In Memory of Jay Miner, the Father of Amiga June 20, 2025, marks 31 years since we lost Jay Miner, the visionary engineer behind the groundbreaking Amiga computer. Born in 1932, Miner’s passion for innovation shaped the tech world, leaving a legacy that still inspires today.
#JayMiner
El 31 de mayo de 1932 nace Jay Glenn Miner, Padre de la computadora Amiga. Hoy quiero recordarlo con un artículo algo extenso donde narró la historia de la creación de este ordenador
#retrocomputingmx #efemeridestecnologica #Amiga #jayminer
https://retrocomputingmx.com/w3av
[1982 ] The Joyboard is a balance board peripheral for the Atari 2600 video game console.
Manufacturer: Amiga Corporation
#amiga #commodore #retrocomputer #retrogaming #80s #90s #Geek #JayMiner #GuruMeditation #SantaClara #California #AmigaCorporation
Well, well, well... Heute vor 39 Jahren, am 23. Juli 1985, wurde der Commodore Amiga 1000 in den USA veröffentlicht. Bei dem Amiga 1000, auch bekannt als A1000, handelte es sich um den ersten Computer der Amiga-Serie, welcher von Commodore auf den Markt gebracht wurde. Anfangs hiess der Heimcomputer auch lediglich Amiga. Mit der Einführung weiterer Modelle wie dem Amiga 500 oder dem Amiga 2000 wurde dann die Zahl „1000“ zum Namen hinzugefügt. In Deutschland wurde der Amiga 1000 erst auf der CeBIT 1986 offiziell vorgestellt und kam kurz darauf in die Läden. #amiga #amiga1000 #Amiga1k #commodore #hitoro #jayminer
Quelle: PlayerOne (Facebook)
In memory of Jay Miner, father of AMIGA, who left us 30 years ago 😔
#JayMiner #commodore #CBM #AMIGA #retrocomputer #retrogaming #Multitasking #videogames #80s #90s #Geek #Atari #AmigaCorporation #HiToro #TheOriginalAMIGA #AMIGA1000 #A1000
Information we have seen in sept.2023.
Unfortunately we have no more news about it so we cannot confirm the veracity of this information.
#commodore #CBM #AMIGA #JayMiner #Mitchie #Mitchy #A1000 #retrocomputer #retrogaming #videogames #80s #90s #Geek
In memory of Jay Miner, father of the AMIGA, who left us 30 years ago 😔
#JayMiner #commodore #CBM #AMIGA #retrocomputer #retrogaming #Multitasking #videogames #80s #90s #Geek #Atari #AmigaCorporation #HiToro #TheOriginalAMIGA #AMIGA1000 #A1000
A nice history article on the #Amiga OS it's brilliant engineering by legends like #JayMiner #CarlSassenrath a nice read
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/08/a-history-of-the-amiga-part-3/2/
Die Lösung: #JayMiner, der Kopf hinter dem #Amiga & Held meiner Jugend ;)
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Miner
Autogramm von der #AmigaEXPO ;)
Happy greetings outside the #Commodore #Amiga1000 from #JayMiner and #Mitchy.
I took a look what kind of RAM expansion, because I've no idea how it is bound at startup.
#RetroComputing
@SanderFocus Need a Jay Miner one for his work on the Atari VCS/2600, Atari 800, and Amiga. #JayMiner #AtariVCS #Atari2600 #Atari800 #Atari8 #Amiga
@vingtroiseize This needs the #JayMiner tag.
@SinclairSpeccy Atari 800, then Acorn BBC Micro B, then Commodore 64. #JayMiner fan
📬 Lesetipps vom 11.12.2022: Advent, Advent, die Sicherung brennt!
#Lesetipps #BatmanGroup #ChatGPT #JayMiner #Microsoft365 #Posadas #rosfinmonitoring #Threema https://tarnkappe.info/lesetipps/lesetipps-vom-11-12-2022-advent-advent-die-sicherung-brennt-260800.html
Der Amiga von Commodore war nicht nur Traum vieler Jugendlicher in den späten 80ern, sondern hat auch viele Kreative in Kunst und Musik beeinflusst.
Zahlen, bitte! Der Amiga - Eine Dekade Pop Art in 16 Bit
Zahlen, bitte! Der Amiga - Eine Dekade Pop Art in 16 Bit
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Of all the home computer stories, Amiga is probably the most interesting, diverse and long. One reason for that is the number of machines Commodore produced for the Amiga line in an attempt to diversify and capture the market throughout the 80s and 90s. For that reason and to ensure you have adequate toilet breaks, this documentary will be broken into two parts, and following in the lines of chronological ordering, we begin, like all things, at the beginning.
To do that, we have to travel almost 40 years back in time, way back in the mid 1970s…..
Atari were expanding. Having developed arcade machines for several years, they were looking to expand their technology into living rooms throughout the world. To assist with this, a gentleman by the name of Jay Glenn Miner was recruited to develop custom integrated circuits by Harold Lee. Jay had been in the electronics industry for a number of years by this point, studying at electronics school in Groton, Connecticut and progressing to electrical engineering at California-Berkeley University in 1958. During his early work career he worked at various startups including General Microelectronics where he gained an impressive knowledge of MOS technology. Armed with his knowledge he successfully reduced the Atari 2600 display hardware down from a plethora of discreet components into a single Television Interface Adapter chip. The 2600, as we know, went on to be one of the most successful consoles of all time. Immediately after Jay would begin development of a new set of chips; the Colour Television Interface Adapter, Alphanumeric Television Interface Controller and Pot Keyboard Integrated Circuit, offering input and output control for the line of new Atari 8 bit home computers. At the time the designs Jay created were impressive, offering 40 on screen colours and custom accelerated circuity, allowing the 8 bit line to live well into the late 1980s. By this point, Atari had been sold to Warner Communications to provide suitable funding to market and deliver their home systems, but Ray Kassar CEO and the new corporate management was more interested in milking their current technology rather than advancing development. Jay and his team were keen to initiate a new project based around the spanking new Motorola 68000, but with Atari uninterested, left the company in 1980 and went back to medical development for a company called Xymos, helping to create a remote controlled pacemaker.
Larry Kaplan
Another Atari employee who had left at around this time was the first 2600 programmer, Larry Kaplan. Larry was unhappy with the lack of recognition Atari attributed to their designers and had left in 1979 to found Activision. The first third party game developer who put game creators at the core of their work. In 1982 with the console market slowing somewhat, Larry felt the urge to pursue something more exciting. After seeing the Nintendo Famicom at the Consumer Electronics Show, He contacted his former colleague Jay, with the idea of creating a new company that would manufacture cartridges and peripherals for the Atari 2600. Investment was needed and along with a few wealthy dentists who were keen to cash in on the video game craze, Jay found additional interest, courtesy of his current employment. Bert Braddock, Jay's boss at Xymos was keen to get both on board and on the company's board. He quickly encouraging the Texas owner of Xymos to invest, and agreed to the team using the Xymos semiconductor labs.
And so in June 1982, work began from a small office at 7, 3350 Scott Boulevard, Santa Clara. With Larry as vice president and Jay in charge of the hardware, a chief executive & president was also brought on board; Dave Morse, head of marketing at Tonka Toys (and yes, that's the same Dave Morse who would go on to head up Epyx. As we're discovering with these documentaries, the same names crop up again and again). With a team in place and suitable investment, the name "Hi-Toro" was conjured for the venture, sounding both hi-tech and Texan. The founding idea was for Larry to design games for the Atari 2600 and other systems whilst Jay designed chips for the cartridges and other new accessories.
By October Bert Braddock was keen for Nolan Bushnell to come on board as board of director chairman. Larry called up his old Atari boss to suggest it, but in a twist, Nolan ended up convincing Larry to come and work for him. Only a few months after setting up Hi-Toro, Larry was gone, and Dave would ask Jay to take his place. The company was then split into two segments; One division, under Dave Morse would continue work on software and peripherals for existing game consoles, whilst under Jay's guidance, the other would begin to focus on his old dream of creating a new computer system based around the Motorola 68000 processor. This required some convincing for their dentist investors. But still excited by the growing games market, they agreed to Jay's plans to create a new powerful games console, whilst Jay slyly worked on the basis that it could be expandable to a full blown computer.
Nolan Bushnell
Codenamed "Lorraine" after the wife of Dave Morse - a naming tradition formed at Atari for labeling new chips after girlfriends so outsiders didn't realise what they were discussing; the hardware plan was to create an advanced 16 bit gaming machine following in the open development practices of Commodore's new 64 machine. Once the design was complete, the circuits would be hammered out at the Xymos Labs.
1983 would see the company named changed to something friendly and welcoming with their investors unhappy that the current name sounded too much like a Japanese lawnmower manufacturer, Toro. After several suggestions, including Amigo, the team finally settled on "Amiga", a soft Spanish word meaning "female friend"… And I mean, the Amiga kinda did feel like a female friend, I guess. Also, like Acorn Computers, it came above Apple and Atari in the phone book - this really was cutting edge marketing for the 1980s. And so it was, the company was renamed to Amiga Incorporated, with one main objective and one side-line to supply funds and act as cover for their secret technology.
Whilst Jay worked on hardware, the other division worked on devices such as the "Powerstick" and "JoyBoard", a kind of early Wii Balance Board, along with compatible titles such as Surf's Up and Mogul Mania. These products weren't really the success the team had hoped for, hindered further by the American video game crash of 83, which also brought with it a considerable degree of nervousness from their investors. Thankfully computer systems like the Apple II and Commodore 64 were still selling well and having unprecedented foresight Jay reassured investors by convincing them that the new hardware could be sold as a full and powerful computer system from the go. However additional investment was needed for which Jay would have to re-mortgage his house and borrow from other sources to keep afloat. Steve Jobs also visited the company a few times at this point but decided the hardware was too complicated to invest in.
Throughout 1983, Hardware development continued aided by additional colleagues from Atari and driven by Jay's insatiable craving for design. The team Jay chose to recruit, all had one thing in common. They were looking to change the world, and Jay's tolerant and flexible management style certainly helped this and crafted the feel of the Amiga. Members brought on board include programmers Dave Luck and R.J Mical, designers Joe Decuir and Dave Needle and even Jay's beloved Coakapoo, Mitchie who came to work on a daily basis.
The custom architecture wasn't new to Jay. The chips he'd designed at Atari are what made their 8 bit line so impressive for the time, offloading work from the 6502 CPU. Lorraine was also built around custom chip designs, freeing up cycled on the Motorola 68000 CPU, which although meaning it would be more expensive to manufacture, also allowed for arcade rivaling graphics. Something the entire team was very keen on nailing.
An early Lorraine (The Amiga)
The chips in question were originally named Portia, Daphne and Agnus, and each had a specific task. Daphne would manage the display. Portia was in charge of sound and I/O tasks whilst Agnus synchronised them all to the CPU and memory whilst also housing the Copper and Blitter circuity which gave the Amiga such impressive animation abilities.
One of Jay's inspirations for Daphne was a "Link Trainer" Flight Simulator machine, introduced to him by Al Pound at manufacturer Singer-Link. He wanted to use the Blitter (which can push large amounts of graphics around a screen quickly) to refresh frames fast enough to create a flight simulator in the home. This simulator was also the inspiration to incorporate a HAM Mode (Hold and Modify) that could place more colours on screen than memory allowed by changing the hue and saturation of existing pixels. This laid the path for the Amiga's impressive 4,096 simultaneous on-screen colour mode, although in these early stages it could only muster 324 at the same time.
The complex designs were put together using wire and large boards in an anti-static area with an entrance sign saying "Ground Thyself", as if you were entering a church of god, and in many ways, that's almost true. In September 1983, Lorraine was completed in discreet form, which although unsuitable for retail, allowed some impressive demonstrations to be coded up on the advanced hardware. Along with Amiga's sideline peripherals, one of these, the infamous bouncing ball, was on show at the Winter CES, but cutting it fine was an understatement.
At this point, the system had to be constantly maintained as components failed on the fly. Bob Pariseau had been brought on as chief of software design but hadn't had time to implement a suitable operating system, so RJ Mical and Dale Luck worked non stop at the show to come up with something worthy of presentation. Lorraine didn't even have a keyboard at this point and software had to be uploaded via. a SAGE IV remote terminal. The result was a red and white checkered ball that according to Dale only bounced, at this point, up and down, with no horizontal movement nor sound effects. But even so, it was enough to spike the interest of several investors who witnessed the system in a VIP only back room, and god knows that Amiga needed the money again at this point… Badly. Even the transportation of their equipment was done on the cheap by booking an extra airline seat and wedging it between them under the name of "Joe Pillow", with smiley face drawn on for good effect.
A Condensed and Revised Lorraine
Amiga struggled on through the first half of 1984, fueled by passion, loans and foam baseball bats which the team would use to settle disputes in meetings. RJ Mical even wrote a meditation program for the "JoyBoard" where you had to sit as still as possible, without registering it's sensors. This became a running joke and the inspiration for the fabled "Guru Meditation Error" we're all very familiar with.
The kit was condensed a little, although still strewn across a variety of bread boats and hundreds of MSI logic chips, which accurately simulated the Amiga, albeit at a somewhat slower pace, and the bouncing ball demo was improved akin to the version we're all familiar with today. Bob Pariseau, Dale Luck, RJ Mical and recruit Carl Sassenrath had also got stuck into the task of creating a suitable operating system for the machine, and the team would arrive ready for the June Summer CES with their latest hardware and bouncing ball demo, this time on wider display.
But what was it about this ball which garnered so much interest? Well.. the initial draw was the sheer size of the ball. Remember, this was an era when computer animation was always on the smaller side. There simply wasn't enough power to chuck a tonne of pixels around in unison. The Boing ball was a whopping 140×100 pixels and seemed to jig around the screen completely seamless and mesmerising fluidity, much like a modern 3D rendering. However, there were some cunning tricks behind Lorraine's big bouncing ball, thanks in part to the design of the hardware, rather than mapping out 14 frames of animation, the ball was completed using just one, through clever cycling of colour registers. The sound echoing from the ball is also from a single sample simply by changing the speed and volume. Bob Pariseau was recorded hitting an aluminium garage door with one of those foam bats and an Apple II digitised it from inside the garage. The demo is a testament to not only the team's advanced hardware, but also to their sheer programming skill. Creating something brilliant, in limited time and with limited resources.
The Boing Ball
But this wasn't their only trick. By now RJ Mical had created the basis of an application programming interface called Intuition. This was a window driven operating environment which took seven months of 100 hour weeks and like others was based around an early Xerox environment from the late 1970s. Combined with the Boing demo, the first glimmers of multi tasking, thanks to Carl Sassenrath's revolutionary multitasking kernal called Exec - the core of the operating system - were tantilisingly evident, but really it was unncessary. By now several big names were interested in Amiga's technology, keen to forge their place in the evergreen and rapidly evolving computer market. The main two were Commodore and Atari who were eager to jump onto the 16 bit bandwagon.
However with Commodore kicking it's heels, it was Atari who stepped up first, offering to buy 1 million shares in Amiga at 3 dollars each whilst keeping the financially struggling company afloat, with a $500,000 loan whilst buy-out preparations were formalised. However, the contract for the loan was a strict one requiring Amiga to repay the entire loan within a month or Atari would be able to snap up their company for next to nothing. Clearly a filthy move designed to work in Atari's favour, but Amiga were so desperate, they had no choice. Strangely, Atari weren't even interested in finishing the computer Jay and his team had come so close to completing, instead they were looking to use the custom chips in their own machines.
Jack Tramiel
Behind closed doors however, at Atari's parent company, Time Warner, negotiations were taking place to find a buyer for Atari as it was currently loosing some $10k dollars per day. James Morgan, CEO of Atari was even unware of these negotiations himself, hence operations were business as usual. One of these negotiators, in early July was Jack Tramiel. Having recently left Commodore over disagreements he was looking for a new venture to sink into and Atari seemed ripe for the picking. A deal was quickly drawn up and Jack became the owner of Atari's consumer division which was renamed to Atari Corporation. He would have also become the proud new investor/owner of Amiga incorporated at this point too, if it hadn't been for his former company…. Commodore.
With Jack and his team of engineers departed from Commodore, the company was keen for a new machine and although late to the party, swept in before June was out and bought out Amiga from right underneath Atari's noses. This included the repayment (with interest) of the $500,000 loan and a $4.24 per share investment in Amiga, taking ownership and bringing them in house as the new Commodore Amiga Incorporated. Upon finding this out, Jack was a little scythed and set about suing Jay and Commodore for breach of contract for $100 million dollars on August 13th, which would be finally settled out of court in Atari's favour after a few years of shouting legalities at each other. Still, disruption was minimal for Jack as he began work on his own, new 16 bit machine, which would soon become known as the ST.
Back at Amiga, Commodore set about investing a further $20 million in the development of their new machine. Jay and his team may not have been running things exclusively anymore, but they were on safe and stable footing for the first time since 1983 at the company Jack Tramiel had first founded in 1955. Things were looking good.
Dave Needle of Amiga from the early days.
The first task was to move the team out of their pokey little office into a spacious facility down the road in Los Gatos, California. More engineers were brought on board to expedite proceedings and their single Sage workstation was subsidised with another 10 so that everyone could work simultaneously. Work quickly progressed on two vital areas, the first was the chip design. Daphne was renamed to Denise, Portia to Paula and a lot of refinement began, including some technical improvements, an increase of memory from 128k to 256k and of course condensing the massive prototypes on actual silicon chips.
Amiga Celebration Party Banner
Although the team, particularly RJ Mical had completed some exemplary work on the Exec Kernal, Graphical interface Intuition and the new operating system, which as a whole was dubbed CAOS (Commodore Amiga Operating System) at this point, it was still taking time to develop into a usable system and needed operating system fundamentals such as file handing and resource routines. As part of the buy out, Commodore had imposed their own strict deadlines to get the system to market and so employed MetaComCo to port a version of TripOS and incorporate it into the Intuition code. TripOS was originally developed at Cambridge University on an IBM 3081, this was then ported to the Motorola 68k by Dr. Tim King. It's fit with the Motorola chip meant that modifying it for the Lorraine chip set was reasonably straight forward, however the final results were still far below the original visions of Jay and his team, lacking many of the features they had intended, including resource tracking which would free up resources on the fly and a technically advanced file system. Still Workbench, working alongside the KickStart Boot ROM still made for a cutting edge operating experience compared to rival systems. This was still a time before Windows 1.0 had even been released.
RJ Mical & Dale Luck
Aside from the technical aspects, there was also the aesthetics of the new computer to deal with. Jay had a whole swave of design drawings which had already progressed, showcasing an elegant system in line with desktop systems like the IBM PC Junior, but some additional tweaks were put into place including a garage unit which allowed the keyboard to fit under the machine, suggested by Dave Morse, who was still present and managing the subsidiary, along with a pencil holder on the keyboard and a stereo start up tune. Not only did Amiga put a lot of time into the machine, but Commodore did as well, fully in the belief that they had hit the holy grail of the computing world.
Just 11 months after the purchase of Amiga Incorporated, the Commodore Amiga was unveiled at a lavish New York show at the Lincoln Centre on 23rd July 1985.
For this grand event, a full orchestra was hired, all Commodore and Amiga employees were shipped over and a lavish display was presented. Commodore's Vice President Bob Truckenbrode hosted the show but it was Bob Pariseau who took charge of the machine's real demonstrations.
The Team Donning Top Hats
In many respects, the event was designed like a flamboyant version of the Apple Macintosh launch, and it showed the key stand out abilities of the new machine, but purpose and direction felt a little lacking. To end the display, the old faithfull Boing Ball demo was back, this time running on a full blown AmigaOS with Workbench file management and Intuition windows allowing tasks to be run simultaneously in the background whilst the ball bounced on regardless. The ball had become so synonymous with Amiga that it was originally uses for it's official logo (something that holds true in more recent times), but Commodore decided to replace it with a rainbow checkmark, similar to the style of their earlier Commodore 64 detailing in a bid to identify the Amiga as a continuation of their earlier, and somewhat equally as impressive hardware.
The show was finalised by Andy Warhol and Deborah Harry (of Blondie fame) joining each other on stage to show case some of the machine's graphical abilities, along with a helping hand of resident Amiga artist, Jack Hager. The paint program in question, called ProPaint was still in it's alpha stages and had known bugs with the flood fill tool, however blissfully unaware Warhol went off on a flood fill pandemic, seemingly pushing the software to breaking point, but thankfully for Amiga, no freezes or glitches occurred.
Press coverage of the show seemed somewhat mixed. People were clearly impressed with the Amiga's abilities, but the system was perhaps so far ahead of it's time, that many didn't know what these features could even be used for. It seems a little absurd now, but the industry was quite well entrenched in the IBM PC Compatible landscape of blandness. The Amiga was just pissing all over that and people didn't know how to react.
The original machine was available as either a 256KB variant, or 512KB via a front expansion upgrade… something Jay had to plead with Commodore to incorporate, knowing that 256KB just wouldn't be enough after the Operating System was loaded into memory. Other than being able to read to and from disk, there was very little in the way of ROM at this point also, with Kickstart loaded via. disk into a 256KB Write Control Store area of memory, which remained resident until power off. One reason for this was to iron out bugs in the code before incorporating a complete Kickstart ROM chip.
Early Hardware Components
At it's heart was of course the Motorola 68000 clocked at 7.16MHz (7.09MHz PAL)
The custom chip set, later known as the OCS or Original Chip Set comprised of our friends, Agnus incorporating the blitter block image transfer processor and the Copper, co-processor. Denise is on hand to fetch planar video data from the Amiga's bitplanes and translate it into a color lookup as well as handling over videos modes. She can provide a borderless display with 640 x 256 pixels on PAL screens, which can be vertically doubled for interlaced display. Denise can also handle 8 16 pixel wide sprites on 3 separate layers in 4 colours, including transparent, or 15 colours when combined. Paula is still handling input, output, including the floppy drive, serial port and mouse ports, but also holds the Amiga's audio capabilities. She comes with 4 DMA based 8 bit sample channels, split to allow stereo audio and also allows one channel to modulate another channel's output allowing for basic FM synthesis effects.
Data is held by a 3.5″ Double Density floppy drive offering 880kB of capacity and a single Zorrro 1 card slot is provided on the right of the machine for expansion.
Port wise, the machine has a keyboard port, 2 mouse ports, an RS-232 serial interface, Centronics parallel access and an additional Floppy drive connector.
For video there's an analog RGB out, a TV MOD output that can be used with an additional RF Modulator, and Composite outputs.
As a tribute to it's creators, who put their heart and soul into this machine, the original models bear the molded markings of the entire team's signatures, including a paw print from faithful Mitchie, who Jay apparently posed questions to and based many a decision around his K9 response.
Amiga 1000 Render (Thomas Koch)
In it's sleek low profile package, the Commodore Amiga looked ahead of it's time both technically and aesthetically, released for $1,495 for the 512kB model and $1,295 for the 256kB iteration in North America. An analog RGB monitor was available for an additional $300 bringing the cheapest package to $1,595. This was a price beyond most casual users but was still half the price of a 128kB Macintosh at $2,495 and cheaper than IBM PC-AT machines, whilst packing a hell of a lot more power.
However, there was one, slight thorn in this issue. Whist Commodore Amiga were frantically building away, Jack Tramiel and his team of ex-Commmodore staff over at Atari had been working even more frantically and had been successful in launching the Atari 520ST a whole month earlier, and not only that, but at a far cheaper price. $799.99 with a monochrome monitor and $999.99 for colour. If you consider that the Amiga didn't even come with a monitor as standard, this was one hell of a deal. Of course it's true that the Atari ST didn't have the same custom abilities as the Amiga but even without those chips, Jack's machine was still pretty advanced in itself. It also had the head start, further confounded by Commodore not getting Amigas out until November. And crucially, it had the price.
Rather than unveiling a golden ticket unrivaled by other machines, Jack had got back at his former company within just a few months and thrown Commodore Amiga into a furious competition from the go.
An Atari ST
By riding on higher development costs and choosing a price point over $1,000 Commodore had immediately placed their Amiga into the high end computer workstation market, fighting the likes of Apple and IBM. This was a market where software mattered. Where spreadsheets and productivity were king, and as a new machine, the Amiga simply lacked a great deal of software. Atari's pricing had placed their machine into big player in an entry level price zone, opening up the system for a swathe of new users wanting to get into something new and exciting. This early discrepancy meant the ST was initially outselling the Amiga and as a result gathering a reasonable degree of software houses looking to work on it, including game developers. However, Amiga did still have the wow factor, along with a few other cards beginning to fall nicely from their sleeves.
One of these cards came from the then innovative Electronic Arts headed by the familiar face of Trip Hawkins. Before, after and during the Amiga's debut, the aspect which received the most interest was its remarkable graphics capabilities. Able to display 32 colours on screen from a palette of 4,096 in low res and 16 in high res, not to mention it's 64 and even 4,096 colour HAM mode, these abilities dumped all over Apple's monochrome Mac, IBM's 4 colour CGA and even beat the Atari ST's maximum of 16 out of a palette of 512. Amiga's various demos showcased these abilities, but if software was available which allowed users to really capitalise on this ability, then the purpose of the Amiga would start to become clear.
An Amiga HAM Image
Deluxe paint, a rewrite of their Prism package for DOS really brought the tools to the table, and artists inspired by the appearance and continued work of Warhol on the machine began popping up. In a shrewd move, Commodore had given EA access to prototype machines several months ahead of the launch date, allowing Trip Hawkins and his team to really see the machine's potential. Before this point, most programs had their own file formats, in a bid to lock users into their line of software, however EA were the first to really integrate a literal Interchangeable File Format (.IFF) into their package developed by Jerry Morrison. This .IFF format acted as a container, allowing images, sound, graphics and animations to all adopt this universal format. Combined with the new features offered in Deluxe Paint, which rather than presenting basic digital tools, seemed to re-create an artist studio in the computer, it opened up a door way for a generation of new artists and graphical tweakers who could begin to unlock the wonders of this new machine or just play around with a wealth of colour and bathe in its on screen glory. If the IBM had found it's niche with business and spreadsheet programs, the Mac with desktop publishing and the ST with music production, the Amiga was just beginning to find its footing in the world of graphical superiority.
Released in November 1985, Deluxe paint was one of the first in a line of Electronic Arts releases which would help propel the Amiga forward and solidify its place in computer history.
Deluxe Paint I
Strangely, games, the software genre the machine was apparently ideal (and originally developed) for had barely got a mention so far. The launch party was devoid of any nod and Commodore seemed to be glossing over the subject altogether. This was alas, an early sign of the mismanagement the Amiga would receive as Commodore tried to establish its identity and purpose. The trap they had fallen into was the trap of "the serious". The notion that expensive technology can't be seen as a frivolous entertainment machine at the cost of losing credibility. This was in part a notion IBM and Apple had come up with to make their machine's lack of graphical and sound abilities come across as a selling point. Rather than breaking this mould and declaring how revolutionary and ideal for the task their machine was Commodore fell right into it, opting for the business computer pitch, and although games would also immediately begin to emerge on the system, they didn't really showcase the hardware. Mostly being conversions from other, lesser machines or just ports from games which were already available on the Atari ST. In part Commodore still viewed their 64 as the low end gaming machine, which indeed it was, but the market was ready for a leading light, something to shine the way, even at a high price.
Commodore were also under some strain, having confusingly launched their original line upgrade, the Commodore 128 earlier in the year, alongside the poorly selling Plus/4 range, their resources and profits were becoming thinner. The Commodore 64 was still being sold, and selling well, at big retail chains, but the Amiga wasn't even stocked in them, with Commodore even turning down an offer for Sears to stock the new hardware, an outlet where Atari STs were stocked and selling. Instead Commodore seemed to continue their emulation of Apple's sales techniques with a zombie based advert, similar to Apple's famous 1984 ad and a bizarre presentation based on 2001: A Space Odyssey. The advertising continued, apparently trying to sell alone off the Amiga's abilities and even moved to soul-less comparison shots before the year was out.
Combined with the delayed production, lacklustre personality and muddled direction, the Amiga only sold 35,000 in 1985, and this wasn't helping with Commodore's cashflow, leading to the company bailing on the January 1986 Consumer Electronics Show. This didn't go amiss from the press who noted that after establishing their brand at that very show, it was akin to Russia resigning from the Soviet Bloc.
An early Amiga advert
Thomas Rattigan, former CEO of PepsiCo International was installed as CEO in February 1986, replacing Marshall Smith, and immediately began a much needed plan to redirect the companies operations and make the most of their frankly, ground breaking technology. By now the Amiga was selling approximately 10,000 machines per month. A figure the Atari ST was beating, along with dealer signups and software support, leading to further software ports from the ST which just made the Amiga look like a high cost version OF the ST. Rattigan's plan was to first cancel well overdue lines such as the PET, VIC-20 and Plus/4 and then create 2 versions of the Amiga hardware. The first would be a high end desktop aimed at the creative markets. The second would be a cost-reduced version designed to replace the Commodore 64 and 128 models. Finally a clear path was beginning to be laid.
Thomas Rattigan Invterview
Whilst these plans were being laid, Jay's original team based in Los Gatos were clearly still disgruntled by the handling of their precious technology. To this end, whilst working on Workbench 1.1, an un-named engineer tucked an Easter Egg into the operating system that would appear when a certain combination of keys were pressed ("We made the Amiga, they fucked it up"). RJ Mical discovered it and although finding it amusing, asked the engineer to change it. However, it was merely encrypted and the first batch of European PAL Amiga's flashed the message on screen for 1/60th of a second if you held down 8 keys and inserted a disk at the same time. Apparently someone with keen eyes spotted this, and recorded the output to a VCR, which even with shoddy 1980s freeze frame ability, allowed it to be shown to Amiga executives, who quickly pulled thousands of machines from UK shelves. Given that it was unlikely to ever be found by users, pulling the machines and suffering a 3 month sales delay whilst new ROMs were fitted seems a costly and strange measure to take. But then it wouldn't be the first we've encountered in the Amiga saga.
Shortly after, Commodore decided to move the Los Gatos team closer to head quarters in West Chester, Pennslyvania, whilst making several lay offs in the process, due to cost cutting. Some of the remaining team did as bade, however Jay Miner had had enough and decided to exit the endeavor and an official employee, and instead work as an external consultant for the company from his home town. To further reduce Commodore's overheads, staff and other internal projects were discarded. This included projects like the Commodore 65, the Commodore 900 Unix workstation and even Commodore's office branding and supplies which had helped establish the company in its infancy.
Rattigan then set about his plans. Proposals for the high end machine were first given to Commodore's German subsidiary, who had recently been responsible for launching Commodore's IBM PC Compatible range. Armed with this fresh PC knowledge their idea was to incorporate an open architecture into the new Amiga, expanding the bus and allowing ISA cards as well as Amiga Zorro cards to be added. A dedicated video slot was also introduced allowing a genlock card upgrade. This allowed computer images to be placed on top of video seamlessly, and fitted perfectly with the Amiga's native video editing abilities. The Amiga was really defining the Multimedia platform as it went, and it would pave Amiga's way into the standard machine of use in the video industry.
The final case and keyboard wasn't as elegant as the original model, but that's in part thanks to another cost cutting measure of using the cancelled Commodore 900 workstation case as the housing. The new machine launching in March 1987 would be called the Amiga 2000, instigating a name change of the original Commodore Amiga to the Amiga 1000. It retailed for a hefty $2395, armed with 512kB of RAM as standard and including a monitor from the off. Immediately its path was sown and advertising was launched hitting home the machine's intended niche and selling points.
Amiga 2000 render (Thomas Koch)
At the other end of the scale work had also begun on a low end Amiga, dubbed the 500. Engineer George Robbins was keen to jump on the project from the go, having pitched for such a machine from the start, fitting much more in line with Commodore's earlier systems and indeed the expectations of developers and consumers alike. Commodore's core group of engineers were put to task on the machine with Jeff Porter in charge - who had previously been working on a cancelled Commodore laptop. Along with Robbins, Bob Welland headed up the engineering of the system who set about shrinking the Amiga 1000 hardware, along with some subtle improvements. One of these was the upgrade of Agnus to Fat Agnus, allowing the system to be upgraded with 512kB of pseudo fast RAM. The motherboards were codenamed after a B52 song Rock Lobster, which you can find printed on the boards.. a trend which would continue with future Amiga variations. The new case design was very much conceived to flow on from earlier Commodore machines and the recently revamped Commodore 64C model, and so a sleek wedge case was molded offering floppy disk access on the side much like Atari's also updated 520STFM model. It seems whatever the Amiga was doing, Atari were always so very slightly ahead. Still, the Amiga 500 was planned for launch in July 1987 but arrived a few months late in October for the budget price of $699 in North America and £499 in the UK, and was ready to go head to head with the Atari ST and wangle its way into homes and living rooms throughout the world.
Not long after this the 2000 model, having shipped 60,000 units was updated to include some of the 500s design improvements and a few updates with US based Dave Haynie and Terry Fisher taking the task to hand. A new Buster chip was integrated to manage the expansion bus, also allowing plug and play functionality, another ahead of it's time feature. A Co-processor interface was added for CPU upgrades and of course Fat Agnus was integrated, giving the 2000 a much needed 1mB memory boost.
Commodore Magazine Amiga 500
It appears that once again, Commodore were finding their footing. Thomas Rattigan had begun to turn things around, posting $28 million in profits for the previous financial year, but yet, this apparently displeased chairman Irving Gould who seemingly had a bone to pick with Rattigan, possibly an egotistical disturbance, its hard to be sure. But Gould accused Rattigan of conducting himself in a "high profile manner", whatever that means… to me it sounds like he just didn't like the guy, and a consulting firm was hired to quickly concluded that Rattigan should be fired. This was promptly executed by Gould in April 1987, and Rattigan found himself booted out of Commodore the very next day to the bewilderment of fellow staff members. He would subsequently sue Commodore for breach of contract and finally win in 1991 for $9 million dollars, but be unable to complete the work he had begun.
Irving Gould - Commodore
We'll never know what difference he would have made to the greater picture of Amiga, but for now Commodore had 2 new machines, and a healthier set of accounts, and was about to launch the Sidecar, allowing the 1000 to serve as a full PC-XT clone. So, what about software for these machines? After all, we know its pretty essential……. Well, ready for the 500 in particular, one game had shone the way since the late 1986 World of Commodore show…. Defender of the Crown.
Defender of the Crown almost defined a new genre of game. It burst open the boundaries of experience you could reap from a gaming world previously filled with abstract concepts or frantic action. Here was a game, which as it's appropriately named creators had envisaged, was essentially a play along film. For the Amiga, it was an experience which tied well with the multimedia principles the hardware was designed for. Underneath it's really a risk like game, dotted with a plethora of mini-games, but it was the colourful, high quality graphics which really caught the eye of gamers currently squinting at their 8 bit screens. Older hardware really needed an overlay of imagination to bring it to life. In Defender of the Crown, there was no need.
Defender of the Crown Graphics at their finest
Bob Jacob, Cinemaware's founder was no stranger to game development, having worked on a number of Commodore 64 titles, but having witnessed the Amiga in its early days, he really got a sense of what the machine could do and built a development company to specifically take advantage of that. Although even the best Amiga games were selling only 25,000 copies in 1986, Commodore 64 versions were selling over 100,000 more. Jacob's idea was to wow the press and consumers with the Amiga game releases, and then follow them up with cut down versions on other hardware. It was a strategy which worked and really set the scene for the Amiga as the games machine it was.
RJ Mical was actually contracted to re-write the Amiga version and it turned out to be one of the best and most impressive incarnations. Almost 200,000 Amiga's had been sold by the end of 1986, but the new 1987 machines heralded a different approach, and keen to gloss over their earlier mishaps, Commodore asked the press to refer to the new machines as "The Amiga, from Commodore", with new logo designs on cases. This pushed the Amiga as almost a separate entity, and helped dispense confusion from Commodore's continued Commodore 64 and 128 lines.
With the Amiga 500 launched, sales began to pick up in the all important home market, but the machines were still expensive and relied on their impressive capabilities to sell. Nintendo was currently dominating the home console market with the NES in North America and Sega was gaining traction with the Master System in other regions. These consoles were cheaper than home computers, in part because they relied on receiving most of their revenue from game licensing models. This meant that although hardware was cheap, games were more expensive, and it was also harder to publish on them. One of the distinct advantages with machines like the Amiga, was their open platform. Practically anyone could create their own software on disk and publish it. This quickly meant a wave of new software was created for the machines. Some conversions from the Atari ST, some brand new and some was just coded by people at home and released as Public domain software…. an area which would grow rapidly over the next few years.
ST Amiga Format Feature on the Atari ST
Although the new systems were selling in America, it was over in Europe where things were looking much more rosy.
Since it's launch, the Atari STFM in particular had gained a foothold as the must have computer upgrade for current Sinclair Spectrum, Amstrad and Commodore 64 owners. This was a region much more used to plonking a full blown computer in front of the living room television for both gaming, and general tinkering. It's this tinkering which grew the number of European development houses so quickly, and eager for new technology, many of these developers had moved onto the ST when it arrived. Armed with Motorola 68000 knowledge, the Amiga seemed a natural and exciting progression and although in the UK only some 50,000 500's were sold in the first year, soon games were released which really took advantage of it's custom hardware.
The Batman Pack Unveiled in Amiga Format issue 4
In 1988, the number of 500 systems sold increased in the same region increased to almost 150,000 and it looked like Commodore UK and European based gamers, at least, were onto a winner. Another key reason for this was the tactics which Commodore UK employed over their American counterparts. Instead of bundling the Amiga 500 with business and educational software, followed by further mundane adverts, David Pleasance, the UK sales and marketing director set about creating entertainment based packs, which echoed earlier bundles from Commodore and even Sinclair, under Amstrad's rule. One of these packages in particular was the Batman pack, incorporating an A500, along with the new Batman game, based on Tim Burton's 1989 classic, as well as The New Zealand Story, Interceptor and Deluxe Paint 2 for just £399. A similar pack was also released for the Commodore 64, but the Amiga was exciting, it was powerful, it was glorious.
These key moves increased annual machine sales to over 200,000 by 1989 and what's more, the Amiga was just getting started.
The Amiga Team
The post The Amiga Story (Part 1) appeared first on Nostalgia Nerd.
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1989 was a time when the Amiga 500 was beginning to take off at a rapid rate, and where the powerful technology was finally being seen for the power house that it was.
Given its superiority to almost everything else on the market, especially in terms of graphical power, its easy to forget that the technology was now 4 years old, and this slow start meant the Amiga still had an uphill struggle on its hands.
Gaming was where the money lay, and the Amiga 500 Batman pack, launched by Commodore UK, had positioned the 500 as the must have computer for that purpose. Most 500 packs before this point required the consumer to purchase the additional RF modulator, but given that vast majority of households would hook machines directly to their televisions, just like their Spectrums and C64s, this inclusion was pivotal. The graphics and sound were flying high above the existing 8 bit competition and the Amiga was leading the way among reviewers, the press and exhibitions. As 1990 ticked over, the Amiga 500 was shifting some 300,000 units a year throughout Europe.
Amiga 500 (16 bit memories by Intercepto)
Over in the United States, things weren't quite so rosy, with sales of the 500 a fraction of their UK counterparts. Commodore of America hadn't positioned the 500 as a gaming machine quite as well, in part due to lackluster advertising. In part due to uncompelling bundles and in part due to the popularity of the NES for gaming and the IBM PC compatibles for other computing tasks. In Europe the Amiga was a natural progression in a world filled with ZX Spectrums, Commodore 64s and a submissive array of 8 bit consoles. IBM compatibles over here were seen almost exclusively as professional machines with a prohibitive cost, whilst at £499, the 500 was now affordable for a significant portion of the middle and working class.
The Amiga 2000, on the other hand was fairing reasonably well in the States, working its way into professional graphics use for businesses, production houses, education and scientific establishments alike. The demand for greater power spawned an update in the form of the Amiga 2500, which was simply a 2000 fitted with a 68020 or 68030 accelerator card. Still, although it was a fairly impressive machine at launch, it was still not enough for many new applications and limitations to the design meant that although the machine could be upgraded to 9MB of total RAM, the custom chipset could only directly access 512kb. Jay miner had even expressed his dissatisfaction over the somewhat pitiful improvement the 2000 had actually brought, making it known that he and consumers expected and needed more.
Amiga 1000,2000+500 Advert
Before leaving Commodore, and almost immediately after the launch of the Amiga 1000, Jay had reportedly begun work on a successor to the already revolutionary chip-set. This successor was code-named "Ranger" and although its widely reported to have been a brand new 32 bit architecture based around the Motorola 68010 or even 68020 CPU, it was more an increase to the expansion capabilities of the original chip-set. These were really the capabilities which came to fruition in the Amiga 2000 itself, leaving the actual base chipset not quite as advanced by 1989 as they were some 4 years prior.
With the Original Chip Set limited to accessing just 512kB of Chip RAM, later iterations for the Amiga 500 and 2000 introduced the Fat Agnus chip, which allowed an additional 512kB pseudo-fast RAM upgrade that could only be accessed by the 68000 CPU, but crucially only via. the congested Agnus bus. Because of this its commonly referred to as slow RAM, and as its not tied to Agnus, its use is somewhat limited if you want to store data directly from the custom chipset, such as GFX or sound data for example. This was essentially a hack of the original chip set, but the next version would circumvent this limitation by employing a new Fatter Agnus chip (also known as Obese Agnus), but its also the point where things get a little messy. Fatter Agnus is capable of addressing 1mB of chip RAM directly and was fitted to Amiga models in 1989 from revision 6 onwards - although some of these machines require jumper changes to fully enable this. These changes, sometimes referred to as the "Half Enhanced Chip Set" were made unbeknownst to the average consumer at the time and were followed by a range of minor board revisions culminating in the arrival of the full Enhanced Chip Set in 1990.
Although an incremental update, this chip set is really the official second generation of Amigas. Developed at Commodore's American Head Quarters, the ECS integrated the Super Agnus, capable of now addressing 2mB of Chip RAM and a Hi-Res Denise chip. To go with the additional RAM space, the blitter could copy display regions larger than 1024×1024 pixels in one operation and display sprites in border regions. Denise could now pump out a "productivity" resolution of 640×480 without interlation, akin to the standard IBM PC compatible VGA resolution which Windows 3, released in May 1990 was able to run at. In addition, Super Hires at 1280×256 or 1280×512 interlaced was now possible along with other custom scan rates. These were all welcome additions, which particularly helped the productivity and graphics applications, Commodore of America were still keen on pursuing, but did little to benefit the games market currently booming over in Europe.
Compatibility wise, ECS was intended to be fully compatible with OCS software, but the changes did mean that the odd title refused to run, and given that some revision 8A Enhanced Chip Sets made it into 1991 production run 500 models, it caused a degree of headache for the odd consumer unaware of the changes lurking under the hood. The first official machine to integrate the technology was the Amiga 3000.
The new model lineup (rendering by Thomas Koch)
Released in June 1990 the 3000 was the culmination of work by David Haynie who had begun work on the Zorro III expansion bus architecture in 1989 continuing the AutoConfig standard from the 2000 series, allowing a similar experience to the plug & play PCI bus on IBM PC compatibles. Alongside Greg Berlin, Hedley Davis, Jeff Boyer and Scott Hood, Haynie's vision for the 3000 was quite an overhaul to the original Amiga specifications and was designed as a high end workstation from the outset, much in part due to demands from current 2000 owners. The 68000 CPU was replaced with the new 32 bit Motorola 68030 processor in either 16 or 25MHz flavours, alongside a 68882 maths co-processor and 32 bit memory bus. Alongside the 2mB capable Enhanced Chip Set, fast RAM can also be added up to 16MB and with there's plenty of room in the case for a SCSI hard drive, twin floppy drives in either double or high density, as well as all the connectors we expect from the Amiga machines. A custom chip, called Amber also removed flicker from the video output and allowed display on cheaper VGA compatible monitors.
Kickstart 1.3 had been order of the day since 1988, and is the go-to ROM for compatibility of older game titles, but the 3000 was almost witness to version 1.4, which increased the ROM size from 256kB to 512kB. However Kickstart 1.4 and the tied in Workbench 1.4 remained in the prototype stage, although this may explain why the 3000 required booting Kickstart from floppy or hard drive to be bootstrapped into memory, just like the original 1000 machines. Kickstart 1.3 was included on early iterations, with the fully fledged version 2 included on releases from late 1990 onwards.
The 3000 was a pretty impressive machine, but again hand in hand with it's ECS capabilities was aimed at the professional market as a high end graphics and video workstation, thanks in part due to the genlock capabilities of the 2000 model and the release of NetTek's video toaster towards the end of 1990. Its uses were wide and varied, including rendering for various television and film productions and also forming the basis of the W Industries Virtuality machines we all gawped at and even got the chance to play for several pounds per play in high end arcades, for me, being Pleasurewood Hills near Great Yarmouth….. I'll be honest, it was a bit of a let down. The high price tag of these machines meant that sales figures weren't huge, but the technology did ensure that the Amiga brand was still stepping forward, albeit with a smaller stride than the leap brought about with the original hardware. This was at a time when other platforms had adopted somewhat of a Monty Python gait, and were catching up fast in terms of both operating system and technical ability, and still bounds ahead in terms of sales.
Fat Agnus on an Amiga 500 Motherboard
Who's in Charge?
You'll remember that since ousting Thomas Rattigan - guy who began to turn Commodore Amiga around - Irving Gould was still holding the reigns as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, but in 1989 had appointed Mehdi Ali as the new company president, a former managing director of investment bank Dillon, Read & Co, and with the typical fashion expected of 2 investors, Commodore International continued on a path of clueless money pinching, misguided decision making and resource appropriation. One such example is with the Amiga 3000UX; an Amiga bundled with Amiga Unix, itself a port of the AT&T System V. Sun Microsystems approached Commodore offering to package the UX as an alternative to their high end Sun Workstations, but Ali's insistence on extortionate licencing fees killed any deal and destroyed the Amiga's chances of penetrating the Unix marketplace. Management then careered on pushing on with some spurious hardware designs, as only an investor would, in an apparent attempt to expand and diversify. Unfortunately, this move was as far removed from the gaming success seen in Europe as possible.
With the luxury Amiga 3000 yacht bobbing along in the Ocean, focus was moved to a brand new take on home entertainment. Commodore's only machine to really penetrate a mainstream market - the Amiga 500 - was still speeding off on the other side of the water and the Commodore 64 was winding down tied to the banks, still serving the lower end market in small numbers. So we can envisage this new concept as some kind of house boat, lumbering onto the scene, much to everyone's bewilderment.
Gail Wellington (The Mother of the Amiga)
This house boat, was of course the Amiga CDTV - the Commodore Dynamic Total Vision. A concept which had been in development since July 1989 when Gail Wellington - otherwise known as "The Mother of the Amiga" and formerly head of the Commodore UK's technical department, met with product developer Don Gilbreath to draft out the new concept. After design in Japan, the machine first popped up as the CDA-1 prototype in various magazines during May 1990. At this stage the black, VCR style box was dubbed an "Interactive Graphics Player" and it was Commodore's attempt to create an entire new market, before the market itself was even established. This market was the area of multimedia home entertainment, and although you have to give credit to Commodore for their innovative thinking, it was a risky move that would prove as ahead of it's time as Clive Sinclair's dinky little pedal car.
An advert for the Commodore CDTV
Now, although Irving Gould can often be portrayed as the evil villain of Commodore who brought about their downfall, which is almost probably correct - especially with his new accomplice - he did recognise that the biggest market for the Amiga was Europe. The management and their apparent lack of knowledge just didn't seem to work out that the smart thing to do was expand on the already successful gaming market, rather than muddy and smear it about a bit. So with the consumer device in mind, almost 2,000 CDTV preview machines were shipped into the UK in October 1990 for press and public testing. The plan was to capitalise on the new multi-media features of CD-ROM and plonk it right into the living room. Commodore even decreed that CDTV units should not be placed within 30 feet of computers in store. This was an entertainment unit, designed to sit under the family television. Given the Amiga's capabilities, adding a CD-ROM seemed like the perfect formula for multi-media bliss, and indeed an upgrade for the 500 may well have been just that. But as a standalone unit, the CDTV brought about its own problems.
Irving Gould
The system was essentially an Amiga 500, based around AmigaOS 1.3 but with a CD-ROM drive instead of a floppy and a remote control instead of a keyboard and mouse. It was largely compatible with existing Amiga titles if you bought a keyboard, mouse and floppy drive, but at £699 initially and $999 in the United States excluding these items, a price that was reduced to £499, it was a pretty expensive splurge. Consequently, gamers stuck to their Amiga 500s, or snapped up one of the new Sega Mega Drives for a fraction of the cost, and everyone else, just didn't know what it was for, happy and content with their video recorders and massive library of VHS titles. The CDTV did actually allow video playback via. CD-ROM through Commodore's CDXL format, however the quality was below that even of VHS and unsuitable for anything of usual running length. Multimedia games and entertainment was the sales pitch Commodore tried to force, with the fact it doubled as a CD player being quite a strong selling point back then. There were of course takers who were keen to get their hands on the latest shiny technology but even with some press outlets hailing it the technology of the future, sales and verdicts were disappointing.
It was actually our old friend Nolan Bushnell who had been brought on to manage the recently formed "Interactive Consumer Products Divison" of Commodore at this time and he was, as you'd expect, an avid endorser of the technology stating "CDTV will truly change the way people learn and are entertained. It's the real new media of the nineties". Peter Black, who was president of Xiphias Corporation and responsible for porting their "Time Table of HIstory" from the Macintosh CD-ROM to the CDTV was also keen to point out that "the CDTV would be on the market a year before the Philips CD-I", although there were early warnings, with the Macintosh CD-ROM market performing poorly at the time, having sold only 2,000 CD add on units in the first few months of launch.
Kelly Sumner of Commodore
The system's official launch was January 1991, and Commodore even ran a trade in campaign for existing Amiga owners, but 2 years of struggle, poor quality titles and the very odd, reasonable game, meant it was discontinued by 1993. The Philips CD-i machine, released in December 1991 was a similar, if not slightly more capable system, and impressively clung on until 1998, with a slightly more directed and clear marketing approach. Kelly Summer of Commodore was quoted as saying "We got the basics wrong. Wrong price, wrong spec, no support", which was partly true, but it was still a mis-placed product and David Pleasance noted that the expensive advertising campaign was off cue, confusing the public by trying to convince them it wasn't a computer at all. Commodore tried to rectify this later in 1992 by adding the Amiga brand before the CDTV name and bundling a keyboard and mouse as standard, but it wasn't enough. In the UK, the CDTV sold just over 30,000 retail units - a similar figure to Germany - and Plans for the improved, full ECS based and cost reduced CDTV-II were scrapped, so focus could be shifted back to the more successful and conventional lines.
However, the CDTV wasn't the only strange thing to emerge from Commodore International under Mehdi Ali's fumbled leadership. The lack of R&D funds meant rather than concentrating on cutting edge technology, the older Commodore 64 tech was looked at for advancement. The period between 1990 and 91 not only saw the development, and subsequent cancellation of the Commodore 65 - an upgrade of the C64 which seemed to have no place next to the Amiga, but also the launch of the Commodore 64 Games System, aimed at the console market. I don't like to borrow quotes, but WHAT WHERE THEY THINKING?
The Commodore 65 System
But it wasn't only Commodore International who were coming up with strange designs. Commodore UK actually launched an Amiga 1500 in 1990. Based around the 2000, this machine shipped with two floppy drives instead of a hard disk and really did little apart from confusing the range. Some believe it was pushed out as a lower cost desktop, to try and kill an A500 desktop conversion kit introduced by Checkmate Digital and named the A1500, others suggest that Commodore just had a lot of spare floppy drives laying around. Either way it was another bizarre foray into the world of general purpose business machines which they had never had much success with.
Amiga Was Looking to Dominate
1990 to 1991 wasn't all doom and gloom though. It was an exciting time and with Commodore selling 1 million Amiga machines throughout the financial year in total - half as many as they'd sold in total previously -, it was still their best sales period, and really the high point for the technology. Revenues for 1990 stood at $887 million dollars and $1.5 million dollars profit. By 1991, revenue rose to over $1 billion dollars, but with reduced R&D profits rose massively to almost $50 million dollars. Especially in 1990, Commodore seemed keen on keeping themselves incredibly busy creating a more expandable A3000 Tower model and various prototypes such as an upgraded A3500 Tower machine, the A1000 Junior, a low cost desktop based on the Enhanced Chipset and the Acutiator modular system designed by David Haynie. But the 500 over in Europe was by far their main cash cow and the growing user base hadn't only increased Commodores fortunes, it had also created a rolling ball effect with some of the best titles on the platform beginning to emerge, creating a knock on momentum gain for the brand.
Software houses like Cinemaware kept pumping out ever refined releases along with Lucasarts, Magnetic Fields, the Bitmap Brothers and of course, DMA Design, with a range of games which really came to define The Amiga and herald a whole swathe of computer gamers, who like the Commodore 64 some 10 years previously, could reap the benefits of a computer, whilst still being ahead in the gaming stakes.
Defender of the Crown - Cinemaware
You'd expect titles like this to herald a run-away success for the machine. The Atari ST was by now floating around with only 1 paddle, even with the launch of the improved STE model, which brought the hardware up to Amiga capabilities, software house allegiance had jumped to the Amiga in droves, leaving Atari struggling frantically to keep up. But a new breed of console competition was gaining momentum, and with its lower cost, incredibly cool advertising and exclusive titles, it was gaining it at an incredibly rapid pace. 1992 would need to be a even more special year.
On the books, 1992 was an incredibly special year for Amiga. But fate it seems was rolling unfavorable dice, some of which was unavoidable.
The first surprise would come in the guise of the Amiga 500+, released in January 1992. With the rise of the IBM PC Compatible, and the earlier launch of the Sega Mega Drive and Super Nintendo. The Amiga, as a games platform, was now falling into obscurity in North America, therefore the 500+, although released in several areas, including most obviously in Europe, wasn't officially available in America, rubbing salt into the wounds of US Amiga gamers, who already had trouble running PAL games on their equipment due to the incompatible signal formats and now had to manually botch an upgrade their 500s in order to play the latest software!
With manufacturing improvements, the 500+ was actually cheaper to produce for Commodore and brought us the ECS chip set, fitted with 1MB as standard along with the brand spanking new AmigaOS 2.04. Kickstart 2 brought about a range of new features, including the ability to enter a boot menu at power on, the integration of the 880k Fast File System into ROM and a range of improvements to operating and memory protection. Given the fragility of the Amiga's early multitasking, previous development manuals had shipped with a warning;
"The Amiga operating system handles most of the housekeeping needed for multitasking, but this does not mean that applications don’t have to worry about multitasking at all. The current generation of Amiga systems do not have hardware memory protection, so there is nothing to stop a task from using memory it has not legally acquired. An errant task can easily corrupt some other task by accidentally overwriting its instructions or data. Amiga programmers need to be extra careful with memory; one bad memory pointer can cause the machine to crash (debugging utilities such as MungWall and Enforcer will prevent this)."
Programmers essentially had to manage the memory themselves, which was an upheaval for those used to single task environments of the past. Rather than hogging resources, programmers now had to request the OS for procedures and this is what led to many of the errors Amiga owners became familiar with. One way to get round this was to avoid the OS completely and program to the metal as if the Amiga was a single tasking entity, but this also led to compatibility issues when systems were upgraded or changed. Hence the upgrade to AmigaOS 2 did cause a fair degree of incompatibility with games programmed this way, leading to the need for switchable ROM boards or boot disks such as relokick to effectively "downgrade" the Kickstart back to version 1.3. Version 2 was by no means a complete fix for future errors, but significantly for some it did herald the removal of the "Guru Meditation" error, replaced with a much more mundane message. Perhaps the most striking difference was the startup boot request and general visuals of the new Workbench desktop. The original high contrast environment was very much designed for fuzzy monitors and televisions, however with new higher quality displays, a more elegant approach was implemented.
The 500+ would also see Amiga's second best selling bundle. The familiar Cartoon Classics pack, complete with The Simpsons, Captain Planet and the key titles of Deluxe Paint 3 and Lemmings. Deluxe Paint 3 was a significant improvement for the series, introducing animation and HAM abilities, and combined with the tank mouse, like the Batman pack, this bundle introduced a pool of 90s kids to the wonder of digital creativity. Given Commodore had dropped the underwhelming and error prone Amiga BASIC from Workbench 2, you could also grab yourself GFA Basic, Photon Paint 2 and an arcade games pack with the Silica Systems bundle. The suggested bundle price was £359, but this was a time when 3rd party vendors were going out of their way to make their offers more appealing than their competitors and it brought about a welcoming wave of price wars, and pages and pages of salivatingly tempting goods. Man, the early 90s. What a time.
Fancy a Party?
It was also the time which witnessed the ever growing peak of two homegrown scenes. These were the Public Domain and the Demo scenes. Public domain was running ahead at great speed thanks to the lack of licencing on the Amiga, with coders trying their hand at software creation before sending it off to one of the vast PD libraries for redistribution. Usually without any monetary reward for their hard coding hours. But the demo scene was something different. Although it emerged on earlier 8 bit systems, in its current guise, it was more or less a descendant of the virus, which emerged on the Amiga way back in 1987, as coders devised more and more ingenious ways of exploiting the machine's hardware. Disks and disks of demos became available from various groups each trying to out-do each other in the graphical and sound stakes. Sometimes fighting competitor machines such as the ST, but also trying to beat other Amiga coders. These demos really exploited the bare metal coding which Commmodore was trying to keep people away from, but it made amazing things possible.
An Amiga 500 Advert
Like the 8 bit cassette tape scene, this was also an era of pirating, or cracking. Something that is often attributed to the demise of the Atari ST, with its standard MS-DOS compatible file system. But thanks to programs like XCopy it was perfectly possible to duplicate most Amiga disks, and there was an entire black market of people pirating games and condensing them onto single floppies. Groups like the Medway Boys weren't just prolific on the ST scene. The cracking scene actually went hand in hand with the demo scene as groups clambered to post their latest impressive visuals and soundtracks on the loading screens of games. Those who wanted their games cheap, also got a healthy injection of demo finesse, and were probably all the more enlightened because of it.
Although Bulletin board systems were available, which offered some "questionable" downloads, including disk magazines, created and distributed by each group, the phone prices were expensive, as was the technology to access them, so these scenes also created their own wake of Demo and Copy parties, where people would lug their machines to large venues to share their code, to see what other people were producing, or to just copy mountains and mountains of floppies. Its in this sort of environment that we witnessed many of the great programmers of the time and of today. A breeding ground of creativity and love, for the freedom brought by this new hardware.
Fighting the Consoles
Elsewhere, away from the crazy copy parties and with the relative security brought by licenced cartridge games, the Super Nintendo was wangling its way into households alongside Sega's Megadrive. Whilst in the higher end computing scene, Intel's 486 processor combined with VGA graphics were morphing the IBM PC Compatibles into not only a productivity pack horse, but also a formidable gaming platform, with a much greater scope for upgrade than any existing platform. In fact even though machines like the ST and Amiga usually had better versions, MS-DOS accounted for 82% of computer game sales at this point… although this was heavily slanted by American figures. Over in Europe the balance was more even.
Some 7 years had passed since the Original Amiga, and on the surface of it, very little had changed with the hardware. Owners and press were beginning to feel a little uncomfortable with the platform's future, and so it was with open arms that several new machines were welcomed by the latter part of 1992.
Amiga 600 Advert
The first was a bit of an odd ball, in that it was essentially just an Amiga 500+, but in a smaller case. The Amiga 600 was intended to originally be the Amiga 300. A low end bottom of the range version of the 500, designed to compliment the 500, and take on the lower cost 16 bit consoles. However, higher than expected costs meant it would actually be sold at a higher price than the 500 and was therefore renamed and shipped as a replacement for the 500 range, leading to the 500+ being one of the shortest living systems, at just under 6 months. The 600 was launched during the March 1992 CeBIT show and was in the shops by the summer for a whopping £399, missing the console price point entirely. Despite this and the lack of numeric keypad, the 600 did have some advantages, such as the capacity for an internal hard drive, side PCMCIA slot and a built in RF modulator. The price point was quickly dropped to £299 and then to just £199, infuriating original buyers, but bundles such as The Wild, The Weird & The Wicked, helped sell machines with similar line-ups to its predecessors.
Almost immediately after launching the Australian built 600s, Commodore announced two higher power machines before the end of the year. This of course, caused consumers to wait rather than buying the 600, and led to increased financial pressure, resulting in the closure of their Australian office to cut costs. The technology for the new machines had actually been on the agenda for some time…. Hopping back to 1989, in what seems to have been some kind of nexus point for the brand, Commodore had begun creating a new state of the art chipset. This technology was designed to retain Amiga's cutting edge credentials and address critics of the lacklustre upgrades seen since 1985. This "Triple A" Advanced Amiga Architecture was designed to break from the original custom architecture and would only be compatible at a basic level with previous software. In line with previous designs, a set of custom chips was conceived. Andrea, Linda, Mary and Monica, but the setup was conceived as a much more modular approach, similar to IBM Compatibles, allowing for easier upgrade routes. However parallel to this, a Commodore International team headed by Bill Sydnes - the new head of engineering - were also working on the Pandora chipset. Later changed to "Double A" chipset, standing for Advanced Architecture. This architecture was an incremental upgrade, like ECS designed to offer an upgrade on the Amiga 3000 hardware, but with a number of significant improvements.
Amiga 600 Bundles
By 1992, the AAA chipset was looking like it would only be slightly faster than the much easier to implement, and fully completed AA chipset, and so was cancelled in favour of a new Hombre chipset based on a PA-RISC. The AA chipset was then gifted a name tweak to AGA, to emphasize the improved graphics abilities (whilst avoiding potential trademark problems with a well known automobile company), and the Amiga Advanced Graphics Architecture was launched in August 1992 in a high end 3000 replacement; The Amiga 4000. The AmigaOS was now at version 3, featuring improved visuals and colour options along with CD support and a new datatype system. Under the hood the faithful Denise chip was replaced with Lisa, and Agnus with Alice offering a logical step up on the hardware, and one which if released a couple of years prior could have made as much impact as the original hardware in 1985.
The 32 bit AGA architecture was actually cut down from what was originally intended. Prototypes of 3000+ units show support for a digital signal processor and 16 bit stereo hardware CODECs similar to what Atari had just released with their impressive, but expensive ST upgrade, The Falcon. But like Atari, both companies were going through a barrage of cost cutting exercises. Profits throughout 1992 had almost halved since 1991 and market share was being lost to the ever expanding competition. The AGA chipset offered a number of significant improvements over previous Amiga machines, and still provided the niche graphics and video advantages the platform was known for, but nothing that would send the competition packing and lacking flicker free higher resolution modes that other similar priced systems now had as standard. The A4000/040 sold for almost £2,500 putting it at the upper price point even for IBM PC Compatibles, meaning its penetration was again, limited and specialist.
Amiga 4000 Advert
The Last Chance Saloon for Amiga
On 21st October, an entry level AGA machine - the A1200 - was released in worldwide regions, including Japan and America. But as you'd expect, it was Europe, and mainly the UK in particular where interest spiked. Existing Amiga owners weren't keen to jump to consoles, and IBM Compatibles were still eye wateringly expensive. At a base price of £399 in the UK (or $599 in the States) the 1200 was a tantilising prospect, and this seemed to be a rare instance when the technology was right, the price level was right and the brand name was right to really make an impact. And it did. Demand was very high for the system, particularly in the UK for the Christmas '92 period, but our old friend "production problems" meant only 30,000 1200s were available at launch, spilling orders over to 1993. With the CDTV discontinued this was also the year that that A570 CD-ROM drive for the 500 was launched. Designed to be compatible with CDTV software, it was late to market and actually released after 500 was discontinued, but given the existing user base of some 2 million owners, it was deemed worthwhile. Uptake was limited but started the wave of compilation CDs containing hundreds, if not, thousands of PD programs, demos and images which caused myself a considerable drooling frenzy. This was exactly the pairing that could have made the Amiga a run-away success in the 90s if it had come instead of the CDTV. The existing user base could have witnessed amazing enhanced versions of Cinemaware games brought to fruition amongst others, rather than limited to the cramped conditions of a floppy disk, and arm aching disk swapping sessions, but like most of the Amiga story, it was in slightly the wrong place at the wrong time.
Amiga 1200 (by Zgodzinski)
The start of 1993 witnessed a price cut of all non AGA machines, but the AGA line continued to sell well with over 100,000 machines sold by March. However, this was not enough to off-set the seemingly spiralling profits. With the 500 discontinued and the 600 already an out of data technology, reliance was heavily placed on the performance of the new hardware. But this was still an era of vast competition, all trying to make strides in new innovations. Although the 1200 sported a Motorola 68020 processor, it was still a CPU originally released way back in 1984, before the original Amiga was even on sale. By now Sega's Mega CD add-on was available, demos of the new 3DO console were showing us what the future held and Atari having discontinued the Falcon were whispering something about a 64 bit Super Console. These machines would come to fruition before the year was out, but not before Commodore finally got a grip on what the market had been demanding all this time. A cutting edge games machine. The idea originally tossed around between Jay and the Amiga team back in 1982 still seemed to be the way forward some 10 years later.
Commodore's Famous Sega Slating Advert
Codenamed Spellbound, the CD32 was announced at the London Science Museum on July 16th 1993 and released in September at the World of Commodore Amiga show, beating both the 3DO and Jaguar to the post and claiming the title of the first 32-bit CD based games console released in the European region. It also significantly undercut the competition in terms of pricing launching at £299, the same price the A1200 was also lowered to. Compared to a Mega CD at £369, with the cost of a Mega Drive on top, this was a significant saving, and it led to substantial sales for the compact, keyboardless, Amiga 1200 in a grey box. The machine's similarity to the 1200 was one of the reasons Commodore were able to get the machine out to market so quickly and David Pleasance, along with Commodore UK entered an aggressive marketing strategy akin to Sega's Nintendo slating approach from a few years prior, even erecting a huge billboard outside Sega UK's office playing on Sega's own marketing slogan.
Although the CD32 was largely cross compatible with the A1200, a new Akiko chip was added under the hood. This little chip was able to perform to “Chunky to Planar” conversions, which would ordinarily consume many cycles of the 68020 processor. It was requested by Amiga’s software group as most software was currently being developed in chunky pixel mode, suitable for PCs – this function converted these “Chunky Pixels” to Amiga bitplanes, allowing 3D based games to run faster than a base standard 1200. The Amiga hardware may have been incredibly optimised for 2D, but these same optimisations proved somewhat of a hinderance for the new 3D games emerging and although Akiko was a helpful addition, it would still be unable to keep up with the technology that was just around the corner. What the system did have, was a wealth of existing Amiga titles that could be easily adapted to the console, which was both a great selling point, but like the other super consoles of the time, a downfall, as the technology didn't seem to improve on what we already had. Titles that shipped with the CD32 bundles completely failed to cast the machine in a respectable light. Despite this, the console sold well, as gamers clambered to get their hands on the a machine that would fulfil their playground boasting requirements.
Amiga CD32 Advert aimed at Sega's MegaCD
The console was also launched in Canada and although planned and advertised in the United States, a legal dispute with Cad Track over their use of the XOR cursor technique (used for displaying the cursor over the background image), prevented the machines being imported from their Philippines stock pile until a $10 million settlement was paid. Despite the tenuous technical grounds which logically made no sense, the court favoured a tenuous verdict against Commodore, which they simply couldn't afford to pay. Some say this was the final blow for Commodore, but they were already on unstable ground by this point. 1993 had seen the company lose an astonishing $356 million dollars, and even though the CD32 was selling well, their Philippines stock was held until they could make payment. Despite this, almost 100,000 machines were sold in Europe outselling its rivals, with demand still going strong into 1994, but Commodore simply ran out of units and with component supply problems and mounting debts, simply couldn't make any more.
Now when you consider some of the finest, ground-breaking and innovative games the platform had witnessed had also come during these years, with software houses like Team17 churning out a record 9 times in 1993 and sharing publisher of the year award with Electronic Arts, its easy to become a little sad and somewhat miffed at the sate of the Amiga's proceedings by this point. But how did we get here? How had the Amiga gone from such promise to such a low in a short space of time?
There are two ways of looking at this, both are valid, and both played their own part. The first is in the hardware itself; the very thing that had provided the Amiga with so much promise from the beginning. The custom chipset helped career the technology above the Mac and other computers of the time by offloading much that others coded into software, but it also locked the engineers into a narrow specification of what they could change and what they couldn't. For example, the NTSC & PAL resolutions were a sticking point of the technology and the chip research team just didn't have the funding to make the jumps they needed. Not only this, but being tied to Motorola processors, the very core of the technology was out of their hands. Whilst Intel created faster and faster chips that could be plonked into IBM PC Compatibles, Motorola struggled to keep up, bailing completely on the 68000 line in 1994 and choosing to enter a partnership with IBM and Apple to develop PowerPC hardware. It's hard to see how any competitor could have fought off the emerging dominance and economies of scale brought about by the IBM Compatible. The Amiga's days as a gaming platform were pretty much numbered with the arrival of Doom in 1993 and immersive CD-ROM based games like Myst which turned the glare of many a gamer.
Mehdi Ali (Commodore's last president)
The other way is by looking at the management, and its a view which is tied in to the hardware development. In various conversations David Haynie has expressed how the funding just wasn't in the right places. The Triple A architecture took some 5 years to almost complete before being dropped. A staggering waste of money that could have been condensed into a shorter time scale and ensured the Amiga's future from the outset of the 90s. Haynie talks about how the successful engineering management team was replaced by a bunch of idiots by 1991. The same idiots who thought up the Amiga 600, which David Pleasance described as an absolute shambles and waste of time, and the same people who intentionally delayed the AGA chipset. Layer upon layer of bad decision was made, mainly from Irving Gould and Mehdi Ali who seemed transfixed on short term goals and were primarily responsible for the R&D shortages, whilst raking in a huge salary and bonus which could alone have helped the chipset funding massively. Its with a sense of ellipsism that we'll never know what the Amiga could have been if perhaps Thomas Rattigan had remained at the helm for a few more years.
The last Amiga to roll out from Commodore during March 1994 was the 4000 Tower. A highly upgradable version of the 4000, complete with both SCSI and IDE interfaces and sold as a high end video workstation. However only small numbers were shipped before Commodore International was forced into bankrupty protection on April 29th at 4:10PM, leaving other subsidiaries, such as Commodore UK short on machines and support. The last project demonstrated was the CD1200 prototype at the CeBIT '94 show which, incorporating the Akiko chip, would have allowed the 1200 to run CD32 games. David Haynie documented the end times of Commodore through his Deathbed Vigil video, which makes for fascinating viewing. The sad news of Commodore International's demise was further compounded in June when Jay Miner, the father of the Amiga, passed away from heart failure after suffering from kidney complications, his words expressed at the end of the 80s;
"Amiga is so far behind Macintosh and IBM now, and they’ve lost so much momentum and position, that I think it’s going to be almost impossible to recover.”
The Full Amiga Lineup (Advert)
seemingly ran true, although he applauded the work David Haynie and the crew had managed to complete with the AGA enhancements against the odds of their management.
In spite of this wave of sad news, the shining light of Amiga, Commodore UK, was actually still solvent, and it didn't take long for joint directors David Pleasance and Colin Proudfoot to announce they were looking to buy out the remaining trademarks and assets of Commodore themselves, which included 3,300 CD32's still sitting in the Philippines and valued at just $22.50 each. A glimmer of hope spread through the Amiga community, with Colin commenting;
"There should be no impact in the UK marketplace… The brand is too strong to die: we're confident that Commodore and the Amiga will come out of this a better, stronger company."
The duo's plan was to initiate a management buyout and operate the company under the name "Amiga International", however as 1995 chugged over, it was apparent that there could be other cash rich bidders including IBM, Dell, Creative Equipment International, Samsung and Escom. Dell and CEI came close to what was described as a hideously complex morass of companies spread over several businesses, but almost a year after delcaring bankruptcy on 20th April 1995, it was the PC brand Escom, who picked up the core Commodore business for some $11 million after bids from other companies were ruled invalid. Escom weren't a company adverse to risk and shunning convention had recently announced it would be shipping OS/2 as the standard Operating System on all their PCs rather than Windows. They were also in the fairly unique position of having a chain of retail shops across the UK and Germany, which could be used to sell their new stock. Pleasance and Proudfoot backed down after it was apparent they couldn't match the bid and instead agreed to work alongside Escom to establish a future for the Amiga.
Colin Proudfoot (Joint MD of Commodore UK)
Enter the Man from Escom
The Amiga Magic Pack
Almost immediately afterwards, Escom announced their plans to resume production of the AGA machines via. a manufacturing plant in China. A point which raised concern for some given China's human rights record and the not so distant memory of Tiananmen Square in 1989. The re-badged Commodore brand was put to use on a new line of PCs and Amiga was split into a new subdidiary called Amiga Technologies GmBH, headed by a number of ex-Amiga people including Jonathan Anderson. Escom took on some 100 ex Commodore staff in total and began work on re-packaging the products and brand.
Amiga Escom Advert
By October, the Amiga Magic Pack was unveiled, consisting of re-badged Amiga 1200 along with Wordworth 4SE, Datastore 1.1, TurboCalc 3.5, Photogenics 1.2SE, Personal Paint 6.4, Organiser 1.1, Pinball Mania and Whizz. It was an all encompassing bundle, but lacked the stand-out games from the Amiga packs seen under David Pleasance's leadership. The price was also back up to the original launch price of £399 or £499 with a 170MB hard disk, although there was still a relatively high demand for the machine, especially for users who had experienced the Amiga 500 either from new or through the expansive 2nd hand scene. Despite all this, it felt like things would never be like they were and that Amiga Technologies were perhaps driving down a path of expansion and destruction. By late 1995 Amiga enthusiast Petro Tyschteschenko had taken over as CEO and president and there was also talk of pushing out an Amiga RISC PowerPC variant, possibly based on the Hombre chipset that would have included powerful 3D capabilities and could have re-ignited the Amiga brand. However you have to ask, due to the complete hardware re-work, would it have really been an Amiga at all?
Amiga Escom Trade in Advert
Surprisingly, software and add-ons were still appearing from third parties. The CD32 SX add on had launched in late 1994, allowing the CD32 to operate as a fully fledged Amiga, and an entire range of Doom clones was hitting the scene demonstrating the love and determination for many to hang onto their beloved Amiga. Ironically, a community which perhaps wouldn't have been quite so prevalent had Commodore done their job properly in the earlier 90s, with many software houses, homebrewers and third parties stepping up to fill the gaps which Commodore had left or simply neglected to fill.
Early 1996 saw the re-launch of the Amiga 4000 followed by an announcement for the Amiga "Mind Walker". This was the only machine which reached the prototype stage under Escom and it combined the AGA architecture, a 68030 CPU and mainstream components including a quad speed CD-ROM, lowering the cost and allowing for expandabiltity, despite it's inhibitive appearance. However, just like Commodore, Escom entered liquidation a few months later. At one point VISCorp looked like it would buy the Amiga for use in set top box technology but this fell through as they seemingly went under as well.
Amiga Mind Walker (by Zgodzinski)
It seemed like everyone around the Amiga was falling, and not only the companies looking to invest. Long running magazines were coming to an end, and although games were still shipping out from loyal software houses, it was at a certainly slower rate than previous years. Despite this, those Amiga users who had upgraded and were holding on tight bore witness to some impressive games designed specifically for accelerated machines, including Alien Breed 3D II and Nemac IV. Even Myst finally made an appearance, followed incredibly by both Doom and Quake conversions after the source code was released, but these were really the last glimmers of hope for the hardware.
Previous Escom manufacturer Quikpak were the next company interested in purchasing the Amiga, and Dell were again on the prowl but were beaten to the post by Gateway 2000, who were seeking to snap up the intellectual property of some 47 patents held by the existing company. Gaining the following of the existing Amiga owners was a bonus, especially when you consider that Amigas were still swapping hands second hand and in active use. This is how I got my own Amiga 600 in early 1995, although I'm one of the people who quickly switched to a PC before the year was out. Under Gateway, the separate Commodore brand was sold to Tulip Computers, Amiga Technologies was renamed to Amiga International and Petro remained at the reigns. At the World of Amiga '97, the company then announced they would be developing a new version of the AmigaOS which finally emerged as AmigaOS 3.5 in 1999 under a new subsidiary, Amiga Incorporated. A promise was also made to build - or at least licence out - the Amiga PowerPC once again.
The final issue of Amiga Format
These licencing deals led to Amiga Technology appearing in a range of devices and clones under the "Powered by Amiga" logo still sporting the aging AGA technology, with Power PC boards also arriving around the same time. Pre 1993 ROMS and material were licenced to Cloanto who still sell emulation packages along with videos from the early Amiga scene. In 1999 Gateway retained the Amiga patents but sold Amiga Incoporated itself to Amino Development for almost $5 million dollars, who renamed themselves to Amiga Corporation, whilst retaining the Amiga Incorporated Subsidiary, bringing it satisfying back to the company name first used by Jay and the team back in the early '80s.
Petro with one of the final Magic Packs
By May 2000 the stable of the Amiga community, Amiga Format published its last issue. Drawing to a close, for me at least, the original days of the Amiga. But its not the end. The period up until now including the contracted development of Amiga OS4 by Hyperion Entertainment in 2004 is worth an entire documentary in itself. With various Power PC variants shipped under the Amiga brand, a host of new accelerator cards, including the lightning quick Vampire II for the Amiga 600, the Armiga system and a massive emulation scene that encompasses both the 68k and Power PC technology. Amiga Incorporated would also move one last time under the ownership of KMOS Inc where it merged into the Amiga Inc name.
But its not just there where we see the Amiga continuing. The influence of Amiga is evident in the very machines we use today. Even after the release of the first AmigaOS, both Microsoft and Apple were watching and implementing features into their own operating systems. The Amiga's unique design itself inspired countless engineers and the games we witnessed on the platform leave a burning ember with the titles of today. Worldwide the Amiga sold somewhere between 5 million and 10 million units in total, with the last roughly accurate figures clocking in at about 5 million machines at the end of 1993. The Amiga's significance to modern computing is rooted very much in its past, but love for the brand and hardware are still driving innovation to this very day, and the Amiga scene although a little different, is just as alive today as it was way back in 1992.
And there we go. That was the Amiga Story. I hope you enjoyed it. I thank you very much for watching, and I bid you good night. If you want to subscribe, contribute to the channel, share or give it a thumbs up before you go, then its hugely appreciated, and remember.
Only Amiga made it possible.
The Amiga 1200
The post Amiga Story (Part 2) appeared first on Nostalgia Nerd.
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