For anyone too young to understand the fascination, the Amiga was far ahead of its time but suffered a premature death due to the gross mismanagement of the Comodore corporation.
In the early 90s, non-linear digital editing for film and TV (as well as graphics, and titles) was limited to specialized machines that cost, literally, millions of dollars in 90s money. With an add-on product called the Video Toaster, these functions could be done on an Amiga — for a price affordable to many public access broadcasters.
Lightwave3D which began as part of the video toaster brought 3d graphics to a ton of people — again, at a time when an SGI and something like wavefront would run around $40k. Lightwave was used to great effect for shows like Star Trek TNG, Babylon 5, etc. Even ILM used it for some shots theatrical releases, if I recall correctly.
Then there was the huge demo scene and gaming cohort which pushed the Amiga to do things that seemed like they shouldn’t have been possible.
Just a minor clarification - the Video Toaster was a switcher, a broadcast quality paint box, and could facilitate regular linear editing but did not have non-linear capabilities. It wasn't until much later, nearly at the point at which the Amiga had ceased to exist and become at best a peripheral of the video toaster rather than the other way around, did the video toaster gain NLE capabilities in the form of another product the Video Toaster Flyer. Source: video toaster serial number 000009 lived in my personal A2000.
It's a minor piece of trivia but one of the key engineers involved with the Video Toaster was Brad Carvey, the brother of Dana Carvey of SNL fame. Apparently Brad Carvey was also the inspiration for the Garth character in the Wayne's World movie.
Quite right — thanks for the clarification / reminder! If I recall the Flyer came out a little after all of those render farm cards for lightwave that I used to see ads for in the various Newtek / Amiga magazines.
In general (not only for video editing), it was an incredibly powerful machine sold for a fraction of the price of comparable hardware of the time, even for personal computing.
Apple and PCs were easily selling for 1000$+, while a basic A500 started at 600/700$, it came with more advanced audio and video capabilities, and you could hook it up to a normal TV instead of a dedicated monitor.
It was also a great gaming machine that you could convince you parents to buy, since it was "useful for studying", unlike a console :)
For the interested (or nostalgic) Arstechnica had a retrospective in many parts:
I am also remembering that the Amiga was "killed" several more times by the bankruptcy process, as the IP rights to it went through legal limbo and then through a series of companies that failed to rejuvenate it or market it properly. Gateway Computers was the biggest profile name on that list, but there were several.
I think it is somewhat like the fascination with historical figures who were assassinated. Had the Amiga simply lived out its commercial life and then gotten obsolete in a normal way, there would not be the sense of potential squandered, and thus perhaps not the ongoing fascination.
At the original presentation/unveiling of Windows 95, the video wall behind Bill Gates was driven by an Amiga.. :D
Apart from its advanced functionality, I also have fond memories of the "feel" of the system. Others will probably describe this better than I ever could.
It was absolutely groundbreaking in terms of commodity video acceleration. If I remember rightly, it was a whole-system genlock: the system clock would be phase-locked to the incoming video. That let it output frames on top of the video stream without having to digitise it first.
They could have been the "SGI for the masses"; if they'd really been able to push the idea of commodity hardware dedicated for gaming and effects they might have been first to market with gaming 3D accelerators.
I reluctantly moved to Windows/PC very late (probably 1997 or 1998) long after Commodore was done for. The scene was clearly losing many people but there were still a few magazines in circulation and I was amazed every time I went in Germany to see much more life on the Amiga scene.
Nothing was ever the same after - the community of creators that had formed and thrived on the Amiga was unique, and while people moved on they did not find a proper alternative to reunite on.
It's always good to see such articles about the Amiga, but it's a bittersweet feeling.
I had similar experience, and have similar bittersweet feelings. I don't think about it every day, but when I do, I miss what we had.
Granted, today's computer systems can be used toward creative ends much more advanced than anything I ever saw done with an Amiga. It's not as if today's computers are lacking technologically. It's really the mindset, the community, the sheer joy, that seems to be gone.
The scene hasn't died! There are still people doing awesome demos on the Amiga 25 years later. Elude's Amiga demo "Rise and Shine" from just last year is phenomenal!
When I first got a windows 3 machine at work (early 90's) it took about year to stop trying to drag down from the top of the screen to show the high res display.
And I also used to be unofficial UK third line amiga support for PRESTEL and telecom gold - if they had some weirdness the normal help desk couldn't replicate
Amiga could support multiple "desktops" with different resolutions at the same time. You could (partially or fully) expose a different desktop by dragging the titlebar at the top of the screen.
Yeah, it's actually a hack that is well explained in the book "The Future was Here". It's not real desktops since it only works on the vertical axis. But even though, it was massively impressive compared to what other computers could do at the time.
It was a hack because it depended on the refresh cycle of old CRT displays. The electron gun scanned across each horizontal line from top to bottom. The video chip could use interrupts to switch resolution in the middle of the vertical refresh cycle. The same trick wouldn't work with a modern LCD display.
The native output resolution is the max vertical resolution of all currently displayed modes.
For instance, if you have an interlaced mode showing under a non-interlaced mode, then the entire screen displays at ~480i (to use modern terms) with the non-interlaced portion doubling its scanlines. But if the interlaced screen gets covered up, then it snaps to ~240p non-scandoubled.
The biggest modern problem with this is that displays turn themselves off to resync on mode changes, which always annoyed me greatly.
From the perspective of now, getting rid of my Amigas turns out to have been one of my more short sighted decisions.
I have no nostalgia for any of the 8 bits I had or any other machines. I have tons for the Amiga and there's still so much they did first or better. I really should have left them in that cupboard, as I was so reluctant to retire them in the first place. It was more to clear the two cupboards full of software, manuals and addons. Oh well. :)
The future never arrived as instead of building on Amiga we built on PCs and Windows.
Edit: Amiga Super Hang On not in the games list? Shocking!
The A500 is my favorite machine ever, it basically merged the best of both worlds from PCs (interface, general purpose OS, programmability) and consoles (dedicated audio and video chipsets, you could use a normal TV as monitor).
It took full adoption of the 256 colors VGA and Sound Blaster cards for the PC to catch-up and eventually surpass it (late games started coming out in 10+ floppy disks and it was clear it had reached its limits).
Nice collection! Genuine question. What do you do with all these Amigas? Do you use them for anything productive, are any of them your "daily driver"? Or do you just fire them up from time to time for nostalgic reasons, or something else?
I just muck about with them when I feel like doing something different to my main 'PC' based computing. Right now, I'm trying to resurrect an old SCSI hard disk controller for the Amiga 500 using newer SCSI disks (which should be backwards compatible) but it's just not playing ball. :/
I'm also into retrocomputing, although my collection is more focused around the 8-bit machines of the UK and Europe (Oric-1/Atmos, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, etc.)
I was just wondering if you'd heard of the RaSCSI device, and/or one of its clones?
As I have a number of other items in my collection, studio-gear, with SCSI this is my next foray into keeping the machines alive: replacing SCSI with something modern/servicable...
I was hoping to keep the full retro experience complete with whirring disks and head clicking, but if I can't get these old controllers to talk to newer drives, then yeah, I may have to go down the SCSI-SDCard route. :(
I'm also trying NOT to expand into Commodore 64/128 as well, as I'm rapidly running out of room... but I never owned a C128 back in the day, and I REALLY want one!
Yeah, I understand the authentic vibe, but there's something to be said about having every bit of software, ever written for the machine, on a single solid-state SD card. ;)
Re: C128 - I know the feeling .. a pal of mine in the retro-computing group at a local hackrrspace recently set up his C128 for some great assembly hacking (he's building a new game engine for it in assembly) and it has totally inspired me to take another look at it as a machine.
If you get a C128, I recommend a C-128DCR with 64k of VDC ram. Otherwise, you'll have an opportunity to do some soldering to get hires multicolor bitmaps from the VDC chip.
I had the 500 with memory upgrade, then upgraded to the 3000 - where I got a new CPU, either the 020 or the 030, and my first ever HDD. I think it was a massive 50MB.
I searched some of the demo archives and could find an intro of kinds that I wrote as a teenager. I was able to start it up in an emulator, and it was a fairly good representation ... memories long lost, revived!
The most fun was probably reading the fantastic crap I wrote in the greeting scrolltext - it was like a portal into a former self. :) And, no, none of my folks had video records back in the 80s, so that's all lost.
I had 2x A500 including the commodore monitors that somehow got lost/thrown out in a family move somewhere much to my dismay :( Loved those machines, and AMIGA BASIC - between that and QBasic was the start of me learning to program.
> I had 2x A500 including the commodore monitors that somehow got lost/thrown out in a family move somewhere much to my dismay :(
I totally feel your pain. All my family heirlooms got thrown out because someone decided to give away the $5 ikea box they were stored in marked 'keep safely' and put them in a gray plastic garbage bag instead.
On the plus side you might be able to find some replacement monitors somewhere. An easy way might be to tell your local recycling compound that that is what you are looking for, just ask them to toss anything labelled 'Commodore' or 'CBM' on a pile and promise to buy it by the pound once every month. You'll be surprised what turns up.
I wasn't but I fixed quite a lot of them (and regular 64's in a 10x larger number). I used the ST quite a bit though, totally different beast software wise, the Amiga was a multimedia powerhouse whereas the ST was more like a 'Mac light'.
Originally I was an A500 user in my teens. I started recently to buy various models in bad shape (1000, 2000, 500, 500+, 1200...) to fix and restore them, I still don't really understand completely why but I enjoy that a lot. My next project will be to build a "new" amiga 1200: new cases have been produced, new keyboards are coming soon and I just bought an unpopulated newly produced motherboard. So overall, this is very little nostalgia but more an excuse to learn new skills like troubleshooting hardware and SMD soldering.
That is cool. Terrible fire is doing that IIRC: they have an end to end emulation running now based on their previous foga based accelerator. You are planning to use that as a base to redo everything from scratch?
I've recently gone on this journey myself, having had an A500 as a teen, and now own an A1200 with 500MB HDD and 8MB memory. I've also recently purchased a 68030 accelerator with 68882 FPU, 128MB of RAM, real-time clock, and the 4GB CF card storage upgrade that I still need to fit.
Just wish I still had all my floppies from the old days. Managed to find a few and was surprised to find they're still working flawlessly.
I may have a box of amiga floppies in the garage, maybe an a500 as well. Wonder if populace is still in that mix.
are you looking for software for amiga or just your old floppies with saved data?
Had no idea people were still using them, after so many c64s were unusable with bad power supplies, I assumes no more would ever be made.
Now I'm glad I kept some of the amiga stuff and sad to think I gave away a box of c64 floppies.
Have a few xeroxed manuals for word processors and such from the commodore days I found while organizing garage stuff. To think that full blown word processors worked with such little memory so long ago.. and now we have huge code bases to save text these days.
As someone who cut my teeth on an A500, I have quite the soft spot for all things Amiga. I came across a wonderful documentary of the Amiga saga on Youtube:
I didn't grow up on the Amiga; I cut my teeth on the TRS-80 Color Computer line (2 & 3). My first brush with an Amiga (outside of a demo at a Babbages in the mall) was thru a guy I knew in high school who had one for video editing. He showed me (and others in our group - I had helped form a "Color Computer Users Group" and we met at this guy's house) a graphics demo - which completely blew me away. This was probably sometime in 1989 or so.
After high school, and a year in a tech voc school (where I also got to use Amigas, because at the time industrial electronics used the 68k for controllers, so we had to learn how to code and interface to them - so we used an Amiga as the platform for that), I started my first software engineering gig, and at some point I convinced my employer (a small mom-n-pop shop) to lend me the money to buy an Amiga. I ended up getting an Amiga 2000 with a monitor and hard drive.
I stayed on at that place long enough for them to give me two more loans (which got completely paid back); first for an Amiga 1200, then last for an Acer 486 PC (fell in love with Myst at Best Buy).
I still have both Amigas, the monitor (1040s), software, tons of Fred Fish floppies...lol. I don't know if any of it still works; I haven't fired any of it up in decades. I got out of the Amiga around 1992 or so, and moved on to Windows. I honestly wished I had discovered Linux at the time, but it wasn't on my radar (I had some experience with Unix, specifically AIX and RS6000 hardware - at that first employer). I didn't discover Linux until 1995. Which I found to be a close experience to what I recall on the Amiga (it's more a feeling thing for me - definitely nothing like the graphics, sound, software, etc - but the discovery and freedom, that wasn't as there with Windows).
Today, about the only thing I do with Amiga is occasionally purchase the latest version of Amiga Forever - at some point I want to build a dedicated emulation box running it.
I have my original A600 (1993) and C64 (1986) — great hardware that captured the imagination of a young kid. I still have fond memories, fooling around and coding games (my parents were too cheap to buy me more than a few retail games)
I still have my original A1200 and it still works. I have adapted an ATX PC PSU to power it - it needs an extra bit of power available to keep the 68040 expansion card+RAM, the VGA adapter card, and the internal IDE drive going.
Haven't powered it up for about 4ish years. The floppy drive seems dead last time I tried it - and it was an upgrade High Density PC-style drive with its own special card to drive it, and I can't remember the name of the card/drive it was that long ago I did all this. :)
I remember being at a computer show in the late 80s/early 90s as a teen. The kind of place that you went to see new tech showed off by major brands (IBM, Intel, and MS were there), but also to get good deals from vendors on components instead of ordering through magazines.
Anyway, I'm waiting in line to price out a motherboard, when this big guy walks up and buys 5 or so of the most expensive ones. People were pretty surprised and someone asked what he was building. He said they were going to be burning them later that day, something about "Amiga makes it, Intel makes it stupid." Made me think there was something seriously wrong with the people who used Amigas.
That was probably my first experience with the toxic fanboy mentality. I realized much later how much that had turned me off from any kind of user community. It makes me a little sad/jealous when I read about people having such fond memories of those times and communities, because I never tried to join in.
Must have been a false flag operation by an Atari ST user, Amiga users would never do that! Damn Atari ST users, always trying to make Amiga users look bad.
I was probably too young to notice any of the "community stuff". Through scrolltexts or readme files I had an idea that there were people communicating and swapping, but for us kids, all that was needed to "join the community" was to have an Amiga, and/or games and demos. We might play mostly on the Amiga, but we weren't looking down on other systems, if it was fun, we were down. E.g. my friend's dad had a Spectrum CPC, so we tried all games we could manage to run on that, too (it didn't matter if they had "worse graphics" if they were fun and different from the games we already knew), and I played a lot of Empire Deluxe on the PC of another friend.
I did have an "Intel Outside" Workbench background image for a while though :D
The fact that my dad worked for IBM and was able to procure my first computer from an office closure pretty much guaranteed my platform of "choice" anyway.
I have recently bought an A1200 as well, but one thing that surprised me was the unbearable-ness of the refresh rate (50/60Hz ?) of the original monitor. I eventually had to buy a signal converter to connect the machine to some better display unit.
I cannot imagine how I could have spent day-long gaming sessions in front of that display.
Maybe you had a good CRT? I had a Sony Trinitron 14" which I have no idea where it ended up; I suspect somebody not too smart in the family threw it out. I'd still use it if I still had it.
These days I use the OSSC to convert the output, A device that barely introduces a few scanlines of latency and I can't recommend enough.
I bought a massive 28" monitor in an auction when I was a student for my Amiga 500. It was surplus kit from the London Stock Exchange trading floor, used to display tables of stock prices. There was distinct burn-in, but hey, 28" in 1989 for peanuts. Just took a bit if work with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers to get the video output working with it IIRC. Great for playing Empire and Carrier Command.
Yes, it can. But, the default video mode it boots up in, and which most games are in, are outside the frequency range that most VGA monitors could cope with. You needed a special VGA monitor that had a slightly extended frequency range (downwards).
I have a small card which fits over one of the chips of my A1200 and provides a VGA signal. Can't remember the name of the card offhand - haven't powered the A1200 up for about 3-4 years since the last time.
Probably an 'Indivison AGA' (Or 'OCS' if you have a 2000/500). Fits over the Lisa chip, and grabs the video output and scan doubles it to work with a standard VGA type monitor either via VGA or DVI. Can support resolutions up to 1280x1024.
An RGB monitor gives the highest quality picture, and
allows you the widest selection of the Amiga's many display modes.
Several types of analog RGB monitors can be used with the A1200,
including multiscan, 15 KHz, and VGAlSVGA monitors. A multiscan
(multiple horizontal scan rate or "multisync") RGB monitor provides
the greatest flexibility. A multiscan monitor is required if you wish
to use display modes that have different horizontal scan rates. A 15
KHz analog RGB monitor can display only the Amiga's default display
mode and other 15 KHz scan rate modes. A VGA or SVGA type monitor can
display the Amiga's de-interlaced and higher resolution modes, but not
the standard 15 KHz video modes. Connect a 15 KHz
monitor with a 23-pin female connector, such as the Commodore 1084 or
10848, directly to the A1200 VIDEO port. For a monitor such as a
multiscan, VGA, or 8VGA model that has a small 15-pin VGA-style
connector, connect the 23-pin to 15-pin adapter included with the
A1200 to the VIDEO port, then connect the monitor cable to the
adapter. With the proper adapter cable, a television with a SCART
input can be used as a 15 KHz RGB monitor. See the "SCART
Televisions" section below for more information.
I would love to find a modern USB joystick in the form factor of that Competition Pro. Alas, these days, the only joysticks anyone seems to make are giant hulking flightsticks.
I used to have an Amiga 500 with a RAM upgrade and HD (3 megs RAM, 30 meg HD. This was amazing for 1989!) I then later upgraded to a 3000 sometime in 1991. I foolishly sold the 3000 in college, and my parents gave away the 500.
I also taught myself C programming on the Amiga. I got Lattice C, before it became SAS, for Christmas one year! This was back when software came on dozens of floppy disks and had huge spiral bound manuals.
Neat. I had that internal 512K expansion, and also a "Supra" brand SCSI controller and RAM expansion that attached to the left side. It gave me another 2 megs.
Not sure about the US, but it definitely wasn't just popular in the UK alone. In Germany it was extremely popular, and the "natural upgrade path" from a C64.
For me it was the ultimate dream machine (apart from a Silicon Graphics workstation or NeXT Cube of course). 3 days after the monetary union in 1990 between East and West Germany I drove to the nearest West German town and spent pretty much everything on an Amiga 500, a 1084 monitor, and a printer, all in all around 2.6k Deutsche Mark if I remember right (don't know why I was so keen on a printer).
It wasn't just British - they were _the_ home computer in New Zealand for a few years in the late 80s, early 90s. Aggressively marketed and priced well below the equivalent IBM clones, they sold well.
An Amiga 500 was the first computer I bought with my own money - $NZ1900 (my entire life savings at 15). I taught myself C and never looked back.
But the window for Amgias was short. By about 1993 the price of the clones was dropping and they were starting to get fast enough to overcome their hardware limitations. Once MS started marketing Windows machines to home users (especially when Win95 came out) the market for Amigas dried up completely.
It was the machine to go for 16 bit demoscene and graphics programming in Portugal.
Atari ST were hardly seen, PC were mostly for school and work related tasks, with the Apple devices beyond reach to everyone not at the university shared labs campus.
PC's, until the 8086mph demo, were considered unfit for the demoscene, as CGA graphics were utter crap when compared to humbler 8-bit machines. They were also clunky and expensive.
Audio as well. I think it was '89 that SoundBlaster came out with sampled audio for PC's. It wasn't anything close to what the Amigas could do though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY9p1oiE1_Y
I remeber a guy at school getting a MS-DOS driver that would drive the speaker in such a way that we could hear midi/mod files instead of the typical lousy beeps.
Still, it required lots of teenage imagination to think it sound anything worthwhile listening to.
Yep, for me the entry into the PC demoscene was to get hold of Abrash's articles series in PC Techniques (I think) and a copy of "PC Intern: System Programming : The Encyclopedia of DOS Programming Know How".
Three key markets seemed to be UK, Germany and US, I think in that order.
Germany was why the 2000 existed, Commodore US wanted a box similar to the A1000, with another sidecar for HDD. UK was the most successful single region, and Commodore UK nearly succeeded buying out after the bankruptcy. In large part that was David Pleasance and things like the Batman bundle.
From what I can tell, US was hampered by terrible advertising, but succeeded despite that almost entirely on word of mouth. Just as well, or there'd have been no toaster. :)
Here in California, both Atari ST and Amiga were less common than PCs and Macs, but they weren't entirely absent. I and a small group of friends had STs of various flavors. And I knew several people with Amigas.
To illustrate, my parents would periodically drive me a few miles to a store that sold ST and Amiga software and magazines, mostly so I could buy a magazine and ruminate on which software to save up to buy. We could have gone right down the street had I been using a PC or Mac.
It was popular in Western Europe especially, (UK, Germany and in a lesser fashion France), but as far as I remember it was rather "small" in the US despite Electronic Arts' support (Trip Hawkins was very positive about the Amiga). It had a small presence in exotic countries (you can find some in Japan too) but I would say it was especially strong in Western Europe.
Heh I donated my old A1200, all the games, and Philips monitor to the The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park, UK. Sort of wish I still had it, Monkey Island was in such good condition it was nearly BNIB condition.
At the same time my dad donated his pristine Apple ][ in it's original box no less!
> Sort of wish I still had it, Monkey Island was in such good condition it was nearly BNIB condition.
You can still play those games with an emulator, like FS-UAE. All of the games (and apps) are around if you search. I've been having lots of fun lately lol.
The sight of the Competition Pro triggered some instant nostalgia. There were lots of cheap knockoffs around when I had an Amiga, but the original was much more reliable.
In the early 90s, non-linear digital editing for film and TV (as well as graphics, and titles) was limited to specialized machines that cost, literally, millions of dollars in 90s money. With an add-on product called the Video Toaster, these functions could be done on an Amiga — for a price affordable to many public access broadcasters.
Lightwave3D which began as part of the video toaster brought 3d graphics to a ton of people — again, at a time when an SGI and something like wavefront would run around $40k. Lightwave was used to great effect for shows like Star Trek TNG, Babylon 5, etc. Even ILM used it for some shots theatrical releases, if I recall correctly.
Then there was the huge demo scene and gaming cohort which pushed the Amiga to do things that seemed like they shouldn’t have been possible.
An awesome time for personal computing.