31 ms·

Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

wasabinator 3mo ago
I'm an Amiga diehard from the start but the industry caught up in a lot less than 10 years. Also, the amazing X68000 was a thing in Japan as of 1987.
- ZenoArrow 3mo ago
  The X68000 was amazing, but it was also around double the price. Amiga A1000 was around $1300 in 1985, Sharp X68000 was around $2500 in 1987. The Amiga A500 was released in 1987 and was even cheaper than the A1000 for an equivalent spec. If I'm paying double the price, of course I'd expect better performance, but Amigas gave great value for money between the mid 80s and early 90s.
  - wasabinator 3mo ago
    Yes but the point of the article was simply that the tech was 10 years ahead of it's time, but it provably wasn't.
    - ZenoArrow 3mo ago
      10 years ahead of it's time for affordable home computers. You have to take the target market into account. To use an analogy, most people accept that Gran Turismo on the PS1 has great graphics for it's time, despite releasing months after Scud Race on Sega Model 3 hardware, because it's accepted that what's impressive for a 70s/80s/90s console is not what's impressive for arcade hardware. The X68000 was basically arcade-class hardware in a PC form factor, with a price to match. There are reasons why Capcom used X68000s as their dev machines for CPS1 games.
phs318u 3mo ago
I’m sure that to the younger members here, you may be rolling your eyes at yet another “halcyon days of computing” post which will inevitably draw the rose-tinted comments from the boomers and gen-x-ers. Believe me when I say I get how tiring that must be. However it is impossible for those that experienced this new dawn to overstate how amazing this was. A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent some time with it, I not only thought this was the end of the line for my paltry C64, I thought I was looking at the future of computing, period. And realising that most computer users at that time were using machines that felt light years behind, made it feel like we had been let in to some amazing secret.
- khazhoux 3mo ago
  It was magical. Multitasking! The ability to pull down the top of the screen and reveal another screen fully running in the background. And of course, the graphics. HAM mode. Demo disks with crisp animations over (relatively) high-fidelity music. I was 14/15 when we got our Amiga 2000 (upgrade from C64). Maybe if I'd been 25 it wouldn't have hit in the same way. But I miss those days.
- pjmlp 3mo ago
  I sign the sibling comment about being magical. As we transitioned from 8 to 16 bits, I was kind of disappointed that my parents only supported the acquisition of a PC, turning me on the only person in the gang with a PC, while everyone else had Amigas. However I got to use them enough at what predated LAN parties, aka house parties with demoscene coding sessions, that I can talk as much as if I actually owned one. Kept looking for the same spirit in other systems, which probably only BeOS, NeXTSTEP, SunOS with NeWS kind of captured it.
- TacticalCoder 3mo ago
  > ... which will inevitably draw the rose-tinted comments from the boomers and gen-x-ers. Believe me when I say I get how tiring that must be Any boomer here that used an Amiga? As a GenXer I can tell you that my parents, the OG boomers, were completely lost when it came to home computing. > A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent some time with it, I not only thought this was the end of the line for my paltry C64, I thought I was looking at the future of computing, period. Exactly the same however... The port of Ultima V, one of the rare game I legally bought as a teenager, for the Amiga however was sooooo bad that I asked the neighbor across the street if I could borrow his Commoder 128 D (I had a C128 but the C128D had already one disk drive, so by hooking my C128's external drive to the C128D, I had two drives and this helped with the five floppies [five IIRC] of Ultima V) to play Ultima V. > And realising that most computer users at that time were using machines that felt light years behind, made it feel like we had been let in to some amazing secret. How it's not just past machines that were left in the dust: the Amiga was so good it left quite some future machines in the dark too. When I had to switch to a 386 running DOS, it felt like going backwards in time on quite a few metrics (for example the quality of games and intros/demos on the PC back then compared to the Amiga were really pathetic). GenXer signing off. P.S: still have my Amiga in the basement, with it's Kickstart ROM 1.2 vs 1.3 added switch/ROM and with it's very rare pirate external 5"1/4 floppy drive (not the, also rare, 5"1/4 floppy drive for the Amiga, which apparently also existed). I had a 5"1/4 floppy drive with a switch, fully emulating the 3"1/2 floppy drive, for 5"1/4 floppies were way cheaper (this mattered for we were sailing the digital high-seas and collecting all the demodisks we could find).
tosti 3mo ago
When I took a computer course in the early 2000s, the teacher said like "look, this had a desktop called workbench and it even has a recycle bin in f$#ing 1985." Things could've so much better if upper management wasn't disfunctional.
- technothrasher 3mo ago
  I loved my Amiga 2000, but AmigaOS was pretty late to the party with their trashcan. It came from the Xerox Star software in 1981, was ripped off by Apple in 1983, and by 1985 Commodore was just following the trend.
  - tosti 3mo ago
    Xerox workstations were pretty much unheard of. A few might've seen a Mac. But most people haven't seen trash can functionality until MS-Windows 95 came out. Personally, I just love the sound of it. Modules were awesome and games continued using them until ~2001.
metalspot 3mo ago
In the early 90s I had an elementary teacher who was an amiga nerd and had a couple for us to play with. Best class ever.
kryptonomist 3mo ago
Though the Atari ST was a superior machine.
- Annatar 3mo ago
  We all have our delusions.
  - vidarh 3mo ago
    The Atari fans showing up does bring up the nostalgia of BBS and Usenet flamewars though. The Atari was so unpopular in my parts that was the only exposure I had to the two of them.
    - Annatar 3mo ago
      [dead]
    - snarfy 3mo ago
      It wouldn't be a proper Amiga thread without some Atari ST guys showing up.
    - detritus 3mo ago
      It's funny, at the time I thought there was a lot more parity between the ST and the 500 but when I watch videos of the two these days, I realise just how much better the Amiga was. I'd always assumed the sound would be great on the Atari because it was midi-compatible, but I was horrified to hear how tinny and bleepy the sound effects were in a game I knew from the Amiga. Oh, to go back in time and use that in an argument at school with my ST nemesis, Andrew!
      - krs_ 3mo ago
        I somehow do really like the sound that some managed to squeeze out of that YM2149 sound chip in the ST though. It was an old low-end chip when the ST was new already, and most games do indeed sound like ass. But the people in the demoscene worked their magic on it to great effect.
SwellJoe 3mo ago
The Amiga was the best and worst thing to happen to a kid in the late 80s. It was heartbreaking watching Commodore die, but it was an amazing introduction to the possibilities of computing. I made a ton of music with OctaMED, learned a bunch about programming, learned how to use all sorts of graphics tools, made all my own icons and wallpaper images, wrote an interactive book in AmigaGuide (an early hypertext system), dialed into BBSes of many sorts. At the time, I thought computer graphics couldn't get much better than Psygnosis games for Amiga. Turns out, I was right. The source for the mentioned TRIPOS is on github: https://github.com/borb/tripos https://github.com/borb/tripos
- actionfromafar 3mo ago
  Don't you mean "it was heartbreaking watching Commodore shooting heroin with dirty needles in an alley, then later scouring trash bins for food" before finally dying? (Twice.) You are right about graphics.
  - LocalH 3mo ago
    And then someone decided it's time for "Weekend at Commodore's"
- iugtmkbdfil834 3mo ago
  Agreed. In my particular case, it did not help that were not exactly rich, so I got to, however briefly, become a zealot in amiga vs pc war. Still, one of a kind experience.
- johnyzee 3mo ago
  Spot on. The Amiga broke my teenage heart (name checks out). I was disgusted with computers after Commodore had run themselves into the ground, and left the whole thing for a few years. I just couldn't work with clunky PCs. In the end I had to budge and here we are, though it will never be quite the same.
- icedchai 3mo ago
  I doubt I'd be an engineer today if it wasn't for the Amiga. I learned C (Lattice, then SAS/C), ran a BBS, set up my first Internet connection (SLIP)...
somat 3mo ago
I was trying to figure out it's contemporaries, the i386 was still a few months away, you could get a sun-2, which had a sweet 4 MB of ram, but wikipedia sez that would cost you a eye watering 29 thousand dollars, in 1985, for the low end monochrome graphics version, oh, you want color that is "just" a cool 50k. Yeah Sun is not really playing the same game. The mac was probably the closest equivalent, it came out the year prior had more memory and a built in screen but cost more than twice as much. The real shocker is how little memory these systems had, amiga1000 only 256K, I distinctly remember buying my first memory module 128Mb for ~ $100 and thinking if I had bought this 10 years earlier, well you could not get 128 Mb ten years earlier, but if you could, it would have cost 200 thousand dollars.
- vidarh 3mo ago
  The Mac hit a completely different market. Nobody I knew got a Mac until after the iMac. Lots had Amigas. In the 80's Mac's were expensive machines for professionals, and while the Amiga due to Commodore's persistent sales and marketing failures were also pigeon holed in professional markers in the US, in Europe the Amiga was also the step up from 8-bit home computers, and the Mac didn't compete in that space at all. That's where the bulk of worldwide Amiga sales were. In my local computer store, the lone Mac sat unused in a corner while the other machines had kids around constantly.
  - dd8601fn 3mo ago
    Around here it was schools. Every machine in every school in every district was an apple, from the 80s to the late 90s. Many thousands of kids spent more time using those than anything else. At home, very few had apple machines. We did have programs where we could take a IIgs home over break, and loaner macbooks in later years. But if your family owned a machine it almost certainly wasn’t an apple. Mine was an IBM house, from the xt, on.
    - thijson 3mo ago
      I remember going to a university as a high schooler in the 80's and being amazed to see the GUI of an Apple computer, and the mouse pointer would change to an hour glass while waiting for something, When the hour glass filled, it would rotate and fill again. That animation blew me away, I was still using DOS at home.
dev0p 3mo ago
I’d argue that it's still ahead of a lot of modern systems. Aside from the loading times, the thing is incredibly fast. I invite you to try one if you have the chance, as words don't make it justice. I can't think of anything today that comes close to how instantly it responds to user input, even iOS feels sluggish in comparison. It had only a few kilobytes of memory, a bunch of CPU cycles and a dream, but By God they made damn sure not to waste a single instructions and it shows. We need to go back.
- elpocko 3mo ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o8E3ycB7Aw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o8E3ycB7Aw In case someone wants to see for themselves how "instantly" it really was. Skip to ~9:50 when it gets real sluggish. Edit: if you don't wear nostalgia glasses, you can watch the bits of screen being redrawn piece by piece after something moves or a menu closes. Everything is flickering. Opening and closing a menu takes up to one second. The text being typed in the editor lags. This is not more responsive than a modern system, far from it. Obviously.
  - dev0p 3mo ago
    Hence the caveat "Aside from the loading times," :) The "instantly" refers to user input: clicking a button, typing, or moving the mouse was as fast as it could possibly get because of how close the OS was to the bare metal, with no fluff bogging down the experience. Simply put, there were no wasted frames, as there were none to waste. Nowadays, at the very least, you get a couple millisecond of latency. That was not the case here. Also, this is a machine from NINETEEN EIGHTY F//G FIVE, and it's still probably faster than your average PC running Windows 11.
    - emj 3mo ago
      The GUI was fast because it was fixed layout, MUI on the Amiga was slow as well. We tend to go that way to get UI that is easy to create. You see the same in all GUI libraries the more CPU you have the more you use it.
giov4 3mo ago
I would not be who I am if my father didn't buy an amiga 1000 for my bigger brother. I was around 7 years old, I still have a few memory frames of the original package unboxing when it arrived. I was too small but I remember the feeling, after that I merged with computers. the kickstarting, deluxe paint, the huge amiga basic manual, the games... an amazing world that shaped how my brain works. thank you commodore, thank you dad. and thanks for this time traveling post!
zedr 3mo ago
Some features of the Amiga that are peculiar even today: 1. The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes 2. A screen can be divided into multiple resolutions, e.g. you can have a half a screen in high res and half in low res and with double the amount of simultaneous colors (or even HAM mode) 3. It can genlock natively, i.e. match its screen refresh rate with an inbound video signal, making it popular with broadcasting studios up to the late Nineties
- flohofwoe 3mo ago
  > 1. The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes Tbf that's also how it works in modern operating systems. The mouse cursor is a hardware overlay (e.g. a more powerful 'sprite') which is rendered independently from the rest of the screen (without this the mouse cursor would have a very obvious lag, as can be observed in some games that use a 'software mouse cursor'). Also theoretically at least, Windows has a feature where it bumps the thread/process priority of the application that owns the active window to make interaction feel more responsive, but this seems to get lost in the overall complexity, e.g. with some touchpads it's not uncommon that the mouse cursor gets completely stuck under high load. AmigaOS had such a 'bump active application priority' too, but unlike on Windows this feature actually worked. What made the Amiga mouse so extremely responsive is that the mouse movement code was (more or less) directly reading the hardware registers from inside an interrupt instead of having to go through tons of abstraction layers and an event system like on modern operating systems. > 2. A screen can be divided into multiple resolutions AFAIK this has also 'kinda sorta' survived as GPU hardware overlays. It's just hardly used in operating systems except for video playback (and mouse cursors). The special sauce of the Amiga was that the operating system actually made use of low-level hardware features instead of using those features only in games.
- 0x1ceb00da 3mo ago
  > The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes Modern macbooks do something really interesting when the OS freezes. If the OS OOMs or something like a kernel panic happens, the trackpad stops clicking! There's something in the trackpad hardware that polls the OS and locks the trackpad when the OS stops responding so that it can't be pressed down to click anymore. Almost makes the OS feel like a real physical thing when this happens.
gxd 3mo ago
One of my game's main characters is an Amiga fan and the Amiga vs ST rivalry has small cameo in it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/ That said, I've never owned an Amiga. I couldn't afford it. By the time I could, the world was already moving on to PCs and VGA...
flohofwoe 3mo ago
For some aspects, the Amiga is still ahead of today's tech. AmigaOS 2.x layed out a vision of the desktop UI as a malleable and personalizable toolbox (or one might say "workbench" heh) like no other operating system since then. The Amiga team envisioned a desktop environment future which focused on being a productivity tool instead of an interface for passive media consumption and doom scrolling, where graphical user interface and command line environments were tightly integrated with each other, where the philosophy of 'doing one thing right' was extended to the GUI and where highlevel operating system features could be extended via a standardized plugin architecture. The closest thing we have today is probably game modding. This grand idea was essentially "sacrificed on the altar of commerce" on Windows and macOS. Desktop Linux could carry that flag forward if it had a consistent vision for the desktop environment, but alas it wastes those resources on irrelevant technical details like creating yet another half-assed Wayland compositor and that way increasing fragmentation instead of reducing it. As a former Amiga user it amuses me to no end that we're now pivoting back to TUIs (see Claude Code) instead of attempting again to make those two worlds (GUI and cmdline) work together.
- pjmlp 3mo ago
  It isn't as if the tools aren't there, Powershell with .NET/COM (yes COM really needs a DX improvement), AppleTalk/XPC/zsh, GNOME/KDE/D-BUS. Yet as you very well point out, it is a mess, and no where close to using AREXX or Datatype libraries.
  - smallstepforman 3mo ago
    BeOS/Haiku uses datatypes natively
    - pjmlp 3mo ago
      Interesting, I didn't use it much beyond the famous demo CD.
  - kalleboo 3mo ago
    It's so sad to see what happened to AppleScript/the Open Scripting Architecture. When it arrived you could basically build your whole app around it as a message-passing/object system and get automatic, deep scripting integration. NeXTpple never properly integrated it into Cocoa, and eventually they wanted a more user-friendly GUI scripting system and put their NIH syndrome to work and made Automator, which never took off because it was too simple. They they built Shortcuts off an acquihire and now Shortcuts introduces NSUserActivity as the new way to... build your whole app around a message-passing/object system and get automatic, deep scripting integration. Except now we have all this weird magic templating going on.
rumgewieselt 3mo ago
Unrelated fact: My German Amiga 1000 keyboard has a serial number that ends with ... 00012. loved memories.
krige 3mo ago
10 years ahead, but for Irving motherf- Gould wasting it all out of pure greed, even after Rattigan managed to turn things around. AmigaOS 2.X is still a fantastic UI and design language though, especially compared to the ugly mess of 1.X
- dosisking 3mo ago
  AmigaOS 2.X is pretty much a copy of NeXTStep, visually speaking
  - krige 3mo ago
    I'm not seeing it. Sure, the window bgs are gray, but so was 90% the OSes at the time. Everything else is different and even the only things those two have in common, the pseudo-3D on buttons, is applied in different ways, creating different divisions and accents.
- TheAmazingRace 3mo ago
  The UI found in WorkBench 1.x was designed to be the way it was so that owners could plug their Amigas into television sets of the day and still be able to make out something without requiring a pristine purpose-built CRT monitor.
  - krige 3mo ago
    This is actually wrong because most of the A1000s were bundled with an RGB monitor and an optional composite out. The system wouldn't be really connected to a shitty TV until the budget models were released well after OS 1.X color scheme was established. As far as I can tell the blue/orange scheme was instead aimed at monochromatic monitors.
    - TheAmazingRace 3mo ago
      Ah. I stand corrected then.
andrewstuart 3mo ago
I thought “I think I have an Amiga 1200 in the garage in a box.” Looked for it, found it and underneath was an Amiga 1000 I forgot I had.
- LordDefender 3mo ago
  Please recap them, or find a pro to do it. Otherwise they get damaged by leaking capacitors.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
mdlxxv 3mo ago
Back when I was a teenager in the late 80s and early 90s, there were two "mythical" machines that I read a lot about but could never afford to own, the Amiga and the Neo-Geo. Nowadays both of them can be casually emulated on any kind of PC, but their capabilities still impress me.
SirFatty 3mo ago
I wanted one, but unlike the C64 I could not afford it.. but I wanted that and a Video Toaster.
spankibalt 3mo ago
The PC made it. Decisively and on all accounts. Save one. You Amiga nerdlingers got adequate enough hardware in them nice wedge-style keyboard computer cases (i. e. not counting Amiga buckets). AFAIK the highest high a (vintage) PC reaches here is the Japanese Epson PC-286C with a 486SLC CPU and the matching FasMath FPU upgrade. Time to change that. :)
mellosouls 3mo ago
Terrific, but not sure about the ten years ahead. Let's not forget this was also the era of Atari ST and the birth of ARM with the incredible Acorn Archimedes arriving just a couple of years later.
- bluGill 3mo ago
  Somehow the Atari ST is panned because it lacked preemptive multitasking (I'm not sure if this is true). They didn't mention any of the other GUIs that unix was working with - X11 already existed back then, and several unix vendors had their own windowing system that was arguably better (at least their marketing said so - I never used any). Of course Unix systems would have been much more expensive.
  - alexisread 3mo ago
    The ST got preemptive multitasking in 92 AFAIK with MINT/Multitos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_TOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_TOS
deepsummer 3mo ago
The Amiga was a great computer when it came out, but it was not 10 years ahead of anything. Things progressed incredibly fast back then. The graphics were not 10 years ahead, not even 3 years. First SVGA cards came out in 1987, with a 320x200 in 256 color mode that was far more practical than Amiga's 4096 color mode, and with resolutions of up to 800x600. By 1995, resolutions of 1280x1024 with 256 colors were widely available, and Nvidia released their first graphics accelerator. The first SoundBlaster cards came out in the late 80s. The SoundBlaster 32 released in 1995 was far superior to the Amiga. And the state-of-the-art CPU in 1995 was the Pentium 133, faster than a 7Mhz 68k by orders of magnitude. The Amiga 1000 was an awesome computer. But technically obsolete by 1990.
- haspok 3mo ago
  The early Soundblaster cards sucked. Even the SB16. The first real comparable product to the Amiga was the Gravis Ultrasound in 1992. Don't even mention SVGA, with it's pre-VESA non-standardised chaos, and abysmal high res performance. OK, the 320x200(240)x256 was actually quite usable for games, quick enough to run Doom in 93. But for video editing, there wasn't really anything on the PC that even compared to the Genlock, at least not for that price. And to top it off, AmigaOS had preemptive multitasking (in 1985!), Windows 95 was the first real OS to do that (not counting OS/2 and NT) with graphics (not counting Linux or any unixes), yay, that's 10 years for you. In 91 I sold my Commodore 16, and got an XT with Hercules graphics and the built-in PC Speaker. Not even on the same planet as the Amiga. In 92 or 93 I got my first 386, with VGA but no sound card for a while, though I secretly wanted an Amiga 500 instead, but it wasn't my call. However around 92/93 PC gaming and the demoscene (!) really took off, so I got a soundcard as soon as I could, and life was very swell after that.
  - dosisking 3mo ago
    I think the Gravis Ultrasound is in the same category as the Apple IIGS sound card, which came out in 1986. And I put the Apple IIGS sound card much further ahead than the Amiga Paula.
    - 3mo ago
cowmix 3mo ago
When the first mentions and prototypes of the Amiga started surfacing in 1984, I began saving my paper-route money to buy one. I finally got it on the first day I could. It was way ahead of its time, but it was also an early lesson in managing expectations. The way it was marketed, I expected things like real-time 3D graphics. It certainly couldn’t do that, at least not in the way I imagined. What the Amiga really prepared me for, though, was tolerating instability. It could multitask and had an incredible amount of functionality for the time, but it crashed constantly. I mean, an insane amount. Part of the problem was the lack of an MMU, but still: it was flaky as hell.
seanwilson 3mo ago
> Instead of failing gracefully if the resources it asked for weren’t available, it would simply allocate them, and cause a guru meditation, the Amiga equivalent of a blue screen of death or kernel panic. Hadn't seen this before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation
peter_d_sherman 3mo ago
Great article overall! But: >"Initially, the Amiga had a reputation for being unstable. But that was largely because early Amiga software wasn’t very well written. Amiga software was prone to ask for resources, and assume the resources were available. Instead of failing gracefully if the resources it asked for weren’t available, it would simply allocate them, and cause a guru meditation, the Amiga equivalent of a blue screen of death or kernel panic. Except it was red, not blue." Not true! Well, not entirely true... Or at least, that's not an entirely correct, nuanced, contextual historical understanding... I was an early Amiga owner, so I speak from experience! Yes, software could crash the system from time to time (any software of the era could crash almost any consumer computer of the era, because CPU's with MMU's and protected memory and protected mode operating systems where kernel/OS code was separate from user/client/program/application/unprivileged code (call it what you will!) either did not exist or were not widely available or inexpensive enough for mass-market adoption by the majority of home/family/mass-market consumers in the early to mid 1980's. The Amiga 1000 used the Motorola 68000 CPU, which did not have a built-in MMU on it or external MMU working alongside it, which means that there was no protected memory where the OS/kernel code could live, which means that any given program, even the simplest of C programs, could overwrite OS/kernel memory, which means that any given program could crash the computer -- but that's exactly the same as most of the other mass-market consumer computers from other manufacturers of the early to mid 1980's -- the same as early Macintoshes with 68000's, the same as 6510 Commodore 64's, the same as 6502/65C02 Apple IIe's, the same as early 8086/8088 IBM PC's and clones, etc., etc. Any program could crash any of those. So if the early Amiga had a "reputation for being unstable" (a reputation which I have never heard about until now, until reading this article what, 41 years or so since the original Amiga 1000 was first produced, I should explain that I've read almost every single early Amiga article (I was a voracious early "Amiga article reader"!) in the 1985-1993 time period) -- then the same thing would have been true about just about every other consumer-grade mass-market computer in the early to mid 1980's... because most didn't have MMU's and run protected mode operating systems...) If the Amiga 1000 had a "reputation for being unstable" -- then that's either fake news (what are your sources?) or AI-generated copypasta or possibly marketing gossip/slander originating from other jealous less-technologically superior competing computer manufacturers back in the day... Now, other than that minor point, that minor nuanced contextual understanding (which I apologize for, because it sounds like I'm trying to be a critic of the article -- I am not! I am merely trying to mitigate the spread of "fake historical news" surrounding the original Amiga 1000!) -- other that that minor point, the article is 100% spot-on, a great article, and I'm really glad the author wrote it! So, to the Author, I say "well done!" An excellent article overall! That, and I greatly appreciate any and all articles written about the early Amiga!
haihaoxu 3mo ago
wow
amigaman 3mo ago
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I'm an Amiga diehard from the start but the industry caught up in a lot less than 10 years. Also, the amazing X68000 was a thing in Japan as of 1987.

ZenoArrow 3mo ago
The X68000 was amazing, but it was also around double the price. Amiga A1000 was around $1300 in 1985, Sharp X68000 was around $2500 in 1987. The Amiga A500 was released in 1987 and was even cheaper than the A1000 for an equivalent spec. If I'm paying double the price, of course I'd expect better performance, but Amigas gave great value for money between the mid 80s and early 90s.
- wasabinator 3mo ago
  Yes but the point of the article was simply that the tech was 10 years ahead of it's time, but it provably wasn't.
  - ZenoArrow 3mo ago
    10 years ahead of it's time for affordable home computers. You have to take the target market into account. To use an analogy, most people accept that Gran Turismo on the PS1 has great graphics for it's time, despite releasing months after Scud Race on Sega Model 3 hardware, because it's accepted that what's impressive for a 70s/80s/90s console is not what's impressive for arcade hardware. The X68000 was basically arcade-class hardware in a PC form factor, with a price to match. There are reasons why Capcom used X68000s as their dev machines for CPS1 games.

phs318u 3mo ago

I’m sure that to the younger members here, you may be rolling your eyes at yet another “halcyon days of computing” post which will inevitably draw the rose-tinted comments from the boomers and gen-x-ers. Believe me when I say I get how tiring that must be. However it is impossible for those that experienced this new dawn to overstate how amazing this was. A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent some time with it, I not only thought this was the end of the line for my paltry C64, I thought I was looking at the future of computing, period. And realising that most computer users at that time were using machines that felt light years behind, made it feel like we had been let in to some amazing secret.

khazhoux 3mo ago
It was magical. Multitasking! The ability to pull down the top of the screen and reveal another screen fully running in the background. And of course, the graphics. HAM mode. Demo disks with crisp animations over (relatively) high-fidelity music. I was 14/15 when we got our Amiga 2000 (upgrade from C64). Maybe if I'd been 25 it wouldn't have hit in the same way. But I miss those days.
pjmlp 3mo ago
I sign the sibling comment about being magical. As we transitioned from 8 to 16 bits, I was kind of disappointed that my parents only supported the acquisition of a PC, turning me on the only person in the gang with a PC, while everyone else had Amigas. However I got to use them enough at what predated LAN parties, aka house parties with demoscene coding sessions, that I can talk as much as if I actually owned one. Kept looking for the same spirit in other systems, which probably only BeOS, NeXTSTEP, SunOS with NeWS kind of captured it.
TacticalCoder 3mo ago
> ... which will inevitably draw the rose-tinted comments from the boomers and gen-x-ers. Believe me when I say I get how tiring that must be Any boomer here that used an Amiga? As a GenXer I can tell you that my parents, the OG boomers, were completely lost when it came to home computing. > A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent some time with it, I not only thought this was the end of the line for my paltry C64, I thought I was looking at the future of computing, period. Exactly the same however... The port of Ultima V, one of the rare game I legally bought as a teenager, for the Amiga however was sooooo bad that I asked the neighbor across the street if I could borrow his Commoder 128 D (I had a C128 but the C128D had already one disk drive, so by hooking my C128's external drive to the C128D, I had two drives and this helped with the five floppies [five IIRC] of Ultima V) to play Ultima V. > And realising that most computer users at that time were using machines that felt light years behind, made it feel like we had been let in to some amazing secret. How it's not just past machines that were left in the dust: the Amiga was so good it left quite some future machines in the dark too. When I had to switch to a 386 running DOS, it felt like going backwards in time on quite a few metrics (for example the quality of games and intros/demos on the PC back then compared to the Amiga were really pathetic). GenXer signing off. P.S: still have my Amiga in the basement, with it's Kickstart ROM 1.2 vs 1.3 added switch/ROM and with it's very rare pirate external 5"1/4 floppy drive (not the, also rare, 5"1/4 floppy drive for the Amiga, which apparently also existed). I had a 5"1/4 floppy drive with a switch, fully emulating the 3"1/2 floppy drive, for 5"1/4 floppies were way cheaper (this mattered for we were sailing the digital high-seas and collecting all the demodisks we could find).

tosti 3mo ago

When I took a computer course in the early 2000s, the teacher said like "look, this had a desktop called workbench and it even has a recycle bin in f$#ing 1985." Things could've so much better if upper management wasn't disfunctional.

technothrasher 3mo ago
I loved my Amiga 2000, but AmigaOS was pretty late to the party with their trashcan. It came from the Xerox Star software in 1981, was ripped off by Apple in 1983, and by 1985 Commodore was just following the trend.
- tosti 3mo ago
  Xerox workstations were pretty much unheard of. A few might've seen a Mac. But most people haven't seen trash can functionality until MS-Windows 95 came out. Personally, I just love the sound of it. Modules were awesome and games continued using them until ~2001.

metalspot 3mo ago

In the early 90s I had an elementary teacher who was an amiga nerd and had a couple for us to play with. Best class ever.

kryptonomist 3mo ago

Though the Atari ST was a superior machine.

Annatar 3mo ago
We all have our delusions.
- vidarh 3mo ago
  The Atari fans showing up does bring up the nostalgia of BBS and Usenet flamewars though. The Atari was so unpopular in my parts that was the only exposure I had to the two of them.
  - Annatar 3mo ago
    [dead]
  - snarfy 3mo ago
    It wouldn't be a proper Amiga thread without some Atari ST guys showing up.
  - detritus 3mo ago
    It's funny, at the time I thought there was a lot more parity between the ST and the 500 but when I watch videos of the two these days, I realise just how much better the Amiga was. I'd always assumed the sound would be great on the Atari because it was midi-compatible, but I was horrified to hear how tinny and bleepy the sound effects were in a game I knew from the Amiga. Oh, to go back in time and use that in an argument at school with my ST nemesis, Andrew!
    - krs_ 3mo ago
      I somehow do really like the sound that some managed to squeeze out of that YM2149 sound chip in the ST though. It was an old low-end chip when the ST was new already, and most games do indeed sound like ass. But the people in the demoscene worked their magic on it to great effect.

SwellJoe 3mo ago

The Amiga was the best and worst thing to happen to a kid in the late 80s. It was heartbreaking watching Commodore die, but it was an amazing introduction to the possibilities of computing. I made a ton of music with OctaMED, learned a bunch about programming, learned how to use all sorts of graphics tools, made all my own icons and wallpaper images, wrote an interactive book in AmigaGuide (an early hypertext system), dialed into BBSes of many sorts. At the time, I thought computer graphics couldn't get much better than Psygnosis games for Amiga. Turns out, I was right. The source for the mentioned TRIPOS is on github: https://github.com/borb/tripos https://github.com/borb/tripos

actionfromafar 3mo ago
Don't you mean "it was heartbreaking watching Commodore shooting heroin with dirty needles in an alley, then later scouring trash bins for food" before finally dying? (Twice.) You are right about graphics.
- LocalH 3mo ago
  And then someone decided it's time for "Weekend at Commodore's"
iugtmkbdfil834 3mo ago
Agreed. In my particular case, it did not help that were not exactly rich, so I got to, however briefly, become a zealot in amiga vs pc war. Still, one of a kind experience.
johnyzee 3mo ago
Spot on. The Amiga broke my teenage heart (name checks out). I was disgusted with computers after Commodore had run themselves into the ground, and left the whole thing for a few years. I just couldn't work with clunky PCs. In the end I had to budge and here we are, though it will never be quite the same.
icedchai 3mo ago
I doubt I'd be an engineer today if it wasn't for the Amiga. I learned C (Lattice, then SAS/C), ran a BBS, set up my first Internet connection (SLIP)...

somat 3mo ago

I was trying to figure out it's contemporaries, the i386 was still a few months away, you could get a sun-2, which had a sweet 4 MB of ram, but wikipedia sez that would cost you a eye watering 29 thousand dollars, in 1985, for the low end monochrome graphics version, oh, you want color that is "just" a cool 50k. Yeah Sun is not really playing the same game. The mac was probably the closest equivalent, it came out the year prior had more memory and a built in screen but cost more than twice as much. The real shocker is how little memory these systems had, amiga1000 only 256K, I distinctly remember buying my first memory module 128Mb for ~ $100 and thinking if I had bought this 10 years earlier, well you could not get 128 Mb ten years earlier, but if you could, it would have cost 200 thousand dollars.

vidarh 3mo ago
The Mac hit a completely different market. Nobody I knew got a Mac until after the iMac. Lots had Amigas. In the 80's Mac's were expensive machines for professionals, and while the Amiga due to Commodore's persistent sales and marketing failures were also pigeon holed in professional markers in the US, in Europe the Amiga was also the step up from 8-bit home computers, and the Mac didn't compete in that space at all. That's where the bulk of worldwide Amiga sales were. In my local computer store, the lone Mac sat unused in a corner while the other machines had kids around constantly.
- dd8601fn 3mo ago
  Around here it was schools. Every machine in every school in every district was an apple, from the 80s to the late 90s. Many thousands of kids spent more time using those than anything else. At home, very few had apple machines. We did have programs where we could take a IIgs home over break, and loaner macbooks in later years. But if your family owned a machine it almost certainly wasn’t an apple. Mine was an IBM house, from the xt, on.
  - thijson 3mo ago
    I remember going to a university as a high schooler in the 80's and being amazed to see the GUI of an Apple computer, and the mouse pointer would change to an hour glass while waiting for something, When the hour glass filled, it would rotate and fill again. That animation blew me away, I was still using DOS at home.

dev0p 3mo ago

I’d argue that it's still ahead of a lot of modern systems. Aside from the loading times, the thing is incredibly fast. I invite you to try one if you have the chance, as words don't make it justice. I can't think of anything today that comes close to how instantly it responds to user input, even iOS feels sluggish in comparison. It had only a few kilobytes of memory, a bunch of CPU cycles and a dream, but By God they made damn sure not to waste a single instructions and it shows. We need to go back.

elpocko 3mo ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o8E3ycB7Aw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o8E3ycB7Aw In case someone wants to see for themselves how "instantly" it really was. Skip to ~9:50 when it gets real sluggish. Edit: if you don't wear nostalgia glasses, you can watch the bits of screen being redrawn piece by piece after something moves or a menu closes. Everything is flickering. Opening and closing a menu takes up to one second. The text being typed in the editor lags. This is not more responsive than a modern system, far from it. Obviously.
- dev0p 3mo ago
  Hence the caveat "Aside from the loading times," :) The "instantly" refers to user input: clicking a button, typing, or moving the mouse was as fast as it could possibly get because of how close the OS was to the bare metal, with no fluff bogging down the experience. Simply put, there were no wasted frames, as there were none to waste. Nowadays, at the very least, you get a couple millisecond of latency. That was not the case here. Also, this is a machine from NINETEEN EIGHTY F//G FIVE, and it's still probably faster than your average PC running Windows 11.
  - emj 3mo ago
    The GUI was fast because it was fixed layout, MUI on the Amiga was slow as well. We tend to go that way to get UI that is easy to create. You see the same in all GUI libraries the more CPU you have the more you use it.

giov4 3mo ago

I would not be who I am if my father didn't buy an amiga 1000 for my bigger brother. I was around 7 years old, I still have a few memory frames of the original package unboxing when it arrived. I was too small but I remember the feeling, after that I merged with computers. the kickstarting, deluxe paint, the huge amiga basic manual, the games... an amazing world that shaped how my brain works. thank you commodore, thank you dad. and thanks for this time traveling post!

zedr 3mo ago

Some features of the Amiga that are peculiar even today: 1. The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes 2. A screen can be divided into multiple resolutions, e.g. you can have a half a screen in high res and half in low res and with double the amount of simultaneous colors (or even HAM mode) 3. It can genlock natively, i.e. match its screen refresh rate with an inbound video signal, making it popular with broadcasting studios up to the late Nineties

flohofwoe 3mo ago
> 1. The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes Tbf that's also how it works in modern operating systems. The mouse cursor is a hardware overlay (e.g. a more powerful 'sprite') which is rendered independently from the rest of the screen (without this the mouse cursor would have a very obvious lag, as can be observed in some games that use a 'software mouse cursor'). Also theoretically at least, Windows has a feature where it bumps the thread/process priority of the application that owns the active window to make interaction feel more responsive, but this seems to get lost in the overall complexity, e.g. with some touchpads it's not uncommon that the mouse cursor gets completely stuck under high load. AmigaOS had such a 'bump active application priority' too, but unlike on Windows this feature actually worked. What made the Amiga mouse so extremely responsive is that the mouse movement code was (more or less) directly reading the hardware registers from inside an interrupt instead of having to go through tons of abstraction layers and an event system like on modern operating systems. > 2. A screen can be divided into multiple resolutions AFAIK this has also 'kinda sorta' survived as GPU hardware overlays. It's just hardly used in operating systems except for video playback (and mouse cursors). The special sauce of the Amiga was that the operating system actually made use of low-level hardware features instead of using those features only in games.
0x1ceb00da 3mo ago
> The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes Modern macbooks do something really interesting when the OS freezes. If the OS OOMs or something like a kernel panic happens, the trackpad stops clicking! There's something in the trackpad hardware that polls the OS and locks the trackpad when the OS stops responding so that it can't be pressed down to click anymore. Almost makes the OS feel like a real physical thing when this happens.

gxd 3mo ago

One of my game's main characters is an Amiga fan and the Amiga vs ST rivalry has small cameo in it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/ That said, I've never owned an Amiga. I couldn't afford it. By the time I could, the world was already moving on to PCs and VGA...

flohofwoe 3mo ago

For some aspects, the Amiga is still ahead of today's tech. AmigaOS 2.x layed out a vision of the desktop UI as a malleable and personalizable toolbox (or one might say "workbench" heh) like no other operating system since then. The Amiga team envisioned a desktop environment future which focused on being a productivity tool instead of an interface for passive media consumption and doom scrolling, where graphical user interface and command line environments were tightly integrated with each other, where the philosophy of 'doing one thing right' was extended to the GUI and where highlevel operating system features could be extended via a standardized plugin architecture. The closest thing we have today is probably game modding. This grand idea was essentially "sacrificed on the altar of commerce" on Windows and macOS. Desktop Linux could carry that flag forward if it had a consistent vision for the desktop environment, but alas it wastes those resources on irrelevant technical details like creating yet another half-assed Wayland compositor and that way increasing fragmentation instead of reducing it. As a former Amiga user it amuses me to no end that we're now pivoting back to TUIs (see Claude Code) instead of attempting again to make those two worlds (GUI and cmdline) work together.

pjmlp 3mo ago
It isn't as if the tools aren't there, Powershell with .NET/COM (yes COM really needs a DX improvement), AppleTalk/XPC/zsh, GNOME/KDE/D-BUS. Yet as you very well point out, it is a mess, and no where close to using AREXX or Datatype libraries.
- smallstepforman 3mo ago
  BeOS/Haiku uses datatypes natively
  - pjmlp 3mo ago
    Interesting, I didn't use it much beyond the famous demo CD.
- kalleboo 3mo ago
  It's so sad to see what happened to AppleScript/the Open Scripting Architecture. When it arrived you could basically build your whole app around it as a message-passing/object system and get automatic, deep scripting integration. NeXTpple never properly integrated it into Cocoa, and eventually they wanted a more user-friendly GUI scripting system and put their NIH syndrome to work and made Automator, which never took off because it was too simple. They they built Shortcuts off an acquihire and now Shortcuts introduces NSUserActivity as the new way to... build your whole app around a message-passing/object system and get automatic, deep scripting integration. Except now we have all this weird magic templating going on.

rumgewieselt 3mo ago

Unrelated fact: My German Amiga 1000 keyboard has a serial number that ends with ... 00012. loved memories.

krige 3mo ago

10 years ahead, but for Irving motherf- Gould wasting it all out of pure greed, even after Rattigan managed to turn things around. AmigaOS 2.X is still a fantastic UI and design language though, especially compared to the ugly mess of 1.X

dosisking 3mo ago
AmigaOS 2.X is pretty much a copy of NeXTStep, visually speaking
- krige 3mo ago
  I'm not seeing it. Sure, the window bgs are gray, but so was 90% the OSes at the time. Everything else is different and even the only things those two have in common, the pseudo-3D on buttons, is applied in different ways, creating different divisions and accents.
TheAmazingRace 3mo ago
The UI found in WorkBench 1.x was designed to be the way it was so that owners could plug their Amigas into television sets of the day and still be able to make out something without requiring a pristine purpose-built CRT monitor.
- krige 3mo ago
  This is actually wrong because most of the A1000s were bundled with an RGB monitor and an optional composite out. The system wouldn't be really connected to a shitty TV until the budget models were released well after OS 1.X color scheme was established. As far as I can tell the blue/orange scheme was instead aimed at monochromatic monitors.
  - TheAmazingRace 3mo ago
    Ah. I stand corrected then.

andrewstuart 3mo ago

I thought “I think I have an Amiga 1200 in the garage in a box.” Looked for it, found it and underneath was an Amiga 1000 I forgot I had.

LordDefender 3mo ago
Please recap them, or find a pro to do it. Otherwise they get damaged by leaking capacitors.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]

mdlxxv 3mo ago

Back when I was a teenager in the late 80s and early 90s, there were two "mythical" machines that I read a lot about but could never afford to own, the Amiga and the Neo-Geo. Nowadays both of them can be casually emulated on any kind of PC, but their capabilities still impress me.

SirFatty 3mo ago

I wanted one, but unlike the C64 I could not afford it.. but I wanted that and a Video Toaster.

spankibalt 3mo ago

The PC made it. Decisively and on all accounts. Save one. You Amiga nerdlingers got adequate enough hardware in them nice wedge-style keyboard computer cases (i. e. not counting Amiga buckets). AFAIK the highest high a (vintage) PC reaches here is the Japanese Epson PC-286C with a 486SLC CPU and the matching FasMath FPU upgrade. Time to change that. :)

mellosouls 3mo ago

Terrific, but not sure about the ten years ahead. Let's not forget this was also the era of Atari ST and the birth of ARM with the incredible Acorn Archimedes arriving just a couple of years later.

bluGill 3mo ago
Somehow the Atari ST is panned because it lacked preemptive multitasking (I'm not sure if this is true). They didn't mention any of the other GUIs that unix was working with - X11 already existed back then, and several unix vendors had their own windowing system that was arguably better (at least their marketing said so - I never used any). Of course Unix systems would have been much more expensive.
- alexisread 3mo ago
  The ST got preemptive multitasking in 92 AFAIK with MINT/Multitos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_TOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_TOS

deepsummer 3mo ago

The Amiga was a great computer when it came out, but it was not 10 years ahead of anything. Things progressed incredibly fast back then. The graphics were not 10 years ahead, not even 3 years. First SVGA cards came out in 1987, with a 320x200 in 256 color mode that was far more practical than Amiga's 4096 color mode, and with resolutions of up to 800x600. By 1995, resolutions of 1280x1024 with 256 colors were widely available, and Nvidia released their first graphics accelerator. The first SoundBlaster cards came out in the late 80s. The SoundBlaster 32 released in 1995 was far superior to the Amiga. And the state-of-the-art CPU in 1995 was the Pentium 133, faster than a 7Mhz 68k by orders of magnitude. The Amiga 1000 was an awesome computer. But technically obsolete by 1990.

haspok 3mo ago
The early Soundblaster cards sucked. Even the SB16. The first real comparable product to the Amiga was the Gravis Ultrasound in 1992. Don't even mention SVGA, with it's pre-VESA non-standardised chaos, and abysmal high res performance. OK, the 320x200(240)x256 was actually quite usable for games, quick enough to run Doom in 93. But for video editing, there wasn't really anything on the PC that even compared to the Genlock, at least not for that price. And to top it off, AmigaOS had preemptive multitasking (in 1985!), Windows 95 was the first real OS to do that (not counting OS/2 and NT) with graphics (not counting Linux or any unixes), yay, that's 10 years for you. In 91 I sold my Commodore 16, and got an XT with Hercules graphics and the built-in PC Speaker. Not even on the same planet as the Amiga. In 92 or 93 I got my first 386, with VGA but no sound card for a while, though I secretly wanted an Amiga 500 instead, but it wasn't my call. However around 92/93 PC gaming and the demoscene (!) really took off, so I got a soundcard as soon as I could, and life was very swell after that.
- dosisking 3mo ago
  I think the Gravis Ultrasound is in the same category as the Apple IIGS sound card, which came out in 1986. And I put the Apple IIGS sound card much further ahead than the Amiga Paula.
  - 3mo ago

cowmix 3mo ago

When the first mentions and prototypes of the Amiga started surfacing in 1984, I began saving my paper-route money to buy one. I finally got it on the first day I could. It was way ahead of its time, but it was also an early lesson in managing expectations. The way it was marketed, I expected things like real-time 3D graphics. It certainly couldn’t do that, at least not in the way I imagined. What the Amiga really prepared me for, though, was tolerating instability. It could multitask and had an incredible amount of functionality for the time, but it crashed constantly. I mean, an insane amount. Part of the problem was the lack of an MMU, but still: it was flaky as hell.

seanwilson 3mo ago

> Instead of failing gracefully if the resources it asked for weren’t available, it would simply allocate them, and cause a guru meditation, the Amiga equivalent of a blue screen of death or kernel panic. Hadn't seen this before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation

peter_d_sherman 3mo ago

Great article overall! But: >"Initially, the Amiga had a reputation for being unstable. But that was largely because early Amiga software wasn’t very well written. Amiga software was prone to ask for resources, and assume the resources were available. Instead of failing gracefully if the resources it asked for weren’t available, it would simply allocate them, and cause a guru meditation, the Amiga equivalent of a blue screen of death or kernel panic. Except it was red, not blue." Not true! Well, not entirely true... Or at least, that's not an entirely correct, nuanced, contextual historical understanding... I was an early Amiga owner, so I speak from experience! Yes, software could crash the system from time to time (any software of the era could crash almost any consumer computer of the era, because CPU's with MMU's and protected memory and protected mode operating systems where kernel/OS code was separate from user/client/program/application/unprivileged code (call it what you will!) either did not exist or were not widely available or inexpensive enough for mass-market adoption by the majority of home/family/mass-market consumers in the early to mid 1980's. The Amiga 1000 used the Motorola 68000 CPU, which did not have a built-in MMU on it or external MMU working alongside it, which means that there was no protected memory where the OS/kernel code could live, which means that any given program, even the simplest of C programs, could overwrite OS/kernel memory, which means that any given program could crash the computer -- but that's exactly the same as most of the other mass-market consumer computers from other manufacturers of the early to mid 1980's -- the same as early Macintoshes with 68000's, the same as 6510 Commodore 64's, the same as 6502/65C02 Apple IIe's, the same as early 8086/8088 IBM PC's and clones, etc., etc. Any program could crash any of those. So if the early Amiga had a "reputation for being unstable" (a reputation which I have never heard about until now, until reading this article what, 41 years or so since the original Amiga 1000 was first produced, I should explain that I've read almost every single early Amiga article (I was a voracious early "Amiga article reader"!) in the 1985-1993 time period) -- then the same thing would have been true about just about every other consumer-grade mass-market computer in the early to mid 1980's... because most didn't have MMU's and run protected mode operating systems...) If the Amiga 1000 had a "reputation for being unstable" -- then that's either fake news (what are your sources?) or AI-generated copypasta or possibly marketing gossip/slander originating from other jealous less-technologically superior competing computer manufacturers back in the day... Now, other than that minor point, that minor nuanced contextual understanding (which I apologize for, because it sounds like I'm trying to be a critic of the article -- I am not! I am merely trying to mitigate the spread of "fake historical news" surrounding the original Amiga 1000!) -- other that that minor point, the article is 100% spot-on, a great article, and I'm really glad the author wrote it! So, to the Author, I say "well done!" An excellent article overall! That, and I greatly appreciate any and all articles written about the early Amiga!

haihaoxu 3mo ago

wow

amigaman 3mo ago

I own The Amiga /AmigaOne /HombreOne . I open source it. Proof ask Gensia they just didnt want to hurt anybodies feelings.. f it. Im RHRH Constantine XII -Amigaman. Base it off of Aros or something. Amigaone model name will be x86 compatible. Hombre will be RISC/ARM compatible. Proof .. how in the heck do u think u got all the Amiga OS on aminet ,and avaibole to u. Plus to boot the hardware that is open to u now. I know Dave and Karl. I know them ALL. People, should check instead of beLIVING liars illumanti stool pidgins like rj and david pleansance, bill, coloanto, so called commodore, and any other so called amiga company. So contact I if u want to see and get that Open source Amiga that u really have.. search my name.