A history of the Amiga, part 9: The Video Toaster
arstechnica.co.uk
arstechnica.co.uk
We had multi-million imaging systems built by defence contractors like Harris and MD, yet we were blown away by the Amiga. The Amiga was 1000x cheaper and 100x better.
Also, can I read about these imaging systems online anywhere?
I miss it; nothing today matches the freedom, flexibility and simplicity of that platform (IMHO).
There was something almost magical about the Amiga... the hardware, the software, the community... I don't think I've ever had such sheer fun with computers as I did then, and I'm not sure if anything will ever be quite like it again.
(edit) To clarify, my Dad still has one, and with all the VHS decks and monitors and mixers and such it's kinda like a mainframe and takes up a huge amount of space. But could be fun for the right, uh, museum? :-)
C64 palette is fine art to me. I like it's peculiarity too.
DF0: would then have the equivalent PC0:, DF1: PC1:, DF2: PC2: and DF3: (the fourth floppy drive) PC3:.
The Amiga floppy drives could read double or high density floppies formatted at 720 KB (although in general, DS-HD floppies were unreliable when formatted at low density 720 KB capacity); if one installed high density floppy drives, the MS-DOS FAT driver could read and write 1.44, and up to 2.88 MB MS-DOS, FAT formatted floppies.
no, unless you mean _one_ particular model sold with Amiga 4000 - chinon FZ357A spinning at half the rpm. Amiga doesnt have traditional fdc controller with hardware MFM/NRZI encoder, instead uses part of audio chip for serialization and operates on raw data stream. Problem is Paula can only handle 500Kbit/s, while HD floppies require 1000Kbit/s.
Cancelling AAA was an Ali cost decision, it would probably have been well received releasing AAA even late 90s.
A4000 was a horrible low budget kludge as there was no money for anything 90/91 on.
Besides world moved on, even cheaper Sega Megadrive was better, never mind PlayStation. Then came the revolution, 1997 was the year of real 3D accelerators, Voodoo/Riva 128, 1998 Voodoo2/tnt. Amiga still couldnt muster a doom clone running at 320x240 above 7 fps while PC saw Quake 2, Unreal, half-life, Tribes and Thief.
Engineering was decimated both in manpower and budget by Ali. Morale was wrecked too - lots who weren't pushed just left. I don't know how many were left in engineering, but it wasn't many. It was also Gould/Ali that destroyed the Unix deal with Sun.
AAA was specced 10x or more faster than original chipset, and way overdue. It was meant to land 91/92 of course. I think the reason they looked at RISC 3D was also cost - budget to get AAA to silicon under Ali was never going to happen, so buy in something. It wasn't 3D so I've no idea how it'd compare with voodoo etc.
I mean (:-) Did not remember the model exactly, but as you have done, it is easy enough to find it out thanks to the "Interwebs".
Commodore had a lot of self-imposed issues as well, which you can read about in this series of articles.
It took a while before PC made any financial sense except of course if you had to use applications available only on DOS/Windows.
Yes, the 2000 series (and later) had expansion slots etc. But most people knew the Amiga via the 500, 600 and 1200 keyboard computers.
And even with the expandability, the core magic lived within the custom chipset that basically acted like a second computer.
In comparison, everything but CPU and RAM lived on expansion boards in the PC.
For those into retro computers, you may also be interested in the Sharp X68000. This was first released in 1987, two years after the A1000, and was another leap forward for home computers, the near arcade perfect ports are very impressive considering when it was released. If the Amiga had continued to have a decent R&D budget we could've had something similar in the Amiga line too: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TQPt69UCyIA
Pity this was lost in the years of Windows' dominance. Now it seems unlikely anyone will come up with a new system like the Amiga.
Why? ARM devices outsell x86 devices by a massive factor, and there's a massive amount of diversity in ARM systems that you can buy as general purpose computers, ranging from TV sticks, through devices like the Pi and similar class devices, to experimental computers like the Parallella (A "Zynq" - which is an ARM + FPGA - coupled with a 16 core Epiphany CPU).
In terms of avoiding the same monoculture, consider the rise of FPGA based computers - e.g. there are now multiple re-implementations of classic Amiga hardware, as well as pretty much any other classic home computer, but many of them are being pushed beyond original specs. E.g. there are people working on seriously complicated out-of-order M68k FPGA based accelerators, for example. They're still "slow", but FPGA advances means we're getting steadily closer to the point where home-brew FPGA based platforms are viable for relatively normal use.
The PC had just got EGA. VGA wouldn't arrive for a couple more years. Everyone was speechless seeing the A1000 after loading a demo, game, or even the desktop. Then make it talk - software speech synth better than hardware solutions of the time. Pre-emptive multi tasking. Windows could background print.
It was so far ahead, how could it possibly fail? C= marketing.
They got so much right. There's still things I miss - Amiga Screens for one. Open IFF file formats and datatypes.library. Arexx. CygnusEd. Intuition was lovely to program. Card autoconfig that worked - none of this plug and pray bull.
I hated every PC I used until probably XP. I bought several fully loaded PCs, but kept going back to the a3000 and a4000 for ages and loaded FreeBSD or Linux on the PCs.
I remember getting some program for both platforms - Superbase maybe, I forget. Something big and businessy. On the Ami it was 2 floppies. On the Win version it was around 20 floppies. The Ami version had a couple more features and lacked none.
Yet the PC and windows won. Funny old world.
True. But also, the hardware barely advanced for a long time. Commodore didn't even start to architect a next generation graphics chipset until 1988, and didn't release a significant upgrade until the AGA in the Amiga 4000, in 1992. Seven years after the original Amiga! In retrospect they should have been far more aggressive with their hardware upgrades. Their inability to do so let the rest of the market catch up.
3000+ was another good leap forward - 16 bit Paula with 8 full pcm channels, DSP co pro, on board network, a stupid amount of DMA channels (64?), and the AA Agnes graphics that did make it to the 4000. I think also on board soft modem (via yet another DSP).
What we got was the 4000, with IDE (spit). We'd had specs and schematics of the 3000+ going around the developer community for a year or more. I'm hazy now what was AAA and what was 3000+, but no one at all was impressed with the 4000. It was a cheap PC with some Amiga chips. Even Commodore UK were unimpressed (and later called the A600 a total screw up) :)
AAA was another stellar leap in 1988-90. PC's were starting to catch up in 1992/93 so it was abandoned for the RISC project. No idea how far that got, but it wasn't going to be original chipset compatible. Bankruptcy came next in 94. Then all the new owners. Starting with Escom who almost immediately went bankrupt. :D
An Amiga 500, genlocker and font package was usually all they needed to be broadcast ready.