A history of the Amiga, part 1: Genesis | Hacker News Reader

A history of the Amiga, part 1: Genesis

arstechnica.com

157 pointsot66 comments

I've posted this here before, but a 25-year old Amiga 2000 still provides background music at home (when the wife is away). A couple hundred megs of Mod files provide hours of nostalgia. Some people meditate with incense, Amigans ruminate to the sounds of 80s tracker beats.

Here's a sample of a great mod: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZWgXiVJbpI - albeit from a lame demo. There are thousands more available at aminet.net.

I've tried replacing the machine with emulation, but there is something comforting in seeing the old girl in the corner singing as well as she ever did. Perhaps devices living beyond their natural lifespans comforts man's worries over his own perishable nature.

For the slightly less "adventurous" in terms of music, here are two great alternatives that provide modern remixes of Amiga and C64 music. I often find that the remixes are better at evoking the feeling I remember in cases where the originals often feel underwhelming when hearing them again. I think the originals are in general easier to listen to for those of us who grew up with the sound (I do listen to quite a bit of the originals too, as well as other chiptune / retro music)

http://remix.kwed.org/

Quality is varying; sort by rating, and check out some of the IK+, Delta and Commando mixes as "easy" introductions where the original tracks have kept well)

http://www.amigaremix.com/ is also great, but the irony is that because the Amiga sound is/was so much more sample driven, I find that there are fewer remixes I like; often because the originals are good enough that bad remixes are much more obvious.

daXX is a consistently quite good arranger to look for (also for C64 remixes). There are many other good ones, but daXX is good for consistency across the board.

Reyn Ouwehand is also highly notable, especially for being a guy that composed original music for the C64 and Amiga (such as for Last Ninja 3), that then went on to a career in the music industry, and has continued to do remixes of C64 and Amiga tracks as a hobby.

Some more resources

https://www.scenemusic.net/demovibes/ (streaming radio)

http://jsspeccy.zxdemo.org/jsmodplayer/ (mod player in javascript)

http://modarchive.org/ (tens of thousands of mods and similar formats)

ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/amiga/audio/ (the venerable funet.fi audio and mod archive)

The endless debates we had Amiga vs Atari vs PC (Mac wasn't even considered). I remember vividly once we debated these three and Atari quickly fell out from the debate (numerous reasons why it was subpar to amiga). Eventually it boiled down to a friend debating PC (his) was better than Amiga and we all went over how 486 (up and coming at the time) was indeed better and with SVGA and stuff like that, but we were all team amiga. Said friend in the end convinced us PC is better (his). Somehow we thought his PC was, indeed, 486 with SVGA... it turned out it was a 286 with Hercules :) Amiga was so far beyond multimedia capabilities (especially AGA ones like 1200 and 4000) in anything in its price range that it surprises me to this day how it could've failed.

It was way beyond in multimedia capabilities at a point, but that edge was quickly eaten away by the raw power provided by the 486, and later the Pentium, combined with the modular PC architecture.

The Motorola 68k-family were beautiful processors to program, but unfortunately they didn't manage to scale compared to the x86. Commodore never made the jump to PowerPC.

The 1200 was a nice machine, but it was just a bit underpowered in every department. It had a 68020 rather than a 68030 (which meant no MMU), 8-bit sound rather than 16, no fast-mem (memory reserved for use by the CPU alone), and no chunky graphics mode (which had been rumored before its release).

The last point was a bit of a death knell for any kind of serious graphics performance. The planar bitmap model had worked ok on the older models with a maximum of 32 colors (5 bitplanes), but with 256 colors you had to do 8 writes to set a pixel. The bitplane model worked great for sidescrollers and similar games, and also for rudimentary 3D games with the help of the blitter co-processor, but when PC games started to do texture mapped 3D in VGA, the Amiga 1200 was left in the dust.

I couldn't get genlocked PAL signal out of PC until late 90's with Targa boards which cost as much as four A1200s in their prime. I can't even remember we used anything video related on PC until at least Pentium Pro became available (and WinNT). Amiga and SGIs were used in video production for an extremely long period of time (well extremely for technology time scale). That's why I was wondering.

Commodore did some serious business mistakes.

For similar reasons (built-in MIDI interfacing) the Atari STs had a huge uptake in music production that has lasted well beyond their lifespan as general-purpose computers, and even into recent years. Music arrangements haven't gotten more complicated over time, so for many artists, there's just no need to replace setups using 30+ year old gear.

The Amiga community is still alive:

http://www.amiga.org/

http://www.amigaworld.net/

And many others, but those are the two "main" English language forums.

(EDIT: There's also a few print magazines still kept alive by enthusiasts. The largest one is "Amiga Future", printed 6 times a year in separate German and English Editions: http://www.amigafuture.de/ )

There's also a number of new machines you can buy that can run either classic AmigaOS (FPGA reimplementations - look for Minimig, Chameleon, ReplayArcade) or AmigaOS4 (PPC based) - AmigaOne X1000, and AmigaOne SAM460.

As well as two "clones" of the OS: MorphOS, and AROS. The former run on old PPC Mac's of various types mainly. The latter is open source runs on "anything" from Raspberry Pi's to modern PCs (either directly on the hardware, or hosted under Linux). Here's a couple of AROS distributions:

http://vmwaros.blogspot.co.uk/

http://www.aeros-os.org/

https://sites.google.com/site/arosaspireone/aros-aspire-dist...

Two other OSes that were influenced by the AmigaOS were AtheOS and then a later fork of this called Syllable.

refs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AtheOS | http://atheos.syllable.org/index.html | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllable_(operating_system) | http://syllable.org

There's an "AmigaOS" release from '06 [1] (you can buy expensive PowerPC boards that run it) [2]

[1] http://www.amigaos.net [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS_4#Compatible_hardware

I first saw an Amiga on Computer Chronicles in the late 80s or early 90s and remember being blown away that they could edit cartoons and show 3D graphics. I had a (gulp) Mac Plus at the time and remember that was the first time that I was really disappointed in my computer! Macs wouldn't have similar abilities until the 60 MHz PowerPC came out.

Tragically Apple's weakest link was always unimaginative hardware, which made most Macs unable to play even the simplest 386-era PC games. My first experience with crippled Apple hardware was trying to blit a 256 color screen on a Mac LC II with BlockMove() and if I recall, it only ran at 20 or 30 fps because the ram bus was only 16 bits wide instead of 32. A quick back of the napkin calculation showed that 640x480@256 should have gotten around 100 fps on a 16 bit, 16 MHz bus, but something about how the VRAM worked cut that by 2-4x. I wasted a lot of years on things like interlaced lines and 2x enlargement blitters that never could quite make up for the lack of a 320x240 video resolution. The system also didn't allow direct access to the palette entries, so palette animation blocked for 1/60 of a second so games couldn't use it. As an aside, the other system libraries for sound, input and networking all had various failings so I found myself reinventing the wheel at every turn. To me, those shortsighted decisions were a big part of why Apple almost went out of business before the second coming of Steve Jobs and the iMac (which had a decent enough video card to at least do 2D in thousands or millions at 60 fps).

Of course, Amiga realized all of this early on and went completely around the problem by providing decent video hardware. Whenever I hear people talking about various limitations with 3D graphics, physics or AI today, I mourn the lack of outside-the-box thinking that Amiga exemplified. Our hands are tied by the CPU/GPU/OS oligarchies for the foreseeable future.

I did a quick search for Amiga and found these videos, not sure if there are more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-hJ_3MvH7Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_zuSrjRMWk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rssl5hbJI_0

Apple did make a machine comparable to the Amiga 500, the Apple IIGS: http://oldcomputers.net/appleiigs.html. Similar in graphics and sound ability along with GUI OS and full Apple IIe emulation. It was certainly capable of playing great games: I spent many fun hours playing Dungeon Master on my IIGS.

It was pretty much a cheaper color Mac that gave Apple II users a straight-forward upgrade path and was great at games to boot. But I guess Apple didn't think any of that was important to selling computers.

Pertinent link: http://www.freetoolsassociation.com

Click on '2GS Best of' and then 'Demos' to see some of the IIGS demos.

Also : http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform[]=Apple+II+GS&pag...

The Apple IIGS is/was nothing like an Amiga 500 in terms of capabilities.

The CPU was pretty much intentionally underpowered to avoid eating into Mac sales. It was ludicrously priced. Graphics wise it lacked hardware sprites, as well as support functionality equivalent to the copper and blitter. Add in a primitive OS, and it was DOA everywhere but the US

(while the Amiga, ironically, was DOA in the US largely because Commodore had a decade of mismanaging their US distribution chain and marketing; Commodore US didn't think any of that was important to selling computers).

This is true in terms of graphics but in terms of sound, the IIGS was better.

Also, the OS had some neat stuff like File System Translators - it could read and write all sorts of disk formats.

> but in terms of sound

That may be so, but that's also pretty much it. Then again, for that price you could buy an Amiga 500 and a synth :D

(amusingly, Ensoniq was founded by ex Commodore/MOS engineers, including Bob Yannes, who created the SID chip found in the C64)

> File System Translators - it could read and write all sorts of disk formats.

Just like the Amiga. There's dozens of filesystem implementations for the Amiga - you just drop a device file in the right directory, and add a very simple configuration.

E.g. here's a small selection from Aminet: http://aminet.net/search?query=filesystem

There's even at least one editor (FrexxEd) that exposed it's currently open buffers as files in a filesystem (so you can e.g. run your compiler directly on the editors buffer without going via a temp file, and have the compiler output go directly to another buffer, without any explicit support in the editor)

Between the ancient Apple IIs at my elementary and middle school, and the jump to Amigas and 386-class PCs, I totally missed out on the IIGS, thinking it was just a slight upgrade to the Apple II computers I remember. Recently I was trolling around retrocomputer forums and came across the /r/apple2 and was blown away by some of the IIGS stuff I saw there. Easily the equal capability-wise to the Amiga, Atari ST or Acorn Archimedes.

http://www.reddit.com/r/apple2

It's worth watching the first link to the news desk portion at the end where they introduce the CD-ROM as well.

Author Brian Bagnall wrote a book about Commodore, from MOS Technology and the 6502 through the departure of Jack Tramiel and the Amiga years: "On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore" (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/412006.On_the_Edge). This was published in 2006.

The book was then later split into two halves. The first half, very heavily expanded, was published in 2011 as "Commodore: A Company on the Edge".

As of 2013, the faithful are still waiting for the second half, "Commodore: The Amiga Years". Bagnall missed his deadline for the update and has now moved onto another project. (https://twitter.com/BrianBagnall1/status/390845357979992064)

I re-read the first half recently while waiting for the second, and I thoroughly recommend it. As of yet I've resisted the temptation to get the 2006 book to see how it ends.

I ended up picking up the 2006 book used because of the cancelled second half. It's ok, but of course nothing like the full book treatment I'd hoped for.

I was a Commodore user from the Vic-20 days, through a C-64 and then several Amiga's, so the first part was also highly interesting to me, though. Just hope Bagnall gets back to it eventually.

Please don't make me cry... I remember in the 90s not understanding all the PC thing that only came with DOS, Hercules/CGA/VGA, a speaker, etc.

Few years later, Windows 3.1 was a quasi-DOS frontend.

Same here :(

My first PC was a 386 SX.

After I got hold of Windows 3.1 and had some Windows only software, I trimmed my autoexec.bat and config.sys to load just the essential MS-DOS stuff, and jump strait into Windows.

I know for about 6 months when switch to 3.1 I kept trying to pull down the lo res screen to get to the high res screen.

I dearly miss Jay Miner. He doesn't get enough credit for the chips he put into the Atari 8-bit and Amiga computers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Miner

Link to whole serie: http://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/

This is a truly fascinating read. It was linked in the other story about OS/2, and I couldn't stop reading. Apparently it will turn into a book, looking forward to buy it!

    Author’s note: The Demo Scene is the latest piece in a
    long-running Ars series on the history of the Amiga. The last
    installment in the series ran in 2008, but professional
    obligations for the author caused a delay. More chapters are on
    the way—emphasis on chapters. The ultimate aim is to compile all
    the parts of this series into a book. Stay tuned!

The Amiga was so much fun. I had a 500 in the late 80's, then upgraded to a 3000. Some games, like Shadow of the Beast, were so amazing for the time. The OS was pretty advanced, too (real, pre-emptive multitasking in 512K of RAM, IPC using very lightweight message passing, etc.)

Around '94 or so I moved on to Linux.

I still miss the Amiga though.

Ahh, nostalgia.. getting a second disk drive for my A500, using PowerPacker to pack the executables of often needed tools, use a menu editor to add them to the Workbench menu = my first taste of the external harddrive I got later. Which was quite the brick and had a proud capacity of 52 MB. The 4 megabyte RAM expansion, also huge... combined with the Action Replay module and the kickstart 2.0 ROM switcher, it all took up quite some space. Oh how I miss my Amiga 500; it died when I got carried away while soldering (after having sucessfully made a pause toggle by putting a switch between a pin from the expansion slot to mass). Ripping modules! I miss that, too. Later on, the A4000, playing Ultima VI with a speed increase of 35x (which had to make up for the games that refused to work on it)... configuring the crap out of MagicMenu, MUI, Directory Opus, and whatever I found on the Public Domain disks I ordered... discovering the Aminet CD series... all that music, the demos, oh. And yes, the games, obviously, all the pixel art and all those amazing composers.

Sorry for rambling, and regards to grafx2, Renoise, DeliPlayer, WinUAE, and whatever else keeps some of that spirit alive still ^^

Yep, my Amiga 500 was the first machine I had with a hard drive: a whopping 30 megs! I had to beg my parents to buy it for me for Christmas, being only 13 years old at the time. It also came with a 2 meg memory expansion, giving the Amiga a total of 3 megs of RAM, which was pretty decent for 1989 or so.

A year or so later, with some birthday money, I bought a copy of Lattice C and managed to teach myself C! That was basically the beginning of my interest in programming.

I got a used 20MB hard drive. After about 6 months it refused to spin up. My solution was to open it up(!), and manually help the motor spin up the platter - after that it'd keep running until I powered the machine down. So I'd keep it running most of the day. It lasted probably about another year after that, with me spinning up the drive by hand first time I booted every day...

Even though I moved from a Timex 2068 to a 386 SX PC, I was the only computer guy with a PC, all my high school computer friends owned Amigas.

So I got to use them every now and then, on the gaming/demo coding/music parties we used to organize.

The Amiga exposure spoiled me to always prefer GUI based applications to CLI ones, given the choice. :)

I tried to do the best I could on my PC, by booting straight into Windows, with a minimal MS-DOS configuration.

On Linux distributions I was always looking for GUI solutions to UNIX System V workflows.

Sometimes I wonder how would computing look like if Commodore managed to sell the Amiga properly.

I never played Shadow of the Beast much (honestly, it was not very well balanced in terms of difficulty in particular), but the intro got played endlessly - it was a fantastic effort for the time.

I got my first PC in 97, that's how long I held out with my Amiga. At the time my Amiga 1200 had 42MB ram and a 68030 accelerator. I had carved a slit on its left side so that I could string an IDE cable out and use a cheap 3.5" HDD (which was sitting in a separate enclosure with its own power source).

When I switched it had already been painfully obvious for years that there would never be an Amiga capable of competing with PC again. It is in a way sad that it played out the way it did and it's easy for me to get nostalgic when I read pieces like this.

I actually moved my A1200 to the PC desktop case! My father and I moved motherboard and other components there (motherboard actually didn't quite fit - we needed to saw off a piece of it). Those were the days...

Enjoy some of the most recent demos released for the amiga platform:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE7vbzMYYRc - Hot Dots by Focus Design (Revision 2012)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmqiR-zT5OQ - LEMON. 2013 RINK A DINK REDUX (A500)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKiftizQoNY - Amiga Scenedemo - Smoke & Mirrors by Ghostown and Loonies (Revision 2013)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcBX-TRkkx0 - Traction - Past is Prologue

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6dfLG7wowQ - Boogietown by Ghostown & RNO

And if this makes you curious, dig a bit through this: http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B0%5D=Amiga+AGA&...

Or even better, come to a demoparty near you ( http://www.demoparty.net/ ), meet amiga coders of the current age and get to poke at the actual machines. :)

Did you see this in yesterday's story about OS/2? Good article.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/11/half-an-operating-sy...

Just booted up my A1000 with Workbench 1.3. This machine is so beautiful and I think the Amiga were the only computers which stay responsive when accessing floppy disks.

Maybe some day I'll upgrade this A1000 to a G. Braun "Super 1000".

http://www.illuwatar.se/project_pages/gba1000/gba1000.htm

The effort they went to in order to maintain responsiveness is amazing. You don't truly appreciate it until you dive into the internals of the OS. I don't think most people at the time even realized just the lengths they went to.

E.g. consider cut and paste.

Easy? Right? You just have an app hand you a representation of the data to cut, and store it until someone chooses paste.

Except you're on a machine with 512KB RAM, where T: ("/tmp") might be on a floppy to save RAM.

The consequence is that "everything" in AmigaOS runs in its own "task" (process/thread - the distinction doesn't mean much since there's no memory protection). In a typical shell, when you do cut and paste, at least the following are involved:

- input.device (mouse handling)

- console.device ("low level" console window processing. This one doesn't "own" a window but can render to any window, and handles things like escape codes)

- console-handler ("high level" console window processing; this one opens/owns the window, and can handle things like line editing)

- ConClip (this one registers handlers to handle cut and paste, and mediates the process)

- clipboard.device (mediates read/writes to clipboard "units", so you can have multiple clipboards; knows where to write the clips)

- (possibly, depending on where T: is mounted: trackdisk.device, handling low level writes to floppy, or one of the ram disk devices)

- The shell process itself.

If you do a "copy", the input device sends the raw mouse events to the console.device, which "cooks them" into higher level events it sends to the console-handler, which then calls a library function in the clipboard device which will start a background write of data to the appropriate storage device. Each of those exchanges apart from calling into clipboard device (which is a bit of a hack, to be honest, but ultimately leads to another async message AFAIK) is an entirely async message exhange.

If the clipboard was on a slow device, who cares? It'd get written in the background, and the source task would be informed when it was safe to change the contents of the buffer (cut and paste in general was accomplished by pointer passing, and it was up to the source application whether it wanted to make a copy, or avoid modifying the source buffer until it was safe).

The path back, to, where console-handler might send codes to trigger highlighting the text to the console.device, which renders to screen (and the window handling is mediated by yet another task, handling Intuition, the GUI).

All in all, it's not unusual for a keypress to be processed by half a dozen tasks, and the resulting action to work it's way back through another half a dozen tasks before you see the result on screen.

All of this has lots of overhead, of course, even on a non-MMU single address space OS - there's lots of context switches, and lots of memory allocation for messages etc., all of which was anathema to most people writing OS's for home computers at the time.

But it is exactly this that made the OS so responsive: You sacrifice absolute throughput for a system that took great care to do "everything" async, so the system was nearly always responsive.

(you see the same in Amiga hardware, which ironically lost out to the brute force approach of the eras PCs, only for us today to make it back to the "co-processor" model: My servers at work has an ARM core in every harddisk, and a PPC or ARM core on the RAID controllers, and many modern ethernet cards has SOCs with ARM cores too; much like my Amiga 2000 back in the day had a 6502 compatible on the keyboard, a Z80 on my SCSI controller, a 68020 accelerator for the main CPU and a 286 accelerator on a bridge board....)

Having worked on AROS (an AmigaOS compatible OS) console support, I can say that sometimes that division is really annoying - having to think long and hard about which task something belongs in. But it leads to a system that is still usable on a 7.16MHz 68000 CPU... On a modern machine (AROS runs on any modern x86 hosted under Linux, and "native" on some x86, ARM, PPC and m68k hardware; albeit still only single core) it flies.

In fact, you truly appreciate how light these OS's were if you try them on modern hardware: I have an AROS setup that "boots" the Linux hosted version straight into FrexxEd (a great editor; one of the original authors is the guy behind CURL). On my laptop, it boots AROS and starts FrexxEd in less time than it takes a console-only build of Emacs to start....

The Amiga brings up so many topics and memories for me that it's hard to know where to start.

People who had an Amiga back then may agree that technically and conceptually it was so far advanced compared particularly to Microsoft's offerings, that any comparison of merits vs market success led to frustration.

I had an Amiga 3000, which was pretty rare and one of the first workbench 2.0 machines. It was quite buggy in the firmware and more when we first got it, but Commodore was very good to us partially because my father worked at a private university in the Northeast. They replaced two machines that were fried by NewTek digiview almost immediately for free (The DigiView board was really pushing the limit of the Amiga 2000 and 2500, and had some incompatibility with the 3000 that actually fried our motherboards).

The Amiga also had some amazing software, such as AmivaVision – object oriented visuals scripting that was like a visual HyperCard/PowerPoint, back in 1992.

When Linux came along, I was pleasantly surprised to see that I felt quite at home in its environment since the Amiga had a unix-like directory structure and shell environment.

It's great to be seeing the Amiga get this sort of attention. One can only wonder what sort of computing environments would be common today if it had been a commercial success instead of Windows and Mac OS.

I was an Amiga in a town of PC. They all thought I'm the odd one out, but still they all came to play Kick Off and Super Cars etc. because their games were sub par.

My goodness. :)

Those two games were the ones we played by far the most as well. Just throw in the game Gravity Force there and you have a winner!

Gravity Force 2 is still the best group game I have ever played, in terms of enjoyment and laughs, closely followed by Worms Director's Cut (also Amiga) and Mario Kart Double Dash.

Can't throw in Gravity Force but I can do some Dungeon Master... Maybe some Xenon if we need to keep it spaceship-like

Player Manager was an incredible game, combining the best of Kick Off and Football Manager.

I hope Dino Dini is rich and happy!

He has a blog:

http://dinodini.wordpress.com/

There is also a long interview with him on the Retro Asylum podcast:

retroasylum.com/ep-37-dino-dini-interview-part-1/

retroasylum.com/episode-39-dino-dini-interview-part-2/

Nive history of the Amiga documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfTIrJu7NbE

Excited to read the rest of this series. No doubt they will get into the Video Toaster -- and Lightwave in particular -- which was used heavily in 90's television production. Fun fact about the Video Toaster: it was developed by Dana Carvey's brother who was the inspiration for Garth in "Wayne's World". (Garth actually wears a Video Toaster t-shirt in "Wayne's World 2".)

At the time many were wondering why the Amiga just didn't seem to catch on. The most common speculation was that it was marketed and perceived as a gaming machine. For some reason this was mutually exclusive with being a serious business machine.

It's really fascinating how far hardware acceleration was able to take that machine. It took a long time before I felt that a PC was even close in responsiveness to my Amiga. Though to be honest at the end it was equipped with a MC68060 which was no slouch. Using a metal cutter and some force it was also possible to squeeze a 3.5" hard drive in an A1200. But eventually the controller hardware broke down and would fry any hard drive connected to it. This was in 1998 so by that time it was pretty difficult to get spare parts if I remember correctly and to be honest the Pentium II I had at the time was a lot faster. So the Amiga went back into its box where it still lives today.

Some of my best programming memories are from assembly coding on that machine. It taught me so much and I doubt I would be here on Hacker News today if not for its creation.

The Amiga did catch on everywhere but the US, pretty much. 5 million or so sold was an amazing feat at the time.

But in the US, Commodore had badly burned their dealer network in the C64 days, and they always did better outside the US and so focused their supply to Europe when they had problems meeting demand.

Unfortunately, staying in that market when it was relegated to high end niche (TV studios etc.) in the US, and largely low end in much of Europe, was a long shot. And then Commodore pursued a massively destructive campaign of hiring and firing managers in the US (which, to be fair, they had a tradition of since early in the Tramiel era) to try to find someone who could build up the US market.

But they ruined their chances further by drastically under-investing in R&D, and continuously second-guessing their engineering teams, who were likely to an extent hurt by their proximity to the toxic US part of the company.

Commodore was an odd beast in that the international subsidiaries were always mostly independent - they ordered the stock they wanted from the parent company, but decided what they wanted to sell and how. Germany also got to design some products (and there were manufacturing there). Yet most of the product development were managed strictly out of the US where their product wasn't selling well.

The A4000 was a pretty good demonstration of the consequence of the US management feuds coupled with putting engineering on the chopping block regularly: It was late; it was slow; it was expensive; it was ugly; it had IDE (the Amiga world was pretty much entirely SCSI, as IDE was CPU intensive in comparison, which was not what you wanted in a system that was already lagging in terms of raw CPU performance; this is what you got by putting managers used to PCs in charge of making decisions about Amiga projects - they saw SCSI and saw "expense" rather than one of the things that was vital to making an Amiga perform well at the time)

Before that, Dave Haynie had his "A3000+" pretty much done: Sam CPUs as the A4000; better memory bus; SCSI; space for an on-board DSP; AGA like the A4000. And fit in an A3000 case, which was actually pretty.

This was par for the course for Commodore, unfortunately. I'd like to say it was a great company, but frankly, while Tramiel did a few strokes of genius in his day, most of Commodore's history is a history of being given fantastic opportunities - often through brilliant acquisitions - and scuppering them with a gusto that would make some think it was intentional (there was/is a long lived rumour that towards the end Irving Gould and Mehdi Ali were intentionally causing share price volatility to profit of it, rather than actually trying to grow the company).

A couple of years ago, I was doing the nostalgia thing with a friend. I used to have an Amiga 500, and I recounted about another friend who had the Acorn Archimedes, and who was constantly espousing how awesome the machine was (and it had a great 3D tank game I can't recall...). Amiga died an unhappy death, but "Whatever happened to Acorn?" I mused, wondering if they'd gone the same way.

"What do you know about ARM... ?"

Not sure if it's a serious question, but the Acorn people went on to found ARM...

Damn, didn't see the last line -- news:yc badly needs an update...

That brings back some memories. I remember saying a lot of silly things on comp.sys.amiga :-). For me the most interesting was the whole "whole machine games" debate where I found myself alternating sides. The question was could a multi-tasking machine run a quality video game and at the same time provide a credible 'computer' user experience. This came up on the Amiga because you could sometimes 'pull down' the screen with the game on it, and often get to the Desktop on the screen behind it.

People argued long into the night that the only way to get decent games was to run 'on the metal' and the other side claimed it could be done while behaving nicely. These days the question is moot of course[1]. But that you could have the debate was wonderful back in 1986 and it didn't surface on the PC until easily 10 years later.

[1] These days of course you can run full up command and conquer in a VM running Win98 if you want with DirectX 8 as an example, while running a nice Linux desktop.

It was the summer of 1996. I was 12 years old and really into exploring older computers, especially the Commodore brand, after my grandmother gave me an old Commodore Plus/4 that she had won as a door prize somewhere many years earlier and never used. I was also able to tinker with others that belonged to my friends or that I found in thrift stores (PET, 64, 128, etc). Unfortunately everything Amiga had eluded me thus far.

I somewhat got to know the Amiga through the UAE Amiga emulator which at the time was only in a semi-working state at best. My 66mhz 486DX Packard Bell didn't exactly do the greatest job of running it at full speed or really even usable speed. But it was still enough that I became enamored with the look-and-feel (and ARexx to some degree) and knew I needed to get my hands on a real one someday. It was the holy grail of my ancient computer quest.

Then one day that fateful summer it finally happened. I was in the Montgomery Ward department store in Indiana, PA with my mom. I was poking through the electronics section and saw a very large stack of reduced-price VCR boxes on one of the shelves out on the open floor. I was looking over the stack from top to bottom when I noticed there was another box stuck underneath the lowest ledge of the shelf. I pulled it out and wiped off the unfathomably thick layer of dust from the box to reveal that it was an unopened Amiga 500, probably untouched and forgotten for many years. THE DAY WAS MINE.

I was never the type of kid to blow my allowance money on random things. I saved it all with my eyes on bigger prizes and I had just found the ultimate prize. The sticker price was $200 and I had roughly that amount saved up at the time. I asked my mom if I could use my allowance money to buy it. Naturally an argument ensued but ultimately I won and was allowed to make the purchase. When I took it up to the counter the lady remarked that she hadn't seen one of those in several years and didn't realize they still sold them. She rung it up and it was still apparently in their inventory system, so the Amiga was mine.

Emulators be damned, I finally got to explore it in real life. It was every bit as magical as I had hoped. I couldn't help but make comparisons to my aforementioned Packard Bell. 4096 colors vs a meager 256. Deluxe Paint vs MS Paint. An operating system with true preemptive multitasking and a very responsive GUI vs DOS 6 and Windows 3.1. Turrican vs. anything that wasn't Turrican. There was no going back. I had left Plato's Cave and seen the light. I didn't ever want to be away from the light again.

Unfortunately we all know how the allegory of the cave ends. No man can give light to the blind. My mom decided that I had spent way too much of my saved allowance on the Amiga, especially since I already owned an old but still working Packard Bell. Then just shy of a month later, while still within the timeframe of the return policy, she forced me to pack it all up and take it back. Just as quickly as I had found the holy grail and drank sweet Amiga-brand kool aid from it, it was gone.

I guess the main point of my post is that the Amiga, even in that short period of time, had a fairly profound effect on me when I was little. At least enough for me to write this long, rosy-eyed, nostalgic comment. It was also partially the impetus for me wanting to study computer science and become a software engineer. My thought being that if someone else can create something so cool, maybe I can too if I just learn how. (Also, secondarily, wtf mom? Where the hell else am I going to get a new-in-the-box Amiga 500 now?)

> (Also, secondarily, wtf mom? Where the hell else am I going to get a new-in-the-box Amiga 500 now?)

There was a warehouse full of unopened Amiga 1200's discovered recently... A new-in-the-box Amiga 500 might be hard, but there's plenty of Amiga gear for sale still, including FPGA reimplementations (with or without improvements).

Thought frankly, at this stage, if you were to consider buying one for the nostalgia, avoid machines that has not been owned by enthusiasts, as there are known problems, such as capacitors that are likely to leak acid and damage motherboard traces, so if you want to pick one up you'd do better picking one up from someone who is/has been aware of the problems and has dealt with them already...

ffor Fpga implementatios, check out the Minimig.

What truly disappointed me is the lack of any hardware for 3d graphics.

It was around 1990-91 where it was obvious that computer games were going 3d.

In the arcade, the most amazing coin-ops with 3d graphics had been consistently Sega's, with amazing hardware sprite scaling and rotation.

At home, Catacomb 3D was already raising eyebrows, Wolfenstein 3D was in development, but the most amazing game of that era was Wing Commander, with 3d graphics that the Amiga couldn't do at all.

But instead of planning a new Amiga with improved 3d capabilities, Commodore was developing...CD32. When CD32 came out in 1993, it didn't have whizzbang sprite scaling and rotation nor did it have 3d graphics capabilities.

Commodore couldn't have been more shortsighted with the Amiga.

Still have mine , 1 Mo , deluxe paint , real 3d and Turrican 2, it was a killer machine and a lot of famous game programmers started on it. Too bad commodore screwed up.

I recently used DPaint 4 to do some pixel art for an iPhone game I am working on :) Photoshop was just too annoying when working at the pixel level.

I really regret not having made any Amiga games/programs when I was a teenager. I just didn't have the money to buy books or development tools. If I ever had time to work on a project of no consequence, I would probably write an Amiga game in 68000 assembly language, just to say I finally did it.

It's funny. My emulator setup is better than any Amiga I could have owned, and thanks to ebay I now have a complete set of programming manuals that I would have killed for when I was 17

Ah the fun I had playing with this machine. First bit of 3D animation I ever did was on the Amiga.

Trying to rack my brain as to the music sequencer I used to spend hours with.

OctaMED?

nostalgia overload

Protracker?

Aegis Sonix? It was the first I laid eyes on, followed directly by trackers.

is arstechnica re-publishing all the osnews.com pieces? i've seen a bunch of os/2 history, comodore history, etc on the HN frontpage recently...

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