User:Orion Blastar~enwiki/Amiga

[[:Image:Amiga logo.svg|right|thumb|265px|The former Amiga logo, as used by

]]

The Amiga is a family of

Based on the

It is rumored that in 1985 when Apple's board of directors saw the Amiga 1000 at half the price with twice as many features and true pre-emptive multitasking they felt that Steve Jobs had made an overpriced toy with the Macintosh and fired him, and made John Sculley the new CEO to make a sequel to the Macintosh the Macintosh II. After Commodore released the Amiga 2000, the Macintosh II was modeled after it but with Nubus slots instead of Zorro slots and a more advanced graphics chip and the faster 68020 CPU in an attempt to out do the Amiga, and also the Apple // series got an Apple //GS to compete with the Amiga and a GUI that resembled the Macintosh GUI. Later Commodore countered with the Amiga 3000 having the 68020 CPU. Around the same time the Macintosh went to the PowerPC CPU, Amiga also used the PowerPC CPU as add in cards for legacy Amigas and later the AmigaONE based on a PowerPC CPU.

It also found a prominent role in the

Since the demise of Commodore, various groups have marketed successors to the original Amiga line. Eyetech sold Amiga hardware under the AmigaOne brand from 2002 to 2005.

History

The Amiga was originally designed by a small company called

, reduced this advantage.

In 1994, Commodore filed for bankruptcy and its assets were purchased by

68060

version of the A4000T.

However, Escom in turn went bankrupt in 1997. The Amiga brand was then sold to another PC manufacturer,

Gateway 2000

, which had announced grand plans for it. However, in 2000, Gateway sold the Amiga brand without releasing a product.

thumb|right|265px|Amiga Technologies Logo. (1996) The current owner of the trademark, Amiga, Inc., licensed the rights to make hardware using the Amiga brand to a UK computer vendor, Eyetech Group, Ltd, which was founded by some former UK employees of Commodore International. They were previously selling the AmigaOne via an international dealer network. The AmigaOne is a PowerPC computer designed to run the latest version of AmigaOS, which was itself licensed to a Belgian-German company, Hyperion Entertainment.^[11]

Hardware

At its core, the Amiga features custom designed coprocessors, useful for handling tasks such as audio, video, encoding and animation. This freed up the Amiga's central processor for other tasks (given that the coprocessors could keep up with the central processor's demands) and gave the Amiga an edge on its competitors in many situations.

The platform also introduced other innovations. The

drive as standard, as well as being one of the earlier computers to no longer include a floppy drive in the standard configuration. The Amiga was also one of the first computers for which inexpensive sound sampling and video digitization accessories were available.

Although it was once regarded as "unemulatable,"[12] since around 2000, many different platforms have Amiga emulation programs available that reproduce the Amiga's hardware functions in software. This allows users to run Amiga software without the need for an actual Amiga computer.

Central processing unit

All Commodore Amiga models make use of Motorola Central Processing Units (

interfaces, alleviating those tasks from the base Amiga.

The Amiga is not limited to solely the 68k CPU architecture; although Commodore never shipped one, it is possible to install a PowerPC coprocessor that can be used by PowerPC-aware software and libraries,^[13] and later the AmigaOne used a PowerPC CPU instead of a 68k CPU.

Custom chipset

There are three generations of chipsets used in the various Amiga models. The first is the

, digital audio and communication between various peripherals (e.g., CPU, memory and floppy disks) in the Amiga.

Graphics

[[:Image:HAM6example.png|thumb|right|352px|A 4,096 color

]]

All Amiga systems can display full-screen animated graphics with 32, 64 (

. The Amiga chipset can genlock — adjust its own screen refresh timing to match an NTSC or PAL video signal. When combined with setting transparency, this allows an Amiga to overlay an external video source with graphics. This ability made the Amiga popular for many applications, and provides the ability to do character generation and CGI effects far more cheaply than earlier systems. Some frequent users of this ability included wedding videographers, TV stations and their weather forecasting divisions (for weather graphics and radar), advertising channels, music video production, and 'desktop video'. The NewTek Video Toaster was made possible by the genlock ability of the Amiga.

Sound

The sound chip, named Paula, supports four sound channels (two for the left speaker and two for the right) with 8-bit resolution for each channel and a 6-bit volume control per channel. The analog output is connected to a low-pass filter, which filters out high-frequency aliases when the Amiga is using a lower sampling rate (see

, using direct memory access (DMA), making sound playback without CPU intervention possible.

Although the hardware is limited to four separate sound channels, software such as OctaMED uses software mixing to allow eight or more virtual channels, and it was possible for software to mix two hardware channels to achieve a single 14-bit resolution channel by playing with the volumes of the channels in such a way that one of the source channels contributes the most significant bits and the other the least ones.

The quality of the Amiga's sound output, and the fact that the hardware is ubiquitous and easily addressed by software, were standout features of Amiga hardware unavailable on PC platforms for years. Third-party sound cards exist that provide DSP functions, multi-track direct-to-disk recording, multiple hardware sound channels and 16-bit and beyond resolutions. A retargetable sound API called AHI was developed allowing these cards to be used transparently by the OS and software.

ROM

The classic Amiga Operating System consists of Kickstart (including System API) and Workbench. In the Amiga 1000 model, Kickstart is first loaded from a floppy disk, followed by Workbench, or other bootable disk. Later models hold Kickstart (and system API) on a ROM, improving start-up times. Models can be upgraded by changing the ROM.

The ROMs are generally known as "Kickstart" and start with version 1.0 (A1000 floppy) and end with Kickstart 3.1. There are hardware and software packages that can "shadow" Kickstart into memory. This resulted in faster operation for functions dependent on the ROM, at the cost of system memory to store the ROM data.

Three finger salute

The Amiga's

which resets the machine entirely, forcing a reload of the Kickstart.

Third party hardware

Many expansion boards were produced for Amiga computers to improve the performance and capability of the hardware, such as memory expansions, SCSI controllers, CPU boards, and graphics boards. Other upgrades include genlocks, ethernet cards, modems, sound cards and samplers, video digitizers, USB cards, extra serial ports, and IDE controllers.

The most popular upgrades were memory, SCSI controllers and CPU accelerator cards. These were sometimes combined into the one device, particularly on big-box Amigas like the A2000, A3000 and A4000.

Early CPU accelerator cards feature full 32-bit CPUs of the 68000 family such as the

. Both CPUs feature integrated FPUs and MMUs. Many CPU accelerator cards also had integrated SCSI controllers.

Phase5 designed the PowerUp boards (BlizzardPPC and CyberstormPPC) featuring both a 68k (a 68040 or 68060) and a PPC (603 or 604) CPU, which are able to run the two CPUs at the same time (and share the system memory). The PPC CPU on PowerUp boards is usually used as a coprocessor for heavy computations (a powerful CPU is needed to run for example MAME, but even decoding JPEG pictures and MP3 audio was considered heavy computation in those years). It is also possible to ignore the 68k CPU and run Linux on the PPC (project Linux APUS), but a PPC-native Amiga OS was not available when the PPC boards first appeared.

24-bit graphics cards and video cards were also available. Graphics cards are designed primarily for 2D artwork production, workstation use, and later, gaming. Video cards are designed for inputting and outputting video signals, and processing and manipulating video.

Perhaps the most famous video card in the North American market was the NewTek

specifically designed to work with the Toaster quickly came to market, most of which were designed as standard Amiga bus cards.

Various manufacturers started producing PCI busboards for the A1200 and A4000, allowing standard Amiga computers to use PCI cards such as Voodoo graphic cards, Sound Blaster sound cards, 10/100 ethernet cards, and TV tuner cards.

PowerPC upgrades with Wide SCSI controllers, PCI busboards with ethernet, sound and 3D graphics cards, and tower cases allowed the A1200 and A4000 to survive well into the late nineties.

Expansion boards were made by Richmond Sound Design that allow their show control and sound design software to communicate with their custom hardware frames either by ribbon cable or fiber optic cable for long distances, allowing the Amiga to control up to eight million digitally controlled external audio, lighting, automation, relay and voltage control channels spread around a large theme park, for example. See Amiga software for more information on these applications.

Models and variants

The "classic Amiga" models

.

The

.

The

Commodore released three significant upgrades: the Amiga 2000 in 1987, the Amiga 3000 in 1990, and the Amiga 4000 in 1992. These upgrades improved the platform's graphical abilities, allowing for more colors and different display modes, and added expansion slots and ports. The best selling models, however, were the much cheaper but still versatile console models - the Amiga 500 (1987) and the Amiga 1200 (1992).

In 2006,

AmigaOS 4 systems

AmigaOS 4 is designed for PowerPC Amiga systems and currently runs on both Amigas equipped with CyberstormPPC or BlizzardPPC accelerator boards, and on the PPC Teron series based AmigaOne computers built by Eyetech under license by Amiga Inc. AmigaOS 4.0 had been available only in developer pre-releases for numerous years until the final update was 'released' in December 2006. Due to the nature of some provisions of the contract between Amiga Inc. and Hyperion Entertainment the Belgian-German firm which is developing the OS, the commercial AmigaOS had only been available licensed to buyers of AmigaOne motherboards.

AmigaOS 4.0 for Classic Amigas equipped with PPC (Cyberstorm PPC or BlizzardPPC) accelerator boards was released commercially in November 2007, prior to this it was available only to developers and beta-testers. The most recent release AmigaOS is 4.1.^[20]

No new hardware has been released since the AmigaOne; however Acube Systems has entered into an agreement with Hyperion under which it plans to port AmigaOS 4 to its SAM440 line of PowerPC-based motherboards.^[21]

Amiga hardware clones

Long-time Amiga developer MacroSystem entered the Amiga-clone market with their DraCo

). The technology was later used in the Casablanca system, a set-top-box also designed for non-linear video editing.

In 1998, Index Information released the Access, an Amiga-clone similar to the A1200, but on a motherboard which could fit into a standard 5 1/4" drive bay. It features either a 68020 or 68030 CPU, with a redesigned AGA chipset, and runs AmigaOS 3.1.

In 2006, two new Amiga-clones were announced. The

announced plans to commercially produce the original Minimig. In February 2008 Acube began selling Minimig boards.

Individual Computers has announced development of the Clone-A system. As of mid 2007 it has been shown in its development form, with FPGA-based boards replacing the custom chips in an Amiga 500.

Operating systems

AmigaOS

At the time of release AmigaOS put an OS that was well ahead of its time into the hands of the average consumer. It was the first commercially available consumer

data.

John C. Dvorak stated in 1996 that AmigaOS "remains one of the great operating systems of the past 20 years, incorporating a small kernel and tremendous multitasking capabilities the likes of which have only recently been developed in OS/2 and Windows NT. The biggest difference is that the AmigaOS could operate fully and multitask in as little as 250 K of address space."^[23]

Dvorak is correct as IBM did license the Amiga GUI for OS/2 in exchange for Commodore using the REXX language. ^[24] Since NT was based on the Microsoft version of OS/2, NT used some Amiga GUI technologies as did Windows 95 and above. ^[25] The Amiga Workbench menu was used and placed on the bottom of NT and 95 and above Windows systems and the trashcan became the recycle can.^[26]

Like other operating systems of the time, the OS lacks

, and fundamentally incapable of enforcing any form of security model since any program had full access to the system. Later this memory protection feature was implemented in Amiga OS 4.

The problem was somewhat exacerbated by Commodore's initial decision to release documentation relating not only to the OS's underlying software routines, but also to the hardware itself, enabling intrepid programmers who cut their teeth on the Commodore 64 to

Following Commodore's bankruptcy, two main clones of AmigaOS were developed:

AROS can be concluded to have a goal to be as portable as Linux is, but easier to use and configure than Linux.

Unix and Unix-like systems

Commodore-Amiga produced

processors.

Other, still maintained, operating systems are available for the classic Amiga platform, including Linux and NetBSD. Both require a CPU with MMU such as the 68020 with 68851 or full versions of the 68030, 68040 or 68060. There is also a version of Linux for Amigas with PowerPC accelerator cards. Debian and Yellow Dog Linux can run on the AmigaOne.

There is an official, older version of OpenBSD. The last Amiga release is 3.2. Minix 1.5.10 also runs on Amiga.^[37]

Emulating other systems

The Amiga is able to emulate other computer platforms ranging from many 8-bit systems such as the

(the arcade machine emulator) is also available for Amiga systems with PPC accelerator card upgrades.

Amiga software

The Amiga was a primary target for productivity and game development during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Software was often developed for the Amiga and the Atari ST simultaneously, since the ST shared a similar architecture.

Aminet was created in 1992 and until around 1996, was the largest public archive of software for any platform.

Bootblock

[[:Image:Amiga kick34.5 askforwb1.3.png|right|frame|If an Amiga 500 is rebooted or powered without a floppy this screen is displayed. The displayed OS is Kickstart 34.5 (AmigaOS 1.3), included in the Amiga 500 ROM.]]

When an Amiga is reset, the Kickstart code selects a boot device (floppy or hard drive), loads the first two sectors of the disk or partition (the bootblock), and passes control to it. Normally this code passes control back to the OS, continuing to boot from the device or partition it was loaded from. The first production Amiga, the Amiga 1000, needed to load Kickstart from floppy disk into 256 kilobytes of RAM reserved for this purpose, but subsequent Amigas held Kickstart in ROM. Some games and demos for the A1000 (notably Dragon's Lair) provided an alternative code-base in order to use the extra 256 kilobytes of RAM for data.

A floppy disk or hard drive partition bootblock normally contains code to load the 'dos.library' (AmigaDOS) and then exit to it, invoking the GUI. Any such disk, no matter what the other contents of the disk, was referred to as a "Boot disk", "bootable disk" or "Workbench disk". (A bootblock could be added to a disk by use of the "install" command.) Some entertainment software contains custom bootblocks. The game or

then takes control of memory and resources to suit itself, effectively disabling AmigaOS and the Amiga GUI.

The bootblock became an obvious target for

attempts included custom bootblocks. These amended bootblock advertised the presence of the virus checker while checking the system for tell-tale signs of memory resident viruses and then passed control back to the system. Unfortunately these could not be used on disks that already relied on a custom bootblock, but did alert users of potential trouble. Several of them also replicated themselves across other disks, becoming little more than viruses in their own right.

Boing Ball

The Boing Ball

showing a red-and-white balloon bouncing forth and back off the edges of the screen, as a deep 'boing!' sound played on each impact. Since then, the Boing Ball became one of the most well-known symbols for Amiga and compatible computers. Within the context of this tradition of bouncing ball demos at the Consumer Electronics Show, CBS Electronics also showed a Bouncing Ball demo for the Atari VCS/2600, with a spinning and bouncing ball, at the same event.

The 1984 Boing Ball demo was one of the very first demos shown on the Amiga. It was specifically designed to take advantage of the Amiga's custom graphics and sound hardware, achieving a level of speed and smoothness not previously seen on a home computer. This demo operated in an Intuition Screen, allowing the higher resolution Amiga Workbench screen to be dragged down to make the Boing Ball visible from behind, bouncing up above the Workbench while the Workbench remained fully active. Since the Boing Ball used almost no CPU time, this made a particularly impressive demonstration of multitasking at the time.

Despite its popularity in the Amiga community, the Boing Ball itself was never officially adopted as a

. After the bankruptcy of Commodore, the Boing Ball remained in use as one of the symbols for Amiga-related systems on hundreds of web sites and products by different companies and individuals.

The demo was once ported to the Atari 2600 under the title Boing.^[39] The porter impressed himself so much that he added a little Easter Egg, which he referred to as lame (When you hold down the game reset switch, the checkered ball turns into a message that says HAPPY XMAS 1999!-----FROM ROB KUDLA and Jingle Bells starts playing. You also won't hear the bounce sound effect. Releasing the switch stops the music, turns the message back into the checkered ball, and the boing sound effect is played again when the ball bounces).

Amiga community

When Commodore went bankrupt in 1994, there was still a very active Amiga community, and it continued to support the platform long after mainstream commercial vendors abandoned it. The most popular Amiga magazine, Amiga Format, continued to publish editions until 2000, some six years after Commodore filed for bankruptcy. Another magazine, Amiga Active, was launched in 1999 and was published until 2001. Interest in the platform is high enough to sustain a specialist column in the UK weekly magazine Micro Mart.

As of mid-2006, there was enough demand for Amiga expansion hardware to keep some small-scale manufacturers in business.

Notable historic uses

The Amiga series of computers found a place in early computer graphic design and television presentation. Below are some examples of notable uses and users.

• Early episodes of the television series Babylon 5 were rendered on Amigas running Video Toasters.^[40] Other television series using Amigas for special effects included SeaQuest DSV^[41] and Max Headroom.^[42]
• Director Steven Spielberg used Amigas in Jurassic Park for pre-visualization, in the seaQuest DSV TV series for special effects and rendering of underwater craft, and in the TV cartoon Animaniacs.
• The Amiga 1000 & 2000 computers appeared multiple times in seasons 3, 4 & 5 of the 80s TV series Miami Vice. The Amiga 1000 was shown the most residing in the Miami PD, whilst another was used in several office settings. The 2000 replaced the PD's Amiga 1000 in season 5, plus it was shown at least once in a separate, private household.
• West End, the Royal Shakespeare Company's many venues, most of Branson, Missouri
  's theaters, and scores of theaters on cruise ships, amongst hundreds of others. RSD purchased used Amigas on the web and reconditioned them to provide enough systems for all the shows that specified them and only stopped providing new Amiga installations in 2000. There are still an unknown number of shows on cruise ships and in themed venues being run by Amigas.
• The Simpsons Season 7 in 1996 (Episode 148 "Bart on the Road") used an Amiga by production staff to create the 3D perspective and rendering during of the rental car Bart gets (mentioned in the audio commentary as a low cost effort).

In addition, many other celebrities and notable individuals have made use of the Amiga:[43]

• Detroit Museum of New Art.^[45] The pop artist also stated: "The thing I like most about doing this kind of work on the Amiga is that it looks like my work in other media."^[46][47]
• Digital Art movement, was the artist who physically taught Andy Warhol how to use Amiga^[48]
  at its best, due to the fact he was one of the pioneers using and enjoying Amiga.
• Actor Dick Van Dyke is a self-described "rabid" user of the Amiga.^[49][50]
• Amigas were used in various NASA laboratories to keep track of multiple low orbiting satellites, and were still used up to 2003/04 (dismissed and sold in 2006). This is another example of long lifetime reliability of Amiga hardware, as well as professional use. Amigas were also used at Kennedy Space Center to run strip-chart recorders, to format and display data, and control stations of platforms for Delta rocket launches.^[51]
• Artist Jean "Moebius" Giraud credits the Amiga he bought for his son as a bridge to learning about "using paint box programs".^[52] He uploaded some of his early experiments to the file sharing forums on CompuServe.
• Tom Fulp is noted as saying he used the Amiga as his first computer for creating cartoons and animations.^[53]
• London Transport Museum developed their own interactive multi-media software for the CD32. The software included a walkthrough of various exhibits and a virtual tour of the museum.^[54]
• The "Weird Al" Yankovic film UHF contains a spoof of the computer-animated video of the Dire Straits song "Money for Nothing." According to the DVD commentary track, this spoof was created on an Amiga home computer.^[55]
• Rolf Harris used an Amiga to digitize his hand-drawn art work for animation on his television series, Rolf's Cartoon Club.
• Todd Rundgren's video "Change Myself" was produced with Toaster and Lightwave.
• An Amiga 1000 can be seen in the movie Disorderlies in the background running a heart animation.
• Pop artist Calvin Harris composed his debut album I Created Disco with an Amiga ^[56].
• Electronic musician Max Tundra also created his three albums with an Amiga 500 ^[57].

See also

• Amiga games
• Minimig
• Amiga Hold-and-Modify
• AROS
  - open source implementation of AmigaOS for various hardware platforms
• 80186
  based contemporary of the Amiga 1000's with similar design philosophy.

References

Further reading

• Famous Amiga Uses
• Amiga, Inc.
• Amiga Hardware Database - details of Amiga hardware
• Amiga Games List - all games released on the Amiga platform
• Big Book of Amiga Hardware - Big Book of Amiga Hardware
• Amiga Lorraine: finally, the next generation Atari?
  Creative Computing
  , April 1984
• The Amiga A3000+ System Specification Dave Haynie, 1991 DevCon Release, July 17, 1991
• On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore Bagnall, Brian (2005), Variant Press,
  ISBN 0-9738649-0-7
  .
• Amiga History
• Amiga History Video
• Amiga emulators at emulation.net

[[Category:Home computers]] [[Category:Personal computers]] [[Category:Amiga|*Amiga]] [[Category:CBM hardware]] [[Category:1985 introductions]]