7 ms·

.... and the Amiga did all of that, and more, in 1985. The basic Amiga cost almost twice as much as a basic PC where I lived, which was why it wasn’t as popular

.... and the Amiga did all of that, and more, in 1985. The basic Amiga cost almost twice as much as a basic PC where I lived, which was why it wasn’t as popular. But in 1985, a PC that had capabilities comparable to the Amiga cost over 10 times as much as the Amiga: you’d need specialized graphics card to get 4096 colors at once, specialized sound cards to get 4 channel 8-bit stereo sound (or 2 channel 13-bit) - hardly any were available, and even if you got them, you didn’t ha e use for them because almost no software supported them. The o/S did good cooperative multitasking with just 512K ram. Oh, and it ran faster than a real Mac while emulating a Mac (used the same CPU, but also had a graphics accelerator that the Mac didn’t). In 1985. Sound blaster (8 bit sound card) and VGA (only 256 colors at once at low resolution, and no sprites) became common around 1991-1992. It took a few more years for it until hardware better than Amiga’s 1985 debut - 16 bit Soundblasters or Gravis Ultrasound; and Extended SuperVGA cards. Still no sprite or genlock features. Win 95 was finally comparable to AmigaOS, if somewhat more buggy. Alas, commodore was horribly mismanaged - and we are left with the PC legacy.

agumonkey 6y ago
A massive amount of creative people or creative content related company were born on the Amiga I believe.
- mortenjorck 6y ago
  Indeed; both EA and Blizzard had some of their earliest successes on the Amiga.
WalterBright 6y ago
I bought an Amiga in the early days. I was pretty annoyed with it because you had to buy the peripherals (like monitor, keyboard, etc.) only from Amiga. They were standard parts, but would have an interface that was just different enough to prevent the use of standard parts. I figured this sort of nonsense would kill the Amiga (like what happened to the Rainbow PC), and decided to not invest in making a compiler for it. Edit: if I recall correctly, while it had standard 3.5" diskettes, it couldn't read/write DOS disks. C'mon, guys. I don't recall what I did with the machine, probably gave it away.
- MrRadar 6y ago
  > and decided to not invest in making a compiler for it. For those who are unaware of the significance of this statement, Walter Bright wrote the Zortec C compiler for DOS (eventually rebranded as Symantec C) which he later extended to be the first compiler that translated C++ directly to machine code without first going through C as an intermediary language and is currently the lead author of the D programming language and its DMD compiler. This man knows compilers!
- beagle3 6y ago
  That was a problem, but that didn’t kill the Amiga. It had enough advantages for people to pay more - but Commodore mostly rested on their laurels. When the Amiga 3000 was out, it turned out that the CPU was faster than the blotter, for example - over 10 years, CPUs effective speed was almost 10 as much, but the ECS (which included the graphics coprocessor) wasn’t even twice as fast as the original 1985 version if I remember correctly. And Commodore was really horribly mismanaged at the time in every perspective. And yet, the Amiga lived a very, very long time - i know it was still used in TV stations into the early 2000s, despite being dead for a few years at that point, and the PC world having caught up to it and surpassed it in capabilities. Amiga hardware and software is still coming out. But it’s the afterlife now.
  - icedchai 6y ago
    I remember running a program on my Amiga 3000 that replaced calls to the blitter with calls to the CPU. Performance for common operations, like scrolling text, was greatly improved. Except for faster CPUs, the Amiga barely changed from 1985 to 1993. The AGA machines (1200, 4000) were too little, too late.
- ghaff 6y ago
  The DEC Rainbow was interesting because it highlighted a couple things in the early 1980s timeframe. - If you were buying a PC right after the IBM PC came out, it still wasn't obvious whether you bought an IBM PC with DOS (or one of the clones that were starting to come out) or if you bought a Z80 system running CP/M-86 (or an Apple III). I bought a PC clone in, I think 1983, but I had been shopping for a good year--those things were pricey--and it wasn't obvious when I first started shopping what the right choice was. - None of the minicomputer makers, including DEC, really understood compatibility in the context of PCs. They were so used to making completely proprietary systems so just selling something that could run an off-the-shelf operating system already seemed like a bold concession.
qbasic_forever 6y ago
Ok fine, but the PC had better demos. Future Crew 4 ever!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFv7mHTf0nA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFv7mHTf0nA (hehe I am a bit delighted in a retro way to see that arguing about PC vs. Amiga is still a thing)
p_l 6y ago
The thing is, by the time VGA appeared, the new hotness was "chunky graphics", something that was IIRC very bad on pre-AGA Amigas and even AGA-based models didn't excel at it. And Chunky graphics became crucial for growing amounts of 3D software.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  The Amiga CD32 fixed that issue by adding hardware-accelerated chunky/planar conversion. It came out too late to make a difference, though.
- cout 6y ago
  Can you explain how chunky graphics differs from non-chunky graphics? I'm not familiar with this term.
  - p_l 6y ago
    "Chunky" Graphics are the kind that most people are used to these days - where your graphical data tends to be addressed as pixels where each pixel has a single address and stores all data in one place. For example, your typical modern RGBA buffer will be composed of linear array of 32bit values, each of them representing 8bit Red, Green, Blue and Alpha values of individual pixels. Planar graphics works differently, with separately addressed bitplanes for different types of colour. For the RGBA example, you'll end up with 4 different buffers, each buffer representing red, green, blue and alpha values separately, requiring separate writes etc. - however one write in single bitplane could mean multiple pixels affected. Both approaches have their pros and cons, but in this case we're going to focus on Amiga's downfall-related specifics. When Amiga's graphic hardware was designed, a lot of it was built with features relevant to then common "home computers", even if much more powerful. This included things like "playfield" and hw sprite support, things especially useful in 2D games. Multiple playfields allowed compositing of two colour-limited screens on top of each other by dividing available bitfields between the two screens. Sprites allowed limited pasting of objects from memory at realtime on the screen (for example, player character, enemies, missiles in a typical platformer or SHMUP game). There was also hw collision detection between sprites. All of that advanced hw however didn't exactly help with software-rendered even pseudo-3D that became popular around that time - some features could be definitely reused (semi-programmable graphic pipeline through copper, blitter helping with bitmap ops, dual playfield allowing composition of, let's say, cockpit and exterior). Instead, you might want to compose variable-size bitmaps of pre-rendered airplane at different angles (method used by LucasArts 1988-1991 trilogy of WW2 aircraft sims), which didn't nicely match with sprite system, instead considerably taxing the blitter capacity (especially since blitting might have to be done in multiple passes due to planar graphics). Chunky graphics is also generally simpler, but changing requirements from applications definitely had their impact. More importantly, as someone mentioned, Amiga chips were innovative and powerful... in 1985. In 1986, VGA debuted, and while not particularly powerful on its own or widely available, the increasing power of the CPUs in PCs quickly eclipsed the benefits of dedicated hw chips in Amiga, especially since the OCS (Original Chip Set) only received incremental update in 1990 (ECS) and another in 1992 (AGA). Someone already mentioned writing faster blitters running on CPU than hw blitters of Amiga allowed, plus there were considerable limitations regarding DMA capabilities (IIRC, DMA for graphic system was only allowed from "Chip" Ram, which was limited to 2MB at best? Someone correct me if I'm wrong). There were also other areas where a dedicated enough PC owner could spend more and build a more powerful machine (wider availability of (E)ISA controllers, 1990's XGA with its higher resolution than AGA and hw blitter, etc. etc.).
pezezin 6y ago
> Sound blaster (8 bit sound card) and VGA (only 256 colors at once at low resolution, and no sprites) The color depth of the OCS and VGA are not directly comparable. OCS and ECS allowed 32 out of 4096 colors at once. To reach the full 4096 you needed to use HAM, which while impressive, was not as flexible and required careful image design. VGA allowed 256 out of 262 144, to get something similar in the Amiga you needed AGA.
- beagle3 6y ago
  While true, VGA only did that at 320x200, HAM6 was 360x576 with sprites, and iirc split screen with other modes was already possible. It is not directly comparable, not being pixel addressable, but was incredibly useful for anything that wasn’t fast moving and had some time to optimize the displayed image. It also took a while for anything actually use 256 color VGA for more than mostly static pictures. I wrote a side scroller in 1993 for the PC. I had to resort to a weird mode whose name escapes me now, where you could only address every 4th pixel without a bank switch - without this. Scrolling was too slow and there was no double buffering on VGA. It became the norm around 1994-1995 but without it, screen updates were severely limited by CPU speed.
  - pezezin 6y ago
    Mode X? With mode X you could reach weird resolutions like 320x480 with 256 colors, but it was planar.
  - vardump 6y ago
    "While true, VGA only did that at 320x200" I remember being able to get VGA to run at 360x480 with 256 colors in mode-x. "I had to resort to a weird mode whose name escapes me now, where you could only address every 4th pixel without a bank switch" That's mode-x. You could also for example set all 4 pixels to same color with a single write, write mask was a 4-bit value. It was great for filling polygons.
- vardump 6y ago
  "OCS and ECS allowed 32 out of 4096 colors at once." Per horizontal line! Copper could swap out palettes between/during horizontal lines. There was also 64-color extra halfbrite mode. Another 32 colors were at 50% brightness.
CodeArtisan 6y ago
Japaneses had the Sharp X68000. Released the same year as the Amiga 500, it had noticeably better graphics and audio. But the release price also was noticeably higher ($2600 vs $700). Sharp X68000 was an arcade turned into a desktop computer. It had an interesting mouse device that you could use as a gaming pad: https://youtu.be/7g7j0iv2QYg?t=132 https://youtu.be/7g7j0iv2QYg?t=132 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X68000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X68000
zepto 6y ago
> The o/S did good cooperative multitasking I always thought the Amiga has preemptive multitasking.
- ChainOfFools 6y ago
  you are correct, the Exec micro kernel was fully preemptive, or as much as it could be without the benefit of an MMU. Message passing through pointer exchange, no protection context,, etc. not pretty but it made for usable multitasking in a paltry 512k of memory at 7.16mhz.

agumonkey 6y ago

A massive amount of creative people or creative content related company were born on the Amiga I believe.

mortenjorck 6y ago
Indeed; both EA and Blizzard had some of their earliest successes on the Amiga.

WalterBright 6y ago

I bought an Amiga in the early days. I was pretty annoyed with it because you had to buy the peripherals (like monitor, keyboard, etc.) only from Amiga. They were standard parts, but would have an interface that was just different enough to prevent the use of standard parts. I figured this sort of nonsense would kill the Amiga (like what happened to the Rainbow PC), and decided to not invest in making a compiler for it. Edit: if I recall correctly, while it had standard 3.5" diskettes, it couldn't read/write DOS disks. C'mon, guys. I don't recall what I did with the machine, probably gave it away.

MrRadar 6y ago
> and decided to not invest in making a compiler for it. For those who are unaware of the significance of this statement, Walter Bright wrote the Zortec C compiler for DOS (eventually rebranded as Symantec C) which he later extended to be the first compiler that translated C++ directly to machine code without first going through C as an intermediary language and is currently the lead author of the D programming language and its DMD compiler. This man knows compilers!
beagle3 6y ago
That was a problem, but that didn’t kill the Amiga. It had enough advantages for people to pay more - but Commodore mostly rested on their laurels. When the Amiga 3000 was out, it turned out that the CPU was faster than the blotter, for example - over 10 years, CPUs effective speed was almost 10 as much, but the ECS (which included the graphics coprocessor) wasn’t even twice as fast as the original 1985 version if I remember correctly. And Commodore was really horribly mismanaged at the time in every perspective. And yet, the Amiga lived a very, very long time - i know it was still used in TV stations into the early 2000s, despite being dead for a few years at that point, and the PC world having caught up to it and surpassed it in capabilities. Amiga hardware and software is still coming out. But it’s the afterlife now.
- icedchai 6y ago
  I remember running a program on my Amiga 3000 that replaced calls to the blitter with calls to the CPU. Performance for common operations, like scrolling text, was greatly improved. Except for faster CPUs, the Amiga barely changed from 1985 to 1993. The AGA machines (1200, 4000) were too little, too late.
ghaff 6y ago
The DEC Rainbow was interesting because it highlighted a couple things in the early 1980s timeframe. - If you were buying a PC right after the IBM PC came out, it still wasn't obvious whether you bought an IBM PC with DOS (or one of the clones that were starting to come out) or if you bought a Z80 system running CP/M-86 (or an Apple III). I bought a PC clone in, I think 1983, but I had been shopping for a good year--those things were pricey--and it wasn't obvious when I first started shopping what the right choice was. - None of the minicomputer makers, including DEC, really understood compatibility in the context of PCs. They were so used to making completely proprietary systems so just selling something that could run an off-the-shelf operating system already seemed like a bold concession.

qbasic_forever 6y ago

Ok fine, but the PC had better demos. Future Crew 4 ever!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFv7mHTf0nA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFv7mHTf0nA (hehe I am a bit delighted in a retro way to see that arguing about PC vs. Amiga is still a thing)

p_l 6y ago

The thing is, by the time VGA appeared, the new hotness was "chunky graphics", something that was IIRC very bad on pre-AGA Amigas and even AGA-based models didn't excel at it. And Chunky graphics became crucial for growing amounts of 3D software.

zozbot234 6y ago
The Amiga CD32 fixed that issue by adding hardware-accelerated chunky/planar conversion. It came out too late to make a difference, though.
cout 6y ago
Can you explain how chunky graphics differs from non-chunky graphics? I'm not familiar with this term.
- p_l 6y ago
  "Chunky" Graphics are the kind that most people are used to these days - where your graphical data tends to be addressed as pixels where each pixel has a single address and stores all data in one place. For example, your typical modern RGBA buffer will be composed of linear array of 32bit values, each of them representing 8bit Red, Green, Blue and Alpha values of individual pixels. Planar graphics works differently, with separately addressed bitplanes for different types of colour. For the RGBA example, you'll end up with 4 different buffers, each buffer representing red, green, blue and alpha values separately, requiring separate writes etc. - however one write in single bitplane could mean multiple pixels affected. Both approaches have their pros and cons, but in this case we're going to focus on Amiga's downfall-related specifics. When Amiga's graphic hardware was designed, a lot of it was built with features relevant to then common "home computers", even if much more powerful. This included things like "playfield" and hw sprite support, things especially useful in 2D games. Multiple playfields allowed compositing of two colour-limited screens on top of each other by dividing available bitfields between the two screens. Sprites allowed limited pasting of objects from memory at realtime on the screen (for example, player character, enemies, missiles in a typical platformer or SHMUP game). There was also hw collision detection between sprites. All of that advanced hw however didn't exactly help with software-rendered even pseudo-3D that became popular around that time - some features could be definitely reused (semi-programmable graphic pipeline through copper, blitter helping with bitmap ops, dual playfield allowing composition of, let's say, cockpit and exterior). Instead, you might want to compose variable-size bitmaps of pre-rendered airplane at different angles (method used by LucasArts 1988-1991 trilogy of WW2 aircraft sims), which didn't nicely match with sprite system, instead considerably taxing the blitter capacity (especially since blitting might have to be done in multiple passes due to planar graphics). Chunky graphics is also generally simpler, but changing requirements from applications definitely had their impact. More importantly, as someone mentioned, Amiga chips were innovative and powerful... in 1985. In 1986, VGA debuted, and while not particularly powerful on its own or widely available, the increasing power of the CPUs in PCs quickly eclipsed the benefits of dedicated hw chips in Amiga, especially since the OCS (Original Chip Set) only received incremental update in 1990 (ECS) and another in 1992 (AGA). Someone already mentioned writing faster blitters running on CPU than hw blitters of Amiga allowed, plus there were considerable limitations regarding DMA capabilities (IIRC, DMA for graphic system was only allowed from "Chip" Ram, which was limited to 2MB at best? Someone correct me if I'm wrong). There were also other areas where a dedicated enough PC owner could spend more and build a more powerful machine (wider availability of (E)ISA controllers, 1990's XGA with its higher resolution than AGA and hw blitter, etc. etc.).

pezezin 6y ago

> Sound blaster (8 bit sound card) and VGA (only 256 colors at once at low resolution, and no sprites) The color depth of the OCS and VGA are not directly comparable. OCS and ECS allowed 32 out of 4096 colors at once. To reach the full 4096 you needed to use HAM, which while impressive, was not as flexible and required careful image design. VGA allowed 256 out of 262 144, to get something similar in the Amiga you needed AGA.

beagle3 6y ago
While true, VGA only did that at 320x200, HAM6 was 360x576 with sprites, and iirc split screen with other modes was already possible. It is not directly comparable, not being pixel addressable, but was incredibly useful for anything that wasn’t fast moving and had some time to optimize the displayed image. It also took a while for anything actually use 256 color VGA for more than mostly static pictures. I wrote a side scroller in 1993 for the PC. I had to resort to a weird mode whose name escapes me now, where you could only address every 4th pixel without a bank switch - without this. Scrolling was too slow and there was no double buffering on VGA. It became the norm around 1994-1995 but without it, screen updates were severely limited by CPU speed.
- pezezin 6y ago
  Mode X? With mode X you could reach weird resolutions like 320x480 with 256 colors, but it was planar.
- vardump 6y ago
  "While true, VGA only did that at 320x200" I remember being able to get VGA to run at 360x480 with 256 colors in mode-x. "I had to resort to a weird mode whose name escapes me now, where you could only address every 4th pixel without a bank switch" That's mode-x. You could also for example set all 4 pixels to same color with a single write, write mask was a 4-bit value. It was great for filling polygons.
vardump 6y ago
"OCS and ECS allowed 32 out of 4096 colors at once." Per horizontal line! Copper could swap out palettes between/during horizontal lines. There was also 64-color extra halfbrite mode. Another 32 colors were at 50% brightness.

CodeArtisan 6y ago

Japaneses had the Sharp X68000. Released the same year as the Amiga 500, it had noticeably better graphics and audio. But the release price also was noticeably higher ($2600 vs $700). Sharp X68000 was an arcade turned into a desktop computer. It had an interesting mouse device that you could use as a gaming pad: https://youtu.be/7g7j0iv2QYg?t=132 https://youtu.be/7g7j0iv2QYg?t=132 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X68000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X68000

zepto 6y ago

> The o/S did good cooperative multitasking I always thought the Amiga has preemptive multitasking.

ChainOfFools 6y ago
you are correct, the Exec micro kernel was fully preemptive, or as much as it could be without the benefit of an MMU. Message passing through pointer exchange, no protection context,, etc. not pretty but it made for usable multitasking in a paltry 512k of memory at 7.16mhz.