 | |
 The 1987Amiga 500 was the bestselling model. | |
| Manufacturer | Commodore International(until 1994) Escom AG(1995–1996) QuikPak(–c. 1998) |
|---|---|
| Type | Personal computers Game console (CD32) |
| Release date | July 23, 1985; 40 years ago (1985-07-23) |
| Discontinued | 1996[a] |
| Units sold | approx. 4.91 million[1] |
| Operating system | AmigaOS onKickstart |
| Predecessor | |
Amiga is a family ofpersonal computers produced byCommodore from 1985 until the company's bankruptcy in 1994, with production by others afterward. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with16-bit or 16/32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphics and audio compared to previous8-bit systems. These include theAtari ST as well as theMacintosh andAcorn Archimedes. The Amiga differs from its contemporaries through custom hardware to accelerate graphics and sound, includingsprites, ablitter, and four channels of sample-based audio. It runs apre-emptive multitasking[2] operating system calledAmigaOS, with a desktop environment calledWorkbench.
TheAmiga 1000, based on theMotorola 68000microprocessor, was released in July 1985. Production problems kept it from becoming widely available until early 1986.[3] While early advertisements cast the computer as an all-purpose business machine,[4] especially with theSidecar IBM PC compatibility add-on, the Amiga was most commercially successful as ahome computer with a range ofvideo games and creative software. The bestselling model, theAmiga 500, was introduced in 1987 along with the more expandableAmiga 2000. The 1990Amiga 3000 includes a minor update to the graphics hardware via theEnhanced Chip Set also used in subsequent models.
The Amiga established a niche in audio and multimedia. The firstmusic tracker was written for the Amiga, and it became a popular platform for music creation. The 3D rendering packagesLightWave 3D,Imagine, and Traces (a predecessor toBlender) originated on the system. The 1990 third-partyVideo Toaster made the Amiga a comparatively low cost option forvideo production. In later years, the Amiga started losing market share toIBM PC compatibles and thefourth generation of video game consoles, eventually leading to Commodore's bankruptcy in 1994 and the end of Amiga. Commodore is estimated to have sold 4.85 million Amigas. Various groups have since releasedspiritual successors.
Jay Miner joinedAtari, Inc. in the 1970s and led development of theAtari Video Computer System's graphics and sound chip, theTelevision Interface Adaptor.[5] When complete, the team began developing a much more sophisticated set of chips,CTIA,ANTIC, andPOKEY, that formed the basis of theAtari 8-bit computers.[6]
With the 8-bit line's launch in 1979, the team once again started looking at a next generation chipset.Nolan Bushnell had sold the company toWarner Communications in 1978, and the new management was much more interested in the existing lines than development of new products that might cut into their sales. Miner wanted to start work with the newMotorola 68000, but management was only interested in another6502 based system. Miner left the company, and, for a time, the industry.[6]
In 1979,Larry Kaplan left Atari and foundedActivision. In 1982, Kaplan was approached by a number of investors who wanted to develop a new game platform. Kaplan hired Miner to run the hardware side of the newly formed company, "Hi-Toro". The system was code-named "Lorraine" in keeping with Miner's policy of giving systems female names, in this case the company president's wife, Lorraine Morse.[7] When Kaplan left the company late in 1982, Miner was promoted to head engineer[6] and the company relaunched as Amiga Corporation.[8]
The Amiga hardware was designed by Miner,RJ Mical, and Dale Luck.[9] Abreadboard prototype for testing and development was largely completed by late 1983, and shown at the January 1984Consumer Electronics Show (CES).[10]
A further developed version of the system was demonstrated at the June 1984 CES and shown to many companies in hopes of garnering further funding, but found little interest in a market that was in the final stages of thevideo game crash of 1983.[7][11]
In March, Atari expressed a tepid interest in Lorraine for its potential use in a games console or home computer tentatively known as the1850XLD. The talks were progressing slowly,[12] and Amiga was running out of money. A temporary arrangement in June led to a $500,000 loan from Atari to Amiga to keep the company going. The terms required the loan to be repaid at the end of the month, otherwise Amiga would forfeit the Lorraine design to Atari.[13]
By the end of thevideo game crash of 1983, Warner was desperate to sell Atari. In January 1984,Jack Tramiel resigned from Commodore, taking some Commodore employees to his new company, Tramel Technology. This included a number of the senior technical staff, where they began development of a new 68000-based machine. In June, Tramiel arranged a no-cash deal to take over Atari, reforming Tramel Technology asAtari Corporation.
Commodore was left without a workable path to creating a next-generation home computer, and it offered to fund Amiga development. The two companies were initially arranging a$4 million license agreement before Commodore offered$24 million to purchase Amiga outright.[13]
By late 1984, the prototype breadboard chipset had successfully been turned into integrated circuits, and the system hardware was being readied for production. At this time, theoperating system was not ready, and led to a deal to portTRIPOS. TRIPOS was amultitasking system written inBCPL during the 1970s for thePDP-11minicomputer. This early version was known as AmigaDOS and the GUI as Workbench. The BCPL parts were later rewritten in theC language, and the entire system became AmigaOS.
The system was enclosed in apizza-box form factor case. A late change was the introduction of vertical supports on either side of the case to provide a "garage" under the main section of the system where the keyboard could be stored.[14]
The first model was announced in 1985 as simply "The Amiga from Commodore", later to be retroactively dubbed theAmiga 1000.[b] They were first offered for sale in August, but by October only 50 had been built, all of which were used by Commodore. Machines only began to arrive in quantity in mid-November, meaning they missed the Christmas buying rush.[15] By the end of the year, they had sold 35,000 machines, and severe cashflow problems made the company pull out of the January 1986 CES.[16] Bad or entirely missing marketing, forcing the development team to move to the east coast, notorious stability problems and other blunders limited sales in early 1986 to between 10,000 and 15,000 units a month.[14] 120,000 units were reported as having been sold from the machine's launch up to the end of 1986.[17]
In late 1985,Thomas Rattigan was promoted toCOO of Commodore, and then toCEO in February 1986. He immediately implemented an ambitious plan that covered almost all of the company's operations. Among these was the long-overdue cancellation of the now outdatedPET andVIC-20 lines, as well as a variety of poorly sellingCommodore 64 offshoots and theCommodore 900workstation effort.[18]
Another one of the changes was to split the Amiga into two products, a new high-end version of the Amiga aimed at the creative market, and a cost-reduced version that would take over for the Commodore 64 in the low-end market.[18] These new designs were released in 1987 as theAmiga 2000 andAmiga 500, the latter of which went on to widespread success and became their best selling model.
Similar high-end/low-end models would make up the Amiga line for the rest of its history; follow-on designs included theAmiga 3000/Amiga 500 Plus/Amiga 600, and theAmiga 4000/Amiga 1200. These models incorporated a series of technical upgrades known as theECS andAGA, which added higher resolution displays among many other improvements and simplifications.[19]
The Amiga line sold an estimated 4,910,000 machines over its lifetime.[1][self-published source] The machines were most popular in the UK and Germany, with about 1.5 million sold in each country, and sales in the high hundreds of thousands in other European nations. The machine was less popular in North America, where an estimated 700,000 were sold.[20][21][22] In the United States, the Amiga found a niche with enthusiasts and invertical markets forvideo processing and editing.[23] In Europe, it was more broadly popular as a home computer and often used forvideo games.[9]
Beginning in 1990, the Amiga overlapped with the European release of the16-bitMega Drive, then theSuper NES in 1992. Commodore UK's Kelly Sumner did not seeSega orNintendo as competitors, but instead credited their marketing campaigns which spent over£40 million or$60,000,000 (equivalent to $130,000,000 in 2024) for promoting video games as a whole and thus helping to boost Amiga sales.[22] Some games were released for both 16-bit consoles and the Amiga, such asChuck Rock andZool.
In spite of his successes in making the company profitable and bringing the Amiga line to market, Rattigan was soon[when?] forced out in a power struggle with majority shareholder,Irving Gould. This is widely regarded as the turning point, as further improvements to the Amiga were eroded by rapid improvements in other platforms.[24]
Commodore shut down the Amiga division on April 26, 1994, and filed for bankruptcy three days later. Commodore's assets were purchased byEscom, a German PC manufacturer, who created the subsidiary company Amiga Technologies. They re-released the A1200 and A4000T, and introduced a new68060 version of the A4000T. Amiga Technologies researched and developed theAmiga Walker prototype. They presented the machine publicly at CeBit,[25][26] but Escom went bankrupt in 1996.[27][28] Some Amigas were still made afterwards for the North American market by QuikPak, a smallPennsylvania-based firm who was the manufacturer of Amigas for Escom.[29]
After a reported sale to VisCorp fell through,[9] a U.S.Wintel PC manufacturer,Gateway 2000, eventually purchased the Amiga branch and technology in 1997.[9] QuikPak attempted but failed to license Amiga from Gateway and build new models.[30] Gateway was then working on a brand new Amiga platform, likely encouraged by a desire to be independent ofMicrosoft andIntel.[29] However this did not materialize and in 2000, Gateway sold the Amiga brand toAmiga, Inc., without having released any products. Amiga, Inc. licensed the rights to sell hardware using theAmigaOne brand toEyetech Group andHyperion Entertainment. In 2019, Amiga, Inc. sold its intellectual property to Amiga Corporation.[31][32]
The Amiga has a custom chipset consisting of severalcoprocessors which handle audio, video, anddirect memory access independently of thecentral processing unit (CPU). This architecture gave the Amiga a performance edge over its competitors, particularly for graphics-intensive applications and games.[33]
The architecture uses two distinctbus subsystems: the chipset bus and the CPU bus. The chipset bus allows the coprocessors and CPU to address"Chip RAM". The CPU bus provides addressing to conventional RAM, ROM and theZorro II orZorro III expansion subsystems. This enables independent operation of the subsystems. The CPU bus can be much faster than the chipset bus. CPU expansion boards may provide additional custom buses. Additionally, "busboards" or "bridgeboards" may provideISA orPCI buses.[33]
The most popular models from Commodore, including theAmiga 1000,Amiga 500, andAmiga 2000, use theMotorola 68000 as the CPU. From a developer's point of view, the 68000 provides a full suite of32-bit operations, but the chip can address only 16 MB of physical memory and is implemented using a 16-bitarithmetic logic unit and has a 16-bit externaldata bus, so 32-bit computations are transparently handled as multiple 16-bit values at a performance cost.[34][35] The laterAmiga 2500 and theAmiga 3000 models use fully 32-bit, 68000-compatible processors from Motorola with improved performance and larger addressing capability.
CPU upgrades were offered by both Commodore and third-party manufacturers. Most Amiga models can be upgraded either by direct CPU replacement or through expansion boards. Such boards often included faster and higher capacity memory interfaces andhard disk controllers.
Towards the end of Commodore's time in charge of Amiga development, there were suggestions that Commodore intended to move away from the 68000 series to higher performanceRISC processors, such as thePA-RISC.[36][37] Those ideas were never developed before Commodore filed for bankruptcy. Despite this, third-party manufacturers designed upgrades featuring a combination of 68000 series and PowerPC processors along with a PowerPC nativemicrokernel and software.[38][39] Later Amiga clones featuredPowerPC processors only.
The custom chipset at the core of the Amiga design appeared in three distinct generations, with a large degree of backward-compatibility. TheOriginal Chip Set (OCS) appeared with the launch of the A1000 in 1985. OCS was eventually followed by the modestly improvedEnhanced Chip Set (ECS) in 1990 and finally by the partly 32-bitAdvanced Graphics Architecture (AGA) in 1992. Each chipset consists of several coprocessors that handlegraphics acceleration, digital audio,direct memory access and communication between various peripherals (e.g., CPU, memory and floppy disks). In addition, some models featured auxiliarycustom chips that performed tasks such asSCSI control and display de-interlacing.
All Amiga systems can display full-screen animatedplanar graphics with 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 (EHB Mode), or 4096 colors (HAM Mode). Models with the AGA chipset (A1200 and A4000) also have non-EHB 64, 128, 256, and 262144 (HAM8 Mode) color modes and a palette expanded from 4096 to16.8 million colors.
The Amiga chipset cangenlock, which is the ability to adjust its own screen refresh timing to match an incoming NTSC or PAL video signal. When combined with setting transparency, this allows an Amiga to overlay an external video source with graphics. This ability made the Amiga popular for many applications, and provides the ability to docharacter generation andCGI effects far more cheaply than earlier systems. This ability has been frequently utilized by wedding videographers, TV stations and their weather forecasting divisions (for weather graphics and radar), advertising channels, music video production, and desktop videographers. TheNewTekVideo Toaster was made possible by the genlock ability of the Amiga.
In 1988, the release of the Amiga A2024 fixed-frequencymonochrome monitor with built-inframebuffer andflicker fixer hardware provided the Amiga with a choice of high-resolution graphic modes (1008×800 for NTSC and 1008×1024 for PAL) with 4Grayscale levels.[40][41]
ReTargetable Graphics is anAPI fordevice drivers mainly used by 3rd party graphics hardware to interface with AmigaOS via a set oflibraries. The software libraries may include software tools to adjustresolution, screen colors,pointers and screenmodes. The standardIntuition interface is limited todisplay depths of8 bits, while RTG makes it possible to handle higher depths like24-bits.
The sound chip, named Paula, supports fourPCM sound channels (two for the left speaker and two for the right) with 8-bit resolution for each channel and a 6-bit volume control per channel. The analog output is connected to a low-pass filter, which filters out high-frequency aliasing when the Amiga is using a lower sampling rate (seeNyquist frequency). The brightness of the Amiga's power LED is used to indicate the status of the Amiga's low-pass filter. The filter is active when the LED is at normal brightness, and deactivated when dimmed (or off on older A500 Amigas). On Amiga 1000 (and first Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000 model), the power LED had no relation to the filter's status, and a wire needed to be manually soldered between pins on the sound chip to disable the filter. Paula can read arbitrary waveforms at arbitrary rates and amplitudes directly from the system'sRAM, using direct memory access (DMA), making sound playback without CPU intervention possible.
Although the hardware is limited to four separate sound channels, software such asOctaMED uses software mixing to allow eight or more virtual channels, and it was possible for software to mix two hardware channels to achieve a single 14-bit resolution channel by playing with the volumes of the channels in such a way that one of the source channels contributes the most significant bits and the other the least.
The quality of the Amiga's sound output, and the fact that sound hardware is part of the standard chipset and easily addressed by software, were standout features of Amiga hardware unavailable on IBM PC compatibles for years.[c] Third-party sound cards exist that provideDSP functions[citation needed], multi-trackdirect-to-disk recording[citation needed], multiple hardware sound channels and 16-bit and beyond resolutions. A retargetable sound API calledAHI was developed allowing these cards to be used transparently by theOS and software.[42]
Kickstart is thefirmware upon which AmigaOS isbootstrapped. Its purpose is to initialize the Amiga hardware and core components of AmigaOS and then attempt to boot from abootablevolume, such as a floppy disk or hard disk drive. Most models (excluding the Amiga 1000) come equipped with Kickstart on an embeddedROM-chip.There are various editions of Kickstart ROMs starting with Kickstart v1.1 for the Amiga 1000, v1.2 and v1.3 for the A500, Kickstart v2.1 on A500+, Kickstart v2.2 for A600 and dual ROMs for Kickstart v3.0 and 3.1 for A1200 and A4000. After Commodore's demise there have been new Kickstart v3.1 ROMs made available for both the A500 and A600 Computers. Amiga Software is mostly backward compatible, but v2.1 ROMs and newer differ slightly, which can cause software glitches with earlier programs. To help address this and to get earlier programs to work with later Kickstart ROMs, some tools have been produced such as RELOKIK 1.4 and MAKE IT WORK! for the A600 and A1200. They revert the system to temporarily boot in Kickstart v1.3.
The keyboard on Amiga computers is similar to that found on a mid-80s IBM PC: Ten function keys, a numeric keypad, and four separate directional arrow keys.Caps Lock andControl share space to the left of A. Absent are Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys: These functions are accomplished on Amigas by pressing shift and the appropriate arrow key. The Amiga keyboard adds a Help key, which a function key usually acts as on PCs (usually F1). In addition to the Control and Alt modifier keys, the Amiga has 2 "Amiga" keys, rendered as "Open Amiga" and "Closed Amiga" similar to the Open/Closed Apple logo keys on Apple II keyboards. The left is used to manipulate the operating system (moving screens and the like) and the right delivers commands to the application. The absence of Num lock frees space for more mathematical symbols around the numeric pad.
Like IBM-compatible computers, the mouse has two buttons, but in AmigaOS, pressing and holding the right button replaces the systemstatus line at the top of the screen with a Maclikemenu bar. As with Apple'sMac OS prior toMac OS 8, menu options are selected by releasing the button over that option, not by left clicking. Menu items that have a Boolean toggle state can be left clicked whilst the menu is kept open with the right button, which allows the user – for example – to set some selected text to bold, underline and italics in one visit to the menus.
The mouse plugs into one of twoAtari joystick ports used forjoysticks,game paddles, andgraphics tablets. Although compatible withanalog joysticks, Atari-style digital joysticks became standard.[43] Unusually, two independent mice can be connected to the joystick ports; some games, such asLemmings, were designed to take advantage of this.[44]
The Amiga was one of the first computers for which inexpensive sound sampling and video digitization accessories were available. As a result of this and the Amiga's audio and video capabilities, the Amiga became a popular system for editing and producing both music and video.
Many expansion boards were produced for Amiga computers to improve the performance and capability of the hardware, such as memory expansions,SCSI controllers, CPU boards, and graphics boards. Other upgrades includegenlocks, network cards forEthernet,modems,sound cards and samplers,video digitizers, extraserial ports, andIDE controllers. Additions after the demise of Commodore company areUSB cards. The most popular upgrades were memory, SCSI controllers and CPU accelerator cards. These were sometimes combined into one device.
Early CPU accelerator cards used the full 32-bit CPUs of the 68000 family such as theMotorola 68020 andMotorola 68030, almost always with 32-bit memory and usually withFPUs andMMUs or the facility to add them. Later designs feature theMotorola 68040 orMotorola 68060. Both CPUs feature integrated FPUs and MMUs. Many CPU accelerator cards also had integrated SCSI controllers.
Phase5 designed thePowerUP boards (Blizzard PPC andCyberStorm PPC) featuring both a 68k (a 68040 or 68060) and a PowerPC (603 or 604) CPU, which are able to run the two CPUs at the same time and share the system memory. The PowerPC CPU on PowerUP boards is usually used as a coprocessor for heavy computations; a powerful CPU is needed to runMAME for example, but even decodingJPEG pictures andMP3 audio was considered heavy computation at the time. It is also possible to ignore the 68k CPU and runLinux on the PPC via project Linux APUS, but a PowerPC-native AmigaOS promised by Amiga Technologies GmbH was not available when the PowerUP boards first appeared.[45]
24-bit graphics cards and video cards were also available. Graphics cards were designed primarily for 2D artwork production, workstation use, and later, gaming. Video cards are designed for inputting and outputting video signals, and processing and manipulating video.
In the North American market, theNewTekVideo Toaster was a video effects board that turned the Amiga into an affordable video processing computer that found its way into many professional video environments. One well-known use was to create the special effects in early series ofBabylon 5.[46] Due to itsNTSC-only design, it did not find a market in countries that used thePAL standard, such as in Europe. In those countries, theOpalVision card was popular, although less featured and supported than the Video Toaster. Low-costtime base correctors (TBC) specifically designed to work with the Toaster quickly came to market, most of which were designed as standard Amiga bus cards.
Various manufacturers started producing PCI busboards for the A1200, A3000 and A4000, allowing standard Amiga computers to use PCI cards such as graphics cards,Sound Blaster sound cards, 10/100 Ethernet cards, USB cards, and television tuner cards. Other manufacturers produced hybrid boards that contained an Intel x86 series chip, allowing the Amiga to emulate a PC.
PowerPC upgrades with Wide SCSI controllers, PCI busboards with Ethernet, sound and 3D graphics cards, and tower cases allowed the A1200 and A4000 to survive well into the late nineties.
Expansion boards were made by Richmond Sound Design that allow theirshow control andsound design software to communicate with their custom hardware frames either by ribbon cable or fiber optic cable for long distances, allowing the Amiga to control up to eight million digitally controlled external audio, lighting, automation, relay and voltage control channels spread around a large theme park, for example. SeeAmiga software for more information on these applications.
Other devices included the following:
The Commodore A2232 board provides seven RS-232Cserial ports in addition to the Amiga's built-in serial port. Each port can be driven independently at speeds of 50 to19,200 bits/s. There is, however, a driver available onAminet that allows two of the serial ports to be driven at115,200 bits/s.[56] The serial card used the65CE02 CPU[57] clocked at3.58 MHz.[56] This CPU was also part of theCSG 4510 CPU core that was used in theCommodore 65 computer.
Amiga has three networking interface APIs:
Different network media were used:
| Type | Speed | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Ethernet | 10,000 kbit/s | A2065[50] |
| ARCNET | 2,500 kbit/s | A560,[58] A2060[59] |
| Floppy disk controller | 250 kbit/s | Amitrix: Amiga-Link[60] |
| Serial port | ≤115.2 kbit/s | RS-232 |
| Parallel port | ≈1,600 kbit/s[original research?] | Village Tronic: Liana[61] |
| Token Ring | 1,500 kbit/s | Nine Tiles: AmigaLink (9 Tiles)[62] |
| AppleTalk /LocalTalk | 230.4 –460 kbit/s | PPS-Doubletalk[63] |
The original Amiga models were produced from 1985 to 1996.[64] They are, in order of production:1000,2000,500,1500,2500,3000,3000UX,3000T,CDTV,500+,600,4000,1200,CD32, and4000T. The PowerPC-basedAmigaOne computers were later marketed beginning in 2002. Several companies and private persons have also released Amigaclones and still do so today.
The first Amiga model, the Amiga 1000, was launched in 1985. In 2006,PC World rated the Amiga 1000 as the seventh greatest PC of all time, stating "Years ahead of its time, the Amiga was the world's first multimedia, multitasking personal computer".[66]
Commodore updated the desktop line of Amiga computers with theAmiga 2000 in 1987, theAmiga 3000 in 1990, and theAmiga 4000 in 1992, each offering improved capabilities and expansion options. The best-selling models were the budget models, however, particularly the highly successfulAmiga 500 (1987) and theAmiga 1200 (1992). TheAmiga 500+ (1991) was the shortest-lived model, replacing the Amiga 500 and lasting only six months until it was phased out and replaced with theAmiga 600 (1992). The A600 was only intended as a temporary gap filler until the A1200 was available for sale. The A600 was actually designed as a portable system, hence the lack of numeric Keypad, and it was originally to be named Amiga 300. Some early A600 models have retained the original A300 logo printed on the mainboard. The Amiga 600 was quickly replaced by the Amiga 1200.[67]
TheCDTV, launched in 1991, was aCD-ROM-based game console, Computer and multimedia appliance based on the Amiga A500 with the same v1.3 Kickstart ROM, several years before CD-ROM drives were common. The cost of CDTV media production and the CD-ROM drives at the time discouraged potential buyers and the system never achieved any real success. The CDTV was however one of the first ever CD-ROM-based machines that were mass-produced. A CDTV legacy is the external A570 CD-ROM drive expansion for the A500 computer.
Commodore's last Amiga offering before filing for bankruptcy was theAmiga CD32 (1993), a 32-bit CD-ROM games console produced until mid 1994. Although discontinued after Commodore's demise it met with moderate commercial success in Europe. The CD32 was a next-generation CDTV, and it was designed and released by Commodore before the PlayStation. It was Commodore's last attempt to enter the ever growing video-game console market.
Following purchase of Commodore's assets by Escom in 1995, the A1200 and A4000T continued to be sold in small quantities until 1996, though the ground lost since the initial launch and the prohibitive expense of these units meant that the Amiga line never regained any real popularity.
Several Amiga models contained references to songs by therock bandThe B-52's. Early A500 units had the words "B52/ROCK LOBSTER"[68]silk-screen printed onto theirprinted circuit board, a reference to the song "Rock Lobster" TheAmiga 600 referenced "JUNE BUG" (after the song "Junebug") and theAmiga 1200 had "CHANNEL Z" (after "Channel Z"),[69] and the CD-32 had "Spellbound."
AmigaOS 4 is designed for PowerPC Amiga systems. It is mainly based on AmigaOS 3.1 source code, with some parts of version 3.9. Currently runs on both Amigas equipped with CyberstormPPC or BlizzardPPC accelerator boards, on the Teron series basedAmigaOne computers built byEyetech under license byAmiga, Inc., on thePegasos II fromGenesi/bPlan GmbH, on theACube Systems SrlSam440ep /Sam460ex / AmigaOne 500 systems and on the A-EONAmigaOne X1000.
AmigaOS 4.0 had been available only in developer pre-releases for numerous years until it was officially released in December 2006.[70] Due to the nature of some provisions of the contract between Amiga Inc. andHyperion Entertainment (the Belgian company that is developing the OS), the commercial AmigaOS 4 had been available only to licensed buyers of AmigaOne motherboards.
AmigaOS 4.0 for Amigas equipped with PowerUP accelerator boards was released in November 2007.[71] Version 4.1 was released in August 2008 for AmigaOne systems,[72][73] and in May 2011 for Amigas equipped with PowerUP accelerator boards.[74] The most recent release of AmigaOS for all supported platforms is 4.1 update 5.[75] Starting with release 4.1 update 4 there is an Emulation drawer containing official AmigaOS 3.x ROMs (all classic Amiga models including CD32) and relative Workbench files.
Acube Systems entered an agreement with Hyperion under which it has ported AmigaOS 4 to itsSam440ep andSam460ex line of PowerPC-based motherboards.[76] In 2009 a version forPegasos II was released in co-operation with Acube Systems.[77] In 2012, A-EON Technology Ltd manufactured and released theAmigaOne X1000 to consumers through their partner, Amiga Kit who provided end-user support, assembly and worldwide distribution of the new system.
Long-time Amiga developer MacroSystem entered the Amiga-clone market with theirDraCo non-linear video editing system.[78] It appears in two versions, initially a tower model and later a cube. DraCo expanded upon and combined a number of earlier expansion cards developed for Amiga (VLabMotion, Toccata, WarpEngine, RetinaIII) into a true Amiga-clone powered by theMotorola 68060 processor. The DraCo can run AmigaOS 3.1 up through AmigaOS 3.9. It is the only Amiga-based system to supportFireWire for videoI/O. DraCo also offers an Amiga-compatibleZorro-II expansion bus and introduced a faster custom DraCoBus, capable of30 MB/sec transfer rates (faster than Commodore'sZorro-III). The technology was later used in the Casablanca system, a set-top-box also designed for non-linear video editing.
In 1998, Index Information released the Access, an Amiga-clone similar to the Amiga 1200, but on a motherboard that could fit into a standard5+1⁄4-inchdrive bay. It features either a68020 or68030 CPU, with aAGA chipset, and runs AmigaOS 3.1.
In 1998, former Amiga employees (John Smith, Peter Kittel,Dave Haynie and Andy Finkel to mention few) formed a new company called PIOS. Their hardware platform, PIOS One, was aimed at Amiga, Atari and Macintosh users. The company was renamed to Met@box in 1999 until it folded.[79]
The NatAmi (short forNative Amiga) hardware project began in 2005 with the aim of designing and building an Amiga clone motherboard that is enhanced with modern features.[80] The NatAmi motherboard is a standardMini-ITX-compatible form factor computer motherboard, powered by a Motorola/Freescale 68060 and its chipset. It is compatible with the original Amiga chipset, which has been inscribed on a programmable FPGAAltera chip on the board. The NatAmi is the second Amiga clone project after theMinimig motherboard, and its history is very similar to that of theC-One mainboard developed byJeri Ellsworth and Jens Schönfeld. From a commercial point of view, Natami's circuitry and design are currentlyclosed source.[citation needed] One goal of the NatAmi project is to design an Amiga-compatible motherboard that includes up-to-date features but that does not rely on emulation (as inWinUAE), modern PCIntel components, or a modernPowerPC mainboard. As such, NatAmi is not intended to become another evolutionary heir to classic Amigas, such as withAmigaOne orPegasos computers. This "purist" philosophy essentially limits the resulting processor speed but puts the focus on bandwidth and low latencies. The developers also recreated the entire Amiga chipset, freeing it from legacy Amiga limitations such as twomegabytes of audio and video graphics RAM as in theAGA chipset, and rebuilt this new chipset by programming a modernFPGAAltera Cyclone IV chip. Later, the developers decided to create from scratch a new software-form processor chip, codenamed "N68050" that resides in the physical Altera FPGA programmable chip.[81]
In 2006, two new Amiga clones were announced, both using FPGA-based hardware synthesis to replace the AmigaOCS custom chipset. The first, theMinimig, is a personal project of Dutch engineer Dennis van Weeren. Referred to as "new Amiga hardware",[82] the original model was built on aXilinx Spartan-3 development board, but soon a dedicated board was developed. The minimig uses the FPGA to reproduce the custom Denise, Agnus, Paula andGary chips as well as both 8520CIAs and implements a simple version ofAmber. The rest of the chips are an actual 68000 CPU, ram chips, and a PIC microcontroller forBIOS control.[82] The design for Minimig was released asopen-source on July 25, 2007. In February 2008, an Italian companyAcube Systems began selling Minimig boards. A third party upgrade replaces the PIC microcontroller with a more powerful ARM processor, providing more functionality such as write access and support for hard disk images. The Minimig core has been ported to the FPGArcade "Replay" board. The Replay uses an FPGA with about three times more capacity and that does support the AGA chipset and a68020soft core with68030 capabilities. The Replay board is designed to implement many older computers and classic arcade machines.
The second is the Clone-A system announced byIndividual Computers. As of mid-2007 it has been shown in its development form, with FPGA-based boards replacing the Amiga chipset and mounted on an Amiga 500 motherboard.[83]
AmigaOS is a single-user multitaskingoperating system. It was one of the first commercially available consumer operating systems for personal computers to implementpreemptive multitasking. It was developed first by Commodore International and initially introduced in 1985 with the Amiga 1000.John C. Dvorak wrote inPC Magazine in 1996:
[AmigaOS] remains one of the great operating systems of the past 20 years, incorporating a small kernel and tremendousmultitasking capabilities the likes of which have only recently been developed inOS/2 andWindows NT. The biggest difference is that the AmigaOS could operate fully and multitask in as little as250 K of address space.[84]
AmigaOS combines acommand-line interface andgraphical user interface.AmigaDOS is the disk operating system and command line portion of the OS andWorkbench the native graphical windowing, graphical environment for file management and launching applications. AmigaDOS allows longfilenames (up to 107 characters) withwhitespace and does not requirefilename extensions. Thewindowing system and user interface engine that handles all input events is calledIntuition.[85]
The multi-tasking kernel is calledExec. It acts as a scheduler for tasks running on the system, providing pre-emptive multitasking with prioritised round-robin scheduling. It enabled true pre-emptive multitasking in as little as 256 KB of free memory.[86][87]
AmigaOS does not implementmemory protection; the68000 CPU does not include amemory management unit.[88] Although this speeds and easesinter-process communication because programs can communicate by simply passing apointer back and forth, the lack of memory protection made the AmigaOS more vulnerable tocrashes from badly behavingprograms than other multitasking systems that did implement memory protection,[89] and Amiga OS is fundamentally incapable of enforcing any form of security model since any program had full access to the system. A co-operational memory protection feature was implemented in AmigaOS 4 and could be retrofitted to old AmigaOS systems using Enforcer or CyberGuard tools.
The problem was somewhat exacerbated by Commodore's initial decision to release documentation relating not only to the OS's underlying software routines,[citation needed] but also to the hardware itself, enabling intrepid programmers who had developed their skills on theCommodore 64 toPOKE the hardware directly, as was done on the older platform. While the decision to release the documentation was a popular one and allowed the creation of fast, sophisticated sound and graphics routines in games and demos, it also contributed to system instability[citation needed]as some programmers lacked the expertise to program at this level. For this reason, when the newAGA chipset was released,Commodore declined to release low-level documentation in an attempt to force developers into using the approved software routines.[citation needed]
The latest version for the PPC Amigas is the AmigaOS 4.1 and for the 68k Amigas is the AmigaOS 3.2.2
AmigaOS directly or indirectly inspired the development of various operating systems.MorphOS andAROS clearly inherit heavily from the structure of AmigaOS as explained directly in articles regarding these two operating systems. AmigaOS also influencedBeOS, which featured a centralized system ofDatatypes, similar to that present in AmigaOS. Likewise,DragonFly BSD was also inspired by AmigaOS as stated by Dragonfly developer Matthew Dillon who is a former Amiga developer.[90][91]WindowLab andamiwm are among severalwindow managers for theX Window System seek to mimic the Workbench interface. IBM licensed the Amiga GUI from Commodore in exchange for the REXX language license. This allowedOS/2 to have the WPS (Workplace Shell) GUI shell for OS/2 2.0, a 32-bit operating system.[92][93]
Commodore-Amiga producedAmiga Unix, informally known as Amix, based on AT&TSVR4. It supports theAmiga 2500 and Amiga 3000 and is included with theAmiga 3000UX. Among other unusual features of Amix is a hardware-accelerated windowing system that can scroll windows without copying data. Amix is not supported on the later Amiga systems based on68040 or68060 processors.
Other, still maintained, operating systems are available for the classic Amiga platform, including Linux andNetBSD. Both require a CPU withMMU such as the68020 with68851 or full versions of the68030,68040 or68060. There is also a version of Linux for Amigas with PowerPC accelerator cards.Debian andYellow Dog Linux can run on the AmigaOne.
There is an official, older version ofOpenBSD. The last Amiga release is 3.2.MINIX 1.5.10 also runs on Amiga.[94]
TheAmiga Sidecar is a completeIBM PC XT compatible computer contained in an expansion card. It was released by Commodore in 1986 and promoted as a way to run business software on the Amiga 1000.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s the platform became particularly popular for gaming,demoscene activities and creative software uses. During this time commercial developers marketed a wide range of games and creative software, often developing titles simultaneously for theAtari ST due to the similar hardware architecture. Popular creative software included3D rendering (ray-tracing) packages,bitmap graphics editors,desktop video software, software development packages and "tracker" music editors.
Until the late 1990s the Amiga remained a popular platform for non-commercial software, often developed by enthusiasts, and much of which was freely redistributable. An on-line archive,Aminet, was created in 1991 and until the late-1990s was the largest public archive of software, art and documents for any platform.[95]
The nameAmiga was chosen by the developers from theSpanish word for a female friend, because they knew Spanish,[96] and because it occurred beforeApple andAtari alphabetically. It also conveyed the message that the Amiga computer line was "user friendly" as a pun or play on words.[97]
The first official Amiga logo was a rainbow-colored doublecheck mark. In later marketing material Commodore largely dropped the checkmark and used logos styled with various typefaces. Although it was never adopted as atrademark by Commodore, the "Boing Ball" has been synonymous with Amiga since its launch. It became an unofficial and enduring theme after a visually impressive animated demonstration at the 1984 Winter Consumer Electronics Show in January 1984 showing a checkered ball bouncing and rotating.[98] Following Escom's purchase of Commodore in 1996, the Boing Ball theme was incorporated into a new logo.[99]
Early Commodore advertisements attempted to cast the computer as an all-purpose business machine,[100][4][101][102][103][104] though the Amiga was most commercially successful as a home computer. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s Commodore primarily placed advertising in computer magazines and occasionally in national newspapers and on television.
Since the demise of Commodore, various groups have marketed successors to the original Amiga line:
AmigaOS and MorphOS are commercial proprietary operating systems. AmigaOS 4, based on AmigaOS 3.1 source code with some parts of version 3.9, is developed byHyperion Entertainment and runs on PowerPC based hardware. MorphOS, based on some parts of AROS source code, is developed by MorphOS Team and is continued onApple and other PowerPC based hardware.
There is alsoAROS, a free and open source operating system (re-implementation of the AmigaOS 3.1 APIs), for Amiga 68k, x86 and ARM hardware (one version runs Linux-hosted on theRaspberry Pi). In particular, AROS for Amiga 68k hardware aims to create an open source Kickstart ROM replacement for emulation purpose and/or for use on real "classic" hardware.[105]
Amiga Format continued publication until 2000.Amiga Active was launched in 1999 and was published until 2001.
Several magazines are in publication today: Print magazineAmiga Addict started publication in 2020.[106]Amiga Future,[107] which is available in both English and German;Bitplane.it,[108] a bimonthly magazine in Italian; andAmigaPower,[109] a long-running French magazine.[110]
The Amiga continues to be popular enough that fans continue to support conferences such as Amiga37 which had over 50 vendors.[111]
The Amiga series of computers found a place in early computer graphic design and television presentation. Season 1 and part of season 2 of the television seriesBabylon 5 were rendered in LightWave 3D on Amigas.[112][113] Other television series using Amigas for special effects includedSeaQuest DSV[114] andMax Headroom.[115]
In addition, many celebrities and notable individuals have made use of the Amiga:[116]
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