Games - Amiga

	Games - Amiga

The Amiga is a family of home/personal computers originally developed by Amiga Corporation as an advanced game console. Development on the Amiga began in 1982 with Jay Miner as the principal hardware designer. Commodore International introduced the machine to the market in 1985, after having bought Amiga Corp. The machine was ahead of its time, sporting a custom chipset with advanced graphics and sound capabilities, and a sophisticated multitasking operating system, now known as AmigaOS. Based on the Motorola 68k series of 32-bit microprocessors, the Amiga provided a significant upgrade from 8-bit computers such as the Commodore 64, and the Amiga quickly grew in popularity among computer enthusiasts, especially in Europe. It also found a prominent role in the video production business.

History

The Amiga was originally designed by a small company called Amiga Corporation as the ultimate video games machine. Before the machine was released into the market, the company was bought out by Commodore, and it was redesigned into a real, general-purpose computer. The first model, called the Amiga 1000, was released in 1985 as a successor to the Commodore 64 and a rival to the Atari ST. :For more information, see Did Atari attempt to acquire Amiga?

Commodore later released several new Amiga models, both for low-end gaming use and high-end productivity use. Throughout the 1980s, the Amiga's combination of advanced hardware and operating system software offered greater power than its competitors, but in the 1990s, other platforms, most of all the PC reduced or eliminated this advantage.

Hardware

At the time of its introduction in 1985, the Amiga was the most advanced computer ever designed for the home market. It offered a fast CPU, enormous memory expansion capability, powerful sound and graphics subsystems, and one of the first multitasking operating systems for personal computers. It was popular in the home, and, to a lesser extent, in business environments, where it was used largely for its video editing capabilities. It never became truly mainstream, and (somewhat arguably) became obsolete in 1994 when Commodore International, its manufacturer, ceased operations.

CPU

The very first model, the Amiga 1000, had a 7.14 MHz 68000 CPU, designed to work directly with NTSC video. The CPU clock frequency was precisely double the 3.57 MHz color carrier frequency. The A1000 had a built-in composite video output, which allowed the computer to be hooked up directly to a TV or VCR. However, the output signal was considered too "hot" (strong) by many to be useful for anything other than home use. This could be remedied by running the A1000's composite output through a video processing amplifier, or "proc amp", to bring the video levels down to a suitable level.

Custom chipset

The Original Amiga chipset, or OCS, was more advanced than other architectures of its time: it had dedicated chips for real-time video effects, allowing users to easily work with genlocks to overlay graphics atop live video. The Amiga's unique overscan feature, the ability to run at custom, user-defined resolutions, allowed it to draw images past the visible borders of a television screen, allowing seamless fly-ins and scrolling from off-frame.

The machine was extremely expandable, supporting a huge amount of memory for the time. The original machine shipped with 256K (and was quite usable), and offered an initial expansion to 512K. That first 512K of memory was Chip RAM, which meant it was shared between the custom chipset and the CPU, with the chipset having priority. Additional RAM, up to 8 more megabytes, could be attached via the side expansion bus, and was visible only to the CPU. A mere 8 megabytes may seem laughably small to a modern reader, but at the time, that much RAM would have cost close to $10,000 US.

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Games - Amiga

History

Hardware

CPU

Custom chipset

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