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Amiga, Amiga

The Amiga was most commercially successful as a home computer, although early Commodore advertisements attempted to place the Amiga into several different markets at the same time.

The first model was released in 1985 as simply "The Amiga from Commodore", later to be retroactively dubbed the Amiga 1000. The following year the Amiga product line was expanded with the introduction of two new models; the Amiga 2000 for high-end graphics and business use, and the Amiga 500 was for home use. Commodore later released several new Amiga models, both for low-end gaming use and high-end productivity use.

However, in 2000, Gateway sold the Amiga brand without releasing a product.

They were previously selling the AmigaOne via an international dealer network. The AmigaOne is a PowerPC computer designed to run the latest version of AmigaOS, which was itself licensed to a Belgian-German company, Hyperion Entertainment.

The Amiga was also one of the first computers for which inexpensive sound sampling and video digitization accessories were available.

This allows users to run Amiga software without the need for an actual Amiga computer.

Low-cost Amiga models come with CPUs either socketed or soldered onto the motherboard. On all Amiga models the CPU can be upgraded through an expansion card or direct CPU replacement. CPU cards were provided by both Commodore and third-party manufacturers. These cards often come with on-board memory slots and hard drive interfaces, alleviating those tasks from the base Amiga.

The first is the OCS, followed by the ECS and finally the AGA. What all these chipsets have in common is that they handle raster graphics, digital audio and communication between various peripherals (e.g., CPU, memory and floppy disks) in the Amiga.

The brightness of the Amiga's power LED is used to indicate the status of the Amigas 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, the power LED had no relation to the filter's status, a wire needed to be manually soldered between pins on the sound chip to disable the filter. Paula can read directly from the system's RAM, using direct memory access (DMA), making sound playback without CPU intervention possible.

These were sometimes combined into the one device, particularly on big-box Amigas like the A2000, A3000 and A4000.

The PPC CPU on PowerUp boards is usually used as a coprocessor for heavy computations (a powerful CPU is needed to run for example MAME, but even decoding JPEG pictures and MP3 audio was considered heavy computation in those years). It is also possible to ignore the 68k CPU and run Linux on the PPC (project Linux APUS), but a PPC-native Amiga OS was not available when the PPC boards first appeared.

This was a powerful video effects board which turned the Amiga into an affordable video processing computer which found its way into many professional video environments. Due to its NTSC-only design it did not find a market in countries that used the PAL standard, such as in Europe. In PAL countries the OpalVision card was popular, although less featured and supported than the Video Toaster. Low-cost time base correctors specifically designed to work with the Toaster quickly came to market, most of which were designed as standard Amiga bus cards.

AmigaOS 4.0 had been available only in developer pre-releases for numerous years until the final update was 'released' in December 2006. Due to the nature of some provisions of the contract between Amiga Inc. and Hyperion Entertainment the Belgian-German firm which is developing the OS, the commercial AmigaOS had only been available licensed to buyers of AmigaOne motherboards.

DraCo also offers an Amiga-compatible ZORRO-II expansion bus and introduced a faster custom DraCoBus, capable of 30 MB/sec transfer rates (faster than Commodore's ZORRO-III). The technology was later used in the Casablanca system, a set-top-box also designed for non-linear video editing.

The Minimig is a personal project of Dutch engineer Dennis van Weeren. Minimig replicates the Amiga OCS custom chipset inside an FPGA. The original model was built on a Xilinx Spartan 3 development board, but now a dedicated board has been demonstrated. The design for Minimig was released as Open Source on July 25, 2007. In December, 2007, an Italian company Acube Systems announced plans to commercially produce the original Minimig. In February 2008 Acube began selling Minimig boards.

It was one of the first commercially available consumer operating system for personal computers to implement preemptive multitasking http://www.amiga.com/amigaos/ . Other features included combining a graphical user interface with a command-line interface, allowing long filenames permitting whitespace and not requiring a file extension and the use of information files associated with other files to store icon, launch and other desktop data.

Dvorak Like other operating systems of the time, the OS lacks memory protection. This is necessary also because the 68000 CPU of the first Amiga computers does not include a memory management unit, and because there is no way of enforcing use of flags indicating memory to be shared.

Among other unusual features of Amix is a hardware-accelerated windowing system which can scroll windows without copying data. Amix is not supported on the later Amiga systems based on 68040 or 68060 processors.

Both require a CPU with MMU such as the 68020 with 68851 or full versions of the 68030, 68040 or 68060. There is also a version of Linux for Amigas with PowerPC accelerator cards. Debian and Yellow Dog Linux can run on the AmigaOne.

MAME (the arcade machine emulator) is also available for Amiga systems with PPC accelerator card upgrades.

Software was often developed for the Amiga and the Atari ST simultaneously, since the ST shared a similar architecture.

Normally this code passes control back to the OS, continuing to boot from the device or partition it was loaded from. The first production Amiga, the Amiga 1000, needed to load Kickstart from floppy disk into 256 kilobytes of RAM reserved for this purpose, but subsequent Amigas held Kickstart in ROM. Some games and demos for the A1000 (notably Dragon's Lair ) provided an alternative code-base in order to use the extra 256 kilobytes of RAM for data.

Commodore released a bouncing ball demo at the 1978 Consumer Electronics Show, to illustrate the capabilities of the VIC chip. A similar theme was used to demonstrate the capabilities of the Amiga computer at the 1984 Consumer Electronics Show. It was a real-time animation showing a red-and-white balloon bouncing forth and back off the edges of the screen, as a deep 'boing!' sound played on each impact. Since then, the Boing Ball became one of the most well-known symbols for Amiga and compatible computers. Within the context of this tradition of bouncing ball demos at the Consumer Electronics Show, CBS Electronics also showed a Bouncing Ball demo for the Atari VCS/2600, with a spinning and bouncing ball, at the same event.

It was specifically designed to take advantage of the Amiga's custom graphics and sound hardware, achieving a level of speed and smoothness not previously seen on a home computer. This demo operated in an Intuition Screen, allowing the higher resolution Amiga Workbench screen to be dragged down to make the Boing Ball visible from behind, bouncing up above the Workbench while the Workbench remained fully active. Since the Boing Ball used almost no CPU time, this made a particularly impressive demonstration of multitasking at the time.

The official Amiga trademark was a rainbow-colored double checkmark. After the bankruptcy of Commodore, the Boing Ball remained in use as one of the symbols for Amiga-related systems on hundreds of web sites and products by different companies and individuals.

The most popular Amiga magazine, Amiga Format , continued to publish editions until 2000, some six years after Commodore filed for bankruptcy. Another magazine, Amiga Active , was launched in 1999 and was published until 2001. Interest in the platform is high enough to sustain a specialist column in the UK weekly magazine Micro Mart.

The video was discovered on two old Amiga floppies in a drawer in Warhol's studio and repaired in 2006 by the Detroit Museum of New Art.

This is another example of long lifetime reliability of Amiga hardware, as well as professional use. Amigas were also used at Kennedy Space Center to run strip-chart recorders, to format and display data, and control stations of platforms for Delta rocket launches.

Source: Wikipedia > Amiga