The Guardian - Commodore Amiga at 30
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I loved to program this machine, that had a functionality way ahead of its time. Amiga means 'friend' and a friend it was.
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride - there's no way I could afford a Commodore Amiga at the time it was released. And I think that is the reason it ultimately failed. And in those days there was also the snobbery factor, since the Amiga was not perceived as a "business" computer and gaming was kids stuff. That's what made the much more staid IBM pc take off. Such are the prejudices that rule our lives and govern the forking path of technology 
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Cool article!
I'm fascinated by the Amiga. I played a few games on an emulator and thought they were great, such as Agony, which featured beautiful graphics and great sound. One day I will dig through more Amiga games and try them.
I'm fascinated by the Amiga. I played a few games on an emulator and thought they were great, such as Agony, which featured beautiful graphics and great sound. One day I will dig through more Amiga games and try them.
I have an Amiga 500 with a 120MB hard drive, CPU accelerator, and 2MB Fast RAM/ 0.5MB Chip RAM memory expansions in the closet. I haven't fired it up in years, but it was a great machine.
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Xian
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I had both the Atari 1040ST and Amiga, first a 500 then 2000. Both had their advantages and exclusives, or if not an exclusive, something that was not on the other platform, for instance Ultima II was available for the Atari ST but not the Amiga. The Atari's best selling game ever was Dungeonmaster, it didn't come out on the Amiga until a year or so later. One of the exclusive RPGs for the Amiga that I remember was The Black Crypt by Raven, a game similar to Eye of the Beholder/Dungeonmaster.
The Amiga had a lot better graphics and sound, 32 colors standard for most games vs 16 for the Atari, and the Amiga was also stereo.
Besides the business aspects that Roq mentioned, I think what finally pushed gamers to the IBM PC and clones was they finally caught up with to the Amiga with Soundblaster/AdLib and 256 color VGA graphics. I can remember playing a few games on a CGA monitor with 4 colors, that was pretty ugly.
The Amiga had a lot better graphics and sound, 32 colors standard for most games vs 16 for the Atari, and the Amiga was also stereo.
Besides the business aspects that Roq mentioned, I think what finally pushed gamers to the IBM PC and clones was they finally caught up with to the Amiga with Soundblaster/AdLib and 256 color VGA graphics. I can remember playing a few games on a CGA monitor with 4 colors, that was pretty ugly.
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Amiga 500 was a spectacular architecture way front of it's time with DMA, separate specialized chips (Agnus, Paula and Denise) and a brilliant motorola's CPU in that time.
IBM? PC? With Intel's x86 rubbish? Compared to Amiga it felt like a garbage.
But instead of investing into it, enhancing, upgrading… Commodore's CEO in all his supidity and ignorance thought Amiga like that will last for centuries and all he will do is sit back and collect the money.
Meanwhile PC was improving, smallsteps first, exponentially later.
Commodore, of course, died.
Sadly, some equally bad but a bit less stupid CEOs learned from this and now instead of thinking Playstation 1 will rule for 873456382465934 years, we already can see Playstation 4.
The sad story is… Those "modern" consoles architecture is pathetic. It can't beat PC. Commodore could. But it's CEO just didn't want to be the technology leader and eventually had to close the company doors.
IBM? PC? With Intel's x86 rubbish? Compared to Amiga it felt like a garbage.
But instead of investing into it, enhancing, upgrading… Commodore's CEO in all his supidity and ignorance thought Amiga like that will last for centuries and all he will do is sit back and collect the money.
Meanwhile PC was improving, smallsteps first, exponentially later.
Commodore, of course, died.
Sadly, some equally bad but a bit less stupid CEOs learned from this and now instead of thinking Playstation 1 will rule for 873456382465934 years, we already can see Playstation 4.
The sad story is… Those "modern" consoles architecture is pathetic. It can't beat PC. Commodore could. But it's CEO just didn't want to be the technology leader and eventually had to close the company doors.
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I had an original Amiga 1000, one of the very first ones. Later I had an A2000 with some fancy stuff (an actual hard drive!).
But joxer is right, Commodore management was always the worst part of the company. (Marketing was a close second.) Plus, it took far, far too long before the Amiga architecture actually received any real improvements, and by then the PC was well into the SVGA era.
But joxer is right, Commodore management was always the worst part of the company. (Marketing was a close second.) Plus, it took far, far too long before the Amiga architecture actually received any real improvements, and by then the PC was well into the SVGA era.
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Commodore wasn't doing nothing, but I think AGA wasn't enough to sell desktops and 3D stuff like floating point operations became more important because of games like Doom.
In some ways they were ahead of their time, like the whole CD32 console is very similar to what Microsoft ended up doing successfully with the Xbox.
Loved my A500. The Amigas filled a vacuum that no other platform did in the later 80's and very early 90's. Hardware-wise, it had nothing to do with the C64 as key designers at Amiga previously developed Atari 8bit line, which was also way ahead of its time.
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Ripper
Зичу Вам успіхів
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Thing is, Joxer, in those days the market was much smaller and more exclusive, and the prices much higher. The Amiga was £499 at launch, which adjusted for today's money is £1307. They could build a pretty killer console with that, if today's market could bear that kind of price.
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Ahh, there's far too much past tense going on in this thread. I have a "hand me down" Amiga collection from a friend (three A500's, 1 ram expansion, several boxes of disks) which I shall have to investigate again more thoroughly one day. Going through such treasure troves of potentially hidden gems remains for me one of those fundamental geek pleasures in life.
I've always been more of a C64 player and never had an Amiga growing up, thus have only come to appreciate it in more recent years.
However, I did recently support a successful kickstarter project for Nicola and Anthony Caulfield's dvd on "The Amiga Years". I supported it on the basis of how much I enjoyed their previous work "From Bedrooms to Billions" which focuses on the early years of computing in the UK.
If anyone is interested but hasn't yet seen the Amiga project, here's the link:
https://www.kickstarter.com/project...rooms-to-billions-the-amiga-years/description
I have a "hand me down" Amiga collection from a friend (three A500's, 1 ram expansion, several boxes of disks) which I shall have to investigate again more thoroughly one day. Going through such treasure troves of potentially hidden gems remains for me one of those fundamental geek pleasures in life. I've always been more of a C64 player and never had an Amiga growing up, thus have only come to appreciate it in more recent years.
However, I did recently support a successful kickstarter project for Nicola and Anthony Caulfield's dvd on "The Amiga Years". I supported it on the basis of how much I enjoyed their previous work "From Bedrooms to Billions" which focuses on the early years of computing in the UK.
If anyone is interested but hasn't yet seen the Amiga project, here's the link:
https://www.kickstarter.com/project...rooms-to-billions-the-amiga-years/description