The Amiga Turns 25 289
retsamxaw reminds us that yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the Amiga. "[The Amiga] debuted to rave reviews and great expectations — heck, InfoWorld said it might be the 'third milestone' in personal computing after the Apple II and the IBM PC. ... Commodore was a famously parsimonious outfit, but it splurged on the Amiga's introduction. The highlight of that Lincoln Center product launch was a demo in which pop art legend Andy Warhol used an Amiga to 'paint' Blondie's Debbie Harry. The exercise didn't prove much of anything other than that Warhol was able to use the paint program's fill command, but it was heady stuff... Other platforms and tech products would inspire similarly fanatical followings — most notably OS/2 and Linux... But Amiga nuts of the 1980s and early 1990s... remain the ultimate fanboys, even though it hadn't yet occurred to anyone to hurl that word at computer users."
Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry (Score:3, Interesting)
And just a month and a half ago, I came into possession of an Amiga 2000, with all the parts and manuals. Unfortunately, it seems not to be in working order, as nothing appears on the screen after a power-on. Ah, someday, maybe...
The Amiga was a blast to program (Score:5, Interesting)
Software patents and the death of the Amiga (Score:5, Interesting)
Software Patent ended CD32 and Commodore Amiga [xcssa.org]
It describes how Commodore lost a software patent fight over, believe it or not, blinking a cursor using XOR. They owed $10m as a result, and were also prohibited from bringing CD32 into the US. Since Commodore had bet large on the CD32, this was a fatal blow.
Read it, it's interesting. I didn't realise this and've read more about Commodore than many. If you're interested in the history of Commodore, and it is interesting, try "On The Edge [variantpress.com]", which describes it very well. The book is sold out in many places but I imagine it will be possible to locate copies.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:Oh yeah! (Score:2, Interesting)
video production..... (Score:1, Interesting)
there was nothing (other than extremely expensive, dedicated equipment) that could integrate so well into a 'low budget' on line edit suite in the 80's and early 90's.
with bt2 (broadcast titler 2) i could knock out graphics that made some of the broadcasted titles of the day look like they came from some fisher-price toy.
by the early 90's (?) i was producing corporate and tv material first on highband, then betacam, then betacamsp, and mastering to 1". all my graphics were sync'd through the amiga (i do remember using some card or other (?)), and using it was a joy.
unfortunately my business grew to the point where the amiga just couldn't keep up (not it's fault, more the pressure of work), and it gave way to pc's running matrox illuminator cards.
i had my amigas in storage till just a few years ago, and fired them up before giving them to the local youth centre (where i believe their still in use with the younger kids for games).
Still cruisin' after all of these years (Score:3, Interesting)
I came late to the Amiga party. Eh, just before Commodore tanked and I began my migration from BBSs to the Internet. I am still rockin' and rollin' 18 years later (holy shit, it really HAS been that long?!) Even my nick/handle/alias is homage. Got my trusty A4000D and several "classic" companions, and a recently-acquired MacMini running MorphOS 2.5. Good times had then, and still yet to be had.
I am sure a lot of people know by now, what with Google and all, but there are a good number of Amiga sites and enthusiast groups, as well as MANUFACTURERS (yes, we get new, modern hardware, too!) amiga.org is a good place to start, though there are many other sites. And let us not forget AmiWest (maybe I will finally make it this year...)
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas (Score:1, Interesting)
Back in the day (okay, I was only in high school at the time), we used to say that IBM stood for "I've Been Mislead".
Yes, this captures quite accurately the disappointment that Amiga users felt when seeing the expensive and over-hyped IBM PC running in command line mode, and having ASCII graphics apps. I thought the world must have gone mad.
And (at least in the early days of the Amiga), don't forget the sound. Then again, before soundblaster cards, the bleeps and bloops of a PC speaker couldn't compare to a C64, let alone the Amiga...
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas (Score:5, Interesting)
If you stuck the Amiga 1000 (ignoring the later models) next to an IBM of the time, it was obvious IBM would win because of those three letters. But if you looked at features and capabilities, the Amiga was better in almost every single aspect except for the amount of software available. It had poor expandability, but the Amiga 2000 was released shortly after that which matched and exceeded the IBM, and had plug and play long while the PC world.
And you didn't need an Atari ST... That was silly. Maybe first ever release of Amiga had some tools problems, but it shortly got very good. Yes many people booted off of floppy, but Amiga 2000 improved on that as well. Plus many Amiga developers continued booting off floppy instead of hard drive because it was faster for them; recoverable RAM disks made for a faster environment than PCs or STs.
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas (Score:3, Interesting)
i wonder if the PC clones was one reason. That way, one could run a el-cheapo at home, using the same software and hardware as the official IBM, with whatever support agreement the workplace had with IBM and so on, at work. Heck, the managers may even look the other way on someone copying those programs, if it meant the person could work at home if "needed" (more like demanded).
basically, the hardware platform turned commodity. And thanks to microsofts deal with IBM, they where free to sell their software to anyone with compatible hardware. End result was a massive drop in hardware price, and a massive rise in customers for microsoft.
problem is, linux cant go the same way, as it may well be that dell and the rest are earning money on using windows, thanks to all kinds of trial bundles (enough of those, and it may offset whatever rebated price microsoft sells them windows for). And this also follows on to the brick and mortar stores where a clueless sales drone can push boxed media based on generic descriptions of "problems".
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas (Score:1, Interesting)
Wrong, Wrong, Wrong.
My last amiga was the 1200. @mb of Ram was todays equivalent to 32gb. It was an endless expanse you could not understand how to use. The PC I bought was 4mb, and -75%- was taken up by a simple desktop (Win3.11, no net). By contrast, the amiga os, consumed a few percent at most of system resources. Maybe 250k tops, thought I think I had mine below 100kb. The 20gb hard disk was easier to consume, even with my external 20 from my last machine, however the OS took up, what 1-2% of the disk? By contrast the 200gb pc was half consumed by the default install. Sound was was -better- than the pc I bought afterwards. The PC I bought at 256 colours, the A1200 had 256,000 colours.
I downgraded from the a1200 to an PC. IT was a 486dx, 4mb of ram, 200gb hard disk sound blaster with a CDRom card hanging off the sound card (non ide). It took a few mins to get to a usable desktop, my amiga took all of 5 seconds (optimised startup script, it was only loadwb from memory).
The Amiga was a pleasure to use and I feel that only recently with the iMac have wee seen a truly 'better' machine (I'm an old MCSE from the 3.5 days, not much of an apple fanboy). The only reason I sold was that I hear on the news about the US parent company going in to receivership and had already being exposed to a dead end funvision system in the past. I sold it -above- retail in Sydney's trading post magazine on a sorrowful day. I miss it, mostly because it costed half the price of the dog I bought next.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Having been there (still have a bunch of Amiga's - that I never use anymore sadly - including an A4000 with a Phase 5 233 MHz PPC board and video toaster/flyer) I don't think it was a marketing issue until the early to mid 90's when Commodore started to face serious problems.
In the early days of the Amiga I recall 4 or 5 magazines, one official one, TV ads, ads in 3rd party magazines (I remember vividly seeing ads for the machines in various video/multimedia trade journals). IDG - with Amigaworld shows you how big it was really - this is the same company that publishes Macworld and Infoworld to this day (and consequently I knew the writing was on the wall when one of the editors for Amigaworld - now writes for Macworld).
I think the problem was a bit more deep sadly - one of mindshare more than anything. When I started working in video part time with a friend - this was in 91-92 when the A4000 came to market many of our colleagues used to think it was hilarious we took the machines seriously. Never mind we were the first shop in town to do editing via disk, (5.25" Quantum SCSI disks :)), and the only shop in town that could do 3D graphics for a long time (long before the flyer we used the DPS Personal Animation Recorder - it rocked). The 3d animations from the demo reel we worked on back then still looks pretty nice today (despite being only on VHS). It was a serious computer developed by some really smart and talented software and hardware engineers, but people didn't see it that way.
At the local computer club most ms-dos/mac users used to decry Amiga users with statements like who needs multi-tasking (the claim back then was "I'm far more productive doing one task at a time thank you very much"), and oh all those wonderful animations and graphics/sound we could do too with the right hardware.
Sadly Amiga met the same fate as NEXT, SGI, Apollo and almost Apple (yes if Steve didn't come back - they would be a topic in some history book right now).
Also I should mention - out of all the companies who have bought Amiga - Commodore was the only company to actually release marketable hardware and advertise said hardware. I think while they mismanaged their entire business down the toilet - they certainly did a much better job than most have (managing the Amiga that is).
Re:Software patents and the death of the Amiga (Score:1, Interesting)
The CD32 was the wrong move by Commodore (did they still own the Amiga by then?). The Amiga had long since lost its way by the time of the CD32. Commodore should have bundled hard drives as standard with the machines long before (e.g. by end of the '80s). Perhaps if the Amiga had got a foothold into business, companies like Microsoft would have developed their apps for it? I used to a have a hard drive for a 1200 but the computer would crash frequently with it.
PCs had moved onto Windows 3.1, and killer apps such as Word 2. The Amiga had missed its chance and become stuck in a rut.
The Amiga was undoubtedly far superior to PCs, but their reliability was suspect. I went through quite a few A500s due to disk drive faults (probably not helped by anti-copy loading techniques). The shop owner I purchased it from was sick of the sight of me.
Re:I'll freely admit to it (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? The A1200 was kind of...meh. Seriously, the Amiga 1000 was revolutionary when it came out in 1985! The Amiga 500 was revolutionary when it came out in 1987 because it made the Amiga affordable. After that? Nothing much. The Amiga 1200 came out in fall of 1992 and what kind of specs did it have?
Sure, the 68EC020 at 14MHz was of course an improvement over the 68000 at 7MHz, but c'mon! It's five years since Amiga 500!
Only 2MiB of chip RAM (and no fast RAM) - once again, it's been five years!
Graphics were kind of braindead, just adding two bitplanes and making a total mess of the color registers. Could have gone with a chunky mode instead.
Blitter is exactly the same as the old Amiga 1000 for goodness sake!
Sound is exactly the same as the old Amiga 1000...
Remember that in 1994, the Playstation came out. Compared to Amiga (and especially CD32 which came out a year earlier) now that is revolutionary again!
Yeah, of course I thought the A1200 was the shit at the time, but that's cause I was a blinded Amiga fanboy. Luckily, it wore off (even though I still actually have two A1200 and one A600 in my closet somewhere); for some people, it's chronic. Just go to amiga.org and watch some deluded people, not in jest or in irony, argue that the Amiga is, in 2010, a better computer than a PC. Oh, the humanity!
Re:Why Amiga? (Score:2, Interesting)
I call bullshit. Even some of the most simple Flash games would be impossible to re-create on a (then) mid-range Amiga.
The Amiga would struggle even with a 'match-3' game where any case arose that the grid full of symbols all had to fall down at the same time. You've got to remember that the Amiga didn't have enough graphical horsepower to move even a 16-colour 320x256 screen full of objects around at 50 or 60fps. Oh, it could move the entire screen around as one object, but the Blitter couldn't shift actual pixels around that fast.
Now try doing Warzone Tower Defense, or *any* of the physics-based games where graphic objects undergo rotation. The Amiga had no built-in support for rotating graphics. It could be kludged but it was usually limited to demoscene stuff. Brian The Lion was the only commercial game to implement full-speed rotating graphics. Well, Turrican 3 I think might have (on small objects), but I may be mis-remembering.
The game Rotox was based entirely on a top-down rotating vector playfield, but framerate was fairly poor.
The only area the PC falls down when dealing with 2D gaming is that there is absolutely no hardware support for detecting per-pixel collisions between objects. You either iterate through the objects pixel-by-pixel using the CPU, or you do bounding-box, bounding-circle or ever more complex bounding-polygon stuff.
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas (Score:5, Interesting)
The innovations in the PC came mostly from external development outside of IBM to the open PC architecture. If you were there in the old days you would remember the competing video and audio standards, memory specifications etc. 3rd party hardware was instrumental in creating the PC we know today.
When Jobs came back he leveraged the established PC standards to move the the Mac forward. Apple used to be a company that used only internally developed hardware (stuff like Nubus and Appletalk). Jobs pushed the company to use standards such as USB and eventually transitioned Mac to commodity processors and busses (Intel and PCI/PCI express).
A single company can't compete with unique hardware vs commodity hardware, that's the story of the PC platforms domination and the transformation of Apple.
Proud Amiga user since 1993. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'll freely admit to it (Score:2, Interesting)
I sold my Amiga 1000 in the early 90's, and I am sooo sorry I did. Best computer ever.
I remember feeling a genuine sense of loss when I sold my 500 and later my 1200. I have never felt the same emotional connection to any of the PC's I have owned since. I will always have a soft spot for the old Amigas.
Re:Software patents and the death of the Amiga (Score:3, Interesting)
Reading the Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org], it seems those were Canadian stock brought across the US border. That entry also bears out the XOR patent story, and searching around on the web seems to confirm multiple sources for it.
It's news to me too - only learned about it today. But it does seem to have validity. Agree with the rest of your post though - betting big time on the CD32 would have been...well....interesting as a strategy.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:The Amiga was a blast to program (Score:3, Interesting)
WE'RE NOT WORTHY!
King of Chicago was one of the first five games I had for my A500 back in the day. It's the game that prompted me to get (read:beg my parents for) the RAM upgrade to play like it was meant to be played. Wow, how did we ever manage those loading times? Still waiting for a remake :)
AGA was stop gap (Score:4, Interesting)
The AGA chipset in the A1200 and A4000 was a stop gap chipset, a quick mod of the ECS chipset. It was supposed to plug the gap between the ECS and AAA chipsets.
So both the A1200 and A4000 were just stop gap machines, but sadly nothing ever was released after then.
People may go on about the A1200 not being much faster than the A500, but have a look at your history books. PCs were faster in specs but they were using Windows 3.1 still back then. Slow, 16-bit code and cooperative multitasking. DOS was still used for games!
Also, a PC would cost you about 4 times as much.
Re:The Amiga was a blast to program (Score:3, Interesting)
I was one of those 50k. :)
Props to you and Cinemaware. Not always 100% successful, I appreciated trying to push the computer game further. A long time since I still see the influence in current games. Thanks for your work.
Re:PCs compared poorly with Amigas as did Macs (Score:1, Interesting)
Babylon 5 effects were first done on Amigas.
Amigas could also put their output out on NTSC.
Re:Why Amiga? (Score:5, Interesting)
Holy cow! Have you never played Armour-Geddon? This was a game in a completely 3D environment. You could use 6 different types of vehicles to move around the very large environment. You could fly a jet fighter, a bomber, or a helicopter. You could drive a heavy tank, a light tank, or a hovercraft. You could use up to 6 vehicles at a time (set a waypoint and then hit F1 through F6 to jump into the drivers seat of another vehicle).
The gameplay was fantastic. You were trying to prevent the computer controlled enemy from gathering enough energy to fry everything on the planet surface. The power gathering was represented by 3d towers that had light beams going from them to the next tower in line until you got to the gathering point of all the towers. These "powerlines" were ditributed all over the surface.
My friends and I played this game for YEARS. I would love to recreate it. We almost perfected beating the game. Our strategy was to run a mission (we created the parameters for it. It was not a mission required by the game) where we would fly a jet equipped with a laser, a night sight, and a drop tank for extra range. We would fly low to avoid radar and start following power lines to junctions, destroying the towers on the way to the junctions (you had to start at the end of the powerline as each tower was more difficult to destroy when it had more power flowing through it). Flown (very!) carefully, a single jet flight could darken most of the map and return.
The next step were bomber missions where we would either pick up missing neutron bomb parts or drop teleport devices. One mission was called the Swooping Bat Mission because we flew a bomber across the landscape (low, to avoid radar) and picked up a bomb part that was surrounded by pyramids. There was no way in other than through the air. The trick was to stall the bomber just above the part so you could pick it up and then punch the engines to full throttle so you could climb enough to miss the sloping slides of the pyramids. (this was so difficult that for months, we were convinced it was impossible to do!)
Near the energy gather point, there is a line of "mountains" (pyramids again) with a valley. We called that cocaine alley because when you flew through it, you could not shoot fast enough to destroy everything. We usually took a laser, a rack of rockets, and a rack of guided missiles. The rockets were to destroy the "stubborn" towers and the missiles were for the jets. You would end up with a LOT of jets chasing you and guided missiles were the best weapon for shooting down other planes... however, (near cocaine alley) I once shot a jet down with a tank using a normal artillery shell!
Meh, this is all tl;dr I am sure. My point is that all of this was possible on my Amiga 500 with only 512k of chip RAM and a 7mhz processor. Your claims about the graphical weakness of the Amiga are not true. How else could a simulated 3D enviroment like that, with such possibilities (shooting down a jet with an artillery shell!), be created?
The Amiga was just plain awesomeness. It had multi-tasking all the way down to its hardware. The Agnus chip could be blitting crap across the screen while the CPU was busy calculating crap elsewhere. Anything that required raw CPU horsepower was slow, but since each chip could do its own thing, you could have tons of crap going on at once.
While I am it, I really really miss DPaint IV. Heh, with its name, you would think it was just a paint program like Microsft Paint. No. That thing had all sorts of tools that I have not seen in any one package since then. It would more realistically be called an animation program. You could make animated brushes and move them through time with just a few keystrokes. It was awesome. I really miss my Amiga. Modern computers are nowhere near as fun and useful and cool.
strike (sad)
Re:Software patents and the death of the Amiga (Score:3, Interesting)
Even when you are right, even when you have prior art, even when any idiot can see that you will win, it can cost you multiple millions to fight, and sometimes even medium sized corporations can't afford to defend themselves, as the only thing they will get at the end is the status quo. If you are doing the suing however, you stand to gain millions in awards, so it is easier to get a team of lawyers to take it on a contingent basis.
Re:The Amiga was a blast to program (Score:1, Interesting)
So you must be Doug Sharp! Respect! And thx for creating a great game, truly revolutionary at the time. Imo one of the great classics and in my book you are up there with the likes of Sid Meier and others.
Absolutely enjoyed 'King of Chicago', with it's adaptive storyline, cinematic graphics and the gameplay-combination of strategy with action. How did the restaurantbombing start again, 'Hit it, Peepers!' ? Ah, the nostalgia...
I can't help myself but demand a sequel on some current platform, preferably PC of Android. Hell, even on Amiga, but that probably wouldn't be a commercial move. And while I am at it, if you know the Cinemaware crew in person, ask them the same for all the other great games they made.
(second post, first one seems to have been lost, so excusez-moi if a double post appears)
My Amiga Memories (Score:5, Interesting)
I got one of the first A1000s. I bought the white ROM Kernel Manuals several months before I got the machine. I learned C by reading the RKMs and K&R.
Several months later I bought one of the first memory expansion boards (the Insider I think) from a small computer shop called Michigan Software. They ran a BBS that I frequented.
I spent thousands of hours with Amiga Paint, Aegis Animator (I think) and a music program (can't remember the name). Once I recorded a version of GhostBusters that I hand edited in the music software, than I added vocals using the speech synthesizer. I was 15.
The next year in high school I wrote a molecular modeling program for the science fair. You could load models and rotate them with a joystick. I remember being frustrated that I wanted BlitMaskBitmapRastPort() which allows you to blit an image through a mask, but my ROM kernel didn't have it. Eventually the new ROMs came out and I could finally finish it. Took me all the way to Puerto Rico for the International Science Fair and I won first place in computer science for it, as well as several awards for photography, for taking long exposure pictures of the computer screen in a dark room. My father had an Anvil Case custom built for the trip, and I remember when we got to the hotel room I unpacked the Amiga to make sure it had survived, and it wouldn't turn on. My sponsor was freaking out. I quickly popped open the top case, re-seated the memory board, and it started up fine. My sponsor thought I was a genius.
I was at a SIGGRAPH in 1989 and met several of the Amiga inventors (RJ Mical, Dale Luck, and some others). We ended up at RJ Mical's house (I think, it might have been Michael Bittner's house) talking about what it would take to build a 3D accelerator. Copper Bittner was there - I always thought she had a cool name. I was honored, at 18, to be taken into the fold.
I made a lot of pizza money in college selling my Periodic Table of the Elements program through Fred Fish (rest in peace) disks. I still have some German Deutsch-marks that someone sent me from Germany.
I remember the first time I tried closing a door on one of those walking plant things in Dungeon Master, and watching it get crushed to death, and laughing my ass off, spewing Jolt and M&Ms everywhere.
Later I sold a bunch of programming articles to Amigaworld Tech Journal. Those were fun times.
Eventually I sold my A3000, all my disks, peripherals, manuals, everything for $500, because I wanted to buy a PC to play Ultima Underworld. It's probably just as well, as I'm now sitting on several SGI machines in the basement that aren't worth anything either.
Re:Good ol miggy ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Amiga: 4 channels, later 8 channels.
AppleIIgs: 15 channels, 16 if you perform timing on the CPU.
Then there was the AtariST which was king of MIDI.
PC users sure ate up 4-channel MOD files when they finally got software mixing players for their SBPro's... but the IIgs boys were still laughing at both Amiga and PC's and continued laughing until the Gravis UltraSound hit the scene with support for 32-channels (only 14 at 44.1khz tho)
Hint: The Gravis UltraSound used a licensed and customized Ensoniq ES5506 mixer chip, while the IIgs used the previous version, the ES5503.
Apple IIgs: 1986
Gravis UltraSound: 1992
Amiga never really competed for high end audio. The IIgs kicked its ass very badly. Those 16 channels were PANNABLE as well, not locked to a side like the Amiga.