 3D no longer seemed so good) . I am hoping its in the loft! together with the Microniks A1230 and my Atari 800XL!)
The Amiga is still my favourite computer. It was so ahead of its time, being multi-media before the term even existed. It could do all the Mac could do, better and faster, and had GFX and sound that a monochrome or CGA PC could only dream of. Sadly the Mac had Steve Jobs and the Amiga had Irving Gould. The rest was history, it will always be computings "what if?" .
Wow, you had some real kit there, and you think you may still have some of it in the loft! Well worth checking out, maybe it all still works? Did the A500 mod just turn the slow ram into chip RAM? and then only if you had a certain Agnus in the board? I'm not up on my A500 board mods. Oh and DOOM and C&C, those were the days I remember after the Amiga was put to rest. I think my first PC might have been a P133.
@@DavePoo2 Hi Dave,
From memory it was a Fat Agnus that was required (but they were socketed so easy to change?) and it turned it into genuine Fast RAM, so a slight increase (Though now I am wondering if it turned it into genuine Chip RAM, it was a long time ago), I also experimented with a 68010 in the A500, though that didnt last long and also a 14MHz 68000? Well thats what I remember but its a long, long time ago. I used to like hacking around with hardware back then.
I do remember as the Amiga that was genuinely for those that "thought different". It wasn't a marketing slogan, it was a genuine feeling. Our local Amiga group was a fun little bunch, always trying new things.
It was before everything got locked down, hell I still recall getting my first modem and discovering BBS, and the awesome Demo scene, Fred Fish Floppies and Aminet CDs. The Amiga was about so much more than the hardware, I guess the whole Jay Miner, RJ Mical, Dave Haynie philosophy just rubbed off on users. I have had many Computers since then, but the one I feel love for is the Amiga. As soon as they released that little A500 Mini, I got one, discovered you could load workbench on it, as well as lots of others games and I haven't left it alone. (I have used it more than the new Mac Studio that I bought last month, I fact I have been looking at getting an A600 case and putting it in there.... Oh and Superfrog , Pinball Fantasies, Sensible Soccer, Cannon Fodder and Ratsoft's Defender are just as great as I remember.
I genuinely feel lucky to have been a part of that scene, before computers got commercialised and homogenised.
Long live the Amiga I say. :)
@@DavePoo2 I will give you a brief synopsis
I am 57, (hell I'm younger than Brad Pitt, but you wouldn't believe it)
I'm from Uk and when I was at secondary school (The old "Comprehensive"), we got to pick "Computer studies", so I did, in those days we programmed with punch cards that went once a week to a local mainframe operated by the county council and we got some run time. and a print out.
Then suddenly a Commodore Pet arrived, paid for by the PTA. We finally had a "PC" shared between 1280 pupils, we had arrived!
At this time I was spending a lot of time in the arcades, (I still recall my fist encounter with Space Invaders, that last bugger was hard to hit) , I learnt the "pattern" to many games (I could "walk " and "clock" invaders, knew the secret hiding space on Pacman, where the monsters would glide right past) but my greatest love back then (apart from a certain girl called Debbie ;)) was Eugene Jarvis's seminal masterpiece Defender, how the hell he fitted all that into 16K is a mystery. I was one of the best back then, and 10P could last hours. I was soon banned from playing it in the local arcade. So I moved to Phoenix, the game not the place :)
In 1982 I dropped out of college and had to get a job, having the gift of the gab I went to work in the City of London at an Ad agency and was earning a fair crack, so I sold my ZX80 (the one with 1K RAM with the additional 16K RAM pack that would disconnect if a fly landed on a feather pillow in Outer Mongolia), and bought an Atari 800XL from Dixons.... (With the cassette deck and 10 shite titles!) for £79.99 I loved that little beast, Star Raiders was awesome, and I literally crapped my pants playing Rescue on Fractalus late one night when the alien attacked!), I then got hooked on Microprose titles like F15-Strike Eagle and Silent Service, a game so good I decided to buy the 1050 Floppy disk drive just to speed up loading times...at £139 it was a lot more than the Atari 800XL but I was hooked. Anyway while I was in Silica Systems in Oxford Street's Selfridges buying the 1050 , they had an Amiga A1000 playing the Juggler demo...I remember looking at it, it was graphically in a different league to the 800XL (Despite both having chipsets designed by Jay Miner), within a couple of months I had stopped seeing Debbie and started saving for an Amiga, luckily the A500 came out and I soon had one. I saw Debbie a few years ago, lucky escape I reckon ;)
Amiga rules. ;}
Seeing the bit about how the 68000 is, in reality, no faster in carrying out operations than a 6502 is really interesting to me. I remember hearing one other source comment about this, but it didn't make sense to me. Hearing Ed Logg talk about "8 clock cycles per instruction" helped, because I've looked at the clock cycles for 6502 instructions, and some of them are quite a bit faster than that, like 2 or 3.
Like Logg said, "larger registers is really all you get."
I had the thought that the programming experience is a lot nicer, since I had the opportunity to program in 68000 assembly, and I've since done some 6502 programming. I have nicer memories of programming on the 68000. But the question has remained on my mind, "So, that's really all that was gained? A nicer programming model, more opcodes, larger registers?..."
I had an Atari Mega STe in the early '90s, and I recall that running it at 8 Mhz, the screen updates in the GUI were a bit sluggish (I could up it to 16 Mhz with a soft-switch, at which point the updates became a bit faster). I've been thinking that I wonder if someone had brought out a 6502 machine with the same graphics and sound capabilities, with bank-switched memory to enable it to get up to a couple megabytes, would it have run just as fast? Logg seemed to say so. Interesting...
It also makes me wonder about Miner's motivations, because in a history I read on why he founded Amiga, it said that when he was at Atari, he wanted to develop a 68000 system, but Atari was only interested in developing things for the 6502. So, he left, and worked at a hearing aid company for a bit (as I recall), and then was approached by another former Atari engineer, who talked him into founding his own company.
What did he, or anyone else for that matter, think they were gaining by developing a 68000 system (this includes Atari under Tramiel, and while we're at it, Apple's engineers, with the Lisa and Macintosh)? I'm not asking rhetorically. I figure Miner, and these other people, must've had a good reason. I have my own reasons for preferring it, but what was it that attracted them to it?
Well, the 68000 had a 16-bit data bus and a greater than 16-bit address bus. So the big advantage there is that you can address larger amounts of memory without the need for banking or any kind of MMU, this basically means the computer is both cheaper and ultimately much more friendly to program. The next advantage is then that it becomes much easier to do more revisions of the machine that move to a larger address bus (e.g the A1200 which had a 24-bit address bus and a full 32-bit address bus, yet could still run all the same software as it's predecessor).
The 6502 was always going to be stuck with a 8-bit data bus as it's just part of it's design. The Commodore 128 managed to get 128Kb of memory working on it, but it had to jump through a lot of hoops to get that.
The other thing worthy of note is that the 68000 does have more registers as Ed Logg points out, and that is actually quite valuable. The 6502 only had 3 registers and only one of them could actually be used for math (it did have the zero page as well, but that isn't quite as fast as the registers), the 68000 had 8 data registers, all of which are capable of doing math operations (plus 7 address registers as well).
So ultimately, the 68000 is a better processor than it's 8-bit predecessors, but I think it's just important to realise, that it isn't better because it clocks higher, it's better because it had more features, it's a much easier to use from a software programming point of view, it can access lots of memory without banking and extra chips, and it left the door open for future hardware upgrades to 32-bit, and later to get coupled with the 68881 floating point processor.
@@DavePoo2 - What about the 65816, though, which was the 16-bit successor to the 6502 (featured in the Apple IIGS)? Looking up its spec's, it was backward-compatible with the 6502, but could switch modes between 8- and 16-bit registers, and effectively had a 24-bit address bus, able to access up to 16 MB of memory (though, it sounds like it in fact had a 16-bit address bus, with the upper 8 bits used to do bank-switching).
It did not become available until 1985, though, which was the same year the Amiga came out. So, it was a new, relatively untested technology (the 68000 had been around since 1979), and Amiga started developing its computer in 1982, as I recall. I guess too little, too late for Western Digital.
I had a friend in college who had a IIGS, and I thought it stacked up well against 16-bit machines. The graphics and sound capabilities were very impressive compared to the older Apple II's. I looked at its GUI. It compared well with the ST's GEM interface, and I'd say its sound capabilities easily beat the ST's. And it was running at 2.8 Mhz.
Thinking about the bank switching on the 6502, it reminds me of the segmented memory model that used to be the bane of PC programmers' existence. I didn't use it (much), but what I heard about that was addressing on the 8086 had two parts: You'd have a segment address, and then an offset (a relative address) you'd use to access memory within the segment. This was why programmers tended to rave about using the 68000, because you didn't need to deal with any of that.
I ran into the segmented memory model a bit when I programmed for MS-DOS in one of my first jobs out of school, in the mid-1990s. I was programming in C, and when I'd look at memory values, the IDE (Borland C++) portrayed it as a flat memory model. I ended up using a 286 DOS extender, because the tool I was developing was running up against the 640K limit of DOS. I thought the extender was going to give me enough memory to complete the project, but no... Even with that, all global variables and string constants (which I had a lot of) were stored in a single 64K segment, and I ran out of that... It was only then I learned that the only way out of that was to store all string literals in a resource file, which would cause the compiler to store them outside this segment. I was SO glad to get away from DOS!
Working with bank-switching does seem difficult, because you can't just program the way you want to. For transferring state between banks, you have to do two steps: transfer what you want into a portion of main memory that isn't bank-selected, so you can turn the first bank off, and the other one on, and then transfer the state to where you actually want it to go. Likewise, if you want to branch between two banks, you effectively need a jump table, because you can't just branch to the address you want. You need to jump out of the bank you're using, into a portion of main memory, into a routine that will turn off the bank you're branching from, turn on the bank you're going into, and then branch you to where you need to go. And it's all effectively relative addressing, because all banks start at the same address. So, yes, it involves jumping through some hoops. :)
@@DavePoo2 - Re. the 68000, I know what you mean about the registers. When I started doing some 6502 programming several years ago, I was struck by there only being 3 of them, with the accumulator (A) being the one you used for just about *everything*. As I got more into it, I saw some code examples where programmers used the stack to temporarily store A, X, and Y, because the programmer needed those registers for something else for a little bit, but they didn't want to lose the state, and they didn't want to set up temporary addresses to store the values. As I learned about the 65C02, I learned that the designer(s) added a few instructions for doing just this (transferring X and Y register values to and from the stack, in addition to transferring A), since programmers were doing this often. Once you learn what you need to do to keep everything working, it's not a big deal, because you can manage with the processor's limited registers, but I remember it felt luxurious on the 68000 that it had as many address and data registers as it did. It seemed like the instruction set was also very well-designed. I've felt fortunate that it was the first processor on which I learned assembly.
For "predecessor" in terms of hardware it would make more sense to discuss the Atari 8-bits.
Possibly, but I picked on the C64 & C128 as they were Commodores own product (even though they were developed by a completely different team). The Atari 8-bits were technically Jay Miner's predecessor computer, and actually my first computer was the Atari 65XE (what i most remember about that computer was the super long loading times for games on cassette)
They even share design similarities. I own an XEGS which I know is after JM, but the chipset genesis goes back to him.
"It's not like" same engineers worked on Atari and Commodore computers. Management team also worked for both companies ...
@@TheNvipy there was a lot of interbreeding between the companies
What a fantastic overview. Cheers Dave.
A truly, truly stunning computer, light years ahead of it's time. Unfortunately, badly let down by poor management. Then again, the PC was catching up fast and 3rd party audio and GFX cards would make the PC's 'win' inevitable. Of course, the consoles applied a wee bit of pressure too. Still, it's legacy will live forever.
I still have my A500 and A1200, but have taken the source code and assets from the software, including several games, that I wrote waay back then, and transferred them into VSCode. Adding the fantastic Amiga Assembly extension (+ UAE emulator), I now have a development system equally light years ahead of what I was using on the real Amiga (ASM-One). The only 'hard bit' is trying to read that old source code and remember exactly what the code is doing. Still, I now have the internet infinite library to help....info overload!
I had a game I was writing on my Amiga back in the day but I don't know what happened to the code. Really cool that you kept some of your old stuff.
The Amiga was great and it held up until around 1992 (which is pretty amazing). The Mega Drive was about on par, but the SNES and 1992/1993s PC games really showed that the Amiga wasn't leading anymore. The A1200 was certainly better than the A500, but it wasn't the leap that was needed. It's not only Doom, but at the end of 1993 the fate of the Amiga (and also CBM) was sealed. Still Amiga games (and the music) aged amazingly well and I'm sure I'll play Turrican 2, Gods, Populous and Mega-Lo-Mania on an emulator in 10, 20 and maybe even 30 years :)
I agree about the 1200, it's a better computer but it isn't really much of a generational leap (although what computers do you buy nowadays where the clock speed literally doubles each time you upgrade, those days are gone). The had just slightly improved the hardware (more colors), but because of the way the Amiga was programmed, you couldn't really take advantage of that in a game without re-coding it. Also the disk drive as the same, so if you made a game for it, you were being asked to provide more colorful graphics but still had the same space to fit them in on the disk.
The gaming oriented hardware in the mega drive made it overall a better gaming device than Amiga aside from the color palette so don't be a fanboy trying to put the snes on a different category with pcs.
I used to own them all the C64 the Amgia 500 and my last Computer from Commodore an Amiga 1200 wich was a very good Machine for low budget money.2MB Ram memory with 14 Mhz 16bit Chip system.compatible with all Programs and Games released for the Amiga Family.Memories of good times.
I didn't get an A1200 until recently. I had the 500 & 600 back in the day. I think the 1200 was a good computer but it never really got the support it needed and it probably came out too late in the Amiga's life. But all in all, I loved the Amigas
Doom killed the Amiga off, and ever since then Amiga owners have been obsessed with getting Doom to run.
Yep, I should have mentioned Doom in the video, it was the Amiga killer.
While I think Doom was certainly a nail in the coffin, Commodore had already put the lid on it. And had they bothered at the time to develop Doom for the Amiga it runs fine.
@@daishi5571 Commodore had botched it up. But I think Id software made the right choice with the PC, it was the right platform for Doom given than the Amiga was really languishing at that time. I remember being so naive back in the day when Commodore went bust and then got sold to Company X, and I thought "cool, they will just take over and the Amiga will continue". If I had just done a little research into it, then it would have been clear that the Amiga was dying and the PC was the way forward.
@@DavePoo2 No doubt Doom was ideal for PC, playing to it's strengths with VGA and not so much for the Amiga. But when you look and see that they did versions for the SGI and Next and they play like dirt, I find it disingenuous of JC to claim that the Amiga couldn't do it when there were systems being sold that could play a decent Doom game as time has proven.
When Commodore went bust and saw the months tick by I saw that as the end (I had already been though that before with another system) I bought a PC and sold my Amiga. But truthfully I have never been as happy as I was with my Amiga which I why I bought it back about 2 years later. And for perspective, I had worked with PC and Mac's for a few years before Commodore went bust but had not owned one because they were crap. And in fact at the time of Commodore going bust I was a PC engineer, I didn't like the machine but it paid me well.
@@daishi5571 This story is so familiar, we all loved the Amiga, but we all ended up with a PC. The PC to me felt like a big kludge of stuff put together, and that's really what it was, just buy any old parts and slap them together and make your own PC. I think it was kludge of parts approach that made the PC so bad, but ultimately was also responsible for it's success as the years went by.
The one thing I really wished the Amiga 500 would have had is an internal Fast Ram slot.
The Amiga 1200 while being too little too late because of bad management had it right when it came to expansion slots.
Yep, you could connect fast RAM to the side expansion bus. I think the choice of slow ram for the internet card was a cost reduction thing. I would have liked it to ship with a small amount of fast RAM directly on the board, it would have been a huge advantage to games etc (but again the machine would have cost more, so pushing the price up might have priced it out of the market).
68000 is great processor for programming compared to the 6502,8086/8088/286. 6502 makes you want to bash your head into a wall. I like my Amiga emulator and am looking forward to the retro Amiga 500 (Maxi not the Mini, hopefully.)
I agree, the 68000 was very easy to program for and I suspect contributed a lot to the success of the Amiga (and the other systems that used that processor).
@@murasaki848 ...that's an interesting evaluation of the decisions which led the explosive PC industry.
@@murasaki848 It sometimes does the same with mine. Try to think of how you can reword it. It's usually because it thinks you're writing something insensitive. Try again making sure it's all nice and calm. TH-cam will usually accept a careful rewording.
All hail to Workbench 1.3 and Assembler.
You have to buy with what was in competition at the time, on the pc side we had the 386 DX which is already years old from the Amiga at the time even though EGA is still not as good as the amiga video system..
Windows at the time wasn't multitasking but the 386 itself is better prepared for multitasking than the amiga processor.
You have to remember that Windows & the 386 didn't even exist yet on the day the Amiga 1000 was released. But Yeah, i think that the PC had a slow start but was always moving forwards towards a better computer. It didn't take long before it had surpassed the Amiga. The tragedy really is that the Amiga if it had kept up could have been so much better I think. If you went back in time and showed me an original IBM PC, there is no way I would believe I would still be using a derivative of that computer in 2022, but here we are.
@@DavePoo2 We had 286 was cold use at 16 MB ram it self was better machine for alot of tings than amiga.and also dont forget Mac classic was the about the same machina than amiga.. In october 1985 at 386 was realese.
@@DavePoo2 I dunno, man. As a gaming computer, sure, it pushed pixels far far faster. But did you ever actually try to use Windows 95 for productivity? Or even 98? Even with eight times the RAM running on a 66 MHz Pentium, the thing was a shitshow. You could use it, but only grudgingly.
I joined the PC master race at about the P133 era, so I missed out on the PC being that slow. When I was working at a computer company around the 2000's I refused to use Win98 as it was such an unreliable piece of crap, I used Windows NT 4.0 as it just seemed to be much more stable (and Win 2000 wasn't quite there yet). Well, MS seemed to agree with that and the current windows lineup is all based on that platform and the 95/98 got scrapped.
@@DavePoo2 Yeah, the NT kernel was the turning point. I still don't like parts of the post-win98 UX, and there's still room to complain, but it's no longer an intrinsically bad system (I have a separate rant in place regarding why today's systems are bloated and slow, but surprisingly enough, it ain't solely the fault of Microsoft).
A 133 MHz Pentium would be fast, yeah. I suspect the classic 16 MB setup would be slow on NT, but I may be misremembering things.
Regardless, for roughly same price, you should be able to towerify an A1200 with an 040 accelerator and the same amount memory. It'd be slower in benchmarks (*very* noticeably slower, frankly), but the OS would probably be a far better, more fluid experience. Until NT, which made it bearable.
I guess that's my main point of contention; I think 15 years is a pretty long time to overtake someone who's pretty much standing still. :-)
Speaking of HAM-mode not being used in games, there was a game that attempted this, DDT - Dynamic Debugger promised to use it in a side scrolling platformer, they even took out full page ads in computer magazines, but the game never materialized. Imagine paying for those expensive ads when the game is not even running as a demo.
Bold claim. No doubt too bold. I do remember Blood Money used a HAM picture in it's intro splash screen, but not in game.
Far ahead of its time, yet it had no applications when it launched, and it was marketed as a business machine, which completely failed. It's first real "killer application" was Deluxe Paint, and the first game that showed off the Amigas real capabilities was Defender of the Crown - before that, there was really nothing besides a few demos and half-assed ST ports.
So in hindsigth, it wasn't really awesome at all. The Amiga had potential.
I didn't want to go to much into the all the crap that Commodore did with the marketing etc as I wanted to focus on the machine from the hardware perspective. But yes, you are right, they really screwed the inital marketing and the didn't make deals with software companies like MS to secure a good suite of software for the machine at launch. I think the fac that the ST had just arrived prior didn't help as developers had got used to programming that system and just ported to the Amiga. So a catalogue of errors that really hindered the launch of the machine.
Amiga 500 solved all those problems and sold like hot cakes. It was almost perfect 16-bit machine - 512 kB RAM, solid graphics and sound, floppy disks and ability to be hooked to a TV. Latter versions upgraded memory to 1 MB and added support for some HDD. Alas, by the time Amiga 1200 came out PC got upgraded with VGA, Sound Blaster and now had games that needed to be installed on HDD but were much better than anything Amiga could do .
@@aleksazunjic9672 What do you mean "alas"? You'd prefer it if we lived in a backward age just so the Amiga could survive? The only way it could remain competitive is if the competition agreed to stop competing? VGA was launched in 1987, the same year at the Amiga A500. VGA offered no-nonsense 8bit 256 colour screens from a palette of 262,144 colours. The Amiga A1200 didn't appear for another five years in 1992. The very next year Doom was released.
@@cloerenjackson3699 Alas, because it would be far better for consumers if Amiga somehow survived as alternative home computer platform with affordable price . As for VGA, it was prohibitively expensive when launched, especially considering that you needed monitor for it . Amiga could use TVs that people already had. What killed Amiga 1200 was lack of HDD out of the box , and lack of high-density floppy . Games like Doom or X-Wing could not be packed to run from floppies, especially not 880 KB Amiga floppies.
@@aleksazunjic9672
"Alas, because it would be far better for consumers if Amiga somehow survived as alternative home computer platform with affordable price"
Why? Competition hasn't ceased. Intel didn't stop making new CPUs, computing didn't come to a standstill. Progress has continued without the Amiga. Competition still exists. Intel don't have a monopoly, Nvidia don't have a monopoly, Microsoft don't have a monopoly. New products are released all the time. It doesn't always produce better devices too. Look at keyboards and printers. There is plenty of competition in those markets but quality has gone down, not up. In active markets manufacturers learn to design to spec and when consumers don't demand quality they don't get it, even when there is a lot of competition. Consumers often don't want things to be great as much as they want them to be cheap to buy.
I do prefer the time of there being greater choice but that time had faded even by the 16bit era. It was during the 8bit era when we had most choice. This seems like a consequence of complexity. During the 8bit era one smart guy could design an entire computer. Today one smart guy can't write a competitive OS. Again, the competition is there, other operating systems exist, they just can't compete. That is what killed the Amiga: It couldn't compete. For that reason I don't see the point of being too sorry about it. The PC won through its rate of iteration. Any advantage the Amiga had on the day of the release of the A1000 in 1985 was quickly eroded or beaten by PC technology. Today the whole Amiga platform has been subsumed into Windows via WinUAE. Not only does that provide access to all its software features the hardware features are faster under emulation today than they were when implemented in real hardware in the 1980s and 1990s. There isn't really a defence for the Amiga anymore, it is simply another legacy system. What are you longing for when there is nothing it could do you can't now do under Windows with an Amiga emulator?
"As for VGA, it was prohibitively expensive when launched, especially considering that you needed monitor for it . Amiga could use TVs that people already had. What killed Amiga 1200 was lack of HDD out of the box , and lack of high-density floppy . Games like Doom or X-Wing could not be packed to run from floppies, especially not 880 KB Amiga floppies."
Amiga fans typically massively overestimate the price of competing products. I've seen prices of $25,000 or $250,000 quoted for anything implied to offer better performance than the Amiga by people who clearly haven't even bothered to check. When the A1000 was released it cost $100 more than a PC with a monitor. VGA cards could be bought for under $500 the same year VGA was released. This is not "prohibitively expensive". Furthermore it's bogus to appeal to expense because what's "expensive" is entirely subjective. What about those for whom the Amiga was "prohibitively expensive"? In fact, one of the reasons consoles and Commodore 64s massively outsold the Amiga was because they offered most of what people wanted from a home computer and were cheaper than the Amiga. So the problem with objecting to things more expensive than Amigas on price is that most people buying home computes and games machines had that same objection to buying the Amiga. It's easy then to argue as far as the market was concerned the Amiga was too expensive for what it offered and what they cold justify buying. Even an A500 was a luxury rather than commodity purchase. The PC for many people was considered a practical necessity rather than a luxury.
I don't think just HDD and HD floppies explain why the Amiga was unsuccessful. I think there is a long list of reasons, most of its shortcomings its fans are unwilling to accept or admit, which is why they have so much trouble coming to a realistic evaluation of why the computer was a failure. It's even paradoxical that amidst the lauding of the platform they seem to have forgotten, it actually lost. Whatever explains the failure of the Amiga it clearly can't be what its fans usually say and want to talk about.
It perhaps is true that some games couldn't work well from floppies. I think it is a thing that PCs were compatible with HDDs and usually had them almost from the very beginning. I just don't think that's at all where the advantages of PC ownership end and I can't be the only one because despite all the bombastic claims made by Amiga fans it was massively outsold by the PC for the duration of its entire life until it eventually gave up the ghost. Clearly against what Amiga fans attest the Amiga was receiving significant ordinance from the PC the entire time it was available. I don't think the usual "marketing" reason holds any part of the explanation. Every computer ever sold except the Macintosh has enjoyed absolutely diabolical marketing. People buy on spec not marketing campaigns. The history of computing says the winners and losers are separated by platform practicality, not marketing, and the PC always had been an ultimately practical computer on its side. That is literally the explanation for why we all use them now and not Amigas. It's also the reason the PC sold well and the Amiga didn't. Hard drives alone just doesn't cover it. The PC always far better satisfied a far greater range of popular practical interests than the Amiga did. H
The Amiga was the first multimedia machine, before the concept really existed. If the internet had been available/affordable a few years earlier, or indeed if CD-ROM drives had hit the market just a few years earlier, then in both cases the Amiga would likely have been the best-placed machine to take advantage.