2 ms·

The Amiga was built to be a gaming console. How many gaming consoles take custom video cards?

tom_ 3y ago
How many gaming consoles have a keyboard and a mouse and (as was much commented upon at the time) a multitasking GUI OS?
- vidarh 3y ago
  The original Amiga design had none of those. All of those were added at a point where the game machine market had collapsed and Amiga was running out of money and/or the final pieces after Commodore had snatched them up. AmigaOS "famously" (to Amiga users) has weird inconsistencies because Commodore last minute had to license a BCPL based system to add the AmigaDOS subsystem which is inconsistent with every other part of the OS, for example, because the original system didn't have filesystems and the like in a working order and the company meant to provide it failed to do so. And so we were grumbling about having to deal with BCPL style "BPTR" pointers (had to be shifted to be dereferenced) for no good reason for years afterward.
Lerc 3y ago
Yet the Zorro II and III busses were quite advanced for their time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig
empressplay 3y ago
The 500 was developed to compete in the 'desktop gaming' market but the original 1000 was designed as a productivity machine to compete with the Macintosh. Later 'expandable' Amigas were similarly targeted towards graphics professionals. The Amiga models targeted toward consumer gaming did not AFAIK have the ability to add a video card, being in the more classic integrated keyboard form factor.
- vidarh 3y ago
  The original Lorraine chipset was developed to be a gaming console. The original Commodore Amiga (the "1000" was added retroactively) was designed as a productivity machine, but that started only once the bottom fell out of the gaming market and they were forced to find another way out, which ended with Commodore buying them. (Amiga Inc only survived until the buyout thanks to a $500k loan from Atari - who intended to buy them, but Tramiel, who had taken over Atari after leaving Commodore, was famously cheap and strung them along expecting to pick them up for pennies if they defaulted on the loan)
toyg 3y ago
The Amiga was not originally meant to be a game console - the Amiga 1000 launch event featured Andie Warhol and Debbie Harry ("Blondie") using the computer to make art. For a period, the Amiga was the gold standard for video FX in TV stations and film studios. It just so happened that its features were very good for games, so the gaming industry produced a lot for it. The abortive successor CD32 was a game console (trying to do what Playstation did a couple of years later), but it was a late hail-mary from an already zombified company. The original Amiga was built with expansion ports, but Commodore saw them as a way to sell more widgets - very few add-ons were produced, and they were very expensive. Aftermarket manufacturers existed, but they couldn't grow significantly: unlike IBM-compatible PCs, the Amiga never managed to get a presence large enough to sustain a large hardware ecosystem.
- Findecanor 3y ago
  The Amiga had been intended as a games machine in early development when it was still only a project at Amiga Inc. However, when the 1983 video games crash happened, they started looking at other purposes and decided to add keyboard and mouse support. When they got funding from Atari it wasn't entirely clear if it was going to become a games console, a home computer, or both. Then Jack Tramiel was ousted from Commodore and took engineers with him. Commodore had to abandon the Commodore 900 project: a 16-bit business computer running Coherent (a clone of Unix), and was looking for a replacement: a hole which the Amiga filled, and then some.
  - Findecanor 3y ago
    Self-correction: the company was called "Amiga Corporation". "Amiga Inc" is something more recent.
- vidarh 3y ago
  The Amiga did not originate under Commodore, and the original business plan was very much a game machine. By the time Commodore snapped it up right under the noses of Atari, that was still the goal. While Commodore changed that goal, the artefacts of that origin is all over the system, from a built in dual "play fields" graphics mode, to the OS support for sprite multiplexing.

tom_ 3y ago

How many gaming consoles have a keyboard and a mouse and (as was much commented upon at the time) a multitasking GUI OS?

vidarh 3y ago
The original Amiga design had none of those. All of those were added at a point where the game machine market had collapsed and Amiga was running out of money and/or the final pieces after Commodore had snatched them up. AmigaOS "famously" (to Amiga users) has weird inconsistencies because Commodore last minute had to license a BCPL based system to add the AmigaDOS subsystem which is inconsistent with every other part of the OS, for example, because the original system didn't have filesystems and the like in a working order and the company meant to provide it failed to do so. And so we were grumbling about having to deal with BCPL style "BPTR" pointers (had to be shifted to be dereferenced) for no good reason for years afterward.

Lerc 3y ago

Yet the Zorro II and III busses were quite advanced for their time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig

empressplay 3y ago

The 500 was developed to compete in the 'desktop gaming' market but the original 1000 was designed as a productivity machine to compete with the Macintosh. Later 'expandable' Amigas were similarly targeted towards graphics professionals. The Amiga models targeted toward consumer gaming did not AFAIK have the ability to add a video card, being in the more classic integrated keyboard form factor.

vidarh 3y ago
The original Lorraine chipset was developed to be a gaming console. The original Commodore Amiga (the "1000" was added retroactively) was designed as a productivity machine, but that started only once the bottom fell out of the gaming market and they were forced to find another way out, which ended with Commodore buying them. (Amiga Inc only survived until the buyout thanks to a $500k loan from Atari - who intended to buy them, but Tramiel, who had taken over Atari after leaving Commodore, was famously cheap and strung them along expecting to pick them up for pennies if they defaulted on the loan)

toyg 3y ago

The Amiga was not originally meant to be a game console - the Amiga 1000 launch event featured Andie Warhol and Debbie Harry ("Blondie") using the computer to make art. For a period, the Amiga was the gold standard for video FX in TV stations and film studios. It just so happened that its features were very good for games, so the gaming industry produced a lot for it. The abortive successor CD32 was a game console (trying to do what Playstation did a couple of years later), but it was a late hail-mary from an already zombified company. The original Amiga was built with expansion ports, but Commodore saw them as a way to sell more widgets - very few add-ons were produced, and they were very expensive. Aftermarket manufacturers existed, but they couldn't grow significantly: unlike IBM-compatible PCs, the Amiga never managed to get a presence large enough to sustain a large hardware ecosystem.

Findecanor 3y ago
The Amiga had been intended as a games machine in early development when it was still only a project at Amiga Inc. However, when the 1983 video games crash happened, they started looking at other purposes and decided to add keyboard and mouse support. When they got funding from Atari it wasn't entirely clear if it was going to become a games console, a home computer, or both. Then Jack Tramiel was ousted from Commodore and took engineers with him. Commodore had to abandon the Commodore 900 project: a 16-bit business computer running Coherent (a clone of Unix), and was looking for a replacement: a hole which the Amiga filled, and then some.
- Findecanor 3y ago
  Self-correction: the company was called "Amiga Corporation". "Amiga Inc" is something more recent.
vidarh 3y ago
The Amiga did not originate under Commodore, and the original business plan was very much a game machine. By the time Commodore snapped it up right under the noses of Atari, that was still the goal. While Commodore changed that goal, the artefacts of that origin is all over the system, from a built in dual "play fields" graphics mode, to the OS support for sprite multiplexing.