When I was in grade 7 or 8, our librarian had a friend who worked at Commodore who came to the school to show us the new computer they were about to release - the Amiga 1000A. As the school “computer guy” I was asked to set it up, and in doing so noticed it had the serial number 0000000001. I have numerous “claims to fame”, but having used the very _first_ Amiga 1000A is still one I cherish all these years later.
Absolutely unbelievable. I had a C64 as a kid in the 80s but never even heard of Amiga until probably the mid-2000s. The graphics and sound on that thing are unreal. It reminds me a lot of a Super Nintendo or a mid-90s Pentium with a Sound Blaster 16 card. Cannot believe this was available in 1985!!
just the soundchip in the amiga was ahead of its time. It was a sampler, and if you wanted to buy a music sampler at the time, it was expensive!. The amiga could do it (albeit a bit more limited) but could also play games.
I heard of it pretty soon, I saw a presentation of it from Commodore at a computer show at a Novotel hotel (not sure where) in 1986 (I know it was 1986 as I remember people playing Ghosts and Goblins on C64 and that was out in 1986). Then I remember walking around the stalls at the show and seeing an A1000 playing Marble Madness. Needless to say I wanted one and the A500 came out the next year and I spent all the savings my family had put away for me on one. Never regretted that for one minute.
A 286 with a parallell dac and vga could preform grapics and sound simular to a A500.... in theory. The issue is that most PC games, really untill about 1989 was made to primary run on ega and vga was a after thought. The issue with this is that ega could not do full or Partial memory loads, every pixel got to be loaded one by one. With vga the memory could just be transfered and loaded over. This made it so most games on the PC was really slow, or they used some trick to just run a partial screenwrite. While amiga and pc generally used the same resolution at this time and even .most amiga games used 16 collors just like ega (some used 32, and a few even 64) amiga games almost always used palets while ega hardly ever did it. The reason is that most ega games was actually tga games. Tga uses also 16 collors, but no palet, while ega uses 16 wirh a palet of 64, granted, way less than 4000 of the A1000/500, still in actuall game play this granularity is not easy ton se. So what really gave amiga fhe advantage was the blank slate benefit
The Hawking documentary explains how the Amiga was used for his voice and how he loved it so much he refused to upgrade it until it finally died. That's why it sounds like him. Because it is the voice he used.
I remember walking into a computer store in the mid 80s and seeing an Amiga on display, running a demo featuring a walking jungle cat of some kind. I was absolutely blown away. Instantly made my Dad's life around every Christmas a nightmare for the next 5 years.
I used part of my college fund to buy an Amiga 2500 in 1989. Never regretted it in spite of the fact I bought a computer with a superfluous 68000 CPU that would never be used due to the included A2620 68020 accelerator card. I added the BridgeBoard so I could take PC classes without buying a PC. I later parted out the A2620 and used the sale to upgrade to the A2630 68030 accelerator card. That poor 68000 still sat unused until I parted out the A2630 (and sold it) and then sold the accelerator-less A2500 as an A2000 to finance my new A3000T tower, so that lonely 68000 finally got some good use some three or four years later. Commodore was in bad shape and sold me the A3000T with a bad motherboard that they had to replace, shipping it direct from Germany. Oh, well.
@Kris R. I would have been around 10 when the 1000 came out, and I think the machine I saw was a 2000. I tried like heck to get my Dad to buy it.. either as a family computer or for me. But he was suspicious of its proprietary Commodore nature and was not sold that the bridgeboard would do what was promised (he got burned on a PCjr with the Quadram expansion heh). Every Christmas I looked for one under the tree but in those days computers were just so crazy expensive it was never going to happen. One year I got excited because there was a box that had the right size and weight.. turned out to be a stereo amp. Which in the end I'm glad I got. But an A2000 was the first Amiga I went for when I started collecting. Did you find the Bridgeboard useful? I have one and have used it a bit but I find things run painfully slow.
@@TechTimeTraveller The Bridgeboard was very slow. I think I had the either the 8086 or the 80286 version, which was good enough for my PC-based classes back in the late 80s, early 90s. I bought it from someone via USENET so I can't be sure which version it was today, over 30 years later. I was ahead of everyone else's time back then and I still am today.
My first purchase was in a Mall at a Electronics Boutique (Remember those?) where they had a A500 on display just running a slide show of Amiga Art and I almost shit a brick. I couldn't believe that a computer was capable of displaying 32 colors on the screen at the same time. I immediately went in and put in a order for one. They didn't have any in stock at the time so I had to wait a week or two to pick it up.
We used an Amiga with a Genlock in high school. It was used mostly for overlaying titles onto our VHS recordings, giving it a somewhat (at the time) professional look especially for high school students. However, I found the paint program and some text animation program so I started making animated titles with letters tumbling around the screen as well as some other cool special effects. I managed to produce some laser battles where I used the Paint program to draw lasers and disintegration effects, and overlay things like starfields in the background to make it look like someone is on a spaceship. I used a Yamaha PSR-36 to make laser sound effects and disintegration noises. Looking at my films today the effects look laughably bad. But back in 1987 they actually looked pretty good (at least for high school students) and people were mystified as to how I did it.
@@mal-avcisi9783 Commodore didn't have as much of a hold in the US microcomputer market than it did in Europe. Here, that market was primarily aimed at businesses and schools, and were dominated primarily by IBM, Apple, and other manufacturers of "PC-compatible" systems, such as Compaq. If someone wanted a computer system for personal use they would more than likely select an IBM PC (or a compatible derivative) or an Apple system, even if something like the Commodore Amiga or the Atari ST were vastly technically superior to anything the former two companies offered at the time. The latter two were seen more as hobby machines, so they didn't catch on state-side.
@@mal-avcisi9783 Commodore avoided taxes in America i think, and is why there weren't allowed to sell anything there most of the time. In Europe Commodore were a threat to IBM around 1990.
@mal-avcisi9783 Poor marketing. They tried playing the Amiga like a high end production box, which at the time it could be when expanded, but the base Amigas were pure game machines. It was mishandled here in the US. They wanted it to beat the Mac, which it did, but it didn't have the same support or user base. I was one of 3 Amiga users in my High School. No one else had one in my area except my neighbor who didn't talk about it. Had a 1000 then a 3000. He let me "see" the 3000.
Do you remember the name of the program that let you slow the CPU down and switch to PAL mode? I think it was called "Degrader" because I started out with the Amiga 2500 NTSC and so many games and programs ran too fast, and PAL samples cut off too early. The Llamatron "Oh, F..." sounds so much funnier on a PAL system than NTSC using Degrader.
One thing that often gets missed due to games bypassing the OS, is that the operating system libraries were absolutely fantastic, as well. There were many of us who used the Amiga as a low cost scientific and engineering workstation, because of how damned good exec, graphics, layers, and intuition.library were.
Exactly! And the APIs for C were pretty easy to get your head around as well (except for some legacy cruft in dos.library), so the barrier to entry was pretty low. Sure, with things like no memory protection it wouldn't fly today, but at the time it was a revolution. And things that showed up later, like MUI, still compare favorably to current frameworks. Lovely stuff.
@@UnamusedClerk The RKM's were indispensable for accessing the libraries and hardware capabilities back in the day. Definitely a joy to program the Amiga!
@@UnamusedClerk Carl Sassenrath actually wanted to include memory protection in the OS but the cost of adding a 68451 MMU was deemed too high. You can see spots in the design where he had the capability in mind, but by the time MMUs became cheaper (or integrated in the 68030) it was too late and too much software would've broken.
@@RobertTempleton64 I still have the three original manuals somewhere: the "Libraries and Devices", "Exec", the hardware manual, the AmigaDOS manual (all for OCS machines), and later, the User Interface Style Guide. Yes, AmigaOS was nice, and it's interesting to disassemble the ROM, so you can see what parts were written in C, and what was coded in assembler. It did suffer from some issues, though, and I'm not just talking about BCPL pointers (although those were pretty bad). I'm also not talking about the lack of memory protection. No, it's about the way that C structs were used. It's been argued that AmigaOS is kind-of object-oriented, because for example a Process struct inherits from a Task, and something else that I forgot. That proved a bit of a challenge when they moved to AmigaOS 2.0, and the Task struct had to be expanded. That space wasn't in the Process struct, so they had to improvise with sticking things at the end. Arguably, this could have been solved a bit neater, for example by using an extra level of indirection. Has-a, rather than is-a. Having said all that, I did my first proper development on the Amiga, and I've always been a stickler for the rules; the "proper" way to write software. And it has helped me a lot in my career.
My brother (11yrs older than me) sold me his A2000 in 1992 (I was in 3rd grade, 8-9 yrs old). It's like I remember every single minute of that first (and long) day I owned that computer. I couldn't believe that I got such awesomeness in my room. At least since then I was in awe for these Amigas - until today. Updated it with Kick 3.1 and 8mb fast ram in 1993 or 1994 (childhood savings). Also a color Monitor (just had an amber monitor till then). Wanted a CD-Drive so badly. Said A2000 is in the basement in an overhauled condition and is ready for use. Can't wait to invite my brother to come over and playin' some old classics (he's living 500km away). I just LOVE them Amigas!
Sold? Makes me a bit sad to hear that, if my little brother hadn't died of childs death at the age of 3 months back in 1989 i would have gladly gifted him any of my computer stuff i didn't need anymore, maybe even passing the odd upgrade just so that we had comparable machines. I loved my little brother and even after all these years i still dearly miss him. 😢
When I got my Amiga 500, my parents bought it second hand. It came with a "moitor" that was actually a TV which just happened to look like a monitor. My parents would have never let me have TV in my room at age 12 so I did my best to not let them find out.
Wow, werent allowed to have a tv in your room? Crazy. Ok, sure maybe they didnt want you watching the "violent 80s tv shows" (roll eyes -- today they'd be considered rated-G children stuff) but wow thats rough. For me, thankfully my parent bought it with a real monitor. I remember when computers finally caught on with the general public in the mid-90s and the public were in awe by the clarity of monitors vs tvs. And here i was confused why they thought it was special since most of us "nerds" (does that word even exist today since everyone uses a computer) had crisp monitors for many years prior.
The Amiga was a work of art and you felt that when you used one. I often wonder where we would be today had the Amiga not been mismanaged by Commodore.
The marketing for the Amiga was terrible, especially here in North America. They stupidly tried to compete directly with IBM and PC Compatibles for the business market. If they were smart, they would have either targeted the gaming industry or the arts industry. The reason why the C64 and VIC-20 (and to a lesser extent the 128) sold so well was because they sold them in big chain stores like K-Mart (as well as Zeller's, Canadian Tire, etc. here in Canada)
Around 1985 I was 13 and a real tearaway. Me and a couple of others would be shoplifting and breaking into places and being antisocial idiots. One day, completely out of the blue - 2 huge boxes turned up at home with my name on them. It was an Amiga 1000 with the ram expansion and a Philips CM8833 monitor (it had a green screen switch!) - My mum knew how much trouble I was getting in to and knew that the only way out of this was by getting a computer like this. I loved it. Never went out again for years and got through school without an issue. Damocles and Mercenary/Mercenary II along with Elite, Starglider II & Sentinel would be my absolute favorite games. Thanks Mum!
The Amiga was a big leap forward in hardware, but unfortunately it then stood still while competitors progressed around it. The main thing that kept it back was software compatibility -- too many apps made too many assumptions about the hardware, and it was impossible to introduce higher-resolution graphics modes and better sound, for example, without breaking existing apps.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 That's where "compatibility modes" come in. It's the classic conundrum of "we want new, better hardware and OSs" vs "I still want to run my old software".
I'd argue that there's one that might just barely beat it out... However, it never received the success level of the Amiga and it techinqually wasn't a sold product. It was a project that produced 2,000 units. So, the Amiga is still the most innovative commercially sold personal computer that I know of. As for what is possibly the most innovative computer platform ever, the insane 16-bit 1973 computer experiment was known as the Xerox Alto. It was the first computer to have a graphical OS, one of the first to be designed to use a computer mouse, and even one of the first to have a network-based videogame! Almost everything that we know graphical OS's for can be traced back to this computer.
@@kidwolf0015 The 1973 Xerox alto was definitely insane, it took a whole decade to merely approach it, and another decade to surpass it. "Ahead of their time" would be the understatement of the century; while others where hand programming PDP/11's & MITS Altairs, and computer still had papertape and teletype paper input, these guyes did not only have a keyboard, screen and hardrive, but a 3(!) button mouse, grapical interface, and most crazy of all - email and full networking.
It fell behind the C64 in quite a few ways. No instantly ready ROM BASIC, no command screen but just a command line, no extended character set and appropriate keyboard (PETSCII), no synthesizer but just a samples player, no backwards compatibility (the C64 can run a lot of programs for older Commodore computers with no or minor modifications).
I know probably some readers would say I'm an old dude, but I have to admit, since I started my computer coding in 1984, this is by far the most dazzling computer and OS at that time. I'm still amazed by its features compared to other systems. It was way ahead of its time. Thank you for this amazing video. You reminded me of the good old days.
@@mal-avcisi9783 Yea, your right. Probably Apple and IBM pc took the cake. Me myself had IBM PC compatible and I wish to God now I saw it before buying mine.
@@mal-avcisi9783Americans are dumb, and don't do research. There were tons of stores peddling dos boxes and parents would buy those to be able to do work at home. The c64 and Atari 8bit computers were mostly getting a hard reputation for just being games machines, so when the ST and Amiga came out, they mostly had the same reputation. If more businesses had adopted them, then who knows what would have happened. But they were very niche in their use outside of games (graphics for the Amiga, Music production/dtp for the ST, and DTP for the Mac. Seems to me, most Graphic artists / Music makers were gobbled up by Apple... Meanwhile, IBM and compatibles were never all that popular in Europe at the time, plenty of places had other computer types, so diversity in platforms was easier to handle. DOS in comparison to the three big 68k based systems were a crap show to use!
Grew up on the Amiga 1000, my dad was debating between the Apple IIgs and the Amiga. He choose the Amiga. We had that computer for over a decade , it was that far ahead of its time, All my friends wanted to come and play games on it because it was "like the arcade" way better than any other stuff out. The Amiga and the stuff like the genlock adapter and the video toaster is what got me interested into video editing on a computer.. never had that stuff but read about it in all the Amiga Rags of the day.. Today I'm a professional video editor and Audio/Video Engineer.. Crazy how just exposure to that stuff from the rags of the day sucked me in. Thanks for this episode.
@@emusunlimited yeah my dad finally replaced it in 1995-96 with a x86 Windows machine. We even had it online back in the early 90's via Gophernet (only thing available then in this area) they were vary capable machines for their time, but by the mid 90's they were quickly outpaced by x86 PC's.
The Amiga was so much better than the Apple. Honestly Apples were an overpriced joke compared to the competition except for very early in the Apple 2 days. Funny how they are still over priced and under powered today.
Hi 8-Bit Guy! My son, who was 9 at the time, is a really big fan and has watched virtually all your videos. Once, in the middle of the night, after watching the Commodore history series, he sat straight up in bed, called out "Commodore, commodore!" turned over and carried on sleeping. Gave me the shock of my life 🤣 Thanks for the wonderful channel, we still enjoy watching these videos as well as the new ones! Greetings from South Africa.
@@danyf3116 The videotoaster was an incredible addon. The first completely CG music video was produced by Todd Rudgren using 16 Amiga 2000's w/ videotoasters running Lightwave Software rendering each scene in 16 million colors. The video is a mind trip of 3d modeled graphics in psychedelic coloring melding from one scene to the next.
I really enjoy your Commodore History series. Honestly, the Commodore gaming / home computing days were the best. The Amiga 1000 was really ahead of it's time!
I'm really impressed with it. I never paid it any attention, only really saw it's desktop interface. I'm completely amazed by it's graphics capabilities!
Me too! I had a 1000 and a 2000, and many of my friends I made on BBS's at the time had 500 and a mix of those. So this is pure nostalgia joy for me. (And a tiny bit of sadness haha)
@@BrawndoQC IIRC, I had, in this order, an A500, an A1000, an A3000, a CD32, an A1200 in a tower. I even owned the SX32 for the CD32, essentially turning it into an A1200, with a black CDTV keyboard. I forgot what happened to most of these computers - I think I just gave them away when I switched to PC in 1998 or so. The A1200 though looked like new and was sitting neatly wrapped in its original box in my cellar - for the past 17 years actually - until some douche bag broke into our cellar and stole it a few months ago. :-/
if i remember, it was some version of the OS that had that easter egg. so anyone who owned an amiga (and was clever enough to find it) could have seen that egg!
I distinctly remember my envy with my friends Amiga, at the time I had a brand-spanking new 386SX/2(!), that pulled nearly twice as many dhrystone as his Amiga, but, especially when it came to the games, there was just no comparison, his Amiga was, at the very least, a generation ahead of my PC, and, mind you, the Amiga wasn't new at that time. Just goes to show the power of specialized co-processing, when done right!
Even at that time, there were Amiga's which could have smashed that PC in terms of performance, the reality was though, that most Amiga owners didn't have one and so games tended to target the lowest common denominator. Even so, it was still impressive what could be attained.
Specialized coprocessing was also going on at the time with SGI. They took it to the next level. Its sad that we live in the homogenized world that the x86 created. These specialized systems had a "soul" that the x86 would never attain
@@bosborn1 I have great memories of both working with (IRIX based) SGIs and owning various models over the years. The hardware was amazing of course in its day. They were also in a whole different price bracket to the Amiga and PCs of the time so, you were certainly paying big bucks for the pleasure.
@@digitalarchaeologist5102 One of my guilty pleasures these days is playing quake on an Indigo 2 Impact. Back when I was in college we used Amiga’s running Newtek video toaster and we had an SGI lab with a bunch of Indy’s networked into a Onyx 2 server. Those were the days. I would go over the PC lab which was running Intergraphs and just laugh at how far behind the Windows based machines were. Heck even running Avid on the Old Quadra’s was a better experience than any of the PC’s I have a soft spot for collecting SGI machines. There is a beautiful Iris Indigo on eBay right now that I would love to have.
My dad bought an Amiga 2000 in the late 80's. I had the pleasure of playing Lemmings, The Lost Vikings, and so many other gems on it. I didn't realize back then how much of a luxury it was to be able to just turn on the system, pop in the game disk, and start playing (after the set up of course).
That intro is SO nostalgic at this point. Feels like I’m watching a PBS show like when I was a kid in the 90’s. I wish you many many more years of success.
The Amiga 500 was my first computer when all of my friends still had a C64... Man the look on their faces when they saw the grpahics and heard the sound of the same games... And the best thing is, I still have it and it's still working.
Great job on the video - I know it's been some time in the making but it's worth the wait to have the 8-bit Guy polish - looking forward to the future episodes. I upgraded from the C64 to the Amiga in 1990 (I was still only 10 at the time) and as the first kid to get one in our school here in the UK I had MAJOR street-cred. No one believed me when I proudly announced that I had it, I had to take a few friends back to show them before I was recognised for this major milestone. In fact, as a 41 year old now I have to look back and say that it was my Dad who deserved that credit. I lost him a few years back and through his entire life he never really got computers, but somehow he chose the C64 in 1986 when all my friends had ZX80s or Specrums and he chose the Amiga 500 - he paid £399 at Rumbelows (a long-since folded electronics store back then) - how did he just know what to buy? Looking back they were the key decisions in my life - I now work in software engineering, love my Retro and that's why I'm typing this message today - and all of it goes back to those choices - thanks Dad. And to all those from St Annes primary I'm still the king of the castle - bow and weep at the glory that was the Amiga.
similar path for me, my uncle got a C64, later my older brother sold it and put the money towards an Amiga 500. We had it until cca 1997 and I loved it to the very last day my brother sold it to buy a PC. I still have that PC by the way. I'm also an IT guy because of these influences and I love old games to this day.
You were so lucky, from other videos or looks like the c64 came with a huge manual that taught basic programming, not to mention that games clearly looked miles better than the other home computers. Sadly my parents didn't even consider buying me a book which might have changed my life forever
@@sie4431 Yes I tried to learn a bit of coding on c64 in basic using the book it came with and the examples in magazines but I was too young really. I learned a bit more basic on the BBC micro at school and translated a bit of that onto my new Amiga in AmigaBasic, but it was when I got my hands on BlitzBasic and AMOS from magazine coverdisks on the Amiga that my world changed. All of a sudden I had the tools to build stuff that could challenge production software (i hadn't learned the beauty of assembler at this point).
My brother and I almost bought an Atari ST, but then the A500 came out and we just had to have that instead. Problem was that all of the local computer shops, including all the Dixons has sold out. We spent hours driving around various towns looking for one in stock. We ended up in Preston (about 30 miles from home) and found the last one in the Dixons there. Eventually upgraded to an A1200 when they arrived, which I used until around 1999. And strangely enough I'm an engineer in computing too. 🙂
Ok, great video and I have to tell my story with the A1000. I was 14 in 1985. My dad was a farmer and school teacher. He actually gave me a 15 acre field of corn to take care of. When it was harvested he gave me the profits and I went out and bought this computer, with the 256k upgrade and a 1080 monitor. I had grown up with the VIC-20 and Commodore 64. The Amiga was so amazing! The MS BASIC was so much fun with it's real-time debugger! You could step through each line and see what was happening. Favorite computer ever.
It wasn't purely the marketing, the tech just got left behind. The AGA chipset (allowing for 256 on-screen colours on an Amiga) wasn't introduced until 1992, whereas VGA had offered that on PCs for five years at that point--plus the price of PCs was plummeting while the Amiga never seemed to get any cheaper.
@@d2factotum Clone PCs drove up the demand for more chips, and the economy of scale took over. Macs are not cheap, compared to a similar PC, but there is only Apple making them.
@@d2factotum More than that, the AGA chipset was a cost cutting compromise. The planned AAA for the 'next gen' Amigas (Amiga Advanced Architecture) would have been revolutionary at the time with a hybrid 32/64 bit retargetable graphics system.. the system began development in 1988. What could have been..
My take is that it wasn't the marketing, but the fact that there was not nearly enough R&D thrown at the machine, since the CEO and President kept taking all the profits from the company.
I had an Atari ST for some weeks and although the graphics were better than the C64 I owned at the time, I was feeling nothing using it. Then I bought an Amiga 500 and a new world opened to me
Great day when 8 bit guy uploads! Even greater when the Commodore History series gets a new episode. 2100 likes in an hour. 8 bit guy, you've made it to the big times!! 👍
When the [...] series gets a new episode. You talk like that happens with any regularity. Last time there was one before this one was a full year before we heard the word "COVID" for the first time. Go figure.
Amiga had pre-emptive multitasking OS in 1985. Even able to run a game at background. PC had pre-emptive multitasking OS in 1995 (Win95) but switching between OS and game was possible in Win2000 and XP. 10 - 15 years ahead of time and yet lost the fight. Amiga was ahead of time also in HW config using different accelerator - much like today's PC: - PC graphic card ........ Amiga's Denise - PC sound card .......... Amiga's Paula - PC 3D accelerator (3dfx Voodoo) .... Amiga's Agnus If Commodore would sell those chips as separate cards (eg. sound cards with Paula chips for ISA bus) that would be something! PC users would love to have also Amiga's graphics with 4096 colours instead horrible CGA with 4 colours. But for some reason Commodore's management rather let die whole Amiga's platform instead. The reason is that those people signed at Amiga's cover were not in management later on. Smart people were all gone. Same storey when management kicked out Steve Jobs and totally ruined Apple. Without Steve's return to Apple it would be gone like Atari and Commodore and others. Who knows how Amiga would end up if those engineers would return to save her.
@@aapaap8595 Is somebody having a bad day today? 😏 Maybe some people just find these videos relaxing to put on, and therefore play them multiple times 😉
I had a PAL Amiga 600 for several months then sold it just this year, i don’t live in PAL Land. Ultimately I can’t recommend a real Amiga, for a few reasons. 1: the Amiga was most successful in PAL areas so you either need a PAL Amiga and a compatible monitor (not easy to find) or a NTSC Amiga and less software for it. 2: the Amiga isn’t compatible with anything else here in North America, not even the most basic things like the FAT file system, so you have to ferry software to the old Amiga from a virtual Amiga using UAE, why not just use WinUAE or UAE-FS then? 3: in order for a real Amiga to be even somewhat useful today, you need at least a Gotek floppy emulator, which has limitations. If you want WHDLoad, you will have to spend money on more chip ram, more fast ram, a CPU accelerator and if your Amiga has no hard drive interface, you’ll really be needing a CPU accelerator for that as well. In other words, a real Amiga is expensive, not compatible with anything else so they’re a huge pain to load software onto nowadays and it’s a very PAL-centric system due to being a flop in the USA.
@@KoopaMedia64 Buying old hardware is pretty inconvenient compared to software emulation and FPGA devices. People talk about 'original experience', but most of them put these absurd accelerators with hundreds of megs of RAM, new unfficial ROMs they install Amiga OS that looks like it's from 2010s and they play games from hard drive with Whdload. They also install USB ports, plug interfaces with modern mice and LCD monitors/TVs. There's nothing original about this experience. Nobody had all this mess back in the day when Amiga was big. People rarely had any expansions or hard drives then. Having a dedicated monitor was a luxury and many Amigants had TVs. FS-UAE is an amazing experience and you can use a modern gamepad that is super precise and comfortable compared to these crappy Quickshot joysticks we had back then. I had Amiga and I love it, but buying like 30 years old computer for a price of a good laptop that can run everything from early arcades to PS2 is a joke. And I don't even count amount of money you need to put into all these modern addons and new parts. 🤷♂️
@@mattx5499 but not all old computers are as difficult and expensive as the Amiga. Look next door to the good old C64, all you need to play some games on a C64 is to get an SD2IEC, which takes SD cards formatted in plain old FAT32 or even just FAT16 if you want. C64s are cheap and plentiful in both NTSC and PAL, easy to work with and doesn’t require expensive extra ram or accelerators.
@@KoopaMedia64 Maybe C64 is ok in this case, but you can just use Vice and avoid all the nuisance. And Vice is not only C64 but everything 8-bit from C=. And on the same computer you can also have Ataris, Apples, Amiga, MSX, Amstrad, Speccy, consoles and arcades and so on. All in one with perfect picture, controlled by one wireless gamepad and good mouse. You can have it all on an old $100 laptop that can be taken everywhere. Why bother with an old junk that can do one thing only?
Amiga and Sharp X68000 have to be some of the juiciest systems at their respective launch (outside of SGI stations and other development hardware). Truly powerful machine head and shoulders above the competition. I think Neo Geo wins the palm on the console front. Great episode David! You found a fun an interesting angle to discuss the Amiga in your series.
Oh, the Sharp X68k and it's Yamaha YM2151. I think that computer system alone has the best version of Castlevania. To be honest, I wish I was born a bit earlier to experience the Computer Wars. But alas, I was born in the last ages of MS-DOS and near the full supremacy of Wintel.
There was another interesting machine from the early 1980s, called the Sirius/Victor 9000. It had some quite innovative hardware. Trouble is, it wasn’t quite “IBM compatible” (really, “Microsoft compatible”), so it was swept aside by the sea of mediocrity that swamped the PC market from the latter 1980s onwards.
@@NaviciaAbbot Which is funny as the Amiga had the worst version of Castlevania. The lack of good ports of Japanese games is one thing that hurt the Amiga pretty badly, but the Japanese stuff leaned heavily on sprites.
When I was around 14yrs old, My dad and I were working on a TV station’s building expansion. To my surprise, all the commercials, ads and overlays were designed on Amiga 1000s, the producer told us he loved them, and never planned to replace them. He showed us a couple of commercials and then told us how long it took to render them, mostly overnight or longer. I was astonished at how the graphics looked even in the mid 90s!
I reversed the tracks on Lotus Turbo Esprit. They were stored as ASCII, in a similar way to Manic Miner was (which I also modified and sent to Alan Maton of Software Projects). The hard part was finding the exact "inverse" character, so the track ends would meet up correctly with the start. I surprised a mate with it, who had bragged he knew the tracks "blindfold"... he soon started crashing into things again! 😁
Amazing overview of Amiga, I've been a software developer for quite some time and always heard about how Amiga architecture differed from IBM PC (and in many cases I've heard how it was "superior") but only now I understand what made it special. Thank you, The 16-Bit Guy!
Wonderful Machine. I had the A500 with 1MB RAM Expansion and 3 Drives which was killer for its Time. Many Guys came after school to me to play with it. Most had C64 or Atari ST. Well i was lucky because the guy who sold it had no idea about the market price and my Dad negotiated it even more down. Otherwise he couldnt afford it. Sadly my Amiga Died in 1995 because the Disk was stuck in the internal Drive. :( Later i decided to Sell all remaining Hardware since i couldnt afford with 13 years a new one. Ah man what memories. Thank you for reminding me of my old Days Your Videos are fantastic and go deep into Details. Keep it up your amazing work. Regards From Germany.
LGR and an 8-Bit Guy upload on the same day. One a sequel to their visit to the Computer Reset warehouse, and the other the long-awaited next installment to on Commodore History. How about that! I was nervous about these Amiga videos for a while; while I was able to get a good sense of how each computer worked on previous videos, the Amiga ecosystem is such a behemoth of revisions and add-ons and enhancements on top of their more advanced hardware that I wouldn't be able to tell which way was up or down with an Amiga. But I continue to underestimate the 8-Bit Guy's ability to make something comprehensive; when I walk away from this video, I feel like I know what an Amiga is, what it can do and how, for the first time in my life. Great job. I look forward to the next installment, and the next video in general, 8-Bit Guy.
When I first saw an Amiga 1000 and it was love at first sight... I got the monitor, extra floppy, and the memory upgrade... I tell people what you said about it being a quantum leap and they don't believe me, you're right I think Win-95 or so was when I think PC's caught up with the Amiga... and still wasn't as cool. I was saddened when I retired my Amiga for a 386 machine because it didn't, how to express this feeling?, Well it was more of a clinical feeling a machine without a soul and as the PC's of today progress, that spirit of what a PC meant is further divorced from the public. If you never had one of these machines, then (no disrespect) but you lack the full appreciation of it without the experience. I think this RU-vid video reaches closest to having that experience without actually owning one. Thank you so much for making this video and I look forward the rest of the series!
I ran my Amiga 3000 (and 500) into my university years and I did not buy my first PC until it felt like it had truly superseded what the Amiga could do for similar money. And that was when the Celeron 300A and the NVidia TnT came to market in the late 90's. That combination got me hooked on Quake 2 deathmatch and never let go :) Of course now I mostly use my PC for games, entertainment and work. Computery playtime is mostly on my macMini since it is the best combination of a Unix-like development environment and support for every GUI-app under the sun... I'm happy that Apple survived the 90's as the computer world would have been exceptionally bleak with only Microsoft in it.... It's cool though that the Amiga community lives on and it's absolutely incredible that new hardware just keeps getting released for it!
@@valcrist7428 LOL! OMG you're so right!!! That's not what made the computers cool in the day, of course the memory, graphics, sound are 6 orders of magnitude greater, but it was the DIY part that made it fun. Games today take an army of people to make, I did it in my spare bedroom (Muncher VIC-20, 1982 sold by Video Wizards) The computer comes in such a way like LEGO bricks that you have to put together and make something. LED's in the CPU case! Dang give me a break!!! LOL
Fancy rich guy! I had a Tandy TRS80, a Packard Bell (can't remember the model) then the Tandy 1000HX, then I think the IBM PS/1 , never could afford the Amiga. Fun times I remember sititng hours on PC with BBS's, Compuserve, typing in BASIC programs in the magazines, etc.
It's hard to describe innit to people today just HOW much BETTER it was than everything else. It was a MENTAL leap. It did EVERYTHING. Things no one thought possible for a computer costing what it did at the time. Like it was so far ahead it was mind boggling.
@@zollotech I'm trying to remember ..the TRS-80 was produced in 79, and I got it in 82 when I was almost finished with high school, but the 90's were when it really took off while in college, fun times.
It’s hard to capture the impact of seeing an Amiga 1000 in 1985. I will literally remember every moment of that demo until my deathbed. I can only describe it as someone demoing an iPhone to you in 1997… except almost nobody bought it or even understood what it would be useful for. Nitpick: “That means that no one application can hog the system or even freeze the system if it crashes.” Although unrelated to cooperative vs. pre-emptive multitasking, it might be worth clarifying this statement in future episodes; the lack of protected memory (for reasons explained in “The Future Was Here”) means that (as I’m sure you know) programs indeed have the ability to crash other programs.
I remember in 1988 my buddy had the Amiga in his dorm room and it was the VERY first time I had ever seen DIAL UP!!! He took us to a really cool BBS with text adventures and discussions...I was totally blown away...
I had an Amiga 500. It was an incredible computer. It literally multitasks at the command line, (i.e. you can have 3-4 command line windows open and do something different in each one at the same time). This is before you even load the Workbench GUI.
as a tech obsessed person who was 10 in 1980, the 80s were truely a magical time for nerds. So many different systems and such an incredibly fast progress, it was dizzying. I loved my A2000 (modded with a 68030, an actual hard drive and extra ram) and was really sad when I had to sell it to get a 486 with Windows3.11 for my CS studies. It was an incredible machine.
Out of all the "retro" machines I've used, I've found that the Amiga is also the most "future-proof" in a few senses. Between just how the OS worked, the upgrades available while the system was current, and the crazy things being made for the platform now, I'd gladly choose the Amiga as my computer to use in a bunker during a nuclear war.
@@drphilxr Oh for sure. I have an A500 that's been stuck in a Checkmate case with so many upgrades it looks modern. Hell, it even has USB! Once my zz9000 arrives I'll have something really special.
It's finding new life in the arduino/raspberry pi world now. I have a $30 controller here, literally a couple of mm smaller than the original 68000 "candy bar" package, that I can emulate the Amiga OS on. Just search for the words 'teensy' and 'amiga'.
The only drawback to the Amiga is that I kind of wish they would have added a SID chip to go along with the Paula and made it downward compatible with the C64, much like what Commodore did with the 128. Hell, pretty much all the 8 bit Commodore line were all downward compatible with the PET
@@lordevyl8317 The Amiga is not a Commodore, completely different architecture and OS, it could never be compatible. It was Commodores biggest mistake not to develop an own 16-bit computer in time, compatible with the C64, which could have killed even the IBM PC and clones. A compatible 16-bit CPU by WDC was around since 1983. A former collaboration between Commodore and WDC had gone wrong, perhaps that prevented it.
I went from a ZX Spectrum 48K to an Amiga 500 in the early 90's. I still remember the first game I played on it, Shadow of the Beast 2 and how amazed by it I was.
An Amiga 500 was my very first foray into emulation. I already owned a C64 previously, so that was a no brainer. Since then, emulation has grown into a nostalgic passion when I REALLY need to decompress and go back to simpler times for a few hours.
"With its built-in video output, speech synthesis, sampled stereo sound, slick GUI, multitasking OS, and superb graphics hardware, the 15-year-old Amiga 1000 is like Buckminster Fuller's streamlined Dymaxion car of 1933: an object from a future that never arrived." (Mark Frauenfelder, WIRED Magazine 8.03). Dave, you should use this quote in the next episode on Amiga. Also do a search 'Amiga at NASA' for some amazing revelations about how useful it was to the U.S. space program.
The Amiga fell behind the C64 in quite a few ways. No instantly ready ROM BASIC, no command screen but just a command line, no extended character set and appropriate keyboard (PETSCII), no synthesizer but just a samples player, no backwards compatibility (the C64 can run a lot of programs for older Commodore computers with no or minor modifications).
@@NuntiusLegis The Amiga technology was completely unrelated to anything Commodore had produced before and so even if they had seen any worth in compatability it would have been impossible. In any case, nobody was buying an Amiga in the hopes of using 8-bit software, that was the past and the Amiga was the future.
@@danyoutube7491 Yeah, backwards-compatibility means nothing to people - WRONG. The IBM clones have been the most successfull line of computers not least because they have always been very backwards compatible, people used 16-bit software for a long time on 32-bit PCs, and 32-bit software is still used on 64-bit PCs today. The C64 was the most widespread computer of it‘s day, so a backwards-compatible 16-bit computer by Commodore in time, combining top multimedia and office usability, would have been a hit the Amiga could only have dreamed of. This could also have been an IBM-(clone-)killer, and thus Commodore‘s ticket not ony to survival, but to keeping the world market leadership they had achieved with the C64. And it would totally have been possible, a compatible 16-bit CPU by WDC had been around since 1983. Apple used this in the IIGS which was backwards compatible with their 8-bit computers (II-line). They slowed it down significantly because they thought that otherwise it would have killed the Mac. I guess Commodore missed the opportunity because a former collaboration with WDC-founder Bill Mensch, when they had still been making calculators, had gone terribly wrong. The Amiga had nothing in common with the former computers by Commodore not because it was new and 16-bit, but because it was actually not made by Commodore, they just bought it. But all that was not even my point, I just gave an outline of nice capabilities the C64 does have and the Amiga does not have. I heard of quite some people who, like me, owned an Amiga after the C64 and were disappointed. I switched back to the C64 after a few months and used that as my main computer again until I got my first IBM-clone.
Bought me a CD32 with a tf330 and love it. All my favorite games in one system and buttery smoth grapix. A pure bundle of joy. Found a 1000 keyboard to it and a honeybee kontroller. The optimal Amiga experience without busting the bank fore something like a Amiga 4000. I realy wanted an CD32 back in 1993 but culd never afford it then. I thought the future was there. So right and wrong I was... R.I.P Amiga Commodore.
I have always been a PC kid, mostly because my dad used to have them because of his job and I just grew up around them exclusively. I've always been slightly annoyed by the praise for the Amiga, especially around the Demo Scene, but man. After this video, I totally get it. When this machine spat out photo realistic images, my dad was just about to upgrade from his trustee Hercules card. Leaps and bounds ahead.
Hah, yeah - us PC guys were seeing that term bandied about in the mid-90s. “Photo realistic” VGA graphics, years later. The brute force CPU method (vs. having everything on a co-proc) definitely made more sense in the long term, but it wasn’t until the _late_ 90s that it actually paid off.
This is why Amiga fans have somewhat of a reputation for being so zealous about the platform because they see what could have been... what should have been. It might be hard to imagine now, but seeing the Amiga do its stuff back in the day when you're used to 8 bits and monochrome PCs just blew my mind. I had to have one. Ironically, it often had the reputation of just being a games machine and wasn't a serious computer because it didn't have Lotus 1-2-3, yet it was never about capability. It was way more capable. People just assumed a serious computer had to be monochrome and run a spreadsheet otherwise it was a just a toy. Thanks to marketing too. So ironic when spreadsheets require like hardware accelerated GPUs these days. Of course the Amiga is not the only example. The Acorn Archimedes is another range which was way ahead of its time and deserved more market than it got.
@@digitalarchaeologist5102 Amiga had spreadheets and wordprocessors that could import files from and export to Lotus 1-2-3 and popular wordprocessors from the PC. It also had CrossDOS that made 720KB 3.5" PC floppies readable/writable on the Amiga. You could also connect Amiga and PC through parallel port. Te problem is that these programs and features weren't advertised at all. So Amiga was seen as gaming and creative software machine and not office work machine. I tried some of the best Amiga office/productivity software like wordprocessors, spreadsheets, database, printing apps etc. Many of them had WYSIWYG interface with features we take as standard today. And yeah all that worked on AmigaOS 1.x. And these programs could be launched at the same time and have their own color schemes intependent from the OS. Even you could set up these programs to run in 2, 4, 8 or 16 colours! All that on a computer released back in 1985.
Having worked at Commodore and lived through some of this history, I have to say that your presentation of the custom chips was excellent! Very well described at the right level for the audience and did caught much of the flavor of just how special the Amiga really was (both SW and HW). Kudos sir!
After using the Amiga in the 80s, I felt like a time traveler, gone back to some prehistoric time whenever I had to use other machines...this feeling didn't go away into well into the 2000s (with the advent of the iPad - which I ordered the first release wifi-only version).
When I was a kid back in '88, I was visiting a friend and his dad had an Amiga. When I played the games on it, it was frigging awesome and like nothing I had played before. I loved the unique art style that seemed to run through a lot of their games and even to this day I can still tell it's an Amiga game - plus it was good times as a kid, so it helps to bring me back to those times :)
Yea... friend of mine had a VIC-20, and I had a Commodore 64. We used to play around with BASIC a bit as kids... But I quickly figured out that the C64 was better than the VIC-20... Then one day that friend got an Amiga 500... What the heck was this sorcery!? Eventually I saved up to get an Amiga of my own, and we'd code with AMOS on our Amigas. And things just went from there.
This was a nice blast from the past. As a former Amiga owner, you did touch on all the important points. Well done. The only thing I felt was missing was an Eric Schwartz animation!
I love your Commodore History series. They are well documented, and really pleasant to watch! I was on the Atari side, and so grew up with an ST. But now I can say it: the Amiga was the best for videogames, even if nostalgia kicks in when I'm talking about ST :D
After playing Pac Man on the 800 in the early 80's I wanted one badly. I eventually bought a demoed C64 with accessories for a great price, so I was a Commodore guy but always had a thing for the 800. Regardless of system it was a great time to be alive.
When you had the CLI up, I was waiting for you to mention Long file names. That was another thing Amiga had that most computers of that era didn't. Great video, I always like to watch anything Amiga.
I was at school and 6th form college in the late 80s and went to university in 1991. While I knew of the c64 and Amiga and the Atari st before going to university All the people I knew that owned a computer had either a pc Mac or acorn bbc micro or Archimedes micro. When I got to university the balance of computer owners was much more 40% pc 45% Amiga 10% Atari st and the remaining were Apple and acorn system. I loved the Amiga it was so groundbreaking and I feel luck to have been involved in computing when you had lots of choices in platforms, and you could understand the principles of how it all worked. Btw the university I attended used exclusively sun workstations or terminals off sun servers.
Back in those days the different platforms all had different niches. The Amiga's was video production thanks to its genlock features, the Atari ST was for music due to its built in MIDI interface, the PC was a business machine because it came from IBM and the Mac was desktop publishing probably because Apple developed a laser printer to go with it.
My local computer store in 85, The Floppy Wizard, had one of these running 24/7 to demonstrate their performance. Like others in the comments mentioned, an amazing time. Thank you for the memories.
Amazing video that brings back fond memories and a lot of nostalgia for those wonderful machines that Amigas were! Only one minor remark: almost all of the pictures that you showed as examples of HAM graphics were indeed regular 32 colors images, just beautifully crafted.
you always mentioned how the graphics quality of the amiga was just so amazing that you almost had to be there to experience it. your commodore history videos in my opinion does a really great job at putting you in that time period so for when you watch this video, even on a phone that has 100s of times more processing power than this, you can finally experience just how amazing the graphics were. very well done!
That Amiga Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 Intro still one of the best game tracks off all time... battle chess is where my father taught me chess rules for the first time and I'm an avid player to this day.. ahh, very good memories with this glorious machine.
Brings back a lot of memories. I think it was in 1985 that I saw the Amiga 1000 being demonstrated at a local shopping mall. At the time we were using underpowered Macs and not-so-user-friendly IBM PC ATs. I instantly fell in love with the Amiga, and soon after, I bought one. Later Commodore offered an upgrade program so I traded it in for an Amiga 2000.
this video was absolutely worth the wait, I am a huge fan of the amiga line of computers and absolutely love the amiga 600 my dad brought home in 2006. really looking forward to seeing the next episodes, especially the a600 one
I worked in a computer store in the early 90s that bought, sold, and repaired older computer equipment. We could not keep the Amigas in stock. If one came in, it was gone that same day or by the next day. When the game Pinball Fantasies came out, it flew off the shelves. We re-ordered it multiple times until the suppliers told us that they could not get any more. It was a really sad day to see Commodore go out of business. It was the end of a great computer and gaming era. The graphics and gameplay were far superior to any other platform of the day.
Ah, those were the days. I got my very first serious tendonitis playing Elite on my Amiga back in the day. It was the first time the specialist doctor had come across someone getting tendonitis from using a computer, he didn't believe me. Proud to have been a pioneer.
I'm currently reading Bil Herd's "Back into the storm". Highly recommended book for anyone interested in the history of the Commodore TED series, Commodore 16, Commodore 128 and various other models that never made it like the 116/264/364.
There's a video of a (quite recent) talk he gave about how he ended up at MOS, later Commodore, and how things were back in the day here on RU-vid. Unfortunately, I don't remember the channel it is on, but I'm quite sure you - or anyone interested - will be able to easily find it. It's about an hour long IIRC, and it's absolutely worth watching.
Now that brings back memories. Thank you, sir. Still have both my A500 and A1200(this one originally belonged to my dad, who gave it to me to replace my aging 500 when he upgraded) downstairs. Last I checked, it was all working, though the 1200 floppy drive was a bit iffy, the hard disk still worked, though. 1200 had a lot done to it over the years, accelerator(68030 at 50mHz) and RAM expansion(first 4mb, then later 8mb) card, as well as a 1gb hard disk and CD-ROM drive later on. Spent many an hour on both those machines. Played probably hundreds of games, but special shout out goes to Sensible Soccer(as well as, or maybe especially, SWOS), Ultimate Soccer Manager, Worms, Cannon Fodder and Settlers. There were also some great PD and shareware games I played from magazine cover CDs that I can't recall the names of, except Deluxe Galaga AGA, which was a great Galaga clone/update.
you might want to give it a thorough check as the capacitors were a bit dodgy and prone to leaking causing acid damage to the board most of the time people will replace the capacitors with modern solid-state ones to prolong the life.
@@jonsouth1545 To be fair, I replaced it(and about 10 other machines) with emulators long ago due to the aforementioned issue with DF0: on the A1200(a lot of games will only work from DF0) and the disks themselves succumbing to bit rot. The SCSI adapter is also broken, so I can't use the CD-ROM drive, either. Add the financial burden of it all, and yeah, it just isn't feasible. It's why they haven't been booted in so long.
How you experienced the home computer revolution of the 80's depended so much on your precise age (and your parents socio-economic status!) in my opinion. I was 7 in 85 so while I remember being in awe at the few Amiga demos in boutique computer stores, I never once saw or used one in "the wild". In fact, it is only as an adult and thanks to awesome channels like David's that I now understand that Commodore was, in my estimation, the most prolific, successful and impressive computer maker of the 80's. The way that they (and Atari) were so quickly obliterated by the PC-compatible onslaught of the 90's is insane.
I started with a 500 and eventually went through the 2000, the 3000, and finally the 4000. In later years thinking back, I considered the 3000 to be the best model, especially for business applications. (I ran a small gfx company courtesy of that mighty machine) There was just something about it... I'm guessing it's the computer they use in heaven :) Please consider doing an episode on the dear old 3000, it always gets forgotten.
I always thought the Amiga 3000 was the best looking of the lot, though the A1000 is pretty nice looking too. I couldn't afford the A3000 at the time it came out, a few years later I could afford to upgrade and got a lightly used A4000. What was cool about the A3000 was the built in deinterlacer or scan-doubler. Of course the A4000 by this point could do 31kHz horizontal scan with 72Hz refresh scan rate natively.
@@marcusdamberger 100% agreed. Always felt Amiga 3000 was the best looking followed by the Amiga 1000. Beautiful works of art those 2. I also loved the Commodore 128D design. When i was a small kid i ended up buying an Amiga 3000 for a friend who then ended up paying me back for the quick purchase -- had to be done since it was a great deal and my friend, who was much older than me wanted to start a video company but had no money but despite being a kid, and a friend, i decided to buy it for him. He still runs a video company and that company is very big now. Haven't talked to him since the fall of C=. That was the closest i ever go to owning an Amiga 3000 sadly. I did get to own an Amiga 500, 2000, 1000 (got it brand new for $100 w/512KB of ram -- misprint!), and then a 1200 (so in that order).
Thanks! This was an awesome trip down memory lane! I regret not learning how to use my Amiga not only as a gaming platform. Maybe I was too young and I didn't know English yet.
The Amiga 1000 holds some of my fondest memories from my youth. We got it in '85 when it was released. I have a MISTer now to perhaps relive some of that with my kid. :)
The 3DO was developed, both hardware and software, by Amiga developers. The operating system, called Portfolio, was a fully 32bit preemptive multitasking system which was way more advanced than peers and attempted to correct issues with Amiga's OS. Recently the source code was leaked as well as versions from the followup system the M2.
