www.theguardian.com/games/2024/apr/26/my-undying-love-for-the-painfully-uncool-amiga
In another topic I recall Zippy lamenting the fact that he no longer had his Amiga. I feel the same about the A1200 I deliberately left in the attic when I moved 20 years ago. At work we must have had one of the first models, an A1000, imported into the UK. We used it for overlaying captions and animated graphics onto video programmes, long before you could do that with a PC. I wrote about it for a magazine and got a journalists discount on an A2000. When that went pop, I replaced it with the A1200. The A1000 and A2000 both had separate keyboards. I also used a PC at work, but didn't buy one until I retired. I almost bought a Mac instead, but they had so many models at the time that I thought they might bust.
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Blimey!
Nostalgia time...
Yes, I had a 500 and upgraded to a 1200. I also had a CD32 (rubbish).
The 1200 was attached to a very nice Philips monitor and was running a tiny 80mb HD and a 68030 accelerator with a further 8mb of "fast" ram - if you know Amigas you know "fast" ram.
I also had various bits and bobs that cost a fortune back then including a standalone CD ROM / Writer, a sound digitiser and a video digitiser - madness to see this tech is available for a few £ now.
The printer was a STAR Micronics colour dot-matrix affair.
My software collection was huge with some classic games and flight sims but I loved VistaPro (a fractal landscaping program with added path program - so you could fly over the terrain) and Imagine 3D - a very good ray-tracing program. The word - processor I used at the time "Wordsworth" was excellent and better than anything Microsoft had - pure GUI WYSISWYG with soft fonts. Development wise I played with Hisoft C (hated it), PASCAL and AMOS / AMOS Pro with the 3d add on and actually built a 3d model of the solar system to scale with it and a 2001 style space-station. You could plot trajectories to the planets and they were accurate with data on all of the planets. It had a fast forward and zoom function so you could watch planets orbit the sun.
For context, a one frame ray-traced image could take a day or two to render - done on the fly on a PlayStation 3.
If I had the money, time and room, I'd scour eBay and rebuy some of the stuff but I suspect I'd be disappointed at it's speed - even though it was blisteringly fast at the time.
The o/s was pre-emptive multitasking - something that we are all used to today, but was revolutionary back then.
The patents on the tech are still used I believe. The sort of stuff we see in modern gadgets like Sky TV boxes and graphics cards were first seen on the Amiga with its bit blitter - designed for moving arrays of data through memory quickly and the other custom chips Angus (later Fat and Fatter Angus), Paula and Denise. Denise was the video chip and supported overscan which is why the Amiga was so popular with video editors at the time.
The demo programmers used to do amazing things with the hardware - something that seems missing today. The copper lists (small machine-code programs written directly for the graphics co-processor and run between the time the electron beam for the screen scanned back from the end of a line to the beginning of the next line) produced some amazing effects unseen before then.
Under investment, bad marketing and cheap PCs killed it. The tower Amiga could run PC software with an added card I recall.
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in 1983, I remember coming back from Singapore, with all the clone parts( they had only just started to appear) to build my first IBM PC (minus the case, too big to fit in the suitcase).
Reminds me of the time, in 79 I think, I came back from the states with a suitcase full of illegal CB radios, but that's another tale
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Commodore Amiga - zippy
