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Amiga

(Redirected from Commodore Amiga)

Amiga is the name of a range of home/personal computers using the Motorola 68000 processor family, whose development started in 1982. The original Amiga was designed by Jay Miner: his machine was many years ahead of its time when it appeared, having memory mapped IO, plug-and-play, a custom chipset (later dubbed OCS) with advanced video and sound features, and a microkernel with preemptive multitasking. Some of these features had been used previously in mainframe computers, but had never been available to the general public before.

Contents

History

The first Amiga computer, Amiga 1000 (or A1000 for short) was released in 1985 by Commodore, who marketed it both as their intended successor to the Commodore 64 and as their competitor against the Atari ST range.


In 1987 Commodore released two new Amiga models, the A500 and the A2000 as low-end and high-end machines, respectively. The first became the most popular Amiga computer of that decade and was mainly used as a console, while the latter was marketed as a more serious workstation for graphic purposes, due to the presence of a SCSI controller option, a Genlock slot and an I/O video connector.

In 1990 the A3000 was introduced in the market as the successor of both A1000 and A2000, with an extended chipset (ECS), and the second release of its operating system, to be known eventually as the AmigaOS. In the same year, Commodore released three new low-end machines: the CDTV, aimed to move the platform to the living room; the A500plus, with the same enhancements as the A3000; and the A600, basically an A500+ in a smaller box with an IDE controller for hard disks. All of them were a failure, because of the inability of Commodore to market them.

Mass-market Amigas were then considerably cheaper than PCs or Macs of their time - this boosted sales in the more price-conscious European markets, but led to Commodore being viewed in the United States as a producer of cheap and nasty 'game machines'. Further adding to this were the fact that most Commodore retail outlets were toy stores, and the marketing campaigns which were woefully mismatched with the status-conscious American public. This explains why Amiga was was very successful in Europe, but not in the US market, with less than a million sold.

In 1992 Commodore released their last Amiga computer models, the A1200 and the A4000: both of them featured the new AGA chipset and the third release of AmigaOS.

In 1993, in a desperate tentative to save their business, menaced by console giants as Sega and Nintendo, Commodore marketed the CD32 a console with specs similar to the A1200, plus a compact disc reader.

In 1994 Commodore filed for liquidation and its asset were bought by Escom, a Germany PC manufacturer, which in turn, filed for liquidation during 1997. Then the Amiga brand was sold to another PC manufacturer, Gateway 2000, which had grand plans for it, but was subsequently obliged by Microsoft to sell it in 2000.

The current owner of the trademark, Amiga Inc. has licensed the rights to make hardware using the Amiga brand to an U.K. computer vendor, Eyetech Group, Ltd http://www.eyetech.co.uk founded by some former employees of the UK branch of Commodore International. They are currently marketing the AmigaOne, a PowerPC computer suited to run the last remnant of the platform, the AmigaOS, that was in turn licensed to a Belgian-German company, Hyperion Entertainment http://www.hyperion-entertainment.biz .

During these years, a very limited number of clones (Amiga-compatible computers) were produced, as both Commodore and subsequent owners of the trademark strongly refused to have Amigas produced under license.

Features

The Amiga had some of the most impressive sound and graphics available for the home user. Indeed, it was also used for commercial entertainment production till the mid 1990s, aiding users in the Video editing and 3D fields. However, as a home computer, compatibility with ordinary household television sets was prioritized over professional-grade graphics.

The original Amiga chipset, OCS, was more advanced than other architectures of its time: it had dedicated chips for graphic effects based on the monitor's beam position and the use of genlocks was very easy; even today many broadcast corporations still use A3000s and A4000s for their real time video effects. One unique feature the amiga had was the ability to change the monitor resolution on the fly, within a scan line or two. This allowed multiple overlapping screens of different resolutions that could be pulled down or up in front of each other, completely without interfering with each other, controlled at the hardware level.

The Amiga keyboard is quite similar to PC 101-key keyboards, but differs in subtle ways. Repeat keypress timings caused by holding down a key were handled by software on the Amiga, not hardcoded into the BIOS, and often synchronized to the display timings. As a result, e.g. scrolling through a document could be smoother than on the PCs of the day, which were limited to at most 30 repeats per second. The layout of the keyboard featured a left and right "Amiga" key (bearing the "A" of the (former) Amiga logo in black on the left and outlined on the right). It has the two keys "Help" and "Del" in the place where PC keyboards have "PgUp", "PgDown", "Pos1", "End", "Inst" and "Del". It doesn't have keys like "Print Screen", "Scroll Lock" or "Break", and has only 10 function keys instead of the 12 on PC 101-key keyboards.

Models and variants

The marketed Amiga models and their variants were:

  • Original Chipset (OCS)
    • Amiga 1000
    • Amiga 500
    • Amiga 2000
      • Amiga 2500/20 (integrated accelerator board with 68020 processor)
      • Amiga 2500/30 (integrated accelerator board with 68030 processor)
      • Amiga 2500/UX (with special UNIX version and an integrated accelerator board with 68020 or 68030 processor)
      • Amiga 1500 (no hard disk, but two floppy drives)
  • Extended Chipset (ECS)
    • Amiga 500+
    • Amiga 600
      • Amiga 600HD (with hard disk)
    • Amiga 3000
      • Amiga 3000T (towerized version)
      • Amiga 3000UX (with special UNIX version)
  • Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA)
    • Amiga 1200
      • Amiga 1200HD (with hard disk)
    • Amiga 4000
      • Amiga 4000T (towerized version)
    • CD32 (first 32-bit console with a CD-ROM reader)
  • PowerPCzed models
    • AmigaONE
      • AmigaOne G3-SE (processor unit soldered on board)
      • AmigaOne XE (with removable processor unit)
    • microA1
      • microA1-C
      • microA1-I (features a PCI 104 slot)

Operating Systems

After powering up an Amiga 500 this screen display is seen, asking the user to insert the Operating System floppy disk. In this case the OS is Workbench 1.3
After powering up an Amiga 500 this screen display is seen, asking the user to insert the Operating System floppy disk. In this case the OS is Workbench 1.3

The operating system, AmigaOS, was also quite sophisticated, combining an elegant GUI like that of the Apple Macintosh with some of the flexibility of UNIX while retaining a simplicity that made maintenance rather easy. While its operating system was the only preemptive multitasking platform with a microkernel in the consumer marketplace for several years with an efficient memory management, robustness left something to be desired, mainly due to the absence of Protected memory, resulting in the famous "Guru Meditation" errors. The Amiga operating system has been resurrected in 2000 as AmigaOS 4, which currently runs only on AmigaOne computers and on A1200s and A4000s with a PowerPC accelerator card.

Other following operating systems that are still available for Amigas: Linux, OpenBSD and NetBSD. Commodore Amiga Unix (based on AT&T System V Rel. 4) was available only for the A2500 and A3000.

Third party software

In spite of being sold short, Amiga was originally supported by such prestigious software titles as AutoCAD, WordPerfect, Deluxe Paint, and Lattice C. Some titles were later ported to Microsoft Windows and continue to thrive there, like the rendering software Maxon Cinema 4D. Many Amigas are still in use today to produce commercials or local cable TV shows.

Trivia

  • The name amiga is the Spanish word for 'female friend', from the Latin amica.
  • The Amiga had and still has a strong user community, particularly outside the United States.
  • The Amiga community contributed a lot to a computer subculture known as the Demo Scene. The Demo Scene was more or less a phenomenon inherited from Commodore C64 times.
  • When an Amiga crashes, it displays a flashing red box with a mysterious Guru Meditation Number. The number is actually the 68000 exception number, and the address at which it occurred.
  • Amiga has two "three-finger-salute", one for warm reset (CTRL plus the two "Amiga" keys) and the other for reboot (CTRL plus the two "Alt" keys).
  • During the Commodore era, machines with 'thousands' numbering were marketed as 'quality' machines for business use, while the other machines (A500, A500+, A600, A1200) were 'mass market' machines.

External links

  • Amiga, Inc. http://www.amiga.com Current owners of the Amiga intellectual property.
  • KMOS, Inc. http://www.kmos.com current licensee of the Amiga intellectual property related to AmigaOS.
  • Hyperion Entertainment http://www.hyperion-entertainment.com Current maintainers of AmigaOS.
  • Eyetech Group, Ltd http://www.eyetech.co.uk Licensee for the AmigaOne platform.
  • Amiga.org http://www.amiga.org Community news and discussions
  • Amigaworld.net http://www.amigaworld.net Community news and discussions. Official support forum for the AmigaOne.
  • ANN http://www.ann.lu Community news, rumors and discussions.
  • Amiga Wiki http://www.amigacentre.co.uk
  • Pouet http://www.pouet.net A demoscene portal
  • The Big Book of Amiga Hardware http://www.amiga-hardware.com/
  • Amiga history guide http://amiga.emugaming.com/
  • The Classic Amiga Preservation Society http://www.caps-project.org/ dedicated to the preservation of classic Amiga software.

See also





Last updated: 02-24-2005 15:08:17