You have all these 8-bit computers limited to fixed palettes of 8 or 16 colors (except the Atari, MSX2 stuff) at the time. Then you have the Macintosh with its

You have all these 8-bit computers limited to fixed palettes of 8 or 16 colors (except the Atari, MSX2 stuff) at the time. Then you have the Macintosh with its monochrome flat framebuffer, or the IBM with what, four to 16 colors? The Amiga chipset was originally designed as a video game system. Its predecessors were really the Atari 8-bit computer family and the Atari 2600. It had a bunch of coprocessors to accelerate 2D graphics, offloading the CPU for other crap while the graphics chipset handled sprites, video memory copying and merging, and even a simple "line shader" that could update graphics registers on a line-per-line basis independent of the CPU. Add similarly powerful audio hardware with four channels of arbitrary sample playback with per-channel frequency and volume independent of the sample data, and a pre-emptively multitasking operating system in many ways ahead of its time and you have a hell of a computer that can do things with the CPU running cold (the boing ball demo on the Amiga was famously implemented using the blitter hardware to draw the checkered ball and changing the palette once per frame to "rotate" it). Of course, these features became increasingly irrelevant as CPUs got cheaper and faster and could perform the graphics duties of the Aliga adequately in software, and the it didn't keep up. Particularly devastating IMO is that the Amiga uses a bit-plane model for graphics. Essentially, this means that graphics screen is composed of several single-bit per pixel planes that are interleaved to index a palette. This is great for memory consumptions because if you don't need 4 bit graphics for a particular screen, you can use two or three planes. It's awful when it comes to render raycasting columns because it makes each pixel in a comumn based renderer take several writes and reads. So a popular opinion is that Doom killed the Amiga. IMO it was just the final nail in the coffin. I got myself an Amiga 1200 with an accelerator rather late, trading it for a Pentium PC when those went out of fashion, just out of interest. It's a great machine and I still sometimes use it for games, basic internet duties like IRC and... Doom!