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100-539: The CDTV is essentially a Commodore Amiga 500 home computer with a CD-ROM drive and remote control . With the optional keyboard, mouse, and floppy disk drive, it gained the functionality of the regular Amiga. Commodore marketed the machine as an all-in-one multimedia appliance. As such, it targeted the same market as the Philips CD-i . The expected market for multimedia appliances did not materialize, and neither machine met with any real commercial success. Though

200-505: A Kickstart 1.3 ROM image into memory and booted the machine into Kickstart 1.3, allowing most incompatible software to run (the software did take up 512 KB of system memory, meaning that some 1 MB only games would now fail for lack of available memory). In some cases, updated compatible versions of games were later released, such as budget versions of Lotus 1 and SWIV , and an update to Bubble Bobble . Double Dragon 2 by Binary Design received an update for ECS machines with

300-583: A 6-bit volume control per channel. The analog output is connected to a low-pass filter, which filters out high-frequency aliasing when the Amiga is using a lower sampling rate (see Nyquist frequency ). The brightness of the Amiga's power LED is used to indicate the status of the Amiga's low-pass filter. The filter is active when the LED is at normal brightness, and deactivated when dimmed (or off on older A500 Amigas). On Amiga 1000 (and first Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000 model),

400-406: A 68k (a 68040 or 68060) and a PowerPC (603 or 604) CPU, which are able to run the two CPUs at the same time and share the system memory. The PowerPC CPU on PowerUP boards is usually used as a coprocessor for heavy computations; a powerful CPU is needed to run MAME for example, but even decoding JPEG pictures and MP3 audio was considered heavy computation at the time. It is also possible to ignore

500-480: A Boolean toggle state can be left clicked whilst the menu is kept open with the right button, which allows the user – for example – to set some selected text to bold, underline and italics in one visit to the menus. The mouse plugs into one of two Atari joystick ports used for joysticks , game paddles , and graphics tablets . Although compatible with analog joysticks , Atari-style digital joysticks became standard. Unusually, two independent mice can be connected to

600-472: A PowerPC native microkernel and software. Later Amiga clones featured PowerPC processors only. The custom chipset at the core of the Amiga design appeared in three distinct generations, with a large degree of backward-compatibility. The Original Chip Set (OCS) appeared with the launch of the A1000 in 1985. OCS was eventually followed by the modestly improved Enhanced Chip Set (ECS) in 1990 and finally by

700-466: A budget machine, socketed chips, which allow easy replacement of defective chips. The CPU can be directly upgraded on the motherboard to a 68010 ; or to a 68020 , 68030 , or 68040 via the side expansion slot; or by removing the CPU and plugging a CPU expansion card into the CPU socket (this requires opening the computer and thus voided any remaining warranty). In fact, all the custom chips can be upgraded to

800-586: A capacity of 901,120 bytes, as well as 360- and 720-KB disks formatted for IBM PC compatibles. The earliest Amiga 500 models use nearly the same Original Amiga chipset as the Amiga 1000. So graphics can be displayed in multiple resolutions and color depths, even on the same screen. Resolutions vary from 320×200 (up to 32 colors) to 640×400 (up to 16 colors) for NTSC (704×484 overscan) and 320×256 to 640×512 for PAL (704×576 overscan.) The system uses planar graphics, with up to five bitplanes (four in high resolution) allowing 2-, 4-, 8-, 16-, and 32-color screens, from

900-419: A maximum of 16 MB of address space . Also built in to the base of the computer is a 3 + 1 ⁄ 2 -inch floppy disk drive. The user can also install up to three external floppy drives, either 3 + 1 ⁄ 2 - or 5 + 1 ⁄ 4 -inch, via the disk drive port. The second and third additional drives are installed by daisy-chaining them. Supported by these drives are double-sided disks with

1000-415: A new game platform. Kaplan hired Miner to run the hardware side of the newly formed company, "Hi-Toro". The system was code-named "Lorraine" in keeping with Miner's policy of giving systems female names, in this case the company president's wife, Lorraine Morse. When Kaplan left the company late in 1982, Miner was promoted to head engineer and the company relaunched as Amiga Corporation. The Amiga hardware

1100-494: A palette of 4096 colors. Two special graphics modes are also available: Extra HalfBrite, which uses a sixth bitplane as a mask to cut the brightness of any pixel in half (resulting in 32 arbitrary colors plus 32 more colors set at half the value of the first 32), and Hold-And-Modify (HAM) which allows all 4096 colors to be used on screen simultaneously. Later revisions of the chipset are PAL / NTSC switchable in software. The sound chip produces four hardware-mixed channels, two to

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1200-519: A predecessor to Blender . Poor marketing and the failure of later models to repeat the technological advances of the first systems resulted in Commodore quickly losing market share to the rapidly dropping prices of IBM PC compatibles (which gained 256 color graphics in 1987), as well as the fourth generation of video game consoles . Commodore ultimately went bankrupt in April 1994 after a version of

1300-503: A series of technical upgrades known as the ECS and AGA , which added higher resolution displays among many other improvements and simplifications. The Amiga line sold an estimated 4,910,000 machines over its lifetime. The machines were most popular in the UK and Germany, with about 1.5 million sold in each country, and sales in the high hundreds of thousands in other European nations. The machine

1400-443: A set of libraries . The software libraries may include software tools to adjust resolution , screen colors, pointers and screenmodes. The standard Intuition interface is limited to display depths of 8 bits , while RTG makes it possible to handle higher depths like 24-bits . The sound chip, named Paula, supports four PCM sound channels (two for the left speaker and two for the right) with 8-bit resolution for each channel and

1500-437: Is 15.75 kHz HSync for standard video modes, which is compatible with NTSC television and CVBS/RGB video, but out of range for most VGA -compatible monitors, while a multisync monitor is required for some of the higher resolutions. This connection can also be genlocked to an external video signal. The system was bundled with an RF adapter to provide output on televisions with a coaxial RF input, while monochrome video

1600-467: Is a floppy drive port for daisy-chaining up to three extra floppy disk drives via a DB23F connector. The then-standard RS-232 serial port (DB25M) and Centronics parallel port (DB25F) are also included. The power supply is ( +5 V , ±12 V ). The system displays video in analog RGB 50  Hz PAL or 60 Hz NTSC through a proprietary DB23M connector and in NTSC mode the line frequency

1700-450: Is available via an RCA connector (also coaxial). On the left side, behind a plastic cover, there is a Zorro (Zorro I) bus expansion external edge connector with 86 pins. Peripherals such as a hard disk drive can be added via the expansion slot and are configured automatically by the Amiga's AutoConfig standard, so that multiple devices do not conflict with each other. Up to 8 MB of so-called "fast RAM" (memory that can be accessed by

1800-402: Is completely programmable and can read 720 KB IBM PC disks, 880 KB standard Amiga disks, and up to 984 KB using custom-formatting drivers. Despite the lack of Amiga 2000-compatible internal expansion slots , there are many ports and expansion options. There are two DE9M Atari joystick ports for joysticks or mice , and stereo audio RCA connectors (1 V p-p ). There

1900-474: Is impacted by chip-bus bandwidth contention, while the chipset is not actually able to address it. Later revisions of the motherboard provide solder-jumpers to relocate the trap-door RAM to the chip memory pool, given the Agnus chip is the newer ECS version, shipped in later A500 motherboards. Newest (rev 8) A500s would share motherboard with A500+, and configure the expansion memory as CHIP by default. Each time

2000-590: Is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 16/32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphics and audio compared to previous 8-bit systems. These systems include the Atari ST —released earlier the same year—as well as the Macintosh and Acorn Archimedes . Based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor , the Amiga differs from its contemporaries through

2100-603: Is possible to expand the Chip RAM to 2 MB, matching the A500+. "Fast" RAM is located on the CPU-side bus. Its access is exclusive to the CPU and not slowed by any chipset access. The side expansion port allows for up to 8 MB of Zorro-style expansion RAM. Alternatively, a CPU adapter allows for internal expansion. Internal or external CPU accelerators often include their own expansion memory. 16-bit CPUs are limited by

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2200-504: The A500 , was the first popular version of the Amiga home computer, "redefining the home computer market and making so-called luxury features such as multitasking and colour a standard long before Microsoft or Apple sold these to the masses." It contains the same Motorola 68000 as the Amiga 1000 , as well as the same graphics and sound coprocessors, but is in a smaller case similar to that of

2300-589: The Amiga 1000 . They were first offered for sale in August, but by October only 50 had been built, all of which were used by Commodore. Machines only began to arrive in quantity in mid-November, meaning they missed the Christmas buying rush. By the end of the year, they had sold 35,000 machines, and severe cashflow problems made the company pull out of the January 1986 CES. Bad or entirely missing marketing, forcing

2400-513: The Amiga Enhanced Chip Set (ECS) versions. The plastic case is made of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene , or ABS. ABS degrades with time due to exposure to oxygen, causing a yellowing of the case. Other factors contributing to the degradation and yellowing include heat, shear, and ultraviolet light. The yellowing can be reversed by using an optical brightener , though without stabilizing agents or antioxidants to block oxygen,

2500-516: The Atari ST line. The Amiga 500 was sold in the same retail outlets as the Commodore 64 , as opposed to the computer store-only Amiga 1000. It proved to be Commodore's best-selling model, particularly in Europe. Although popular with hobbyists, arguably its most widespread use was as a gaming machine, where its graphics and sound were of significant benefit. It was followed by a revised version of

2600-542: The Atari Video Computer System 's TIA . When complete, the team began developing a much more sophisticated set of chips, CTIA , ANTIC and POKEY , that formed the basis of the Atari 8-bit computers . With the 8-bit line's launch in 1979, the team once again started looking at a next generation chipset. Nolan Bushnell had sold the company to Warner Communications in 1978, and the new management

2700-406: The C language, and the entire system became AmigaOS. The system was enclosed in a pizza box form factor case; a late change was the introduction of vertical supports on either side of the case to provide a "garage" under the main section of the system where the keyboard could be stored. The first model was announced in 1985 as simply "The Amiga from Commodore", later to be retroactively dubbed

2800-567: The Commodore 128 . Commodore announced the Amiga 500 at the January 1987 winter Consumer Electronics Show  – at the same time as the high-end Amiga 2000 . It was initially available in the Netherlands in April 1987, then the rest of Europe in May. In North America and the UK it was released in October 1987 with a US$ 699/£499 list price. It competed directly against models in

2900-836: The OpalVision card was popular, although less featured and supported than the Video Toaster. Low-cost time base correctors (TBC) specifically designed to work with the Toaster quickly came to market, most of which were designed as standard Amiga bus cards. Various manufacturers started producing PCI busboards for the A1200, A3000 and A4000, allowing standard Amiga computers to use PCI cards such as graphics cards, Sound Blaster sound cards, 10/100 Ethernet cards, USB cards, and television tuner cards. Other manufacturers produced hybrid boards that contained an Intel x86 series chip, allowing

3000-574: The Sidecar IBM PC compatibility add-on, the Amiga was most commercially successful as a home computer , with a wide range of games and creative software. It also found a niche in video production with the Video Toaster hardware and software, and Amiga's audio hardware made it a popular platform for music tracker software. The processor and memory capacity enabled 3D rendering packages, including LightWave 3D , Imagine , and Traces,

3100-538: The central processing unit (CPU). This architecture gave the Amiga a performance edge over its competitors, particularly for graphics-intensive applications and games. The architecture uses two distinct bus subsystems: the chipset bus and the CPU bus. The chipset bus allows the coprocessors and CPU to address "Chip RAM" . The CPU bus provides addressing to conventional RAM, ROM and the Zorro II or Zorro III expansion subsystems. This enables independent operation of

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3200-417: The "Amiga phase-alternated linescan version 4.01/ECS". This solved compatibility issues with the graphics which appeared garbled on ECS machines, and it also slashed the in-game loading times from around 20 seconds to just over 6. Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers produced by Commodore from 1985 until 1994, with production by others for a number of years afterwards. The original model

3300-469: The "low-cost" Macintosh Classic , LC , and IIsi models. Outwardly resembling the Commodore 128 and codenamed " Rock Lobster " during development, the Amiga 500's base houses a keyboard and a CPU in one shell, unlike the Amiga 1000 . The keyboard for Amiga 500s sold in the United States contains 94 keys, including ten function keys , four cursor keys, and a number pad. All European versions

3400-506: The 2.7 and 2.30 ROMs. Because of copyright reasons the custom ROM is distributed in patch form. The Commodore CDTV is reported to have sold 25,800 units in Germany, and around 29,000 units in the UK. The CDTV was intended as a media appliance rather than a mainstream personal computer. As such, it came with an infrared remote control, and its housing had dimensions and styling that was comparable to most household stereo system components of

3500-436: The 2000s. AmigaOS has influenced replacements, clones, and compatible software such as MorphOS and AROS . Currently Belgian company Hyperion Entertainment maintains and develops AmigaOS 4 , which is an official and direct descendant of AmigaOS 3.1 – the last system made by Commodore for the original Amiga computers. Jay Miner joined Atari, Inc. in the 1970s to develop custom integrated circuits , and led development of

3600-513: The 24-bit address space but they can repurpose otherwise unused memory space for their included RAM. 32-bit CPU accelerators aren't limited by 24-bit addressing and can include up to 128 MB of Fast RAM (and potentially more). When the computer is powered on a self-diagnostic test is run that will indicates failure with a specific colour: The keyboard LED uses blink codes: Measurements Overall (base): 6.2 cm x 47.4 cm x 33 cm; 2 7/16 in x 18 11/16 in x 13 in. A popular expansion for

3700-566: The 68k CPU and run Linux on the PPC via project Linux APUS, but a PowerPC-native AmigaOS promised by Amiga Technologies GmbH was not available when the PowerUP boards first appeared. 24-bit graphics cards and video cards were also available. Graphics cards were designed primarily for 2D artwork production, workstation use, and later, gaming. Video cards are designed for inputting and outputting video signals, and processing and manipulating video. In

3800-520: The A600 and A1200. They revert the system to temporarily boot in Kickstart v1.3. The keyboard on Amiga computers is similar to that found on a mid-80s IBM PC: Ten function keys, a numeric keypad, and four separate directional arrow keys. Caps Lock and Control share space to the left of A. Absent are Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys: These functions are accomplished on Amigas by pressing shift and

3900-486: The AGA chipset (A1200 and A4000) also have non-EHB 64, 128, 256, and 262144 ( HAM8 Mode ) color modes and a palette expanded from 4096 to 16.8 million colors . The Amiga chipset can genlock , which is the ability to adjust its own screen refresh timing to match an incoming NTSC or PAL video signal. When combined with setting transparency, this allows an Amiga to overlay an external video source with graphics. This ability made

4000-623: The Amiga 1000, v1.2 and v1.3 for the A500, Kickstart v2.1 on A500+, Kickstart v2.2 for A600 and dual ROMs for Kickstart v3.0 and 3.1 for A1200 and A4000. After Commodore's demise there have been new Kickstart v3.1 ROMs made available for both the A500 and A600 Computers. Amiga Software is mostly backward compatible, but v2.1 ROMs and newer differ slightly, which can cause software glitches with earlier programs. To help address this and to get earlier programs to work with later Kickstart ROMs, some tools have been produced such as RELOKIK 1.4 and MAKE IT WORK! for

4100-637: The Amiga 500 is booted, it executes code from the Kickstart ROM. The Amiga 500 initially came shipped with AmigaOS 1.2, but units since October 1988 had version 1.3 installed. The Amiga 500 was the best-selling model in the Amiga family of computers. The German computer magazine Chip awarded the model the annual "Home Computer of the Year" title three consecutive times. At the European Computer Trade Show 1991, it also won

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4200-406: The Amiga 500 was the Amiga 501 circuit board that can be installed underneath the computer behind a plastic cover. The expansion contains 512 KB RAM configured by default as " Slow RAM " or "trap-door RAM" and a battery-backed real-time clock (RTC). The 512 KB trap-door RAM and 512 KB of original chip RAM will result in 1 MB of total memory. The added memory is known as "Slow RAM", as its access

4300-468: The Amiga brand to Amiga, Inc. , without having released any products. Amiga, Inc. licensed the rights to sell hardware using the AmigaOne brand to Eyetech Group and Hyperion Entertainment . In 2019, Amiga, Inc. sold its intellectual property to Amiga Corporation. The Amiga has a custom chipset consisting of several coprocessors which handle audio, video, and direct memory access independently of

4400-507: The Amiga community on the whole avoided the CDTV in the expectation of an add-on CD-ROM drive for the Amiga, which eventually came in the form of the A570 . This further hurt sales of the CDTV, as an A570-equipped A500 was electronically the same as a CDTV and, consequently, could run CDTV software, so there was very little motivation for an Amiga owner to buy a CDTV. However, Nolan Bushnell , one of

4500-506: The Amiga packaged as a game console, the Amiga CD32 , failed in the marketplace. Escom of Germany, who acquired Commodore properties, continued developing the Amiga line for just under two more years until it also went bankrupt. Since the demise of Commodore and Escom, various groups have marketed successors to the original Amiga line, including Eyetech , ACube Systems Srl and A-EON Technology who have produced AmigaOne computers since

4600-406: The Amiga popular for many applications, and provides the ability to do character generation and CGI effects far more cheaply than earlier systems. This ability has been frequently utilized by wedding videographers, TV stations and their weather forecasting divisions (for weather graphics and radar), advertising channels, music video production, and desktop videographers. The NewTek Video Toaster

4700-494: The Amiga to control up to eight million digitally controlled external audio, lighting, automation, relay and voltage control channels spread around a large theme park, for example. See Amiga software for more information on these applications. Other devices included the following: The Commodore A2232 board provides seven RS-232C serial ports in addition to the Amiga's built-in serial port. Each port can be driven independently at speeds of 50 to 19,200 bits/s . There is, however,

4800-451: The Amiga to emulate a PC. PowerPC upgrades with Wide SCSI controllers, PCI busboards with Ethernet, sound and 3D graphics cards, and tower cases allowed the A1200 and A4000 to survive well into the late nineties. Expansion boards were made by Richmond Sound Design that allow their show control and sound design software to communicate with their custom hardware frames either by ribbon cable or fiber optic cable for long distances, allowing

4900-608: The CDTV was based entirely on Amiga hardware, it was marketed strictly as a CDTV, with the Amiga name omitted from product branding. Commodore announced the CDTV at the summer 1990 Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, promising to release it before the end of the year with 100 software titles. The product debuted in North America in March 1991 (CES Las Vegas) and in the UK ( World of Commodore 1991 at Earls Court, London). It

5000-562: The CPU can access it. Suffering from the same contention limitations as Chip RAM, that memory is known as "Slow RAM" or "Pseudo-fast RAM". Agnus revisions shipped with late A500 are ECS and allow use of trapdoor RAM as real Chip RAM for a total 1 MB. Additionally, several third-party expansions exist with up to 2 MB on the trapdoor board. Using a Gary adapter, that memory will be mapped as either split on Chip RAM and Slow RAM or fully as Slow RAM, depending on configuration. Furthermore, using an A3000 Agnus on an adapter board, it

5100-402: The CPU only) can be added using the side expansion slot. This connector is electronically identical with the Amiga 1000's, but swapped on the other side. The Amiga 500 has a "trap-door" slot on the underside for a RAM upgrade (typically 512 KB ) . This extra RAM is classified as "fast" RAM, but is sometimes referred to as "slow" RAM: due to the design of the expansion bus, it is actually on

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5200-431: The Commodore 64 in the low-end market. These new designs were released in 1987 as the Amiga 2000 and Amiga 500 , the latter of which went on to widespread success and became their best selling model. Similar high-end/low-end models would make up the Amiga line for the rest of its history; follow-on designs included the Amiga 3000 / Amiga 500 Plus / Amiga 600 , and the Amiga 4000 / Amiga 1200 . These models incorporated

5300-612: The Leisure Award for the similar "Home Computer of the Year" title. Owing to the inexpensive cost of the Amiga 500 in then price-sensitive Europe, sales of the Amiga family of computers were strongest there, constituting 85 percent of Commodore's total sales in the fourth quarter of 1990. The Amiga 500 was widely perceived as a gaming machine and the Amiga 2000 a computer for artists and hobbyists. It has been claimed that Commodore sold as many as six million units worldwide. However, Commodore UK refuted that figure and said that

5400-619: The North American market, the NewTek Video Toaster was a video effects board that turned the Amiga into an affordable video processing computer that found its way into many professional video environments. One well-known use was to create the special effects in early series of Babylon 5 . Due to its NTSC -only design, it did not find a market in countries that used the PAL standard, such as in Europe. In those countries,

5500-518: The application. The absence of Num lock frees space for more mathematical symbols around the numeric pad. Like IBM-compatible computers, the mouse has two buttons, but in AmigaOS, pressing and holding the right button replaces the system status line at the top of the screen with a Maclike menu bar . As with Apple's Mac OS prior to Mac OS 8 , menu options are selected by releasing the button over that option, not by left clicking. Menu items that have

5600-550: The appropriate arrow key. The Amiga keyboard adds a Help key, which a function key usually acts as on PCs (usually F1). In addition to the Control and Alt modifier keys, the Amiga has 2 "Amiga" keys, rendered as "Open Amiga" and "Closed Amiga" similar to the Open/Closed Apple logo keys on Apple II keyboards. The left is used to manipulate the operating system (moving screens and the like) and the right delivers commands to

5700-475: The chief endorsers of the CDTV, argued the system's high price alone was enough to explain its market failure: "... it's very difficult to sell significant numbers of anything at more than $ 500 . ... I felt that I could sell a hundred thousand of something that costs $ 800 standing on my head. I thought that it would be a no-brainer. And I can tell you that the number of units that we sold in the U.S. at $ 800 you could put in your eye and not draw tears." The CDTV

5800-706: The chip can address only 16 MB of physical memory and is implemented using a 16-bit arithmetic logic unit and has a 16-bit external data bus , so 32-bit computations are transparently handled as multiple 16-bit values at a performance cost. The later Amiga 2500 and the Amiga 3000 models use fully 32-bit, 68000-compatible processors from Motorola with improved performance and larger addressing capability. CPU upgrades were offered by both Commodore and third-party manufacturers. Most Amiga models can be upgraded either by direct CPU replacement or through expansion boards. Such boards often included faster and higher capacity memory interfaces and hard disk controllers. Towards

5900-443: The chipset bus. Such upgrades usually include a battery-backed real-time clock . All versions of the A500 can have the additional RAM configured as chip RAM by a simple hardware modification, which involves fitting a later model (8372A) Agnus chip. Likewise, all versions of the A500 can be upgraded to 2 MB chip RAM by fitting the 8372B Agnus chip and adding additional memory. The Amiga 500 also sports an unusual feature for

6000-417: The company's operations. Among these was the long-overdue cancellation of the now outdated PET and VIC-20 lines, as well as a variety of poorly selling Commodore 64 offshoots and the Commodore 900 workstation effort. Another one of the changes was to split the Amiga into two products, a new high-end version of the Amiga aimed at the creative market, and a cost-reduced version that would take over for

6100-579: The computer, the Amiga 500 Plus , and the 500 series was discontinued in 1992. In mid-1988, the Amiga 500 dropped its price from £ 499 to £399 ( https://amr.abime.net/issue_535_pages page 7), and it was later bundled with the Batman Pack in the United Kingdom (from October 1989 to September 1990) which included the games Batman , F/A-18 Interceptor , The New Zealand Story and the bitmap graphics editor Deluxe Paint 2 . Also included

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6200-500: The development team to move to the east coast, notorious stability problems and other blunders limited sales in early 1986 to between 10,000 and 15,000 units a month. 120,000 units were reported as having been sold from the machine's launch up to the end of 1986. In late 1985, Thomas Rattigan was promoted to COO of Commodore, and then to CEO in February 1986. He immediately implemented an ambitious plan that covered almost all of

6300-415: The early 1990s. Commodore UK's Kelly Sumner did not see Sega or Nintendo as competitors, but instead credited their marketing campaigns which spent over £40 million or $ 60,000,000 (equivalent to $ 130,000,000 in 2023) for promoting video games as a whole and thus helping to boost Amiga sales. In spite of his successes in making the company profitable and bringing the Amiga line to market, Rattigan

6400-465: The end of Commodore's time in charge of Amiga development, there were suggestions that Commodore intended to move away from the 68000 series to higher performance RISC processors, such as the PA-RISC . Those ideas were never developed before Commodore filed for bankruptcy. Despite this, third-party manufacturers designed upgrades featuring a combination of 68000 series and PowerPC processors along with

6500-416: The entire Amiga line sold between four and five million computers. Indeed, Ars Technica provides a year-by-year graph of the sales of all Amiga computers. The machine is reported to have sold 1,160,500 units in Germany (including Amiga 500 Plus sales). The Amiga 500 Plus (often A500 Plus or simply A500+ ) is a revised version of the original Amiga 500 computer. The A500+ featured minor changes to

6600-507: The full 32-bit CPUs of the 68000 family such as the Motorola 68020 and Motorola 68030 , almost always with 32-bit memory and usually with FPUs and MMUs or the facility to add them. Later designs feature the Motorola 68040 or Motorola 68060 . Both CPUs feature integrated FPUs and MMUs. Many CPU accelerator cards also had integrated SCSI controllers. Phase5 designed the PowerUP boards ( Blizzard PPC and CyberStorm PPC ) featuring both

6700-421: The future direction of the company. A number of Commodore employees followed him to his new company, Tramel Technology. This included a number of the senior technical staff, where they began development of a 68000-based machine of their own. In June, Tramiel arranged a no-cash deal to take over Atari, reforming Tramel Technology as Atari Corporation . As many Commodore technical staff had moved to Atari, Commodore

6800-475: The inclusion of custom hardware to accelerate graphics and sound, including sprites and a blitter , and a pre-emptive multitasking operating system called AmigaOS . The Amiga 1000 was released in July 1985, but production problems kept it from becoming widely available until early 1986. The best-selling model, the Amiga 500 , was introduced in 1987 along with the more expandable Amiga 2000 . The Amiga 3000

6900-441: The joystick ports; some games, such as Lemmings , were designed to take advantage of this. The Amiga was one of the first computers for which inexpensive sound sampling and video digitization accessories were available. As a result of this and the Amiga's audio and video capabilities, the Amiga became a popular system for editing and producing both music and video. Many expansion boards were produced for Amiga computers to improve

7000-552: The keyboard have an additional two keys, except for the British variety, which still uses 94 keys. It uses a Motorola 68000 microprocessor running at 7.159 09   MHz in NTSC regions and 7.093 79  MHz in PAL regions. The CPU implements a 32-bit model and has 32-bit registers, but it has a 16-bit main ALU and uses a 16-bit external data bus and a 24-bit address bus, providing

7100-670: The left and two to the right, of 8-bit PCM at a sampling frequency up to 28  kHz . Each hardware channel has its own independent volume level and sampling rate, and can be designated to another channel where it can modulate both volume and frequency using its own output. With DMA disabled it's possible to output with a sampling frequency up to 56 kHz . There is a common trick to output sound with 14-bit precision that can be combined to output 14-bit 56 kHz sound. The stock system comes with AmigaOS version 1.2 or 1.3 and 512 KB of chip RAM (150 ns access time), one built-in double-density standard floppy disk drive that

7200-463: The loan to be repaid at the end of the month, otherwise Amiga would forfeit the Lorraine design to Atari. During 1983, Atari lost over $ 1 million a week , due to the combined effects of the crash and the ongoing price war in the home computer market. By the end of the year, Warner was desperate to sell the company. In January 1984, Jack Tramiel resigned from Commodore due to internal battles over

7300-474: The motherboard to make it cheaper to produce than the original A500. It was notable for introducing new versions of Kickstart and Workbench , and for some minor improvements in the custom chips, known as the Enhanced Chip Set (or ECS). Although officially introduced in 1992, some Amiga 500 units sold in late 1991 actually featured the revised motherboard used in the A500+. Although the Amiga 500+

7400-463: The official logo of Escom subsidiary Amiga Technologies. CES attendees had trouble believing the computer being demonstrated had the power to display such a demo and searched in vain for the "real" computer behind it. A further developed version of the system was demonstrated at the June 1984 CES and shown to many companies in hopes of garnering further funding, but found little interest in a market that

7500-552: The partly 32-bit Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA) in 1992. Each chipset consists of several coprocessors that handle graphics acceleration , digital audio, direct memory access and communication between various peripherals (e.g., CPU, memory and floppy disks). In addition, some models featured auxiliary custom chips that performed tasks such as SCSI control and display de-interlacing. All Amiga systems can display full-screen animated planar graphics with 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 ( EHB Mode ), or 4096 colors ( HAM Mode ). Models with

7600-525: The performance and capability of the hardware, such as memory expansions, SCSI controllers, CPU boards, and graphics boards. Other upgrades include genlocks , network cards for Ethernet , modems , sound cards and samplers, video digitizers , extra serial ports , and IDE controllers. Additions after the demise of Commodore company are USB cards. The most popular upgrades were memory, SCSI controllers and CPU accelerator cards. These were sometimes combined into one device. Early CPU accelerator cards used

7700-587: The period. For the same reason, it was initially sold without a keyboard or a mouse (which could be added separately, and were later bundled with the machine). The CDTV was based on the same technology as earlier Amiga systems, but featured a single-speed CD-ROM drive and no floppy disk drive as standard. The CDTV is compatible with many Amiga peripherals from the same period. In addition, official CDTV peripherals and upgrades included: There are currently 63 games on this list. (multi-purpose audio/video systems) Amiga 500 The Amiga 500 , also known as

7800-509: The power LED had no relation to the filter's status, and a wire needed to be manually soldered between pins on the sound chip to disable the filter. Paula can read arbitrary waveforms at arbitrary rates and amplitudes directly from the system's RAM , using direct memory access (DMA), making sound playback without CPU intervention possible. Although the hardware is limited to four separate sound channels, software such as OctaMED uses software mixing to allow eight or more virtual channels, and it

7900-522: The subsidiary company Amiga Technologies. They re-released the A1200 and A4000T, and introduced a new 68060 version of the A4000T. Amiga Technologies researched and developed the Amiga Walker prototype. They presented the machine publicly at CeBit, but Escom went bankrupt in 1996. Some Amigas were still made afterwards for the North American market by QuikPak, a small Pennsylvania -based firm who

8000-437: The subsystems. The CPU bus can be much faster than the chipset bus. CPU expansion boards may provide additional custom buses. Additionally, "busboards" or "bridgeboards" may provide ISA or PCI buses. The most popular models from Commodore, including the Amiga 1000 , Amiga 500 , and Amiga 2000 , use the Motorola 68000 as the CPU. From a developer's point of view, the 68000 provides a full suite of 32-bit operations, but

8100-599: The system hardware was being readied for production. At this time the operating system (OS) was not as ready, and led to a deal to port an OS known as TRIPOS to the platform. TRIPOS was a multitasking system that had been written in BCPL during the 1970s for the PDP-11 minicomputer , but later experimentally ported to the 68000. This early version was known as AmigaDOS and the GUI as Workbench. The BCPL parts were later rewritten in

8200-421: The two were discontinued and effectively replaced by the Amiga 600 . In late 1992, Commodore released the Amiga 1200 , a machine closer in concept to the original Amiga 500, but with significant technical improvements. Despite this, neither the A1200 nor the A600 replicated the commercial success of its predecessor. By this time, the home market was strongly shifting to IBM PC compatibles with VGA graphics and

8300-477: The yellowing will return. Using various expansion techniques, the A500's total RAM can reach up to 138 MB – 2 MB Chip RAM, 8 MB 16-bit Fast RAM, and 128 MB 32-bit Fast RAM. The stock 512 KB Chip RAM can be complemented by 512 KB using a "trapdoor" expansion (Commodore A501 or compatible). While that expansion memory is connected to the chip bus, hardware limitations of early stock Agnus chip revisions prevent its use as Chip RAM, only

8400-400: Was advertised at £499 for the CDTV unit, remote control and two software titles. The device was released in the United States for $ 999. In 1990 Computer Gaming World stated that Commodore had a poor reputation among consumers and developers, citing "abysmal record of customer and technical support in the past". The company chose Amiga-enthusiast magazines as its chief advertising channel, but

8500-442: Was an improvement to the Amiga 500, it was minor. It was discontinued and replaced by the Amiga 600 in summer 1992, making it the shortest-lived Amiga model. Due to the new Kickstart v2.04, quite a few popular games (such as Treasure Island Dizzy , Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge , and SWIV ) failed to work on the Amiga 500+, and some people took them back to dealers demanding an original Kickstart 1.3 Amiga 500. This problem

8600-438: Was designed by Miner, RJ Mical , and Dale Luck. A breadboard prototype for testing and development was largely completed by late 1983, and shown at the January 1984 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). At the time, the operating system was not ready, so the machine was demonstrated with the "Boing Ball" demo, a real-time animation showing a red-and-white spinning ball bouncing and casting a shadow; this bouncing ball later became

8700-548: Was developed allowing these cards to be used transparently by the OS and software. Kickstart is the firmware upon which AmigaOS is bootstrapped . Its purpose is to initialize the Amiga hardware and core components of AmigaOS and then attempt to boot from a bootable volume , such as a floppy disk or hard disk drive. Most models (excluding the Amiga 1000) come equipped with Kickstart on an embedded ROM-chip . There are various editions of Kickstart ROMs starting with Kickstart v1.1 for

8800-406: Was in the final stages of the video game crash of 1983 . In March, Atari expressed a tepid interest in Lorraine for its potential use in a games console or home computer tentatively known as the 1850XLD . The talks were progressing slowly, and Amiga was running out of money. A temporary arrangement in June led to a $ 500,000 loan from Atari to Amiga to keep the company going. The terms required

8900-424: Was introduced in 1990, followed by the Amiga 500 Plus , and Amiga 600 in March 1992, followed by the Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000 . Estimates of Amiga sales figures vary, with several older sources presenting values between 4.85 (purely Commodore Amiga sales) and 5.29 million (including Escom sales). While early advertisements cast the computer as an all-purpose business machine, especially when outfitted with

9000-441: Was largely solved by third parties who produced Kickstart ROM switching boards, that could allow the Amiga 500+ to be downgraded to Kickstart 1.2 or 1.3. It also encouraged game developers to use better programming habits, which was important since Commodore already had plans for the introduction of the next-generation Amiga 1200 computer. A program, Relokick, was also released (and included with an issue of CU Amiga ) which loaded

9100-532: Was left with no workable path to design their own next-generation computer. The company approached Amiga offering to fund development as a home computer system. They quickly arranged to repay the Atari loan, ending that threat. The two companies were initially arranging a $ 4 million license agreement before Commodore offered $ 24 million to purchase Amiga outright. By late 1984, the prototype breadboard chipset had successfully been turned into integrated circuits, and

9200-499: Was less popular in North America, where an estimated 700,000 were sold. In the United States, the Amiga found a niche with enthusiasts and in vertical markets for video processing and editing. In Europe, it was more broadly popular as a home computer and often used for video games . Beginning in 1988 it overlapped with the 16-bit Mega Drive , then the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in

9300-488: Was made possible by the genlock ability of the Amiga. In 1988, the release of the Amiga A2024 fixed-frequency monochrome monitor with built-in framebuffer and flicker fixer hardware provided the Amiga with a choice of high-resolution graphic modes (1024×800 for NTSC and 1024×1024 for PAL). ReTargetable Graphics is an API for device drivers mainly used by 3rd party graphics hardware to interface with AmigaOS via

9400-434: Was much more interested in the existing lines than development of new products that might cut into their sales. Miner wanted to start work with the new Motorola 68000 , but management was only interested in another 6502 based system. Miner left the company, and, for a time, the industry. In 1979, Larry Kaplan left Atari and founded Activision . In 1982, Kaplan was approached by a number of investors who wanted to develop

9500-480: Was never released. Commodore discontinued the CDTV in 1993 with the launch of the Amiga CD32 , which again was substantially based on Amiga hardware (in this case the newer Amiga 1200 ) but explicitly targeted the games market. In December 2021 an unofficial free ROM update was released for CDTV ( 2.35 ), which brings compatibility with 68030 accelerator boards and 32-bit Fast RAM, allows non-CDTV titles to boot, fixes bugs and restores several features that were lost in

9600-683: Was possible for software to mix two hardware channels to achieve a single 14-bit resolution channel by playing with the volumes of the channels in such a way that one of the source channels contributes the most significant bits and the other the least. The quality of the Amiga's sound output, and the fact that sound hardware is part of the standard chipset and easily addressed by software, were standout features of Amiga hardware unavailable on PC platforms for years . Third-party sound cards exist that provide DSP functions , multi-track direct-to-disk recording , multiple hardware sound channels and 16-bit and beyond resolutions. A retargetable sound API called AHI

9700-407: Was soon forced out in a power struggle with majority shareholder, Irving Gould . This is widely regarded as the turning point, as further improvements to the Amiga were eroded by rapid improvements in other platforms. Commodore shut down the Amiga division on April 26, 1994, and filed for bankruptcy three days later. Commodore's assets were purchased by Escom , a German PC manufacturer, who created

9800-516: Was supplied with AmigaOS 1.3 , rather than the more advanced and user-friendly 2.0 release that was launched at around the same time. Notably, the CDXL motion video format was primarily developed for the CDTV, making it one of the earliest consumer systems to allow video playback directly from CD-ROM. By 1994 Computer Gaming World described the CDTV as a " fiasco " for Commodore. Though the company later developed an improved and cost-reduced CDTV-II, it

9900-552: Was the Amiga video connector which allows the A500 to be used with a conventional CRT television. In November 1991, the enhanced Amiga 500 Plus replaced the 500 in some markets. It was bundled with the Cartoon Classics pack in the United Kingdom at £399, although many stores still advertised it as an 'A500'. The Amiga 500 Plus was virtually identical except for its new operating system, different 'trap-door' expansion slot and slightly different keyboard, and in mid-1992,

10000-480: Was the manufacturer of Amigas for Escom. After a reported sale to VisCorp fell through, a U.S. Wintel PC manufacturer, Gateway 2000 , eventually purchased the Amiga branch and technology in 1997. QuickPak attempted but failed to license Amiga from Gateway and build new models. Gateway was then working on a brand new Amiga platform, likely encouraged by a desire to be independent of Microsoft and Intel . However this did not materialize and in 2000, Gateway sold

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