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114-445: "Workbench" was also the name originally given to the entire Amiga operating system up until version 3.1. From release 3.5 the operating system was renamed "AmigaOS" and subsequently "Workbench" refers to the native file manager only. The Amiga Workbench uses the metaphor of a workbench (i.e. a workbench for manual labor), rather than the now-standard desktop metaphor , for representing file system organization. The desktop itself

228-544: A "dream machine." These criticisms were directed toward its case quality, the disk drives slowing during certain operations, and not finding an AUTOEXEC command in AmigaDOS, though the marketing vice president of Commodore, Clive Smith, assured the magazine that later production units would address most of its complaints. Months after the Amiga 1000 was released, InfoWorld offered a mixed review. It praised Intuition and

342-531: 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),

456-406: 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

570-480: 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

684-472: 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

798-460: A base configuration of 256 KB of RAM at the retail price of US$ 1,295 . A 13-inch (330 mm) analog RGB monitor was available for around US$ 300 , bringing the price of a complete Amiga system to US$ 1,595 (equivalent to $ 4,520 in 2023). Before the release of the Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000 models in 1987, the A1000 was marketed as simply the Amiga , although the model number was there from

912-604: A driver available on Aminet that allows two of the serial ports to be driven at 115,200 bits/s . The serial card used the 65CE02 CPU clocked at 3.58 MHz . This CPU was also part of the CSG 4510 CPU core that was used in the Commodore 65 computer. Amiga has three networking interface APIs: Amiga 1000 The Amiga 1000 , also known as the A1000 , is the first personal computer released by Commodore International in

1026-495: A file on non-native media) is represented by the default system icon for one of the five types listed above. These default icons are also customizable. Icon-less files are only displayed in this manner if the drawer is configured to [Show All Files] – if this option is not set (which is the case in Workbench 1.x), such files will not appear at all and can only be seen from a CLI. Tool (application) files can include "tool types" in

1140-431: A file type, the type of the related file is specified by its very own properties, along with the restrictions (AmigaDOS: protection flags) given to this file. For example, if you add a tool icon to a text document file, AmigaOS will tell you the file "is not executable" or "is not of required type" as it has no 'e'-protection-flag (AmigaDOS: Hold, Script, Pure, Archived, Read, Writeable, Executable, Deletable) nor does it have

1254-415: 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

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1368-589: A number of years afterwards. The original model 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 ,

1482-519: 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

1596-482: A reload of the WCS. In Europe, the WCS was often referred to as WOM (Write Once Memory), a play on the more conventional term "ROM" ( read-only memory ). The preproduction Amiga (which was codenamed "Velvet") released to developers in early 1985 contained 128 KB of RAM with an option to expand it to 256 KB. Commodore later increased the system memory to 256 KB due to objections by the Amiga development team. The names of

1710-503: 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

1824-443: 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

1938-453: A simple text-only hypertext markup scheme and browser, for providing online help inside applications. It also introduced Installer , a standard software installation program, driven by a LISP -like scripting language. Finally, Workbench 2.0 rectified the problem of applications hooking directly into the input-events stream to capture keyboard and mouse movements, sometimes locking up the whole system. Workbench 2.0 provided Commodities ,

2052-418: A standard interface for modifying or scanning input events. This included a standard method for specifying global "hotkey" key-sequences, and a Commodities Exchange registry for the user to see which commodities were running. Version 3.0 was originally shipped with the Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000 computers. Version 3.0 added datatype support and Workbench could load any background image in any format, as long as

2166-407: A total of 512 KB of RAM. Using the external slot the primary memory can be expanded up to 8.5 MB. The A1000 has a number of characteristics that distinguish it from later Amiga models: It is the only model to feature the short-lived Amiga check-mark logo on its case, the majority of the case is elevated slightly to give a storage area for the keyboard when not in use (a "keyboard garage"), and

2280-454: A two button mouse, where right click operates pull-down menus and left click is used for all other purposes. The underlying AmigaOS allows the Workbench to launch multiple applications that can execute concurrently. This is achieved through Exec , the Amiga's multi-tasking kernel, which handles memory management , message passing , and task scheduling . Applications launched from Workbench could report their success back to Workbench, but this

2394-430: Is a spatial file manager in the sense that it uses a spatial metaphor to represent files and folders as if they are real physical objects. Under this concept, each drawer (folder) opens in its own window, rather than within a single browser under the now more common navigational concept. Workbench utilizes the Amiga's native windowing system called Intuition to provide the graphical user interface . Intuition manages

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2508-587: Is called Workbench and uses the following representations: drawers (instead of folders) for directories, tools for executable programs, projects for data files, and a trash can as a folder intended to contain deleted files. These representations may be considered somewhat unusual by a modern user, but at the time there were no commonly accepted metaphors and Commodore chose to use different idioms from their competitors ( Apple had already pursued legal action to prevent other software companies from offering graphical user interfaces similar to its own). Workbench

2622-610: Is not used unnecessarily by the OS in memory-limited systems. Workbench was shipped with all Amiga models from Commodore. Workbench was provided either on floppy disk or later (as part of AmigaOS) on CD-ROM . Initially, Workbench was designed to be launched and operate from floppy disk (or other removable media ). Later versions could be installed on hard disk , for which an installer was developed for use with AmigaOS 2.0 and later. AmigaOS (including Workbench) often came pre-installed on systems shipped with hard disks. Up until release 3.1 of

2736-581: Is used. The 4.0 icons, designed by Martin Merz, can use a 24-bit palette. Both AROS and MorphOS support PNG icons natively. PNG allows using full 24-bit palette with alpha blending. On Amiga Workbench PNG icons are supported through plugins. In comparison to the competing Mac OS and Atari , the early Amiga Workbench (pre-Workbench 2.04) featured, as the default, a 4 color blue desktop screen with color icons at 640 × 200 NTSC American standard or 640 × 256 on European PAL television sets, in contrast to

2850-669: The .info file matching the name of the file it represents. For example, the icon for NotePad , a text editor , is found in the file NotePad.info . This .info extension is the only file extension required by AmigaOS. The .info file contains the icon image and its spatial position within its parent window. The icon also specifies the type of the file, as used by Workbench. Workbench recognises five different file types: An additional three file types are available and are intended for future expansion: Of these three file types, only "App Icons" currently are used by any part of Workbench/AmigaOS. While an icon may represent or suggest

2964-399: The .info file. These are used as configuration options for the program. Each tool type is a single line of text, which can optionally include parameters written after an = sign. Tool types can be commented out by writing them in parentheses . For example, the tooltype " CX_POPKEY=ctrl alt f1 " defines that the application (a Commodity ) will activate the user interface in response to

3078-495: The 512 × 342 black and white interface presented by the Mac. The Amiga user was also free to create and modify system and program icons, while Atari TOS featured only default system icons whose appearance could not be modified. Workbench contributed many other unique features/philosophies to intuitive GUI design (starting with version 2.04/2.1): The freedom in customization and the multitude of color settings and aspects available to

3192-419: The Amiga line. It combines the 16/32-bit Motorola 68000 CPU which was powerful by 1985 standards with one of the most advanced graphics and sound systems in its class. It runs a preemptive multitasking operating system that fits into 256 KB of read-only memory and was shipped with 256 KB of RAM. The primary memory can be expanded internally with a manufacturer-supplied 256 KB module for

3306-589: 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

3420-542: 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

3534-406: 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

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3648-836: 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

3762-574: 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,

3876-459: The Tramiel era. Along with the operating system, the machine came bundled with a version of AmigaBASIC developed by Microsoft and a speech synthesis library developed by Softvoice, Inc . Many A1000 owners remained attached to their machines long after newer models rendered the units technically obsolete, and it attracted numerous aftermarket upgrades. Many CPU upgrades that plugged into

3990-587: 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

4104-436: 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

4218-409: The 68000 but also introduces a small degree of software incompatibility. Third-party CPU upgrades, which mostly fit in the CPU socket, use faster 68020 or 68030 microprocessors and integrated memory, as well as provide support for a 68881 or 68882 FPU . Such upgrades often have the option to revert to 68000 mode for full compatibility. Some boards have a socket to seat the original 68000, whereas

4332-484: The 68000's 24-bit address bus . This memory is accessible only by the CPU permitting faster code execution as DMA cycles are not shared with the chipset. The Amiga 1000 features an 86-pin expansion port (electrically identical to the later Amiga 500 expansion port, though the A500's connector is inverted). This port is used by third-party expansions such as memory upgrades and SCSI adapters. These resources are handled by

4446-408: The 68030 cards typically come with an on-board 68000. The original Amiga 1000 is the only model to have 256  KB of Amiga Chip RAM , which can be expanded to 512 KB with the addition of a daughterboard under a cover in the center front of the machine. RAM may also be upgraded via official and third-party upgrades, with a practical upper limit of about 9  MB of "fast RAM" due to

4560-566: 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

4674-453: The A1000 also has a built-in composite video output which allows the computer to be connected directly to some monitors other than their standard RGB monitor. The A1000 also has a "TV MOD" output, into which an RF Modulator can be plugged, allowing connection to older televisions that did not have a composite video input. The original 68000 CPU can be directly replaced with a Motorola 68010 , which can execute instructions slightly faster than

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4788-520: 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

4902-486: 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

5016-663: The Amiga Autoconfig standard. Other expansion options are available including a bus expander which provides two Zorro-II slots. Graphic modes with up to 16 on-screen colors: Introduced on July 23, 1985, during a star-studded gala featuring Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry held at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City , machines began shipping in September with

5130-445: The Amiga 1000 "the first multimedia computer ... so far ahead of its time that almost nobody—including Commodore's marketing department—could fully articulate what it was all about". In 2006, PC World rated the Amiga 1000 as the 7th greatest PC of all time. In 2007, it was rated by the same magazine as the 37th best tech product of all time. Also that year, IDG Sweden ranked it the 10th best computer of all time. " Joe Pillow "

5244-572: 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

5358-468: 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

5472-475: The Amiga differs from its contemporaries through 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

5586-506: 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

5700-406: 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

5814-494: 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,

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5928-451: 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

6042-454: The Amiga's operating system, Commodore used Workbench to refer to the entire Amiga operating system. As a consequence Workbench was commonly used to refer to both the operating system and the file manager component. For end users Workbench was often synonymous with AmigaOS. From version 3.5 the OS was renamed "AmigaOS" and pre-3.5 versions were also retroactively referred to as "AmigaOS" (rather than Workbench). Subsequently, "Workbench" refers to

6156-431: 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

6270-566: The Motorola 68000 socket functioned in the A1000. Additionally, a line of products called the Rejuvenator series allowed the use of newer chipsets in the A1000, and an Australian -designed replacement A1000 motherboard called The Phoenix utilized the same chipset as the A3000 and added an A2000-compatible video slot and on-board SCSI controller. In its product preview, Byte magazine

6384-672: 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,

6498-485: The TV or monitor overscan could be adjusted. Several features were deprecated in later versions. For example, the gauge meter showing the free space on a file system was replaced with a percentage in Workbench 2.0. Under Workbench 1.x, right clicking on icons opens a display of the files metadata, whereas from Workbench 2.0 right clicking activates pull-down menus only. The default "busy" pointer (a comic balloon showing "Zzz...")

6612-518: 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

6726-550: 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

6840-636: The beginning, as the original box indicates. In the US, the A1000 was marketed as The Amiga from Commodore , with the Commodore logo omitted from the case. The Commodore branding was retained for the international versions. Additionally, the Amiga 1000 was sold exclusively in computer stores in the US rather than the various non computer-dedicated department and toy stores through which the VIC-20 and Commodore 64 were retailed. These measures were an effort to avoid Commodore's "toy-store" computer image created during

6954-706: 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

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7068-417: 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

7182-448: The custom chips were different; Denise and Paula were called Daphne and Portia respectively. The casing of the preproduction Amiga was almost identical to the production version: the main difference being an embossed Commodore logo in the top left corner. It did not have the developer signatures. The Amiga 1000 has a Motorola 68000 CPU running at 7.15909  MHz on NTSC systems or 7.09379 MHz on PAL systems, precisely double

7296-424: The customizability of Workbench, but took issue with the operating system's bugs such as memory overflow and screen flickering of single lines as a result of their being interleaved when displayed in high resolution mode. It also criticized the sparseness of the software library preventing the publication from fully realizing the computer's potential. In 1994, as Commodore filed for bankruptcy, Byte magazine called

7410-599: The datatypes. Following Commodore's demise and around six years after Workbench 3.1 was released, Haage & Partner were commissioned to update AmigaOS, which was released in 1999 as a software-only update for existing systems. The Workbench look and feel , though still largely based on the earlier 3.1 release, was revised somewhat, with an improved user interface based on ReAction, improved icon rendering and official support for true color backdrops . These releases included support for existing third-party GUI enhancements, such as NewIcons , by integrating these patches into

7524-500: 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

7638-415: 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

7752-465: 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

7866-507: 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

7980-421: 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

8094-454: The inside of the case is engraved with the signatures of the Amiga designers (similar to the Macintosh ); including Jay Miner and the paw print of his dog Mitchy. The A1000's case was designed by Howard Stolz . As Senior Industrial Designer at Commodore, Stolz was the mechanical lead and primary interface with Sanyo in Japan, the contract manufacturer for the A1000 casing. The Amiga 1000

8208-441: 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

8322-496: The key sequence Ctrl-Alt-F1. The colours used in the icon are normally only stored as indices to the Amiga Workbench screen's current palette. Because of this, the icons' colour scheme is inherently tied to the chosen hues in the screen's palette, and choosing non-standard colours can give the icons an ugly appearance. This problem was partly solved by a third-party system called NewIcons , which adds additional features to

8436-463: 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

8550-493: The microcomputer marketplace. In this case, it was capable of outperforming most business, as well as arcade game machines and delivering sampled sound, making it suitable for offices, gamers, and digital artists. Computer Gaming World praised the machine's versatility without any obvious hardware shortcomings and stressed that it was ideal for game designers demanding fewer system constraints. Creative Computing magazine had only minor criticisms for what they otherwise called

8664-527: The more expandable Amiga 2000 . The Amiga 3000 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

8778-411: The native graphical file manager only. From its inception, Workbench offered a highly customizable interface. The user could change the aspect of program icons replacing it with newer ones with different color combinations. Users could also take a "snapshot" of icons and windows so the icons will remain on the desktop at coordinates chosen by user and windows will open at the desired size. Workbench 1.0

8892-525: The need of associated .info files, thus streamlining the process of starting executables in the GUI. Workbench 2.0 also added support for public screens . Instead of the Workbench screen being the only shareable screen, applications could create their own named screens to share with other applications. Workbench 2.0 included and integrated ARexx , allowing users to control the system and other programs from user scripts. Workbench 2.0 introduced AmigaGuide ,

9006-463: 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

9120-552: 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

9234-525: 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

9348-509: 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

9462-401: The rendering of screens, windows, and gadgets (graphical elements, equivalent to widgets). Later versions of AmigaOS enhanced the interface with more complex object-oriented widget systems, such as gadtools.library and BOOPSI (AmigaOS 2.0 and later) and ReAction (AmigaOS 3.5 and later). Intuition also handles user input events, such as, input from the keyboard and mouse. Workbench requires

9576-577: The required datatype was installed. This feature was also used in Multiview. Its capabilities were directly related to the datatypes installed in Devs:Datatypes. Localisation was added to allow Workbench, and any installed programs that had localization, to appear in any supported language. The established AmigaGuide hypertext system gained more usability by using document links pointing to mediafiles, for example pictures or sounds, all recognized by

9690-457: The standard .info files. Unlike normal Workbench icons, NewIcons include actual RGB colour information, and the system tries its best to match the icons' colour hues to those in the screen palette. Since AmigaOS 3.5, Workbench supports icons with up to 256 colors. This release of AmigaOS features the GlowIcons icon set by Matt Chaput. With AmigaOS 3.5, a screen-palette-independent system

9804-416: The startup header of an executable. Also, stripping an 'application' from its counterpart icon file (application.info) will not render this application useless; it still remains executable, it will run, only missing the (required) options and arguments delivered from workbench via icons "tool types", e.g. stack size, public screen, etc. Starting in Workbench 2.x, a file without a .info counterpart (such as

9918-522: 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

10032-437: 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

10146-550: 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

10260-566: The system. The 3.5 and 3.9 releases included a new set of 256-color icons and a choice of desktop wallpaper. These replaced the default all-metal gray 4/8 color scheme used on AmigaOS from release 2.0 to 3.1. The 3.9 release of Workbench was again developed by Haage&Partner and released in 2000. The main improvements were the introduction of a program start bar called AmiDock, revised user interfaces for system settings and improved utility programs. This new Workbench, called Workbench 4.0, has been rewritten to become fully PowerPC compatible. It

10374-404: The user were sometimes seen as chaotic. Customization permitted icons of a vastly different size and appearance than those of the original system icons. Before Workbench 2.0, there were no user interface design guidelines , so the look and feel of menu options could be different from one application to the next (i.e. the layout of basic items like Load , Save , Open , Close , Quit , etc.). This

10488-551: The video color carrier frequency for NTSC or 1.6 times the color carrier frequency for PAL. The system clock timings are derived from the video frequency, which simplifies glue logic and allows the Amiga ;1000 to make do with a single crystal . In keeping with its video game heritage, the chipset was designed to synchronize CPU memory access and chipset DMA so the hardware runs in real time without wait-state delays. Though most units were sold with an analog RGB monitor,

10602-456: Was added which replaced the WBStartup drawer. Additional enhancements include: a new icon set to complement higher screen resolutions, new window themes including drop shadows, AmiDock with true transparency, scalable icons, and a Workbench auto-update feature. The icons that Workbench uses to represent the files in a volume or a drawer are stored in special .info files, with the name of

10716-580: Was created, which provided standard widget sets. The Amiga User Interface Style Guide , was published which explained how applications should be laid out for consistency. Intuition was improved with BOOPSI (Basic Object Oriented Programming system for Intuition) which enhanced the system with an object-oriented interface to define a system of classes in which every class individuate a single widget or describes an interface event. It can be used to program object oriented interfaces into Amiga at any level. As of Workbench 2.0 all files became visible as icons without

10830-438: 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

10944-548: 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

11058-575: Was free to create and modify system and user icons, while Atari TOS featured only default system icons whose appearance could not be modified and customizing icons on the Macintosh required using ResEdit . Icons can be of arbitrary size and design and can have two image states to produce a pseudo-animated effect when selected. Users could customize four display colors and choose from two resolutions: 640×200 or 640×400 (interlaced) on NTSC , or 640×256 or 640×512 on PAL systems. In later revisions,

11172-437: Was impressed by the computer's multitasking capabilities and the quality of its graphics and sound systems. It also praised its text-to-speech library for voice output, and predicted that the Amiga would be successful enough to influence the personal computer industry. The Amiga 1000 was released to positive reviews. Compute! lauded it as an inexpensive, truly general-purpose computer that might break preconceptions dividing

11286-406: 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

11400-532: 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

11514-625: 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

11628-488: 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

11742-688: Was manufactured in two variations: One uses the NTSC television standard and the other uses the PAL television standard. The NTSC variant was the initial model manufactured and sold in North America . The later PAL model was manufactured in Germany and sold in countries using the PAL television standard. The first NTSC systems lack the EHB video mode which is present in all later Amiga models. Because AmigaOS

11856-434: 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

11970-469: Was not a requirement and few actually did. Workbench itself has always been a disk-based component, though much of the underlying functionality is stored in the Amiga's Kickstart firmware, usually stored in ROM . As a consequence, it is necessary to boot from a system disk to launch Workbench. This setup streamlines the process of launching games (which typically do not require Workbench) and ensures that memory

12084-415: Was part of AmigaOS 4.0 , and released in 2006. Since the fourth Developer Pre-Release Update screens are now draggable in any direction. Drag and drop of Workbench icons between different screens is also possible. Additionally, Workbench 4.0 includes a new version of Amidock, TrueType / OpenType fonts and movie player with DivX and MPEG-4 support. In AmigaOS 4.1, a new Startup preferences feature

12198-683: 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

12312-470: Was rather buggy at the time of the A1000's release, the OS was not placed in ROM then. Instead, the A1000 includes a daughterboard with 256  KB of RAM, dubbed the "writable control store" (WCS), into which the core of the operating system is loaded from floppy disk (this portion of the operating system is known as the " Kickstart "). The WCS is write-protected after loading, and system resets do not require

12426-406: Was released with the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000 , in 1985. The 1.x versions of Workbench used a blue-and-orange color scheme, designed to give high contrast on even the worst of television screens (the colors can be changed by the user). Versions 1.1 consists mostly of bug fixes and, like version 1.0, was distributed for the Amiga 1000 only. The display was highly customizable for the era. The user

12540-417: Was replaced with a stopwatch in later versions. Workbench 2.0 was released with the launch of the Amiga 3000 in 1990. Until AmigaOS 2.0 there was no unified look and feel design standard and application developers had to write their own widgets (both buttons and menus) if they wished to enhance the already-meager selection of standard basic widgets provided by Intuition. With Workbench 2.0 gadtools.library

12654-438: Was seen as a problem with the Amiga by its detractors. The historical GUI site GUIdebook calls Amiga Workbench a "unique (if slightly chaotic) GUI for Amiga machines". The Ren'Py visual novel Digital: A Love Story uses an Amiga Workbench 1.0 design (known as Amie Workbench within the game). Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers produced by Commodore from 1985 until 1994, with production by others for

12768-407: 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

12882-480: 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

12996-412: Was the name given on the ticket for the extra airline seat purchased to hold the first Amiga prototype while on the way to the January 1984 Consumer Electronics Show . The airlines required a name for the airline ticket and Joe Pillow was born. The engineers ( RJ Mical and Dale Luck) who flew with the Amiga prototype (codenamed Lorraine ) drew a happy face on the front of the pillowcase and even added

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