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108-452: Air Support is a 1992 game for the Amiga and Atari ST . It is a top-down strategy game , with a first-person mode available for special missions. The game takes place during a retro-futuristic 21st century where all wars are fought in virtual reality . This strategy video game –related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Amiga The Amiga 1000

216-567: A 16-bit external data bus . For this reason, Motorola termed it a 16/32-bit processor. As one of the first widely available processors with a 32-bit instruction set, large unsegmented address space, and relatively high speed for the era, the 68k was a popular design through the 1980s. It was widely used in a new generation of personal computers with graphical user interfaces , including the Macintosh 128K , Amiga , Atari ST , and X68000 . The Sega Genesis/Mega Drive console, released in 1988,

324-525: A 16-bit status register. The upper 8 bits is the system byte, and modification of it is privileged. The lower 8 bits is the user byte, also known as the condition code register (CCR), and modification of it is not privileged. The 68000 comparison, arithmetic, and logic operations modify condition codes to record their results for use by later conditional jumps. The condition code bits are "carry" (C), "overflow" (V), "zero" (Z), "negative" (N) and "extend" (X). The "extend" (X) flag deserves special mention, because it

432-583: 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),

540-413: A 64-pin package. This became known as the "Texas Cockroach". By the mid-1970s, Motorola's MOS design techniques had become less advanced than their competition, and their fabrication lines at times struggled with low yields . By the late-1970s, the company had entered a technology exchange program with Hitachi , dramatically improving their production capabilities. As part of this, a new fab named MOS-8

648-406: 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

756-480: 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

864-472: 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

972-555: 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: Motorola 68000 The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand")

1080-467: A dual 68000 CPU configuration, and systems with a triple 68000 CPU configuration also exist (such as Galaxy Force and others based on the Sega Y Board), along with a quad 68000 CPU configuration, which has been used by Jaleco (one 68000 for sound has a lower clock rate compared to the other 68000 CPUs) for games such as Big Run and Cisco Heat ; another, fifth 68000 (at a different clock rate than

1188-491: A higher-numbered interrupt can always interrupt a lower-numbered interrupt. In the status register, a privileged instruction allows setting the current minimum interrupt level, blocking lower or equal priority interrupts. For example, if the interrupt level in the status register is set to 3, higher levels from 4 to 7 can cause an exception. Level 7 is a level triggered non-maskable interrupt (NMI). Level 1 can be interrupted by any higher level. Level 0 means no interrupt. The level

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1296-437: A logically flat 32-bit address space , while accessing only a 24-bit physical address space. Motorola's intent with the internal 32-bit address space was forward compatibility, making it feasible to write 68000 software that would take full advantage of later 32-bit implementations of the 68000 instruction set. However, this did not prevent programmers from writing forward incompatible software. "24-bit" software that discarded

1404-413: A minimum instruction size of 16 bits. Many instructions and addressing modes are longer to include more address or mode bits. The CPU, and later the whole family, implements two levels of privilege. User mode gives access to everything except privileged instructions such as interrupt level controls. Supervisor privilege gives access to everything. An interrupt always becomes supervisory. The supervisor bit

1512-415: 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

1620-519: 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

1728-560: A second-source maker of the CMOS 68HC000 (TMP68HC000). Encrypted variants of the 68000, being the Hitachi FD1089 and FD1094, store decryption keys for opcodes and opcode data in battery-backed memory and were used in certain Sega arcade systems including System 16 to prevent piracy and illegal bootleg games. The 68HC000, the first CMOS version of the 68000, was designed by Hitachi and jointly introduced in 1985. Motorola's version

1836-503: 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

1944-443: 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

2052-484: Is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor , introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector. The design implements a 32-bit instruction set , with 32-bit registers and a 16-bit internal data bus . The address bus is 24 bits and does not use memory segmentation , which made it easier to program for. Internally, it uses a 16-bit data arithmetic logic unit (ALU) and two more 16-bit ALUs used mostly for addresses, and has

2160-474: Is also powered by the 68000. Later processors in the Motorola 68000 series , beginning with the Motorola 68020 , use full 32-bit ALUs and have full 32-bit address and data buses, speeding up 32-bit operations and allowing 32-bit addressing, rather than the 24-bit addressing of the 68000 and 68010 or the 31-bit addressing of the Motorola 68012 . The original 68k is generally software forward-compatible with

2268-616: Is also the CPU of the Sega Pico , a young childrens' educational game console. The multi-processor Atari Jaguar console from 1993 used a 68000 as a support chip, although, due to familiarity, some developers used it as the primary processor. The 1994 Sega Saturn console used the 68000 as a sound co-processor. In October 1995, the 68000 made it into a handheld game console , Sega's Genesis Nomad , as its CPU. Certain arcade games (such as Steel Gunner and others based on Namco System 2 ) use

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2376-771: Is called the MC68HC000, while Hitachi's is the HD68HC000. The 68HC000 offers speeds of 8–20 MHz. Except for using CMOS circuitry, it behaved identically to the HMOS MC68000, but the change to CMOS greatly reduced its power consumption. The original HMOS MC68000 consumed around 1.35  watts at an ambient temperature of 25  °C , regardless of clock speed, while the MC68HC000 consumed only 0.13 watts at 8 MHz and 0.38 watts at 20 MHz. (Unlike CMOS circuits, HMOS still draws power when idle, so power consumption varies little with clock rate.) Apple selected

2484-410: Is separate from the carry flag . This permits the extra bit from arithmetic, logic, and shift operations to be separated from the carry multiprecision arithmetic . The designers attempted to make the assembly language orthogonal . That is, instructions are divided into operations and address modes , and almost all address modes are available for almost all instructions. There are 56 instructions and

2592-458: Is stored in the status register, and is visible to user programs. An advantage of this system is that the supervisor level has a separate stack pointer. This permits a multitasking system to use very small stacks for tasks, because the designers do not have to allocate the memory required to hold the stack frames of a maximum stack-up of interrupts. The CPU recognizes seven interrupt levels. Levels 1 through 5 are strictly prioritized. That is,

2700-412: Is stored in the status register, and is visible to user-level programs. Hardware interrupts are signalled to the CPU using three inputs that encode the highest pending interrupt priority. A separate encoder is usually required to encode the interrupts, though for systems that do not require more than three hardware interrupts it is possible to connect the interrupt signals directly to the encoded inputs at

2808-450: The 68020 and 88000 projects. Several other companies were second-source manufacturers of the HMOS 68000. These included Hitachi (HD68000), who shrank the feature size to 2.7 μm for their 12.5 MHz version, Mostek (MK68000), Rockwell (R68000), Signetics (SCN68000), Thomson / SGS-Thomson (originally EF68000 and later TS68000), and Toshiba (TMP68000). Toshiba was also

2916-540: The 680x0 , CPU32 , and Coldfire families, were also still in production. More recently, with the Sendai fab closure, all 68HC000, 68020, 68030, and 68882 parts have been discontinued, leaving only the 68SEC000 in production. Since being succeeded by "true" 32-bit microprocessors, the 68000 is used as the core of many microcontrollers . In 1989, Motorola introduced the MC68302 communications processor. IBM considered

3024-589: 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

3132-542: 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

3240-406: 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

3348-670: The Data General Nova or PDP-8 . Based on the semiconductor manufacturing processes of the era, these were often multi-chip solutions like the National Semiconductor IMP-16 , or the single-chip PACE that had issues with speed. With the sales prospects for the 6800 dimming, but still cash-flush from the engine control sales, in late 1976 Colin Crook, Operations Manager, began considering how to successfully win future sales. They were aware that Intel

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3456-486: The Macintosh moved from the 6809 to the 68k. The average price eventually reached $ 14.76. In 1982, the 68000 received a minor update to its instruction set architecture (ISA) to support virtual memory and to conform to the Popek and Goldberg virtualization requirements . The updated chip is called the 68010 . It also adds a new "loop mode" which speeds up small loops, and increases overall performance by about 10% at

3564-510: The Motorola 68000 Educational Computer Board , a single-board computer for educational and training purposes which in addition to the 68000 itself contained memory, I/O devices, programmable timer and wire-wrap area for custom circuitry. The board remained in use in US colleges as a tool for learning assembly programming until the early 1990s. At its introduction, the 68000 was first used in high-priced systems, including multiuser microcomputers like

3672-836: 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

3780-858: The Palm PDAs and the Handspring Visor used the DragonBall , a derivative of the 68000. AlphaSmart used the DragonBall family in later versions of its portable word processors. Texas Instruments used the 68000 in its high-end graphing calculators, the TI-89 and TI-92 series and Voyage 200 . A modified version of the 68000 formed the basis of the IBM XT/370 hardware emulator of the System 370 processor. Video game manufacturers used

3888-572: The WICAT 150, early Alpha Microsystems computers, Sage II / IV , Tandy 6000 / TRS-80 Model 16 , and Fortune 32:16 ; single-user workstations such as Hewlett-Packard 's HP 9000 Series 200 systems, the first Apollo/Domain systems, Sun Microsystems ' Sun-1 , and the Corvus Concept ; and graphics terminals like Digital Equipment Corporation 's VAXstation 100 and Silicon Graphics ' IRIS 1000 and 1200. Unix systems rapidly moved to

3996-538: 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

4104-439: The 1990s in low-end printers. The 68000 was successful in the field of industrial control systems. Among the systems benefited from having a 68000 or derivative as their microprocessor were families of programmable logic controllers (PLCs) manufactured by Allen-Bradley , Texas Instruments and subsequently, following the acquisition of that division of TI, by Siemens . Users of such systems do not accept product obsolescence at

4212-436: 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

4320-550: The 6800, as they felt the 8-bit designs were too limited to be the basis for new designs. The new system was influenced by the PDP-11 , the most popular minicomputer design of the era. At the time, a key concept in minis was the concept of an orthogonal instruction set , in which every operation was allowed to work on any sort of data. To feed the correct data into the internal units, MACSS made extensive use of microcode , essentially small programs in read only memory that gathered up

4428-450: The 68000 (including the 9400/9400A) can also perform fast Fourier transform functions on a waveform. The 683XX microcontrollers, based on the 68000 architecture, are used in networking and telecom equipment, television set-top boxes, laboratory and medical instruments, and even handheld calculators. The MC68302 and its derivatives have been used in many telecom products from Cisco, 3com, Ascend, Marconi, Cyclades and others. Past models of

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4536-528: The 68000 as the backbone of many arcade games and home game consoles : Atari's Food Fight , from 1982, was one of the first 68000-based arcade games. Others included Sega 's System 16 , Capcom 's CP System and CPS-2 , and SNK 's Neo Geo . By the late 1980s, the 68000 was inexpensive enough to power home game consoles, such as Sega's Genesis console, and also the Sega CD attachment for it (a Sega CD system has three CPUs, two of them 68000s.) The 68000

4644-511: The 68000 for the IBM PC but chose the Intel 8088 ; however, IBM Instruments briefly sold the 68000-based IBM System 9000 laboratory computer systems. The 68k instruction set is particularly well suited to implement Unix, and the 68000 and its successors became the dominant CPUs for Unix-based workstations including Sun workstations and Apollo/Domain workstations. In 1981, Motorola introduced

4752-503: The 68000 itself had to succeed despite initially adopting a metal-gate design. Though the point about playing catch-up is clear, this could not have been an entirely accurate summary because Motorola's 1976 datasheets, predating the inception of the MACCS project, denote the majority of its 6800 family in silicon-gate. Indeed, Gunter's own 1979 article introducing the 68000 highlighted it as a silicon-gate depletion-mode HMOS design. Whatever

4860-472: The 68000 to respond quickly to interrupts (even in the worst case where all 8 data registers D0–D7 and 7 address registers A0–A6 needed to be saved, 15 registers in total), and yet large enough to make most calculations fast, because they could be done entirely within the processor without keeping any partial results in memory. (Note that an exception routine in supervisor mode can also save the user stack pointer A7, which would total 8 address registers. However,

4968-685: The 68HC000 for use in the Macintosh Portable . Motorola replaced the MC68008 with the MC68HC001 in 1990. This chip resembles the 68HC000 in most respects, but its data bus can operate in either 16-bit or 8-bit mode, depending on the value of an input pin at reset. Thus, like the 68008, it can be used in systems with cheaper 8-bit memories. The later evolution of the 68000 focused on more modern embedded control applications and on-chip peripherals. The 68EC000 chip and SCM68000 core remove

5076-566: 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

5184-520: 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

5292-486: 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

5400-623: 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

5508-468: 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

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5616-506: 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

5724-406: 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

5832-494: 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,

5940-451: 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

6048-431: 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

6156-550: The Imagen Imprint-10 were controlled by external boards equipped with the 68000. The first HP LaserJet , introduced in 1984, came with a built-in 8 MHz 68000. Other printer manufacturers adopted the 68000, including Apple with its introduction of the LaserWriter in 1985, the first PostScript laser printer. The 68000 continued to be widely used in printers throughout the rest of the 1980s, persisting well into

6264-632: The M6800 peripheral bus, and exclude the MOVE from SR instruction from user mode programs, making the 68EC000 and 68SEC000 the only 68000 CPUs not 100% object code compatible with previous 68000 CPUs when run in User Mode. When run in Supervisor Mode, there is no difference. In 1996, Motorola updated the standalone core with fully static circuitry, drawing only 2  μW in low-power mode, calling it

6372-736: The MC68000, the fastest version of the original HMOS chip, was not produced until the late 1980s. By the start of 1981, the 68k was winning orders in the high end, and Gunter began to approach Apple to win their business. At that time, the 68k sold for about $ 125 in quantity. In meetings with Steve Jobs , Jobs talked about using the 68k in the Apple Lisa , but stated "the real future is in this product that I'm personally doing. If you want this business, you got to commit that you'll sell it for $ 15." Motorola countered by offering to sell it at $ 55 at first, then step down to $ 35, and so on. Jobs agreed, and

6480-518: The MC68SEC000. Motorola ceased production of the HMOS MC68000, as well as the MC68008, MC68010, MC68330, and MC68340 in on June 1, 1996, but its spin-off company Freescale Semiconductor was still producing the MC68HC000, MC68HC001, MC68EC000, and MC68SEC000, as well as the MC68302 and MC68306 microcontrollers and later versions of the DragonBall family. The 68000's architectural descendants,

6588-672: 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,

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6696-518: 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

6804-550: 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

6912-706: 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

7020-417: 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

7128-660: The computer as an all-purpose business machine, especially when outfitted with 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,

7236-694: The degree of Motorola's process and manufacturing deficits in the early days, the team was undeterred and would not compromise in its pursuit of a microprocessor with industry-leading performance. Formally introduced in September 1979, initial samples were released in February 1980, with production chips available over the counter in November. Initial speed grades were 4, 6, and 8  MHz . 10 MHz chips became available during 1981, and 12.5 MHz chips by June 1982. The 16.67 MHz "12F" version of

7344-444: 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

7452-416: The dual stack pointer (A7 and supervisor-mode A7') design of the 68000 makes this normally unnecessary, except when a task switch is performed in a multitasking system.) Having the two types of registers allows one 32-bit address and one 16-bit data calculation to take place at the same time. This results in reduced instruction execution time as addresses and data can be processed in parallel. The 68000 has

7560-415: 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

7668-617: The end of 1976. Crook formed the Motorola Advanced Computer System on Silicon (MACSS) project to build the design and hired Tom Gunter to be its principal architect. Gunter began forming his team in January 1977. The performance goal was set at 1 million instructions per second (MIPS). They wanted the design to not only win back microcomputer vendors like Apple Computer and Tandy , but also minicomputer companies like NCR and AT&T . The team decided to abandon an attempt at backward compatibility with

7776-465: 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

7884-507: 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

7992-421: 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

8100-441: 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

8208-463: 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

8316-421: The market. In order to compete, they set themselves the goal of being two times as powerful at the same cost, or one-half the cost with the same performance. Crook decided that they would attack the high-end of the market with the most powerful processor on the market. Another 16-bit would not do, their design would have to be bigger, and that meant having some 32-bit features. Crook had decided on this approach by

8424-492: The more capable later generations of the 68k line, which remained popular in that market throughout the 1980s. By the mid-1980s, falling production cost made the 68000 viable for use in personal computers starting with the Apple Lisa and Macintosh , and followed by the Amiga , Atari ST , and X68000 . The Sinclair QL microcomputer, along with its derivatives, such as the ICL One Per Desk business terminal,

8532-463: 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

8640-527: The other 68000 CPUs) was used in the Jaleco arcade game Wild Pilot for input/output (I/O) processing. The 68000 has a 24-bit external address bus and two byte-select signals "replaced" A0. These 24 lines can therefore address 16 MB of physical memory with byte resolution. Address storage and computation uses 32 bits internally; however, the 8 high-order address bits are ignored due to the physical lack of device pins. This allows it to run software written for

8748-552: 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

8856-525: 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

8964-509: 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

9072-417: The release of the 1989 Mac IIci. The 68000 family stores multi-byte integers in memory in big-endian order. The CPU has eight 32-bit general-purpose data registers (D0-D7), and eight address registers (A0-A7). The last address register is the stack pointer , and assemblers accept the label SP as equivalent to A7. This was a good number of registers at the time in many ways. It was small enough to allow

9180-508: The required data, performed the operations and wrote out the results. MACSS was among the first to use this technique in a microprocessor. There was a large amount of support hardware for the 6800 that would remain useful, things like UARTs and similar interfacing systems. For this reason, the new design retained a bus protocol compatibility mode for existing 6800 peripheral devices. A chip with 32 data and 32 addressing pins would require 64 pins, plus more for power and other features. At

9288-415: The rest of the line despite being limited to a 16-bit wide external bus. After 45 years in production , the 68000 architecture is still in use. Motorola's first widely produced microprocessor was the 6800 , introduced in early 1974 and available in quantity late that year. The company set itself the goal of selling 25,000 units by September 1976, a goal they did meet. Although a capable design, it

9396-423: The same clock speeds. A further extended version, which exposes 31 bits of the address bus, was also produced in small quantities as the 68012 . To support lower-cost systems and control applications with smaller memory sizes, Motorola introduced the 8-bit compatible MC68008 , also in 1982. This is a 68000 with an 8-bit data bus and a smaller (20-bit) address bus. After 1982, Motorola devoted more attention to

9504-611: The same rate as domestic users, and it is entirely likely that despite having been installed over 20 years ago, many 68000-based controllers will continue in reliable service well into the 21st century. In a number of digital oscilloscopes from the 80s, the 68000 has been used as a waveform display processor; some models including the LeCroy 9400/9400A also use the 68000 as a waveform math processor (including addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of two waveforms/references/waveform memories), and some digital oscilloscopes using

9612-522: 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

9720-437: 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

9828-547: 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

9936-422: The time, 64-pin dual inline package (DIP)s were "large, heavy-cost" systems and "just terrible", making that the largest they could consider. To make it fit, Crook selected a hybrid design, with a 32-bit instruction set architecture (ISA) but 16-bit components implementing it, like the arithmetic logic unit (ALU). The external interface was reduced to 16 data pins and 24 for addresses, allowing it all to fit in

10044-464: The upper address byte, or used it for purposes other than addressing, could fail on 32-bit 68000 implementations. For example, early (pre-7.0) versions of Apple's Mac OS used the high byte of memory-block master pointers to hold flags such as locked and purgeable . Later versions of the OS moved the flags to a nearby location, and Apple began shipping computers which had " 32-bit clean " ROMs beginning with

10152-466: Was built using the latest 5-inch wafer sizes and Intel's HMOS process with a 3.5  μm feature size. This was an investment aimed at catching the competition: even upstart semiconductor companies such as Zilog and MOS Technology had introduced CPUs fabricated on depletion-mode NMOS logic before Motorola did. In fact, Motorola may have substantially lagged contemporaries in phasing out enhancement mode and metal gate, with Gunter recollecting that

10260-438: 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

10368-548: 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

10476-580: Was eclipsed by more powerful designs, such as the Zilog Z80 , and less expensive designs, such as the MOS Technology 6502 . By late 1976, the sales book was flat and the division was only saved by a project for General Motors that turned into a huge product line for engine control and other tasks. By the time the 6800 was introduced, a small number of 16-bit designs had come to market. These were generally modeled on minicomputer platforms like

10584-406: 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

10692-532: 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

10800-625: 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

10908-488: 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

11016-434: 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

11124-683: 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

11232-676: 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 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

11340-407: 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

11448-480: 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

11556-751: Was the most commercially important utilisation of the 68008. Helix Systems (in Missouri, United States) designed an extension to the SWTPC SS-50 bus , the SS-64, and produced systems built around the 68008 processor. While the adoption of RISC and x86 displaced the 68000 series as desktop/workstation CPU, the processor found substantial use in embedded applications. By the early 1990s, quantities of 68000 CPUs could be purchased for less than 30  USD per part. The 68000 also saw great success as an embedded controller. As early as 1981, laser printers such as

11664-457: Was working on a 16-bit extension of their 8080 series, which would emerge as the Intel 8086 , and had heard rumors of a 16-bit Zilog Z80 , which became the Z8000 . These would use new design techniques that would eliminate the problems seen in earlier 16-bit systems. Motorola knew that if they launched a product similar to the 8086, within 10% of its capabilities, Intel would outperform them in

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