History of the Amiga

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The Amiga is a family of home computers that were designed and sold by the Amiga Corporation (and later by Commodore Computing International) from 1985 to 1994.[1][2]

Amiga Corporation

The Amiga's

multi-media
personal computer.

The company demonstrated a prototype at the January 1984

BYTE described "big steel boxes" substituting for the chipset that did not yet exist.[8] The magazine reported in April 1984 that Amiga Corporation "is developing a 68000-based home computer with a custom graphics processor. With 128K bytes of RAM and a floppy-disk drive, the computer will reportedly sell for less than $1000 late this year."[9]

Further presentations were made at the following CES in June 1984, to

IBM PC.[8] Jay Miner, co-founder, lead engineer and architect, took out a second mortgage on his home to keep the company from going bankrupt.[6]

In July 1984, Atari Inc. was bought by the recently resigned CEO and founder of Commodore, Jack Tramiel. A substantial number of Commodore's employees followed him, prompting a lawsuit from Commodore for theft of trade secrets.[11] Tramiel's son Leonard later discovered that Atari Inc. had lent $500,000 to the Amiga Corporation, with repayment due at the end of June, prompting Atari Corp. to counter Commodore.[6]

In a subsequent development, the Amiga group received interested from Commodore, and began discussions of selling the company.[12] In August 1984, Amiga was purchased by Commodore for $27 million, including paying off the loan from Atari.[7]

Commodore

1985–87: the early years

When the first Amiga computer was released in July 1985 by

Macintosh. It was later renamed the Amiga 1000
.

The Amiga 1000's graphics abilities were significantly ahead of its rivals.

At a relatively affordable base price of US$1,295 (equivalent to $3,669 in 2023), the Amiga could display up to 4,096 colors, produce 8-bit

IBM PC
).

The public saw both Commodore and Atari selling, as

Lotus. The New York Times stated that "it is not clear that the business computer user really cares about colorful graphics".[14] The computers' sophisticated graphics strengthened their perception as "game machines".[15]

Poorly marketed,

BYTE praised the Amiga Sidecar as "really impressive", and approved of the "great deal of Amiga software" at Spring COMDEX, but wondered "whether Commdore has enough high-tech people to support the Amiga properly" after large layoffs, while "Atari ST software pours forth like a flood".[18] Bruce Webster reported in January 1987 that Commodore had sold about 150,000 Amigas as of October 1986, but "imagine how many [the company] might have sold if they had done things right". He criticized many aspects of Commodore's handling of the computer, including selling "not-quite-finished" hardware and software, not supporting third-party developers, poor advertising, and internal uncertainty of the Amiga's target market.[19] Aware of its reputation, Commodore asked the press to call the computer "The Amiga, from Commodore" and designed new logos to replace its own iconic "C=" design. Commodore compounded the problem by marketing the new 8-bit Commodore 128
alongside the Amiga, confusing the general public about Commodore's direction and the Amiga's advantages.

By 1987, rumors spread that the size of the Amiga market disappointed software vendors, which were uncertain of Commodore's intention for the computer.

Escom
, Gateway, and other owners.

1987–90: Cost-reduced and high-end models

In 1987, faced with strong competition from Atari ST in the lower end of the segment, Commodore released the cost-reduced Amiga 500 and the high-end Amiga 2000, for the respective prices of US$699 and $2395 (this price included 1 MB RAM and a monitor).

By 1988, software sales for the Amiga remained disappointing, compared to those for the IBM PC, Commodore 64, and Apple II.[22] With its lowered price, the Amiga 500 became a successful home computer and eventually outsold its main rival, the Atari ST.[23] The Amiga 2000, thanks to its Genlock and internal expansion slots, also managed to carve out a market niche within desktop video. This market was not as large as the office and publishing markets dominated by the IBM PC and Apple Macintosh, and the Amiga 2000 lagged behind these systems in sales. Additionally, Commodore had initially announced a price of $1495 for 2000,[24] resulting in widespread disappointment among their customer base when the higher price was made public. This was also the case for the A500, which Commodore announced its price as $595.95, but later released it at $699. The Amiga did see widespread use in the television and video production industry during the late 1980s and early 1990s, including on popular shows like Clarissa Explains It All and Unsolved Mysteries.[25]

1990–92: Height of popularity

An Amiga 500, with 1084S RGB monitor and A1010 floppy disk drive. (1987)

In 1990, Commodore released a significant update of the Amiga platform, in the shape of the Amiga 3000 featuring an enhanced chipset (ECS) and the second release of its operating system, commonly referred to as Workbench 2.0.

Commodore had a poor reputation among consumers and developers. Computer Gaming World wrote in 1990 of its "abysmal record of customer and technical support in the past".

economy of scale, and users complained that the custom ECS chipset failed to match the features of the PC and Mac display hardware at the time. Users also felt that the operating system (Workbench 2.0) only featured improvements taken from the user community. As Apple was the only other major user of Motorola
chips at the time, Commodore often had to wait for a new CPU technology until increased supplies allowed Motorola to sell chips to anyone but Apple.

On the plus side, many users considered the Amiga 3000 the most well-engineered Amiga model, and the Amiga 3000's integrated flicker filter made it painless to use inexpensive PC-style VGA monitors. This may in part be the reason Commodore went on to sell one million Amigas in just one year, which is equal to a third of all Amigas sold up to that time.

In the same year as the Amiga 3000, Commodore released the US$895

CD Interactive (CD-I)
. Commodore believed that there was a market for a system that could display animations, pictures and offer educational software and games on television, and many game developers thought that interactive CD-based video games would become a popular market. The end result was a system that could be described as an Amiga 500 with a remote control replacing the keyboard and a CD-ROM replacing the floppy drive.

Considering that the Amiga 500 was cheaper, more versatile, and had the promise of a future CDTV expansion, few Amiga users had any interest in the Amiga CDTV. At the same time, the general public preferred cheaper game consoles over both the CDTV and CD-I, and they were not aware of or interested in the multimedia potential of these CD-ROM based systems.

Both Commodore and Philips tried to tempt users with the promise of an MPEG-1 module capable of playing video from a CD-ROM. These Video CDs can be considered lower-resolution versions of today's Digital Versatile Disks (DVDs), but without some additional features and the inconvenience of having to change the disks during a full-length movie.

The CDTV became Commodore's first Amiga-based failure, one that allegedly cost them a significant amount of resources. Commodore made a last-ditch effort in saving the system with the CDTV 2 but dropped that design in favor of the much more capable Amiga CD32.

1992–94: Trouble ahead

Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge, and some people returned them to dealers, demanding an original Amiga 500.[citation needed
]

By the early 1990s, the IBM PC platform dominated the market for computer games. In December 1992, Computer Gaming World (CGW) reported that

Civilization, and added that "The heavy MS-DOS emphasis in CGW merely reflects the realities of the market".[27] Instead of discontinuing the Amiga 500 and 500+, Commodore envisioned it taking the place of the Commodore 64 in the low-cost segment. To make that possible Commodore set out to design the Amiga 600, a system intended to be much cheaper than the Amiga 500. The Amiga 500 itself would be replaced by Amiga 1200
, also under development.

Commodore had the new machines (A600) manufactured in Australia and launched them on what it assumed would be an eager market. Unfortunately, soon afterward it announced that two new super-Amigas would be released.

— Edge, August 1995[This quote needs a citation]

Shortly after releasing the Amiga 600, Commodore announced that two new super Amigas would be released at the end of the year. In classic

Commodore's foray into the highly competitive PC market was unsuccessful. This contributed to Commodore's 1992 profits falling to an unimpressive $28 million,[28]
and made the need for a successful new Amiga launch all that more critical.

In October 1992, Commodore released the

AGA chipset and the third release of AmigaOS
.

Computer Gaming World reported in March 1993 that declining Amiga sales were "causing many U.S. publishers to quit publishing Amiga titles",

CD
-based consoles and was also the world's first 32-bit game machine, with specifications similar to the A1200.

The last Amiga (and the last computer) released by Commodore was the A4000T, in 1994.

Amiga in the United States

Mass-market Amigas were considerably cheaper than

Macintoshes at the time. This factor helped to boost sales in European markets, but it also continued Commodore's misfortune of being viewed in the more price-conscious US markets as a producer of cheap "toy computers" and "game machines". This perception was furthered by the fact that most Commodore retail outlets were toy stores, and marketing campaigns were mismatched with the public's needs and wants. Overall, the Amiga was very successful in Europe
, but it sold less than a million units in the US.

Additionally, in the US market, the

PC gaming titles to be introduced during the late 1980s and early 1990s, including many ported from Amiga versions. Consumers began to see no advantage in the Amiga's "incompatible" technology. Commodore's attempts at interoperability did not persuade users concerned about IBM compatibility to buy an Amiga. Instead, inexpensive PC clones were beginning to flood the US market. As a result, US Amiga users tended to be technophiles enamored of the Amiga's software or hardware capabilities, Commodore loyalists upgrading from the C-64 or 128, iconoclasts who disliked IBM, video and graphic arts enthusiasts, or professionals – the desktop video
market was one of the few areas where the Amiga would gain widespread adoption in the US outside of the home.

Bankruptcy

In 1993, Commodore lost a staggering $357 million.

— Edge, August 1995 edition[This quote needs a citation]

Commodore management voluntarily filed for

Chapter 11 under US bankruptcy laws in late April 1994. Chapter 11 US rules allow a firm to recover its debts and reorganize it. Commodore was reorganized in various occasions twice before and repaid by Irving Gould without requesting filing for Chapter 11, but this time, as being controlled by US bankruptcy laws, the court-appointed board of trustees decided to liquidate the company without proceeding to reorganization. The majority of Commodore's assets and name were sold to Escom. Production was halted briefly until it was restarted for a short time under Escom's Amiga Technologies. Though the machines had been upgraded and had plentiful hardware and software support, the lack of new Amigas meant that vendors sooner or later moved on. Most of the technology hobbyists and productivity market moved to PC architecture, sometimes running Linux or BeOS in preference to Microsoft Windows
.

Due to the fierce loyalty of some Amiga fans, the 'scene' continued for many year after the last original Amiga was sold. Inevitably, the PC eventually became the undisputed leading home computing technology, and the console wars also left the CD32 behind.

The rights to the Amiga platform were successively sold to Escom, and later,

Gateway 2000.[31] Escom had almost immediately gone bankrupt itself (due to non-Amiga related problems), while Gateway decided to keep the patents and sell the remaining assets to a new company later renamed to Amiga, Inc. (no relation to the original Amiga Corporation) in 1999. Amiga also received a license to use Amiga-related patents, which were retained by Gateway until they expired.[32] Amiga Inc. sold the copyrights for works created up to 1993 to Cloanto,[33][34] and commissioned development of AmigaOS 4 to Hyperion Entertainment
.

New Amigas

Since the end of the Commodore-Amiga, there have been many attempts to create new Amiga hardware and solutions. All new Amigas are built from standard components without using the original Commodore custom chips.

Amiga compatibles

Only Amiga compatible machines share the original Amiga heritage with the custom chip compatibility. While they are not using the original chips (as in original Amiga computers), they implement compatible functionality using their

field-programmable gate arrays
(FPGA) or custom bootloaders.

DraCo

The DraCo was the first Amiga clone. It was released during the bankruptcy of Commodore International in 1994 and was sold until 2000. Unlike later systems employing FPGA for the custom chipset, the Draco only provided compatibility at the operating system level and used a bootloader to patch various system devices and libraries that attempted to directly access any real Amiga chips. It was never intended to be a 'general purpose' desktop computer, however, users have been able to get some models to boot to Workbench.

Minimig

Minimig 120×120 mm PCB board (Nano-ITX size)[35]

Freescale and supports overclocking up to 50 MHz. The size of the FPGA limited the MiniMig to a subset of the ECS
graphics, lacking support for productivity modes on the real chipset. It was also limited to only 2 MB of memory that was artificially split into ROM, "chip", and "fast" segments with an aftermarket 'hack' that could increase it to 4 MB total.

Natami

Natami was a hardware project to build 68k-based computers to run AmigaOS.[36]
While the original project is defunct, many of the core members of Natami have moved onto the Vampire project.

Vampire V4 Standalone

Vampire V4 Standalone is an FPGA Amiga-compatible currently[

microSD and retargetable graphics (RTG)
, named "SAGA" or Super-AGA.

The V4 is designed to replace the V2 V500 model as an accelerator, as well as operate entirely independently of any computer in a so-called "standalone mode".[37] To accomplish this, Apollo Accelerators has built a cleanroom version of the AGA chipset and added direct support classic DB9-based joysticks and various low or full-speed USB 2.0 peripherals such as mice, keyboard and gamepads. Amiga AGA graphics are automatically upscaled to HDMI (576p) resolution and can switch automatically between classic and SAGA display modes for use with modern LCD monitors and televisions.

As of August 2019, the AC68080 is the fastest 680x0-compatible Amiga processor with more than four times the performance of the previously fastest, the Motorola 68060. It is capable of 192.12 MIPS and 102.06 MFLOPS, while the Cyberstorm 68060 at 50 MHz was capable of only 39.29 MIPS and 28.02 MFLOPS.

AGA machines with all chipsets having DMA disabled.[39]

The AC68080 is

EmuTOS, and FreeMiNT, as well as the Classic Macintosh OS
.

Amiga Components

A number of suppliers have begun to spring up to provide components to allow users to build their own Amiga compatibles.[41] This includes new motherboards[42] and cases.[43] intended to be combined with either an emulator or an FPGA.

AmigaOS 4 systems

The AmigaOS is known for combining the functionality of OS and window manager.[44] It was primarily designed to run on PowerPC Amiga systems or hardware equipped with Cyberstorm PPC or BlizzardPPC accelerator boards as well as AmigaOne computers with PPC Teron installed. This system was only available in developer pre-releases for several years until the final release in December 2006. Since 2001, Hyperion Entertainment has been developing new AmigaOS 4 running on PowerPC-based systems. The contract between Amiga Inc. and this Belgian-German company only allowed for the availability of the commercial AmigaOS 4 license to computers with AmigaOne motherboards.

AmigaOS 4 also runs on the Sam440 line developed by ACube Systems, following an agreement Hyperion. It also runs on Pegasos II systems developed by Genesi/bPlan and AmigaOne systems developed by British Eyetech and A-eon Technologies. AmigaOS 4 can run system-friendly AmigaOS software written for original Commodore Amigas.

AmigaOS 4 provides backward-compatibility to 68K software through tiered emulation. If the program is known to be OS-friendly (it does not attempt to access hardware directly), then a lightweight JIT emulator is used and calls are allowed directly to AmigaOS 4's API which remains largely compatible to AmigaOS 3.x. However, if the program is not known, or is known to access hardware directly, then it will be executed using E-UAE.

AROS systems

AROS is an open-source re-implementation of AmigaOS and is designed more for portability. The features of the first attempts replicated those found in the AmigaOS 3.1.[45] It runs on many x86-based systems as native or hosted flavors. AROS also runs on some 68k-based Amigas and PowerPC systems. There are also sellers of 'AresOne' systems dedicated to run AROS only. Unlike many other Amiga-based solutions, AROS is Amiga binary compatible only on 68k-based systems.[46] This version is recognized for its high degree of compatibility at the source-code level, allowing it to make concessions towards the legacy deficiencies of the OS it was based from.[45]

MorphOS systems

PowerMac, PowerBook, and iBook
.

References

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  2. ^ "Amiga Documents". sites.google.com. Retrieved June 5, 2020.
  3. ^ "Secret Weapons of Commodore: The Lorraine". 090427 floodgap.com
  4. ^ "39+Rare+Sage+VI+Photo.jpg (image)". bp0.blogger.com. Retrieved June 7, 2020.
  5. ^ "OLD-COMPUTERS.COM : The Museum". www.old-computers.com. Retrieved June 7, 2020.
  6. ^ a b c d "A history of the Amiga, part 3: The first prototype". Arstechnica.com. August 22, 2007. Retrieved July 17, 2016.
  7. ^ a b c Gareth Knight. "Amiga History". Amigahistory.co.uk. Retrieved April 20, 2013.
  8. ^ a b "Features". BYTE. August 1985. p. 81. Retrieved October 27, 2013.
  9. ^ "Microbytes". BYTE. April 1984. p. 10. Retrieved October 22, 2013.
  10. ^ "Steve Jobs was reported to be extremely worried about the Amiga, but fortunately for him and Apple, Commodore had absolutely no idea what they were doing". arstechnica.com. January 18, 2005.
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  13. ^ Dvorak, John C. (September 1, 1985). "Image". Ahoy!. p. 5. Retrieved June 27, 2014.
  14. ^ "This Season's Computer War". The New York Times. December 16, 1985. Retrieved March 31, 2016.
  15. ^ Webster, Bruce (December 1985). "Microcomputer Color Graphics-Observations". BYTE. p. 405. Retrieved October 28, 2013.
  16. ^ "Info Magazine issue 17". Archive.org. Retrieved July 17, 2016.
  17. ^ Lock, Robert (August 1986). "Editor's Notes". Compute!. p. 6. Retrieved November 9, 2013.
  18. ^ Pournelle, Jerry (September 1986). "A Busy Day". BYTE. p. 321.
  19. ^ Webster, Bruce (January 1987). "View and Reviews". BYTE. p. 367. Retrieved November 4, 2013.
  20. ^ "Amiga Prospects Still Bright!". Computer Gaming World. June–July 1987. p. 42.
  21. ^ Tom R. Halfhill (August 1, 1994). "R.I.P. Commodore 1954-1994". Byte.com. Archived from the original on April 7, 2007. Retrieved March 23, 2010.
  22. ^ Proctor, Bob (March 1988). "Titans of the Computer Gaming World / SSI". Computer Gaming World. p. 36.
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  27. ^ "Letters". Computer Gaming World. December 1, 1992. p. 124. Retrieved July 5, 2014.
  28. ^ a b Edge, August 1995
  29. ^ "Special Report from the Winter Consumer Electronics Show / Part I". Computer Gaming World. March 1, 1993. p. 10. Retrieved July 6, 2014.
  30. ^ Matthews, Robin (July 1, 1993). "CGW's Foreign Agent Stalks Europe's Premier Computer Show". Computer Gaming World. p. 106. Retrieved July 12, 2014.
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  33. ^ "Cloanto". Amiga Documents. Retrieved February 20, 2015.
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  37. ^ "V4 Announcement Letter via Wayback Machine" (PDF). June 9, 2019. Archived from the original (PDF) on June 9, 2019. Retrieved August 29, 2019.
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  40. ^ "Free 68080 FPGA core license by Apollo Team is Great". amitopia.com. November 7, 2017.
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  44. ISBN 978-8182930476
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  45. ^
    ISBN 9780956081315
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  46. ^ "AROS Research Operating System". Aros.sourceforge.net. Retrieved July 17, 2016.

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