The Amiga is a very interesting case. It started out extremely capable, with a complex architecture with multiple coprocessors tightly coupled to memory and the CPU.
As time passed, that complexity made it more difficult to build newer, better Amigas that were compatible with the software already written for it. All its unique features - graphics, 2D acceleration, audio - made it complicated to improve the machine. The PC, on the other hand, was very easy - you could throw out your CGA card and get an EGA or VGA, the same way you could plug in a generic sound card and get MIDI and PCM audio, along with an IDE port for a CD-ROM.
If the value proposition held, it could have survived longer, but this business of getting a new computer in order to get better video output gets expensive very quickly. I had EGA on my 10MHz XT-compatible and it was great.
Commodore was stuck in the 8-bit home computer model - mostly non-upgradable machines. This was the 1000 (it had a little upgradability), the 500, the 600, and the 1200. The 2000, 3000, and 4000 were seen as their professional counterparts, but they were all saddled by being compatible with games written for their built-in video and audio hardware that was quickly becoming inadequate compared to PCs.
Sadly, Atari didn't have as much custom hardware it would need to evolve, but still never quite made the leap from their self-contained machines to more modular ones that'd make it easier to compete with PCs. When they did, they opted for the VME bus instead of something simpler (such as a 16-bit ISA bus).
Impressively, near their deaths, both made PCs, but the PCs didn't share anything with their proprietary jewels. Both companies should know much better.
In 1992, I went from Amiga to a PC solely because of Wolfenstein 3D. I already felt like I was clinging to the Amiga platform. Most of my other friends in the Amiga world had moved on to other platforms. Doom came out about a year later, near Christmas 1993, IIRC.
The author bought their Amiga 500 in early 1992! It was already a "classic" by then.
I remember those extremely early days, which were filled with slow releases, I must say - but it was a singular experience, playing with that hardware. I left and came back with an Amiga 2000 in 1988 and that was a great time - a peak time to be an Amigoid.
1992 does seem late for a first Amiga - and a 500; I had an A1200 in '92.
I still have two Amigas that I use often (1000, 2000 '020) and a PowerPC "Amiga," that I rarely power on.
My experience mirrors yours, I got my first Amiga 500 in 1986, and besides gaming, it was my home programming rig until 1994. I was studying informatics and while everybody was stuck on monochrome 640Kb MS-DOS equipped PS/2 programming a few hundred lines of Turbo Pascal at most, I had the joy of venturing into a modern OS with multitasking, GUI, a complex file system, writing stuff in AmigaBASIC, compiling my first programs with AC-Basic. Then I started learning C and Intuition, and built several GUI programs. I finally spent a couple years writing like, 300K SLOC of Motorola 68000 assembly, which resulted in a basic, but very fast text editor, and two fractal generators capable of almost matching the performance of FractInt on a PC. My knowledge of C and GUIs finally landed me my very first job as junior developer in august 1994, thanks to my Amiga! Literally a dream come true in Italy. My very first paycheck was spent buying an A4000, but by then I realized the Amiga had lost, and sadly returned it to the seller in exchange for an ugly stupid Pentium PC with Microsoft Windows 3.1, which had far superior graphics, sound, memory, disk and computing power, though it was soulless. The Commodore Amiga OTOH will always have a little place in my heart.
Blake, I have to say you had to have had a VERY cool childhood growing up with your mom helping you get some then cutting edge tech like that in the mid 80s. I have to wonder what a typical 80s kid's exposure to computers was like back then and the discoverability of it all, because computers of any kind in the states were generally very niche in family homes back then, let alone Amiga computers.
Yep, I was lucky. We were a middle-class family and my mom and dad did support my extreme passion in computers. I went through a huge amount of systems.
I would buy one, love it, read about another and finally put the first in the newspaper for sale ( https://bytecellar.com/2019/05/08/computer-classifieds-datin... ) and move to the next, with funds added in by my parents to cover the different. I was very lucky in that! (The link shared shows actual scans of the newspaper ads I ran, selling some of the systems back in the '80s.)
Thank you for sharing your story and experience Blake. I was born in the late 80s, and my very first introduction to computers was via my dad’s white-box homemade 486 DX/33 PC running MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 (which from what I understand was pretty hot stuff for 1992 when he built it) and I believe we were the only household on our street that had any kind of PC at that point. My dad even dabbled in BBSes of the day and DOS games, in addition to his usual productivity stuff with WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.
Sadly, I missed out on the more fun era of computers from the 80s, as PCs became quite the tour-de-force by the time the 90s rolled in. So I made it my mission to procure some classic computers from time to time and use them for awhile before selling them. My current retro system of choice is a modded Atari 520ST with 1 MB of RAM via a Marpet XTRA-RAM expansion.
> I have to wonder what a typical 80s kid's exposure to computers was like back then and the discoverability of it all, because computers of any kind in the states were generally very niche in family homes back then, let alone Amiga computers.
Platform studies as an interdisplinary discipline should, and usually does, pay attention to the subtleties of different markets; many an enthusiast's dabblings in history do not, thereby often enough mimicking the sort of Ereignisgeschichte ("event history") from other fields hobbyists gravitate to, e. g. military history.
I, for my part, value Datagubbe's account as an interesting meditation on personal computing realities, and therefore choices, in the Sweden of the late 80s to early 90s.
Born in 84 myself, first major introduction to computing was in '89 or '90, my grade school had received about 20 Apple 2e with various edutainment titles.
Ya, the author's timeline doesnt mesh with mine. In my memory the amiga was dead long before 1995. Wing commander was 91/92, which blew away anything on amiga. The great microprose simulations also started in 91/92 when the best Amiga could barely run the original civilization.
Yep, one of the first games that really needed a chunky pixel video memory layout (which the Amiga lacked). Amiga's planar arrangement was perfect for platformers, which was the target of the Amiga gfx hardware design.
It was not like lot's of very talented Amiga devs didn't try their very best to create a Wolfenstein/Doom clone for their platform, but iirc the bitplane setup used by Amiga gfx, which enabled lot's of other cool features did not perform well with the opereations needed for "3D" games.
Then with Quake, the 3rd party 3D graphics cards market took off, and even if there were cards for the Amigas too, market economics made them unviable.
And even though I usually appreciate Datagubbe's writings, this time I think his take is incorrect. At least in my circles Wolfenstein / Doom and ultimately Quake was the final nails in the Amiga's coffin.
Sure, the picture is bigger - PC market drove down prices and very soon the price/performance difference was very unfavorable for Amiga - but at least initially the issue was kids wanted to play Wolfenstein, Doom, or at least something similar, and that was not possible if you stayed on the Amiga.
> Games consoles killed the Amiga, just like they did all other home computers that were primarily used for games.
Wait, which games, and which consoles? Arcadey sprite-based action games were popular on the Amiga, and there the consoles caught up to it by about 1990 (the Sega Master System) or 1992 (the SNES) in the European market. But 16-bit consoles would have been a depressingly bad substitute for the Amiga when it came to games like point-and-click adventures, Lemmings, Populous, the Freescape games, or XCOM, when those even received a 16-bit console port at all. The Amiga was in actual use mostly a games system, yes, but to a large extent the successful, beloved games were the kind of thing we now think of as PC games. That's also probably a big part of why finally losing pace with the PC over DOOM was such a bitter blow. The 32-bit consoles only started to take off in Europe with the release of the PlayStation there, well into 1995 when it seems the Amiga's goose was mostly already cooked, and even those systems weren't a great place to have a PC-like gaming experience. Then there's the awkward issue of downloading a car: famously, many Amiga users were piracy-happy, and would not have welcomed the game prices and relatively successful copy protection of '90s consoles.
(Data mostly from Wikipedia. I'm not an expert on the Amiga's commercial history, and it's a complicated topic.)
Yes, I meant the Mega Drive, but the PAL Mega Drive, the really relevant one here, didn’t come out until well into 1990 (if the easiest Internet sources are to be believed).
> I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games.
The Amiga was used worldwide by TV stations for CGI and titling effects, for digital signage eg arrivals/departures at airports, and video walls, besides being a tool for countless digital artists. I know because I wrote digital signage software for the Amiga and sold it to customers in 21 countries.
Just to be clear, because there have been a number of similar responses, I am not claiming the Amiga couldn’t do anything else, nor that it wasn’t used for anything other than games.
But, the vast majority of people who bought Amigas did so because it was a great machine for games and had lots of high quality titles.
When the majority of your market disappears and moves to cheaper options; and all you have left is video walls in departure lounges, you’re fucked.
But as I pointed out elsewhere: The subsidiary that survived the longest did so on the continued strength of sales driven by games - that market continued to do well for the Amiga until the end in the markets where the subsidiaries actually focused on gaming bundles.
The Video Toaster was the first successful competitor to the horribly expensive Avid system ($100k+) for non-linear video editing, titling, SMTPE code syncing, etc. and ran on an Amiga 2000 as a double card. I think it was $3k.
It was used to make the first 3 seasons of Babylon 5 and all of the sub graphics for Sealquest DSV.
As an aside, Dana Carveys brother was one of the lead designers.
Most of my circle used the Amiga primarily for other things than games.
None of us replaced them with consoles.
While the use in business was of course important, that the PC survives is just as much down to the open platform and the clone market that prevented its future from being tied to a single company - in this case a wildly dysfunctional one.
No, I'm pointing out that your anecdote doesn't mean much. Lots of people used it for other things. In fact, the US Amiga gaming market, for example, was extremely lackluster because unlike in Europe, in the US the sale was geared much more toward professional use, which was also reflected in e.g. US Amiga magazines like Amiga World, as well as in models like the Amiga 2500 which was aimed at the professional market and mostly sold in the US and Canada.
The profile varied extensively by country - Germany as well had a market where Commodore was big in the business market, and while that was mostly PC's, it was also the reason for much of the success of the Amiga 2000, which also largely aimed at non-gaming users.
Commodore UK meanwhile, did fit your "profile" for the Amiga and was very much focused on games.
But Commodore UK was the subsidiary that remained most successful despite competition from consoles.
In fact Commodore UK survived the bankruptcy of Commodore International and did well enough that management tried to put together a buyout offer (but had to throw in the towel after Dell and Escom entered the process).
In other words, while you're right that competition from consoles and PC's of course mattered a lot, it was a lot more nuanced than that.
E.g. in the US, Commodore had burned its relationships to the ground, and so failed to get the low-end Amiga's out there as gaming machines too, and were nowhere near as successful as some of the subsidiaries like Commodore UK, and Commodore B.V (Netherlands; also briefly survived bankruptcy).
Where Commodore did best, it did okay in both the game market and in various professional niches, but that meant actually working the game market hard. E.g. Commodore UK did a "famous" bundle with the game for the 1989 Batman movie which drove relatively-speaking huge sales.
Had the rest of the subsidiaries done close to as well as Commodore UK, the company as a whole would've at least weathered the cash crunch that killed it in '94. Whether that'd have let them rebuild (e.g. by completing their next chipsets) or if it'd have just made them linger on in a zombie state another year, is an open question.
It wasn't meant to mean more than showing that yours was just "just me and my friends", and it did that.
> at least I have the evidence of the extremely large and vibrant Amiga games industry.
And for the business use we have the evidence of the sales of the bigger models that were totally unattractive for games, the multiple magazines targeting business use, and the number of businesses built exclusively on selling solutions that were for a long time only available for the Amiga, like the Video Toaster.
Nobody has argued with you that games weren't important for the Amiga (but your thesis that the Amiga failed due to consoles falls apart when we consider that the Commodore subsidiaries that focused more on selling it as a games computer survived longer when Commodore failed), but that it was not nearly as singularly sold as a games machine. Even Commodore UK, which was perhaps the most gaming focused of the Commodore subsidiaries also got significant revenue from business use.
EDIT: I'd also add that there isn't like there haven't been extensive analysis on this, such as Brian Bagnall's book series on Commodore, or Jimmy Maher's "The Future Was Here". We know a lot about Commodore's internal issues and their finances that was not public knowledge at the time. Commodore was horribly mismanaged more than anything else, and there are many competing reasons that contributed to the fall of Commodore, and while the consoles certainly contributed too, there's not much evidence it was anywhere near the only, or main, reason.
Most of my friends were gaming on consoles at the time. I very much preferred the Amiga (I also had Atari STs during this time) to consoles perhaps mainly due to the ability to use RGB monitors with a proper RGB signal. It was at best composite back then on the consoles of the era - in the states anyway (we didn't have SCART as an option). I know I'm odd here, but that was a major factor -- but also the fact that I used the Amiga for much more than gaming. I BBSed heavily, generated hundreds of images with paint programs, programmed on it, and then there was enjoying scenedemos as a huge part of my use.
Most people in the user group I was in back then (ALFA - Amigoid Life Form Association) were NASA engineers who used them as cheap and capable alternatives to the UNIX workstations they worked with at NASA (which was local, Hampton, VA). Many of these guys were older and didn't game at all.
I heard NASA used their Amiga systems clear up to 2006, which is a rather unusually long lifespan for the application they intended them for. But I suppose commodity PC hardware and the software they needed just wasn't really there at a price point that made sense, plus, I guess as the old adage goes... if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Yes. "Amigas take in all the telemetry data from the spacecraft, scale it by applying coefficients of up to fifth order polynomials and convert the data back to engineering units for display to the engineers working the launch."[1]
In my part of the woods all those consoles were frowned upon, back in the days when we had 386s, 486s and Pentiums. Yes, PS1 could display some interesting games, but you couldn't do anything creative on it.
As to what killed Amiga - I think it's in the article - the lagging behind the x86 performance, especially when 386DX-40 came about, and please allow me to propose one additional, if not the primary, factor - that our fathers suddenly began to require Word and Excel to do their work at home.
I'm sure that was an important reason for the US and UK markets. I don't know much about the Swedish market, but in the Eastern European markets, game consoles were not popular at all until the very late 1990s.
Gamers in the early 1990s used Commodore (and less affluents ZX Spectrums and clones), and later, as the article says, more and more PCs.
In these parts, people were very short of money, which caused piracy to grow HUGE. Computers were also preferred due to being multipurpose. And console games were difficult to copy, so if you wanted to be a serious gamer, you had to have a PC.
Even if you had the money to buy games, you couldn't really do that, because nobody really was selling actual games in these markets. With different currencies and limitations on hard currency exchange, you didn't spend those limited funds on games, even if you travelled abroad.
Probably also as a consequence, playing on consoles was considered to be lame. It was for kids only. Hah, for those born in the 1990s only! So that was a bit different over here.
I had consoles and a PC and so did all of my friends. They offered very different experiences in the 90s.
Amiga could offer the PC experiences too, and did, until it ran into hardware limitations. Then it was suddenly competing with the Genesis and Super Nintendo, but with inferior European side scrolling games, with their single button controls, “sound or music not both”, etc.
> I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games.
My Amiga friends used it for playing games and for creative things: writing music, pixel/digital art, some coding, making games (at least, in shoot-em-up-construction-kit), as well as dialing up BBSes and the text-based Internet (like me on my PC).
I used my Amiga 3000 for a lot of video production and graphics work, along with some word processing / desktop publishing, and a bit of programming. And games! In my observation of other Amiga users at the time, this was typical.
Besides random individual users doing these sorts of things, Amigas were used in local broadcast television studios as video switchers and graphics layover systems, and even in more major media production outlets for video editing and 3D animation. They were seen as a more economical solution to more expensive hardware built specifically for television or graphics, but could pull of the work on a comparable level.
I did (but also for games). That wasn't the problem. The problem was computers built on closed architecture didn't have a future even if company didn't went to shit like Commodore did.
One could argue that apple is the only exception to the rule. And let's not forget that apple almost went bankrupt in 1997, only to be rescued by Microsoft.
Do you honestly think that the general public gave two shits about closed architectures?
The vast majority of people, who were using computers, were using them to play games. People completely misremember how little interest the general public had in computers (for serious tasks) at the time.
The only exception to that really was the IBM PC. It didn’t have an open architecture either. For a long time it was the case that if you didn’t buy an IBM branded PC, you couldn’t guarantee that any software would actually work on it.
They gave lots of shits about access to cheaper clones, though, and to access to cheaper peripherals.
> It didn’t have an open architecture either.
It was open enough that the closed parts could be reverse engineered, and so the market was already full of clones by the time the Amiga was even released.
Meanwhile, the Amiga was tied to custom chips only manufactured by Commodore, and didn't get anything resembling a clone until Commodore was already bankrupt (DraCo, which ditched a lot of backwards compatibility)
> For a long time it was the case that if you didn’t buy an IBM branded PC, you couldn’t guarantee that any software would actually work on it
By the time the Amiga died, this hadn't been an issue for many years.
I didn’t buy a pc until much later (I was an Acorn user), so you may be right, but the lore around that lasted a reasonable amount of time if my memory serves me correctly. Well into the late 80s.
I’d still argue nobody cared about architectures, they cared about where the type of computer was primarily used. PCs were for the office. Acorn was for education. Atari, Commodore, Sinclair were for games and therefore vulnerable to games consoles.
I seem to remember that PCs had quite a poor rep for games, even during the Wolfenstein -> Doom -> Quake era. Only really shaking that off when the first graphics cards arrived
PCs were definitely at a disadvantage for anything involving a lot of motion, like arcade-style games, platformers, shoot em ups, fighting, and racing games. But the PC did do well at puzzle games like Lemmings, text+graphics games like King's Quest, and sims like SimCity. That disadvantage was gone, at least on a technical level, by 1992-94.
I think PC graphics had two major leaps forward in this era: VGA in 1987, and VLB graphics (on 486 machines) in 1992. The former brought an expanded colour palette, and the latter brought enough memory bandwidth that you didn't need dedicated blitter/sprite chips.
> "PCs were definitely at a disadvantage for anything involving a lot of motion, [...]."
Not on a strictly technical level, especially not in the world of 3D. 2D arcade games à la Silpheed came out for the PC in 1989, running maxed-out on machines that were already a possibility, with VGA graphics and Adlib or MT-32 sound, from late 1987 onwards, roughly the same time the A500 was released in the United States. The notion that PCs had "a bad rep for games" after the release of titles such as Wing Commander doesn't really hold much water.
It was mostly economical factors and some specific usecases that made home computers an excellent, and often superior, choice for many of its future users.
Yes, there were strictly technical limitations. Memory throughput to the video framebuffer did not allow for arbitrary full-screen updates at native frame rate, and there were no hardware sprites or other display hacks to cope with this limitation - the framebuffer was all you had. These limitations became gradually less important throughout the 1990s, depending on what resolution and color depth you were running.
> "Yes, there were strictly technical limitations."
Precision, friend. I never disputed that there were no (strictly) technical limitations for PCs. I only argued against the notion, emphasis mine, that "PCs were definitely at a disadvantage for anything involving a lot of motion, like arcade-style games, platformers, shoot em ups, fighting, and racing games. [...] That disadvantage was gone, at least on a technical level, by 1992-94."
Amigas never saw the light against IBM and compatibles in a lot of ways, and that already before 1992. Two famous titles I already mentioned; one had no Amiga port (Silpheed, 1989) AFAIK, the other (Wing Commander, 1990) came out later as a technically inferior, albeit atmospheric, hand-me-down. When people reminisce about the graphics capabilities of home computers, especially Amigas, they often forget whole, shall we say "inconvenient", genres. Et cetera.
It's not that we forget "inconvenient" genres, but that at the peak of the Amiga popularity, while high end PC's could compete, the vast majority of people did not have those high-end PC's with the requisite graphics and sound cards. We continued to laugh at people with PC's pretty much until Doom, because most of the PC's our friends had were still low end, and lacked expensive graphics- and sound cards, while at the same time, certainly there was a mounting concern over what was trickling down for PC's from the high-end.
With respect to Silpheed, the original version is a graphically primitive 8-bit game and the 1989 version was ported to Apple II-GS - it was hardly performance that was the reason it didn't get an Amiga release. Even the 1993 Sega CD version doesn't contain much that'd be difficult to do on an Amiga (you'd "cheat" and pre-render more version of the ships and rely on the blitter to compensate for the expense of polygons, and possibly use dual playfields and copper lists to allow for the updating background).
Wing Commander, I agree with. The AGA version is nice, but too late.
High-end PC's were also extremely costly prior to the mid-1990s or so (the "Multimedia PC" era). You could've bought an Acorn Archimedes home computer that would have run rings around the Amiga on a pure CPU compute basis and given you the same emerging multimedia (graphics+sound) capabilities, for less than the cost of a high-end IBM-compatible PC.
> High-end PC's were also extremely costly prior to the mid-1990s or so (the "Multimedia PC" era).
I saw the first PCs starting to appear in East German households in 1990. Typically a VGA-capable 286 machine, 16 MHz, 1 MB RAM, two HD FDDs (one 1.44 MB 3.5", one 1.2 MB 5.25"), one 20 to 40 MB hard disk. No sound card. Without monitor, in early 1991, such a machine cost new about 1,500 DM.
At the same time, a new Amiga 500 with 512 kB memory extension cost about 900 bucks, the A590 external 20 MB hard disk an additional 700 DM, for a grand total of 1,600 DM. In other words, we roughly on equal footing here.
A barebones A2000 without hard disk and 1 MB of RAM cost also about 1,600 DM in the same time period. The costs racked-up even quicker to furnish out that bird.
Coincidentally, 1,500 DM is the same price I payed in early 1993 for a well-cared for second-hand 386DX-25 (387 FPU included) graphics workstation.
And the Acorn Archimedes? That machine was essentially a unicorn where I'm from; the Amigas had at least some visibility here.
A 286 machine with no sound card and needing a costly external monitor, while the Amiga could just be hooked up to a household TV (it's not like you could tell the difference in quality at VGA 320x200 resolution). That's hard to describe as a high-end or multimedia-capable PC. It seems that you're proving the point I made.
> A 286 machine with no sound card and needing a costly external monitor, while the Amiga could just be hooked up to a household TV [...].
1. Yes, my example pits a typical PC against a typical A500 as the purchasing choice to make early 1991. In my area, both machines cost roughly the same, but PCs and corresponding architectures were much more widespread and familiar (the GDR worked on its own IBM-compatible clones after all). The point was to illustrate what people here who had the money could choose from shortly after the watershed that is the German reunification. And prices and capability only skewed more in favor of the PC as time went on...
2. A small (14" or 15") monitor was not that expensive (600+ DM; the venerable 1024 x 768-capable, MPR-II-certified Highscreen "LE 1024" cost about 1,000 DM in early 1991); A500 users of the time could go for a new 1084S, at a cost of just about 600 DM. And AdLib and SoundBlaster clones of good value were also not expensive (think around 150 DM, sometimes with one or two games thrown-in). Something one would buy "the month after" if money was a bit tight.
3. If I can't tell the difference between 320 x 200 on a typical CRT or a typical TV in a 1991 kidlet's room I'd be off to an ophthalmologist. The TV-capability was definitely an advantage, though; lotsa cheap CRTs of the era sucked because they made one's fuckin' eyes burn. I remember most small TVs being easier on the eyeballs. I exchanged the 14" monitor my PC came with (was a gift) for a much better 15" CRT about four months later.
4. You talked about "Multimedia-PCs"... which in the mid-90s delivered even better bang-for-bucks. By then, the Amigas were already buried anyways. Unless you were a fan, financially much less mobile, had a need for the luggability (and other pros) only a keyboard-case computer could deliver at competitive prices, or got scammed or somesuch.
5. People here who were too cash-strapped and just wanted to play games usually went for game consoles (Atari 2600 jr. as well as the NES being the most popular choices... 'till the SEGA Mega Drive and especially the SNES took over).
The early ('89 to '91) home computer for the value-oriented customer? The Commodore 64 of course. Saw many. A lot of them second-hand machines bought from Westerners who cleaned house to make room for whatever came next.
> "It's not that we forget "inconvenient" genres, [...]"
I beg to differ; in my experience, the Amiga who doesn't forget is an outlier. ;)
> "[...] the vast majority of people did not have those high-end PC's with the requisite graphics and sound cards."
Once again: The context was the strictly technical, which was brought up by another poster. I am also well aware of the economical, and for specific usecases corresponding technical, realities. But that is best served by (comparative) market analysis and not just anecdotes. Which brings me to...
> "We continued to laugh at people with PC's pretty much until Doom, because most of the PC's our friends had were still low end, and lacked expensive graphics- and sound cards, while at the same time, certainly there was a mounting concern over what was trickling down for PC's from the high-end."
In my little corner of East Germany, I didn't feel the same about Amiga users. For you simply were not relevant; I didn't know anyone with an Amiga until much, much later (2007!).
> "With respect to Silpheed, the original version is a graphically primitive 8-bit game and the 1989 version was ported to Apple II-GS - it was hardly performance that was the reason it didn't get an Amiga release."
It serves as an example of an arcade game with good production values, and many supported graphics and sound modes ("expandability"), for a PC of the era, i. e. the outgoing 80s.
> The context was the strictly technical, which was brought up by another poster.
That's fine, but it was not what I took issue with in your response.
> It serves as an example of an arcade game with good production values, and many supported graphics and sound modes ("expandability"), for a PC of the era, i. e. the outgoing 80s.
It serves, to me, as an example of a pretty primitive game given the year the port was released, basic enough to replicate on an 8-bit machine, that likely didn't get a port because it wasn't well known enough in the markets where the Amiga was popular to bother licensing it and too basic to be competitive.
> Do you honestly think that the general public gave two shits about closed architectures?
First, this specific argument is about the computer-buying public, not the general public. Furthermore, yes, many people also bought into the IBM-PC & Compatibles eco-system because it was much more open. Many young(er) urban professionals of the time took their work home, to be continued on computers. I think financial mobility, supply, as well as culture (incl. generational divides) are more much important factors.
> The vast majority of people, who were using computers, were using them to play games.
Do you have data to back that up? Because where I'm from (East Germany), strictly based on my observations, this didn't track; many PCs were used as intended: general-purpose computing. That means work and play.
The Amiga platform was originally built on game-console hardware. Incidentally, so was the Raspberry Pi, which is why the first Raspberry Pi models were comparatively very cheap.
The platform is irrelevant. They were more expensive than games consoles. So they lost, just like all other true personal computer manufacturers. They had too many components and couldn’t compete.
I think it was lack of vision and financial mismanagement that killed them more than anything technical.
Edit: an interesting take with the games consoles, I never really thought about it from that angle before. But it makes a lot of sense. Console makers get a cut of the revenue stream of the games. Commodore never saw a cent of that and the only commercial niche they briefly owned was low-budget TV production, like cable channels and such.
The end of the Motorola MC68000 architecture killed a whole lot of platforms around that same time. Amiga was just one of them among many, but the fact that Atari ST also died, NeXT was ported to x86, the Mac was ported to PowerPC, Sun Microsystems went SPARC etc. etc. all pretty much simultaneously, is not a coincidence.
Were they? I bought my Amiga 500 around 1992 for $200 USD at Software Etc. I think the Nintendo was around $100 USD and the games were often much more expensive. Not to mention most games were just the cost of a floppy disk if you had Amiga friends.
In 1985 the NES launched in the US at $179.99 and didn’t include a game. So while I’m sure somebody came home with a useless object, in general people where forced to but at least one.
Oh yea, 1985-1987 is when a lot of the VHS places started stocking video games.
It’s the only way I was able to play. My best friend across the street had the console and I didn’t (I had Atari 2600). So I would rent and we would play together. I eventually got my own in maybe 1987-1988.
PS1 kicked off in 1995 and we had rentals for a long time by that point. I never owned a PS1 but same friend did. I ended up going from NES, SNES, N64 before switching mostly to PC games and eventually went to college where video games took a back seat for a number of years
> Ever since I saw an Amiga 500 at a friend's house in what was probably late 1988, I wanted one for myself. Back then, computers were uncommon, especially at home. Even though I went to a school in a fairly affluent neighborhood, few kids had home computers or video games.
This may be true in the US and Japan, the rest of the world were mainly using 8-bit (and increasingly 16-bit) computers in this era, so this scans really oddly outside the US.
I grew up on an 80s UK council estate (surrounded by poverty) and practically every kid had a computer, mainly Commodore 64, 16, +4, Sinclair Spectrum, or an Amstrad CPC (maybe a few BBC Micros dotted around, and some other oddities)
Lots of people had the early Atari consoles in the early 80s, but after that I didn't see a console until the Megadrive. Everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE had computers in the mid-late 80s to early 90s where I was growing up.
Yeah, virtually everyone I knew circa 1990 had a home computer. Mostly Spectrum and CPC. A few years later it was a few Amiga 500 too. The only “console” I had seen was the Atari VCS or a dedicated Pong machine. A few people got Game Boys a little later circa 1992. A single friend who had a Master System and one kid with divorced parents who got a SNES as a result.
It was in this environment that I would discover programming and the internet.
In 1989, the closest year I can find stats, home computer penetration was 15% of households in the US, but that wasn't uniformly distributed, so some people will have grown up with the experience of it being VERY common for people around them to have computers (I did), while others will have known no one with one.
Yeah if your secret sauce is a chip, with very particular timing and memory behaviour... you've just built in obsolescence. There's no abstracted API for doing the fancy graphics (at least not one used by games, etc), and the whole system is built around sharing the memory bus between CPU and VDP (not going to fly once memory & bus speeds became a fraction of the CPU speed and once cache was a serious thing)... it's just stuck in a grotto.. a neighbourhood that looks fantastic when you moved in but now the next city over is getting a brand new subway system while you're still stuck with an old fleet of busses.
Nevermind Moore's law and exponential improvements... you're stuck even falling behind in very incremental developments.
I also lived through this era, but from the Atari ST side. When I got my 486 it was a feeling of a kind of relenting "sigh" abandoning the 68k and its basic superiority... but economies of scale and the arrival of Linux (I used the very first versions, before the a.out->ELF transition even) made it worthwhile.
We might be able to circle back to this now by putting some portion of memory and video on the die along with the CPU, but that was not going to happen for Atari and Commodore back in the 90s. Motorola wasn't going to shove 128KB or whatever of RAM into a 68k just for them, and even if they did it would have been so expensive
Memory speeds plateau'd while CPU speeds skyrocketed. Almost all the complexities of modern architectures have to do with this. There used to be "no need" for something as funky as L1/L2/L3 caches really because often your memory was faster than your CPU (hence why something like the C64's VIC-II or the Atari ST's "Shifter" are even possible).
Hell there were systems back then that didn't even have onboard registers in the CPU, but used external memory for it (TI's TMS series). The 6502's "zero page" is another example.
You can't do that anymore. The CPU will run many laps around your memory.
Still it'd be interesting to see what Jay Miner would have come up with in the late 90s or 21st century, if he was still around and in the game.
The combination with “There's no abstracted API for doing the fancy graphics (at least not one used by games, etc)” only works as long as you have a solid unique benefit, and that, Amiga lost fairly rapidly due to Moore’s law.
It lasted pretty long, especially considering the rate of evolution in those days. It debuted already in 1985, and there were some incremental improvements along the way (first the A3000 and then AGA A4000/A1200 in 1992). After the biggest lead in graphics started to shrink you still had a big user and software user base, multitasking desktop that was far ahead at least until W95, great CLI environment compared to PC stuff, competitive price etc.
> and there were some incremental improvements along the way (first the A3000 and then AGA A4000/A1200 in 1992)
About the A3000 Wikipedia says “The machine is reported to have sold 14,380 units in Germany (including Amiga 3000T sales)”, and about the A4000 “The machine is reported to have sold 11,300 units in Germany”. Both were on sale for about 2 years.
In comparison, the A2000 sold 124,500 units in Germany, again according to Wikipedia, in the about 4 years of its commercial availability.
So, about a 80% decline in sales per month, in what I think/guess was an expanding market for personal computers.
⇒ I don’t think those improvements made much of a difference.
The A3000 was more than twice as expensive. The A4000 even more expensive. They were not mass market machines.
Variants of the A2000 continued in the market after the A3000 was released, such as the A2500, so people who didn't need the upgrades - or could make use of them (e.g. the VideoToaster didn't fit in the A3000 case without modifications) would continue to buy cheaper models.
.. And the 1992 Amiga 600 and 1993 1200 sold 193k/95k. The volume was always in the A500 form factor machines that used a TV as the display half the time.
Commodore's focus on low cost stuff (in their own way) while PC clones managed to push the HDD+SVGA setup price down was a critical factor for how things turned out I think. In the high end there was also Apple, Macintosh had launched a year before the Amiga and made the
professional GUI market harder to enter.
But the fateful focus also let the masses have access to a great hacker's computer growing up, without the vibe satirized by "Office Space" that marked the Microsoft platforms.
Unified memory is more about taking advantage of zero copy access for the GPU. Since everything the GPU wants is already right there there's no need to send it on a trip over a bus into separate GPU memory. Memory bandwidth is of course still important for both the GPU and CPU so that unified memory can be a bottleneck if it's slow or has too few channels.
If they had been smarter with money, I'm sure they could have innovated in many many ways without giving up on backwards compatilibity. Sony put a PS1 inside the PS2. The Sony MSX2 contained an MSX1-on-a-chip.
Amiga could easily have had a PCI bus for external video chips.
And I'm not even going into the more crazy PS3-like ideas like "so, memory and bus speed are just a fraction of CPU speed? Ok, here are 32 parallel CPUs with their own chunk of the VDP bandwidth and their own local memory".
The last iteration of the Amiga chipset Commodore worked on when they went bankrupt (Hombre)[1] was intended to be a 2-chip system providing a 64-bit 3D chipset with a PA-RISC CPU on-die in the in one of them that'd break compatibility, and be used for both standalone computers, set-top boxes and for a high-end graphics card.
To sort out compatibility, the idea was for an "AGA Amiga on a chip".
I'm not convinced Amiga-users would've been all too happy with all of this - or that PA RISC was a good choice, given what we know now -, but it certainly would've been a massive upgrade.
(What Commodore was close to completing when they went bankrupt, though, was AAA[2] - which would've seen far more modest but still significant upgrades, like wider buses, support for chunky graphics modes, higher resolutions, far higher video bandwidth; AAA was in testing when Commodore failed)
Did you ever use MiNT on your Atari ST when it was relevant? I understand that for some folks, MiNT was kind of the gateway drug that often led users to Linux on PC shortly afterwards.
I presume you mean MB and not GB? On native Atari hardware at least, you could only address up to 1 GB partitions on the very last TOS 4.04 based systems like the Falcon.
Though my ST only had 1MB of RAM and a floppy, no hard drive. On that I ran a UUCP node to get email and news for a while. And some unix-like shells (Mupfel, I believe was one? Gulam was another great one). I did use MiNT a bit but the whole GNU toolset was a bit big for a floppy system, and the multitasking was only somewhat useful. You could get a unix-like environment without going fully MiNT.
The big jump for me was having a 200MB HD in my 486 when I got it. Massive life change.
its easier to see this in hindsight. the amiga was basically just using the model that every previous home computer had used, expecting game devs to use the hardware directly like they had been doing since the first home PCs. wasting resources on an API or any kind of abstraction was for user level BASICs and similar, not for professional games
I was not a big Amiga user, but on the Atari ST we had a graphics abstraction API (VDI) from day one. Had the notion of a virtual device and drawing surface. All done through a proper syscall TRAP system, too. I am given to understand that the AmigaOS syscall API was in the form of JMPs.
So when the Falcon and TT Etc came along with full 16-bit 256 colour SVGA-like graphics, anything properly written GUI "just worked"
Games and the like, yes, had to fall back to a video compat mode.
It used JMP, but you looked up the API base addresses from a fixed address, ($4 IIRC) so it worked basically the same. But only like some turned based games, and like some chess games etc used that API. The rest maybe used the APIs to allocate a screen but they were banging hardware after that. Most didn't even use the OS even to read the keyboard, which became an annoyance on the A600 which lacked some of the keys.
The original Amiga platform had no MMU, hence no support for memory protection or virtual memory addressing. Some Motorola processors included it (the 68030 and up) but these were only used on high-end Amigas that were not the most common platform, and are more comparable to contemporary workstations. The AmigaOS just used the single address space approach, that's not necessarily incompatible with protected memory.
The Intel 80386 and its successors were quite exceptional in being "killer micros" with a workstation-class feature set for the time.
Memory protection was basically impossible or at least "Research Level Hard" on the Amiga, because of how the OS was designed with linked lists and message passing of pointers. This was what made it so fast, but at a cost. (They would have needed something like Rust to balance that.)
Everything could have been fixed with the March of Moore. The OS could have gotten a hypervisor and been running each program in its own "VM" thinking it was the only program on the machine.
Later iterations of OS extensions on the ST got memory protection support, albeit a bit inconistently and with likely backwards compat problems. FreeMiNT I think supports MMU + protection on 030 machines.
Achilles heel for classic MacOS, too. Sins of our fathers.
Pretty sure MultiTOS (which was derived from MiNT IIRC) fully supported preemptive multitasking back in 1992 or so when it came out. This, plus the fancier graphics support, a proper 68030 instead of the rather cut down 68EC020, and addition of a Motorola 56K DSP, meant the Atari Falcon was superior to the Amiga A1200, at least on paper. I certainly adored mine when I owned it not that long ago as a part of my small collection.
Nothing else like Video Toaster being available kept Amigas around for a while. 2001 my parent's cable provider still used them for guide/PPV channels.
Long time PC gamer here. I didn’t own an Amiga so I definitely have another POV.
1994?! Every single PC gaming store was flooded with PC CD demos.
Day of the Tentacle. Loom. Monkey Island. Rebel Assault. Myst. 7th Guest.
Every “AAA” release at the time was getting a “talkie” version with added FMV or cd audio.
Plus Doom, and then Doom 2.
I actually think the 93-96 period is basically the most hype I’ve ever seen the PC market, ever.
I’m sure Amiga had a lot of cool stuff still. The demo scene, the various Psygnosis games. But I never got on my radar beyond “this doesn’t need config.sys and it has more colors”.
The Amiga is a very interesting case. It started out extremely capable, with a complex architecture with multiple coprocessors tightly coupled to memory and the CPU.
As time passed, that complexity made it more difficult to build newer, better Amigas that were compatible with the software already written for it. All its unique features - graphics, 2D acceleration, audio - made it complicated to improve the machine. The PC, on the other hand, was very easy - you could throw out your CGA card and get an EGA or VGA, the same way you could plug in a generic sound card and get MIDI and PCM audio, along with an IDE port for a CD-ROM.
If the value proposition held, it could have survived longer, but this business of getting a new computer in order to get better video output gets expensive very quickly. I had EGA on my 10MHz XT-compatible and it was great.
Commodore was stuck in the 8-bit home computer model - mostly non-upgradable machines. This was the 1000 (it had a little upgradability), the 500, the 600, and the 1200. The 2000, 3000, and 4000 were seen as their professional counterparts, but they were all saddled by being compatible with games written for their built-in video and audio hardware that was quickly becoming inadequate compared to PCs.
Sadly, Atari didn't have as much custom hardware it would need to evolve, but still never quite made the leap from their self-contained machines to more modular ones that'd make it easier to compete with PCs. When they did, they opted for the VME bus instead of something simpler (such as a 16-bit ISA bus).
Impressively, near their deaths, both made PCs, but the PCs didn't share anything with their proprietary jewels. Both companies should know much better.
In 1992, I went from Amiga to a PC solely because of Wolfenstein 3D. I already felt like I was clinging to the Amiga platform. Most of my other friends in the Amiga world had moved on to other platforms. Doom came out about a year later, near Christmas 1993, IIRC.
The author bought their Amiga 500 in early 1992! It was already a "classic" by then.
Indeed, I got my first Amiga in October 1985 - I believe it was the first Amiga sold in Virginia (U.S.) and one of the first ever sold - period.
https://bytecellar.com/2020/10/27/looking-back-on-35-years-a...
I remember those extremely early days, which were filled with slow releases, I must say - but it was a singular experience, playing with that hardware. I left and came back with an Amiga 2000 in 1988 and that was a great time - a peak time to be an Amigoid.
1992 does seem late for a first Amiga - and a 500; I had an A1200 in '92.
I still have two Amigas that I use often (1000, 2000 '020) and a PowerPC "Amiga," that I rarely power on.
My experience mirrors yours, I got my first Amiga 500 in 1986, and besides gaming, it was my home programming rig until 1994. I was studying informatics and while everybody was stuck on monochrome 640Kb MS-DOS equipped PS/2 programming a few hundred lines of Turbo Pascal at most, I had the joy of venturing into a modern OS with multitasking, GUI, a complex file system, writing stuff in AmigaBASIC, compiling my first programs with AC-Basic. Then I started learning C and Intuition, and built several GUI programs. I finally spent a couple years writing like, 300K SLOC of Motorola 68000 assembly, which resulted in a basic, but very fast text editor, and two fractal generators capable of almost matching the performance of FractInt on a PC. My knowledge of C and GUIs finally landed me my very first job as junior developer in august 1994, thanks to my Amiga! Literally a dream come true in Italy. My very first paycheck was spent buying an A4000, but by then I realized the Amiga had lost, and sadly returned it to the seller in exchange for an ugly stupid Pentium PC with Microsoft Windows 3.1, which had far superior graphics, sound, memory, disk and computing power, though it was soulless. The Commodore Amiga OTOH will always have a little place in my heart.
Minor correction: The Amiga 500 came out in ~May-October 1987, depending on your country.
You're right, it was probably summer 1987.
Blake, I have to say you had to have had a VERY cool childhood growing up with your mom helping you get some then cutting edge tech like that in the mid 80s. I have to wonder what a typical 80s kid's exposure to computers was like back then and the discoverability of it all, because computers of any kind in the states were generally very niche in family homes back then, let alone Amiga computers.
Yep, I was lucky. We were a middle-class family and my mom and dad did support my extreme passion in computers. I went through a huge amount of systems.
Here's the list: https://bytecellar.com/the-list
I would buy one, love it, read about another and finally put the first in the newspaper for sale ( https://bytecellar.com/2019/05/08/computer-classifieds-datin... ) and move to the next, with funds added in by my parents to cover the different. I was very lucky in that! (The link shared shows actual scans of the newspaper ads I ran, selling some of the systems back in the '80s.)
Thank you for sharing your story and experience Blake. I was born in the late 80s, and my very first introduction to computers was via my dad’s white-box homemade 486 DX/33 PC running MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 (which from what I understand was pretty hot stuff for 1992 when he built it) and I believe we were the only household on our street that had any kind of PC at that point. My dad even dabbled in BBSes of the day and DOS games, in addition to his usual productivity stuff with WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.
Sadly, I missed out on the more fun era of computers from the 80s, as PCs became quite the tour-de-force by the time the 90s rolled in. So I made it my mission to procure some classic computers from time to time and use them for awhile before selling them. My current retro system of choice is a modded Atari 520ST with 1 MB of RAM via a Marpet XTRA-RAM expansion.
> I have to wonder what a typical 80s kid's exposure to computers was like back then and the discoverability of it all, because computers of any kind in the states were generally very niche in family homes back then, let alone Amiga computers.
Platform studies as an interdisplinary discipline should, and usually does, pay attention to the subtleties of different markets; many an enthusiast's dabblings in history do not, thereby often enough mimicking the sort of Ereignisgeschichte ("event history") from other fields hobbyists gravitate to, e. g. military history.
I, for my part, value Datagubbe's account as an interesting meditation on personal computing realities, and therefore choices, in the Sweden of the late 80s to early 90s.
Born in 84 myself, first major introduction to computing was in '89 or '90, my grade school had received about 20 Apple 2e with various edutainment titles.
Ya, the author's timeline doesnt mesh with mine. In my memory the amiga was dead long before 1995. Wing commander was 91/92, which blew away anything on amiga. The great microprose simulations also started in 91/92 when the best Amiga could barely run the original civilization.
Wing Commander was released for the Amiga! It just ran absurdly slowly.
Yep, one of the first games that really needed a chunky pixel video memory layout (which the Amiga lacked). Amiga's planar arrangement was perfect for platformers, which was the target of the Amiga gfx hardware design.
It was not like lot's of very talented Amiga devs didn't try their very best to create a Wolfenstein/Doom clone for their platform, but iirc the bitplane setup used by Amiga gfx, which enabled lot's of other cool features did not perform well with the opereations needed for "3D" games.
Then with Quake, the 3rd party 3D graphics cards market took off, and even if there were cards for the Amigas too, market economics made them unviable.
And even though I usually appreciate Datagubbe's writings, this time I think his take is incorrect. At least in my circles Wolfenstein / Doom and ultimately Quake was the final nails in the Amiga's coffin.
Sure, the picture is bigger - PC market drove down prices and very soon the price/performance difference was very unfavorable for Amiga - but at least initially the issue was kids wanted to play Wolfenstein, Doom, or at least something similar, and that was not possible if you stayed on the Amiga.
[flagged]
A lot of words there. But the word ‘console’ is there exactly once.
Games consoles killed the Amiga, just like they did all other home computers that were primarily used for games.
I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games.
PCs survived because they were genuinely used for business, not just games.
> Games consoles killed the Amiga, just like they did all other home computers that were primarily used for games.
Wait, which games, and which consoles? Arcadey sprite-based action games were popular on the Amiga, and there the consoles caught up to it by about 1990 (the Sega Master System) or 1992 (the SNES) in the European market. But 16-bit consoles would have been a depressingly bad substitute for the Amiga when it came to games like point-and-click adventures, Lemmings, Populous, the Freescape games, or XCOM, when those even received a 16-bit console port at all. The Amiga was in actual use mostly a games system, yes, but to a large extent the successful, beloved games were the kind of thing we now think of as PC games. That's also probably a big part of why finally losing pace with the PC over DOOM was such a bitter blow. The 32-bit consoles only started to take off in Europe with the release of the PlayStation there, well into 1995 when it seems the Amiga's goose was mostly already cooked, and even those systems weren't a great place to have a PC-like gaming experience. Then there's the awkward issue of downloading a car: famously, many Amiga users were piracy-happy, and would not have welcomed the game prices and relatively successful copy protection of '90s consoles.
(Data mostly from Wikipedia. I'm not an expert on the Amiga's commercial history, and it's a complicated topic.)
>1990 (the Sega Master System)
Probably meant 1988 (Sega Mega Drive).
>I'm not an expert on the Amiga's commercial history, and it's a complicated topic.
For anybody curious, the Amiga Documents[0].
0. https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/
> Probably meant 1988 (Sega Mega Drive)
Yes, I meant the Mega Drive, but the PAL Mega Drive, the really relevant one here, didn’t come out until well into 1990 (if the easiest Internet sources are to be believed).
> I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games.
The Amiga was used worldwide by TV stations for CGI and titling effects, for digital signage eg arrivals/departures at airports, and video walls, besides being a tool for countless digital artists. I know because I wrote digital signage software for the Amiga and sold it to customers in 21 countries.
Just to be clear, because there have been a number of similar responses, I am not claiming the Amiga couldn’t do anything else, nor that it wasn’t used for anything other than games.
But, the vast majority of people who bought Amigas did so because it was a great machine for games and had lots of high quality titles.
When the majority of your market disappears and moves to cheaper options; and all you have left is video walls in departure lounges, you’re fucked.
But as I pointed out elsewhere: The subsidiary that survived the longest did so on the continued strength of sales driven by games - that market continued to do well for the Amiga until the end in the markets where the subsidiaries actually focused on gaming bundles.
The Video Toaster was the first successful competitor to the horribly expensive Avid system ($100k+) for non-linear video editing, titling, SMTPE code syncing, etc. and ran on an Amiga 2000 as a double card. I think it was $3k.
It was used to make the first 3 seasons of Babylon 5 and all of the sub graphics for Sealquest DSV.
As an aside, Dana Carveys brother was one of the lead designers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster
Most of my circle used the Amiga primarily for other things than games.
None of us replaced them with consoles.
While the use in business was of course important, that the PC survives is just as much down to the open platform and the clone market that prevented its future from being tied to a single company - in this case a wildly dysfunctional one.
> Most of my circle used the Amiga primarily for other things than games.
Are you claiming your circle is representative of the computer buying masses of the time? (whether the computers were consoles or not)
No, I'm pointing out that your anecdote doesn't mean much. Lots of people used it for other things. In fact, the US Amiga gaming market, for example, was extremely lackluster because unlike in Europe, in the US the sale was geared much more toward professional use, which was also reflected in e.g. US Amiga magazines like Amiga World, as well as in models like the Amiga 2500 which was aimed at the professional market and mostly sold in the US and Canada.
The profile varied extensively by country - Germany as well had a market where Commodore was big in the business market, and while that was mostly PC's, it was also the reason for much of the success of the Amiga 2000, which also largely aimed at non-gaming users.
Commodore UK meanwhile, did fit your "profile" for the Amiga and was very much focused on games.
But Commodore UK was the subsidiary that remained most successful despite competition from consoles.
In fact Commodore UK survived the bankruptcy of Commodore International and did well enough that management tried to put together a buyout offer (but had to throw in the towel after Dell and Escom entered the process).
In other words, while you're right that competition from consoles and PC's of course mattered a lot, it was a lot more nuanced than that.
E.g. in the US, Commodore had burned its relationships to the ground, and so failed to get the low-end Amiga's out there as gaming machines too, and were nowhere near as successful as some of the subsidiaries like Commodore UK, and Commodore B.V (Netherlands; also briefly survived bankruptcy).
Where Commodore did best, it did okay in both the game market and in various professional niches, but that meant actually working the game market hard. E.g. Commodore UK did a "famous" bundle with the game for the 1989 Batman movie which drove relatively-speaking huge sales.
Had the rest of the subsidiaries done close to as well as Commodore UK, the company as a whole would've at least weathered the cash crunch that killed it in '94. Whether that'd have let them rebuild (e.g. by completing their next chipsets) or if it'd have just made them linger on in a zombie state another year, is an open question.
> No, I'm pointing out that your anecdote doesn't mean much
Neither does yours, at least I have the evidence of the extremely large and vibrant Amiga games industry.
Your anecdote is “not me or my friends”
It wasn't meant to mean more than showing that yours was just "just me and my friends", and it did that.
> at least I have the evidence of the extremely large and vibrant Amiga games industry.
And for the business use we have the evidence of the sales of the bigger models that were totally unattractive for games, the multiple magazines targeting business use, and the number of businesses built exclusively on selling solutions that were for a long time only available for the Amiga, like the Video Toaster.
Nobody has argued with you that games weren't important for the Amiga (but your thesis that the Amiga failed due to consoles falls apart when we consider that the Commodore subsidiaries that focused more on selling it as a games computer survived longer when Commodore failed), but that it was not nearly as singularly sold as a games machine. Even Commodore UK, which was perhaps the most gaming focused of the Commodore subsidiaries also got significant revenue from business use.
EDIT: I'd also add that there isn't like there haven't been extensive analysis on this, such as Brian Bagnall's book series on Commodore, or Jimmy Maher's "The Future Was Here". We know a lot about Commodore's internal issues and their finances that was not public knowledge at the time. Commodore was horribly mismanaged more than anything else, and there are many competing reasons that contributed to the fall of Commodore, and while the consoles certainly contributed too, there's not much evidence it was anywhere near the only, or main, reason.
And your anecdote is "not me or people I know of".
When you say the Amiga games industry is "extremely" large and vibrant, what contemporary platform are you comparing it to?
If there is an "extremely large and vibrant" aspect that makes the Amiga stand out, it is the demo scene.
Most of my friends were gaming on consoles at the time. I very much preferred the Amiga (I also had Atari STs during this time) to consoles perhaps mainly due to the ability to use RGB monitors with a proper RGB signal. It was at best composite back then on the consoles of the era - in the states anyway (we didn't have SCART as an option). I know I'm odd here, but that was a major factor -- but also the fact that I used the Amiga for much more than gaming. I BBSed heavily, generated hundreds of images with paint programs, programmed on it, and then there was enjoying scenedemos as a huge part of my use.
Most people in the user group I was in back then (ALFA - Amigoid Life Form Association) were NASA engineers who used them as cheap and capable alternatives to the UNIX workstations they worked with at NASA (which was local, Hampton, VA). Many of these guys were older and didn't game at all.
I heard NASA used their Amiga systems clear up to 2006, which is a rather unusually long lifespan for the application they intended them for. But I suppose commodity PC hardware and the software they needed just wasn't really there at a price point that made sense, plus, I guess as the old adage goes... if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
> I heard NASA used their Amiga systems
Yes. "Amigas take in all the telemetry data from the spacecraft, scale it by applying coefficients of up to fifth order polynomials and convert the data back to engineering units for display to the engineers working the launch."[1]
[0] https://hackaday.com/2021/08/16/retrotechtacular-amiga-pips-...
[1] http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/amiganasa_en.p...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAPD9HA8Unw&t=1s
https://www.modd3d.com/articles/item/waterworld-show-control...
The document is sadly 404 now, but this was an awesome nerdy writeup of the conversion of the Universal Studios Waterworld from Amigas in 2007.
In my part of the woods all those consoles were frowned upon, back in the days when we had 386s, 486s and Pentiums. Yes, PS1 could display some interesting games, but you couldn't do anything creative on it.
As to what killed Amiga - I think it's in the article - the lagging behind the x86 performance, especially when 386DX-40 came about, and please allow me to propose one additional, if not the primary, factor - that our fathers suddenly began to require Word and Excel to do their work at home.
I'm sure that was an important reason for the US and UK markets. I don't know much about the Swedish market, but in the Eastern European markets, game consoles were not popular at all until the very late 1990s. Gamers in the early 1990s used Commodore (and less affluents ZX Spectrums and clones), and later, as the article says, more and more PCs. In these parts, people were very short of money, which caused piracy to grow HUGE. Computers were also preferred due to being multipurpose. And console games were difficult to copy, so if you wanted to be a serious gamer, you had to have a PC. Even if you had the money to buy games, you couldn't really do that, because nobody really was selling actual games in these markets. With different currencies and limitations on hard currency exchange, you didn't spend those limited funds on games, even if you travelled abroad. Probably also as a consequence, playing on consoles was considered to be lame. It was for kids only. Hah, for those born in the 1990s only! So that was a bit different over here.
I had consoles and a PC and so did all of my friends. They offered very different experiences in the 90s.
Amiga could offer the PC experiences too, and did, until it ran into hardware limitations. Then it was suddenly competing with the Genesis and Super Nintendo, but with inferior European side scrolling games, with their single button controls, “sound or music not both”, etc.
> I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games.
My Amiga friends used it for playing games and for creative things: writing music, pixel/digital art, some coding, making games (at least, in shoot-em-up-construction-kit), as well as dialing up BBSes and the text-based Internet (like me on my PC).
I used my Amiga 3000 for a lot of video production and graphics work, along with some word processing / desktop publishing, and a bit of programming. And games! In my observation of other Amiga users at the time, this was typical.
Besides random individual users doing these sorts of things, Amigas were used in local broadcast television studios as video switchers and graphics layover systems, and even in more major media production outlets for video editing and 3D animation. They were seen as a more economical solution to more expensive hardware built specifically for television or graphics, but could pull of the work on a comparable level.
I did (but also for games). That wasn't the problem. The problem was computers built on closed architecture didn't have a future even if company didn't went to shit like Commodore did.
> The problem was computers built on closed architecture didn't have a future
Like Apple/Mac?
> Like Apple/Mac?
One could argue that apple is the only exception to the rule. And let's not forget that apple almost went bankrupt in 1997, only to be rescued by Microsoft.
Pretty big exception...
> computers built on closed architecture
Do you honestly think that the general public gave two shits about closed architectures?
The vast majority of people, who were using computers, were using them to play games. People completely misremember how little interest the general public had in computers (for serious tasks) at the time.
The only exception to that really was the IBM PC. It didn’t have an open architecture either. For a long time it was the case that if you didn’t buy an IBM branded PC, you couldn’t guarantee that any software would actually work on it.
They gave lots of shits about access to cheaper clones, though, and to access to cheaper peripherals.
> It didn’t have an open architecture either.
It was open enough that the closed parts could be reverse engineered, and so the market was already full of clones by the time the Amiga was even released.
Meanwhile, the Amiga was tied to custom chips only manufactured by Commodore, and didn't get anything resembling a clone until Commodore was already bankrupt (DraCo, which ditched a lot of backwards compatibility)
> For a long time it was the case that if you didn’t buy an IBM branded PC, you couldn’t guarantee that any software would actually work on it
By the time the Amiga died, this hadn't been an issue for many years.
> For a long time it was the case that if you didn’t buy an IBM branded PC, you couldn’t guarantee that any software would actually work on it.
I don't know if it was a long time. The PC came out in 1981, and by 1984 you had the fully compatible Tandy 1000 and Compaq Deskpro.
Except for the BIOS ROMs, which companies like Compaq rewrote themselves, the PC did have an open architecture.
I didn’t buy a pc until much later (I was an Acorn user), so you may be right, but the lore around that lasted a reasonable amount of time if my memory serves me correctly. Well into the late 80s.
I’d still argue nobody cared about architectures, they cared about where the type of computer was primarily used. PCs were for the office. Acorn was for education. Atari, Commodore, Sinclair were for games and therefore vulnerable to games consoles.
I seem to remember that PCs had quite a poor rep for games, even during the Wolfenstein -> Doom -> Quake era. Only really shaking that off when the first graphics cards arrived
PCs were definitely at a disadvantage for anything involving a lot of motion, like arcade-style games, platformers, shoot em ups, fighting, and racing games. But the PC did do well at puzzle games like Lemmings, text+graphics games like King's Quest, and sims like SimCity. That disadvantage was gone, at least on a technical level, by 1992-94.
I think PC graphics had two major leaps forward in this era: VGA in 1987, and VLB graphics (on 486 machines) in 1992. The former brought an expanded colour palette, and the latter brought enough memory bandwidth that you didn't need dedicated blitter/sprite chips.
> "PCs were definitely at a disadvantage for anything involving a lot of motion, [...]."
Not on a strictly technical level, especially not in the world of 3D. 2D arcade games à la Silpheed came out for the PC in 1989, running maxed-out on machines that were already a possibility, with VGA graphics and Adlib or MT-32 sound, from late 1987 onwards, roughly the same time the A500 was released in the United States. The notion that PCs had "a bad rep for games" after the release of titles such as Wing Commander doesn't really hold much water.
It was mostly economical factors and some specific usecases that made home computers an excellent, and often superior, choice for many of its future users.
> Not on a strictly technical level
Yes, there were strictly technical limitations. Memory throughput to the video framebuffer did not allow for arbitrary full-screen updates at native frame rate, and there were no hardware sprites or other display hacks to cope with this limitation - the framebuffer was all you had. These limitations became gradually less important throughout the 1990s, depending on what resolution and color depth you were running.
> "Yes, there were strictly technical limitations."
Precision, friend. I never disputed that there were no (strictly) technical limitations for PCs. I only argued against the notion, emphasis mine, that "PCs were definitely at a disadvantage for anything involving a lot of motion, like arcade-style games, platformers, shoot em ups, fighting, and racing games. [...] That disadvantage was gone, at least on a technical level, by 1992-94."
Amigas never saw the light against IBM and compatibles in a lot of ways, and that already before 1992. Two famous titles I already mentioned; one had no Amiga port (Silpheed, 1989) AFAIK, the other (Wing Commander, 1990) came out later as a technically inferior, albeit atmospheric, hand-me-down. When people reminisce about the graphics capabilities of home computers, especially Amigas, they often forget whole, shall we say "inconvenient", genres. Et cetera.
It's not that we forget "inconvenient" genres, but that at the peak of the Amiga popularity, while high end PC's could compete, the vast majority of people did not have those high-end PC's with the requisite graphics and sound cards. We continued to laugh at people with PC's pretty much until Doom, because most of the PC's our friends had were still low end, and lacked expensive graphics- and sound cards, while at the same time, certainly there was a mounting concern over what was trickling down for PC's from the high-end.
With respect to Silpheed, the original version is a graphically primitive 8-bit game and the 1989 version was ported to Apple II-GS - it was hardly performance that was the reason it didn't get an Amiga release. Even the 1993 Sega CD version doesn't contain much that'd be difficult to do on an Amiga (you'd "cheat" and pre-render more version of the ships and rely on the blitter to compensate for the expense of polygons, and possibly use dual playfields and copper lists to allow for the updating background).
Wing Commander, I agree with. The AGA version is nice, but too late.
High-end PC's were also extremely costly prior to the mid-1990s or so (the "Multimedia PC" era). You could've bought an Acorn Archimedes home computer that would have run rings around the Amiga on a pure CPU compute basis and given you the same emerging multimedia (graphics+sound) capabilities, for less than the cost of a high-end IBM-compatible PC.
> High-end PC's were also extremely costly prior to the mid-1990s or so (the "Multimedia PC" era).
I saw the first PCs starting to appear in East German households in 1990. Typically a VGA-capable 286 machine, 16 MHz, 1 MB RAM, two HD FDDs (one 1.44 MB 3.5", one 1.2 MB 5.25"), one 20 to 40 MB hard disk. No sound card. Without monitor, in early 1991, such a machine cost new about 1,500 DM.
At the same time, a new Amiga 500 with 512 kB memory extension cost about 900 bucks, the A590 external 20 MB hard disk an additional 700 DM, for a grand total of 1,600 DM. In other words, we roughly on equal footing here.
A barebones A2000 without hard disk and 1 MB of RAM cost also about 1,600 DM in the same time period. The costs racked-up even quicker to furnish out that bird.
Coincidentally, 1,500 DM is the same price I payed in early 1993 for a well-cared for second-hand 386DX-25 (387 FPU included) graphics workstation.
And the Acorn Archimedes? That machine was essentially a unicorn where I'm from; the Amigas had at least some visibility here.
A 286 machine with no sound card and needing a costly external monitor, while the Amiga could just be hooked up to a household TV (it's not like you could tell the difference in quality at VGA 320x200 resolution). That's hard to describe as a high-end or multimedia-capable PC. It seems that you're proving the point I made.
> A 286 machine with no sound card and needing a costly external monitor, while the Amiga could just be hooked up to a household TV [...].
1. Yes, my example pits a typical PC against a typical A500 as the purchasing choice to make early 1991. In my area, both machines cost roughly the same, but PCs and corresponding architectures were much more widespread and familiar (the GDR worked on its own IBM-compatible clones after all). The point was to illustrate what people here who had the money could choose from shortly after the watershed that is the German reunification. And prices and capability only skewed more in favor of the PC as time went on...
2. A small (14" or 15") monitor was not that expensive (600+ DM; the venerable 1024 x 768-capable, MPR-II-certified Highscreen "LE 1024" cost about 1,000 DM in early 1991); A500 users of the time could go for a new 1084S, at a cost of just about 600 DM. And AdLib and SoundBlaster clones of good value were also not expensive (think around 150 DM, sometimes with one or two games thrown-in). Something one would buy "the month after" if money was a bit tight.
3. If I can't tell the difference between 320 x 200 on a typical CRT or a typical TV in a 1991 kidlet's room I'd be off to an ophthalmologist. The TV-capability was definitely an advantage, though; lotsa cheap CRTs of the era sucked because they made one's fuckin' eyes burn. I remember most small TVs being easier on the eyeballs. I exchanged the 14" monitor my PC came with (was a gift) for a much better 15" CRT about four months later.
4. You talked about "Multimedia-PCs"... which in the mid-90s delivered even better bang-for-bucks. By then, the Amigas were already buried anyways. Unless you were a fan, financially much less mobile, had a need for the luggability (and other pros) only a keyboard-case computer could deliver at competitive prices, or got scammed or somesuch.
5. People here who were too cash-strapped and just wanted to play games usually went for game consoles (Atari 2600 jr. as well as the NES being the most popular choices... 'till the SEGA Mega Drive and especially the SNES took over).
The early ('89 to '91) home computer for the value-oriented customer? The Commodore 64 of course. Saw many. A lot of them second-hand machines bought from Westerners who cleaned house to make room for whatever came next.
> "It's not that we forget "inconvenient" genres, [...]"
I beg to differ; in my experience, the Amiga who doesn't forget is an outlier. ;)
> "[...] the vast majority of people did not have those high-end PC's with the requisite graphics and sound cards."
Once again: The context was the strictly technical, which was brought up by another poster. I am also well aware of the economical, and for specific usecases corresponding technical, realities. But that is best served by (comparative) market analysis and not just anecdotes. Which brings me to...
> "We continued to laugh at people with PC's pretty much until Doom, because most of the PC's our friends had were still low end, and lacked expensive graphics- and sound cards, while at the same time, certainly there was a mounting concern over what was trickling down for PC's from the high-end."
In my little corner of East Germany, I didn't feel the same about Amiga users. For you simply were not relevant; I didn't know anyone with an Amiga until much, much later (2007!).
> "With respect to Silpheed, the original version is a graphically primitive 8-bit game and the 1989 version was ported to Apple II-GS - it was hardly performance that was the reason it didn't get an Amiga release."
It serves as an example of an arcade game with good production values, and many supported graphics and sound modes ("expandability"), for a PC of the era, i. e. the outgoing 80s.
> The context was the strictly technical, which was brought up by another poster.
That's fine, but it was not what I took issue with in your response.
> It serves as an example of an arcade game with good production values, and many supported graphics and sound modes ("expandability"), for a PC of the era, i. e. the outgoing 80s.
It serves, to me, as an example of a pretty primitive game given the year the port was released, basic enough to replicate on an 8-bit machine, that likely didn't get a port because it wasn't well known enough in the markets where the Amiga was popular to bother licensing it and too basic to be competitive.
> "That's fine, but it was not what I took issue with in your response."
It's what was I was replying to; it's what the argument was about.
> "It serves, to me, as an example of a pretty primitive game given the year the port was released, [...]"
Okay.
> Do you honestly think that the general public gave ... about closed architectures?
Not consciously, but they could see more and more capable and affordable systems and upgrades available from a lively and competitive industry.
> Do you honestly think that the general public gave two shits about closed architectures?
First, this specific argument is about the computer-buying public, not the general public. Furthermore, yes, many people also bought into the IBM-PC & Compatibles eco-system because it was much more open. Many young(er) urban professionals of the time took their work home, to be continued on computers. I think financial mobility, supply, as well as culture (incl. generational divides) are more much important factors.
> The vast majority of people, who were using computers, were using them to play games.
Do you have data to back that up? Because where I'm from (East Germany), strictly based on my observations, this didn't track; many PCs were used as intended: general-purpose computing. That means work and play.
The Amiga platform was originally built on game-console hardware. Incidentally, so was the Raspberry Pi, which is why the first Raspberry Pi models were comparatively very cheap.
The platform is irrelevant. They were more expensive than games consoles. So they lost, just like all other true personal computer manufacturers. They had too many components and couldn’t compete.
I think it was lack of vision and financial mismanagement that killed them more than anything technical.
Edit: an interesting take with the games consoles, I never really thought about it from that angle before. But it makes a lot of sense. Console makers get a cut of the revenue stream of the games. Commodore never saw a cent of that and the only commercial niche they briefly owned was low-budget TV production, like cable channels and such.
The end of the Motorola MC68000 architecture killed a whole lot of platforms around that same time. Amiga was just one of them among many, but the fact that Atari ST also died, NeXT was ported to x86, the Mac was ported to PowerPC, Sun Microsystems went SPARC etc. etc. all pretty much simultaneously, is not a coincidence.
Were they? I bought my Amiga 500 around 1992 for $200 USD at Software Etc. I think the Nintendo was around $100 USD and the games were often much more expensive. Not to mention most games were just the cost of a floppy disk if you had Amiga friends.
$100 < $200
A console without games isn’t useful.
And a printer without ink doesn’t print. Yet we all continue to fall for this initial low price bait.
In 1985 the NES launched in the US at $179.99 and didn’t include a game. So while I’m sure somebody came home with a useless object, in general people where forced to but at least one.
In 1996 the first hit became free.
Video rental was huge. It's the only way I could afford to play games.
In 1985? That didn’t take off where I was until PS1 days.
Oh yea, 1985-1987 is when a lot of the VHS places started stocking video games.
It’s the only way I was able to play. My best friend across the street had the console and I didn’t (I had Atari 2600). So I would rent and we would play together. I eventually got my own in maybe 1987-1988.
PS1 kicked off in 1995 and we had rentals for a long time by that point. I never owned a PS1 but same friend did. I ended up going from NES, SNES, N64 before switching mostly to PC games and eventually went to college where video games took a back seat for a number of years
Mostly play Xbox now (short while I had PSP)
Interesting, of the 3 rental places near me only one started carrying video games in 1994 with the others soon following.
This is in Florida too and not a major metropolitan area. I just assumed it was everywhere
Piracy made Amiga cheaper. SNES and two cartridges/Genesis with three was more expensive than Amiga 500.
Were they? I had an Amiga 1200, a friend a 500, both of which were around long before games consoles became mainstream.
> I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games.
I mean TV studios and media houses, but admittedly, that's not exactly a huge market.
> Ever since I saw an Amiga 500 at a friend's house in what was probably late 1988, I wanted one for myself. Back then, computers were uncommon, especially at home. Even though I went to a school in a fairly affluent neighborhood, few kids had home computers or video games.
This may be true in the US and Japan, the rest of the world were mainly using 8-bit (and increasingly 16-bit) computers in this era, so this scans really oddly outside the US.
I grew up on an 80s UK council estate (surrounded by poverty) and practically every kid had a computer, mainly Commodore 64, 16, +4, Sinclair Spectrum, or an Amstrad CPC (maybe a few BBC Micros dotted around, and some other oddities)
Lots of people had the early Atari consoles in the early 80s, but after that I didn't see a console until the Megadrive. Everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE had computers in the mid-late 80s to early 90s where I was growing up.
Yeah, virtually everyone I knew circa 1990 had a home computer. Mostly Spectrum and CPC. A few years later it was a few Amiga 500 too. The only “console” I had seen was the Atari VCS or a dedicated Pong machine. A few people got Game Boys a little later circa 1992. A single friend who had a Master System and one kid with divorced parents who got a SNES as a result.
It was in this environment that I would discover programming and the internet.
> This was may be true in the US
In 1989, the closest year I can find stats, home computer penetration was 15% of households in the US, but that wasn't uniformly distributed, so some people will have grown up with the experience of it being VERY common for people around them to have computers (I did), while others will have known no one with one.
Yeah if your secret sauce is a chip, with very particular timing and memory behaviour... you've just built in obsolescence. There's no abstracted API for doing the fancy graphics (at least not one used by games, etc), and the whole system is built around sharing the memory bus between CPU and VDP (not going to fly once memory & bus speeds became a fraction of the CPU speed and once cache was a serious thing)... it's just stuck in a grotto.. a neighbourhood that looks fantastic when you moved in but now the next city over is getting a brand new subway system while you're still stuck with an old fleet of busses.
Nevermind Moore's law and exponential improvements... you're stuck even falling behind in very incremental developments.
I also lived through this era, but from the Atari ST side. When I got my 486 it was a feeling of a kind of relenting "sigh" abandoning the 68k and its basic superiority... but economies of scale and the arrival of Linux (I used the very first versions, before the a.out->ELF transition even) made it worthwhile.
> the whole system is built around sharing the memory bus between CPU and VDP
Isn't this what "Unified Memory" does in more modern systems? There's nothing wrong with sharing memory between CPU and hardware graphics.
We might be able to circle back to this now by putting some portion of memory and video on the die along with the CPU, but that was not going to happen for Atari and Commodore back in the 90s. Motorola wasn't going to shove 128KB or whatever of RAM into a 68k just for them, and even if they did it would have been so expensive
Memory speeds plateau'd while CPU speeds skyrocketed. Almost all the complexities of modern architectures have to do with this. There used to be "no need" for something as funky as L1/L2/L3 caches really because often your memory was faster than your CPU (hence why something like the C64's VIC-II or the Atari ST's "Shifter" are even possible).
Hell there were systems back then that didn't even have onboard registers in the CPU, but used external memory for it (TI's TMS series). The 6502's "zero page" is another example.
You can't do that anymore. The CPU will run many laps around your memory.
Still it'd be interesting to see what Jay Miner would have come up with in the late 90s or 21st century, if he was still around and in the game.
The combination with “There's no abstracted API for doing the fancy graphics (at least not one used by games, etc)” only works as long as you have a solid unique benefit, and that, Amiga lost fairly rapidly due to Moore’s law.
It lasted pretty long, especially considering the rate of evolution in those days. It debuted already in 1985, and there were some incremental improvements along the way (first the A3000 and then AGA A4000/A1200 in 1992). After the biggest lead in graphics started to shrink you still had a big user and software user base, multitasking desktop that was far ahead at least until W95, great CLI environment compared to PC stuff, competitive price etc.
> and there were some incremental improvements along the way (first the A3000 and then AGA A4000/A1200 in 1992)
About the A3000 Wikipedia says “The machine is reported to have sold 14,380 units in Germany (including Amiga 3000T sales)”, and about the A4000 “The machine is reported to have sold 11,300 units in Germany”. Both were on sale for about 2 years.
In comparison, the A2000 sold 124,500 units in Germany, again according to Wikipedia, in the about 4 years of its commercial availability.
So, about a 80% decline in sales per month, in what I think/guess was an expanding market for personal computers.
⇒ I don’t think those improvements made much of a difference.
3000 and 4000 were "high end". The 1200 was the 500/600 replacement with AGA and sold relatively well.
The A3000 was more than twice as expensive. The A4000 even more expensive. They were not mass market machines.
Variants of the A2000 continued in the market after the A3000 was released, such as the A2500, so people who didn't need the upgrades - or could make use of them (e.g. the VideoToaster didn't fit in the A3000 case without modifications) would continue to buy cheaper models.
.. And the 1992 Amiga 600 and 1993 1200 sold 193k/95k. The volume was always in the A500 form factor machines that used a TV as the display half the time.
Commodore's focus on low cost stuff (in their own way) while PC clones managed to push the HDD+SVGA setup price down was a critical factor for how things turned out I think. In the high end there was also Apple, Macintosh had launched a year before the Amiga and made the professional GUI market harder to enter.
But the fateful focus also let the masses have access to a great hacker's computer growing up, without the vibe satirized by "Office Space" that marked the Microsoft platforms.
Unified memory is more about taking advantage of zero copy access for the GPU. Since everything the GPU wants is already right there there's no need to send it on a trip over a bus into separate GPU memory. Memory bandwidth is of course still important for both the GPU and CPU so that unified memory can be a bottleneck if it's slow or has too few channels.
Commodore operations were very, very poor, too.
If they had been smarter with money, I'm sure they could have innovated in many many ways without giving up on backwards compatilibity. Sony put a PS1 inside the PS2. The Sony MSX2 contained an MSX1-on-a-chip.
Amiga could easily have had a PCI bus for external video chips.
And I'm not even going into the more crazy PS3-like ideas like "so, memory and bus speed are just a fraction of CPU speed? Ok, here are 32 parallel CPUs with their own chunk of the VDP bandwidth and their own local memory".
The last iteration of the Amiga chipset Commodore worked on when they went bankrupt (Hombre)[1] was intended to be a 2-chip system providing a 64-bit 3D chipset with a PA-RISC CPU on-die in the in one of them that'd break compatibility, and be used for both standalone computers, set-top boxes and for a high-end graphics card.
To sort out compatibility, the idea was for an "AGA Amiga on a chip".
I'm not convinced Amiga-users would've been all too happy with all of this - or that PA RISC was a good choice, given what we know now -, but it certainly would've been a massive upgrade.
(What Commodore was close to completing when they went bankrupt, though, was AAA[2] - which would've seen far more modest but still significant upgrades, like wider buses, support for chunky graphics modes, higher resolutions, far higher video bandwidth; AAA was in testing when Commodore failed)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Amiga_Architecture_ch...
Did you ever use MiNT on your Atari ST when it was relevant? I understand that for some folks, MiNT was kind of the gateway drug that often led users to Linux on PC shortly afterwards.
MiNT and a 16 GB hard drive with all the GNU tools installed. It was just like the Unix at work.
Linux came later after also going through AIX, HP/UX, A/UX, AT&T SVr4, SunOS, Solaris, OSF/1, ISC, ...
I presume you mean MB and not GB? On native Atari hardware at least, you could only address up to 1 GB partitions on the very last TOS 4.04 based systems like the Falcon.
Yes, that was indeed the gateway. Among others.
Though my ST only had 1MB of RAM and a floppy, no hard drive. On that I ran a UUCP node to get email and news for a while. And some unix-like shells (Mupfel, I believe was one? Gulam was another great one). I did use MiNT a bit but the whole GNU toolset was a bit big for a floppy system, and the multitasking was only somewhat useful. You could get a unix-like environment without going fully MiNT.
The big jump for me was having a 200MB HD in my 486 when I got it. Massive life change.
its easier to see this in hindsight. the amiga was basically just using the model that every previous home computer had used, expecting game devs to use the hardware directly like they had been doing since the first home PCs. wasting resources on an API or any kind of abstraction was for user level BASICs and similar, not for professional games
I was not a big Amiga user, but on the Atari ST we had a graphics abstraction API (VDI) from day one. Had the notion of a virtual device and drawing surface. All done through a proper syscall TRAP system, too. I am given to understand that the AmigaOS syscall API was in the form of JMPs.
So when the Falcon and TT Etc came along with full 16-bit 256 colour SVGA-like graphics, anything properly written GUI "just worked"
Games and the like, yes, had to fall back to a video compat mode.
It used JMP, but you looked up the API base addresses from a fixed address, ($4 IIRC) so it worked basically the same. But only like some turned based games, and like some chess games etc used that API. The rest maybe used the APIs to allocate a screen but they were banging hardware after that. Most didn't even use the OS even to read the keyboard, which became an annoyance on the A600 which lacked some of the keys.
I mean the advantage of the TRAP approach is more amenable to supervisor/user mode switch and memory protection and the like?
Separate topic from graphics and device independence though
The original Amiga platform had no MMU, hence no support for memory protection or virtual memory addressing. Some Motorola processors included it (the 68030 and up) but these were only used on high-end Amigas that were not the most common platform, and are more comparable to contemporary workstations. The AmigaOS just used the single address space approach, that's not necessarily incompatible with protected memory.
The Intel 80386 and its successors were quite exceptional in being "killer micros" with a workstation-class feature set for the time.
Memory protection was basically impossible or at least "Research Level Hard" on the Amiga, because of how the OS was designed with linked lists and message passing of pointers. This was what made it so fast, but at a cost. (They would have needed something like Rust to balance that.)
Everything could have been fixed with the March of Moore. The OS could have gotten a hypervisor and been running each program in its own "VM" thinking it was the only program on the machine.
Later iterations of OS extensions on the ST got memory protection support, albeit a bit inconistently and with likely backwards compat problems. FreeMiNT I think supports MMU + protection on 030 machines.
Achilles heel for classic MacOS, too. Sins of our fathers.
Pretty sure MultiTOS (which was derived from MiNT IIRC) fully supported preemptive multitasking back in 1992 or so when it came out. This, plus the fancier graphics support, a proper 68030 instead of the rather cut down 68EC020, and addition of a Motorola 56K DSP, meant the Atari Falcon was superior to the Amiga A1200, at least on paper. I certainly adored mine when I owned it not that long ago as a part of my small collection.
Yeah I have two Falcons here. Not that I ever use them, but they're amazing machines for the time.
[dead]
> So when the Falcon and TT Etc came along with full 16-bit 256 colour SVGA-like graphics, anything properly written GUI "just worked"
> Games and the like, yes, had to fall back to a video compat mode.
The Amiga had retargetable graphics too. No real difference there.
Yeah. It was very much the same with DOS games, too.
Nothing else like Video Toaster being available kept Amigas around for a while. 2001 my parent's cable provider still used them for guide/PPV channels.
(2024)
Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39246825
Long time PC gamer here. I didn’t own an Amiga so I definitely have another POV.
1994?! Every single PC gaming store was flooded with PC CD demos.
Day of the Tentacle. Loom. Monkey Island. Rebel Assault. Myst. 7th Guest.
Every “AAA” release at the time was getting a “talkie” version with added FMV or cd audio.
Plus Doom, and then Doom 2.
I actually think the 93-96 period is basically the most hype I’ve ever seen the PC market, ever.
I’m sure Amiga had a lot of cool stuff still. The demo scene, the various Psygnosis games. But I never got on my radar beyond “this doesn’t need config.sys and it has more colors”.
A more accurate or complete statement:
Doom didn't kill the Amiga. Wolfenstein 3D did. (2024)
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsADJa-23Sg (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40343333)
Amiga was a games console masquerading as a computer.
If it had started life as the cd32 then the company might still be around today.