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84-583: Christian Bauer (developer of a Mac 68k emulator ShapeShifter for Amiga ) released the first version of Basilisk II in March 1999. The emulator was expected to be highly portable across several computing platforms and provided some improvements in comparison to ShapeShifter - e.g. no limit for number of emulated disks, improved CD-ROM support and support for the host file system . However, early reviews highlighted several issues like difficult configuration and limited compatibility with recommendation of ShapeShifter as

168-583: 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),

252-406: 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

336-480: 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

420-472: 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

504-660: A better choice for Amiga users. Newer releases mitigated these problems, 2005 review of the MorphOS version noted only slow CPU emulation (in comparison to built-in 68k CPU emulation for Amiga applications in MorphOS) as a major issue. The latest version of Classic Mac OS that can be run within Basilisk II is Mac OS 8.1, the last 680x0-compatible version, released in January 1998. Mac OS 8.5, which came out nine months later,

588-399: A complete song consists of a master list of repeated patterns. Later trackers departed from solely using module files , adding other options both to the sound synthesis (hosting generic synthesizers and effects or MIDI output) and to the sequencing (MIDI input and recording), effectively becoming general purpose sequencers with a different user interface . In the 2010s, tracker music

672-504: 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: Music tracker A music tracker (sometimes referred to as a tracker for short) is

756-454: A few "hardware trackers" have emerged: specialized hardware designed specifically to host tracker software, in turn designed to exploit the hardware of the machine. These hardware trackers are largely inspired by LittleSoundDJ, a tracker created for the original Game Boy . The first such hardware tracker released was the NerdSeq in 2018, a hybrid tracker-sequencer for Eurorack systems. As

840-494: A modest price point, standalone all-in-one capability, and intuitive controls. In 2021, DirtyWave released the M8 Tracker, a portable tracker that is more heavily inspired by Little Sound DJ . There are several elements common to any tracker program: samples, notes, effects, tracks (or channels), patterns, and orders. A sample is a small digital sound file of an instrument, voice, or other sound effect. Most trackers allow

924-457: A modular setup. Each machine would have its own tracker, drum machines would use a tracker-like drum pattern editor and effect and control machines could be automated tracker-like via tables of parameters. Tracker music could be found in computer games of the late 1990s and early 2000s, such as the Unreal series , Deus Ex , Crusader: No Remorse , Jazz Jackrabbit and Uplink . Some of

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1008-492: A module of said system, it cannot be used alone, and the "tracker" portion of the device is simply used as an interface to sequence , while the hardware is used to handle sampling and other functions. The first standalone hardware tracker released was the Polyend Tracker in 2020, a USB -powered device with all the functions of a software tracker. It was met with mostly positive critical reception, with critics citing

1092-415: 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

1176-558: A part of the sample to be looped, simulating a sustain of a note. A note designates the frequency at which the sample is played back. By increasing or decreasing the playback speed of a digital sample, the pitch is raised or lowered, simulating instrumental notes (e.g., C, C#, D, etc.). An effect is a special function applied to a particular note. These effects are then applied during playback through either hardware or software. Common tracker effects include volume, portamento , vibrato , retrigger , and arpeggio . A track (or channel)

1260-519: 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

1344-503: 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

1428-443: 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

1512-490: A type of music sequencer software for creating music. The music is represented as discrete musical notes positioned in several channels at chronological positions on a vertical timeline. A music tracker's user interface is traditionally number based. Notes, parameter changes, effects and other commands are entered with the keyboard into a grid of fixed time slots as codes consisting of letters, numbers and hexadecimal digits. Separate patterns have independent timelines;

1596-470: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers produced by Commodore from 1985 until 1994, with production by others for a number of years afterwards. The original model 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

1680-438: Is a space where one sample is played back at a time. Whereas the original Amiga trackers only provided four tracks, the hardware limit, modern trackers can mix a virtually unlimited number of channels into one sound stream through software mixing. Tracks have a fixed number of "rows" on which notes and effects can be placed (most trackers lay out tracks in a vertical fashion). Tracks typically contain 64 rows and 16 beats, although

1764-400: Is part of a sequence of patterns that defines the layout of a song. Patterns can be repeated across multiple orders to save tracking time and file space. There are also some tracker-like programs that utilize tracker-style sequencing schemes, while using real-time sound synthesis instead of samples. Many of these programs are designed for creating music for a particular synthesizer chip such as

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1848-466: Is still featured in demoscene products for old hardware platforms and demoparties have often separate tracker music competitions. Tracker music may also be used in games which borrow aesthetics from past decades . The term tracker derives from Ultimate Soundtracker (the first tracker software ) written by Karsten Obarski and released in 1987 by EAS Computer Technik for the Amiga . Ultimate Soundtracker

1932-467: Is the only tracker allowing multiple sound chips from multiple systems to be played simultaneously (for example, Commodore 64 and PC-98 together.)), and SunVox (Music Tracker with modular synth engine and a free form, dynamic length pattern timeline system) The earliest trackers existed to get closer to the hardware of a given machine, allowing memory-light playback of music ideal for games and similar programs. Keeping in theme with this philosophy,

2016-534: 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

2100-440: 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

2184-735: The Atari ST —released earlier the same year—as well as the Macintosh and Acorn Archimedes . Based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor , the Amiga differs from its contemporaries through 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,

2268-542: 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

2352-406: 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

2436-836: 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

2520-587: 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

2604-436: 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

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2688-566: 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

2772-520: 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

2856-486: 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

2940-659: The AWE and GUS range became obsolete. DirectX, WDM and, now more commonly, ASIO , deliver high-quality sampled audio irrespective of hardware brand. There was also a split off from the sample based trackers taking advantage of the OPL2 and OPL3 chips of the Sound Blaster series. All Sound Tracker was able to combine both the FM synthesis of the OPL chips and the sample based synthesis of

3024-623: 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

3108-468: 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

3192-506: 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

3276-406: 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

3360-494: 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,

3444-451: 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

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3528-431: 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

3612-566: The EMU-8000 chips in the Sound Blaster AWE series of cards as well as MIDI output to any additional hardware of choice. Jeskola Buzz is a modular music studio developed from 1997 to 2000 for Microsoft Windows using a tracker as its sequencer where the sounds were produced by virtual machines (Buzzmachines) such as signal generators, synthesizer emulators, drum computers, samplers, effects and control machines, that where connected in

3696-585: The GUS to become an integral component of many tracking programs and software. Inevitably, the balance was largely redressed with the introduction of the Sound Blaster AWE32 and its successors, which also featured on-board RAM and wavetable (or sample table) mixing. The responsibility for audio mixing passed from hardware to software (the main CPU ) which gradually enabled the use of more channels. From

3780-672: 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,

3864-525: The OPL chips of the Adlib and SoundBlaster sound cards, or the sound chips of classic home computers. Tracker music is typically stored in module files where the song data and samples are encapsulated in a single file. Several module file formats are supported by popular audio players . Well-known formats include MOD , MED , S3M , XM and IT . Many of these formats can also be imported into existing trackers, allowing to view arrangement, instrumentation and

3948-518: 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

4032-550: 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

4116-402: The beats, rows and tempo can be increased or decreased to the composer's taste. A basic drum set could thus be arranged by putting a bass drum at rows 0, 4, 8, 12 etc. of one track and putting some hi hat at rows 2, 6, 10, 14 etc. of a second track. Of course, bass and hats could be interleaved on the same track, if the samples are short enough. If not, the previous sample is usually stopped when

4200-706: 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

4284-417: 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

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4368-660: 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,

4452-452: The computer's internal synthesizer. Later, programs like Rock Monitor also supported additional sample playback, usually with short drum samples loaded in RAM memory. The first trackers supported four pitch and volume modulated channels of 8-bit PCM samples , a limitation derived from the Amiga's Paula audio chipset and the commonplace 8SVX format used to store sampled sound. However, since

4536-500: 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

4620-415: 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

4704-680: The early Amiga trackers such as Protracker (1990) and OctaMED have received various updates, mostly for porting to other platforms. Protracker having resumed development in 2004, with plans for releasing version 5 to Windows and AmigaOS , but only version 4.0 beta 2 for AmigaOS has been released. During 2007, Renoise (PC, 2002) and OpenMPT (PC, 1997) were presented in Computer Music Magazine as professional and inexpensive alternative to other music production software. Modern trackers include, but not limited to Deflemask, FamiTracker, VGM Music Maker, Furnace (which currently

4788-465: 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

4872-507: 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

4956-421: 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

5040-441: 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

5124-463: 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

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5208-408: The next one begins. Some modern trackers simulate polyphony in a single track by setting the "new note action" of each instrument to cut, continue, fade out, or release , opening new mixing channels as necessary. A pattern is a group of simultaneously played tracks that represents a full section of the song. A pattern usually represents an even number of measures of music composition. An order

5292-651: The notes were samples, the limitation was less important than those of synthesizing music chips. During the 1990s, tracker musicians gravitated to the PC as software production in general switched from the Amiga platform to the PC. Although the IBM and compatibles initially lacked the hardware sound processing capabilities of the Amiga, with the advent of the Sound Blaster line from Creative , PC audio slowly began to approach CD Quality ( 44.1 kHz/16 bit/Stereo ) with

5376-463: 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

5460-552: 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

5544-525: 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

5628-509: 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

5712-664: The release of the SoundBlaster 16 . Another sound card popular on the PC tracker scene was the Gravis Ultrasound , which continued the hardware mixing tradition, with 32 internal channels and onboard memory for sample storage. For a time, it offered unparalleled sound quality and became the choice of discerning tracker musicians. Understanding that the support of tracker music would benefit sales, Gravis gave away some 6000 GUS cards to participants. Coupled with excellent developer documentation, this gesture quickly prompted

5796-522: 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

5880-437: 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

5964-599: The system hardware was being readied for production. At this time the operating system (OS) was not as ready, and led to a deal to port an OS known as TRIPOS to the platform. TRIPOS was a multitasking system that had been written in BCPL during the 1970s for the PDP-11 minicomputer , but later experimentally ported to the 68000. This early version was known as AmigaDOS and the GUI as Workbench. The BCPL parts were later rewritten in

6048-629: The typical 4 MOD channels of the Amiga, the limit had moved to 7 with TFMX players and 8, first with Oktalyzer and later with the vastly more popular OctaMED (Amiga, 1989), then 32 with ScreamTracker 3 (PC, 1994) and 16 with FastTracker 2 (PC, 1994) and on to 64 with Impulse Tracker (PC, 1995) and MED SoundStudio (updated version of OctaMED). An Amiga tracker called Symphonie Pro even supported 256 channels. As such, hardware mixing did not last. As processors got faster and acquired special multimedia processing abilities (e.g. MMX ) and companies began to push Hardware Abstraction Layers , like DirectX ,

6132-620: Was PowerPC -only and marked the end of Apple's 680x0 support. Ports of Basilisk II exist for multiple computing platforms , including AmigaOS 4 , BeOS , Linux , Amiga , Windows NT , macOS , MorphOS and mobile devices such as the PlayStation Portable . Released under the terms of the GNU General Public License , Basilisk II is free software , and its source code of is available on GitHub . This free and open-source software article

6216-588: Was a commercial product, but soon shareware clones such as NoiseTracker (1989 ) appeared as well. The general concept of step-sequencing samples numerically, as used in trackers, is also found in the Fairlight CMI sampling workstation of the early 1980s. Some early tracker-like programs appeared for the MSX ( Yamaha CX5M ) and Commodore 64 , before 1987, such as Chris Huelsbeck 's SoundMonitor, but these did not feature sample playback, instead playing notes on

6300-438: 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

6384-548: 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

6468-406: 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

6552-532: 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

6636-625: 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

6720-488: 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

6804-434: 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

6888-683: 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

6972-407: 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

7056-480: Was the manufacturer of Amigas for Escom. After a reported sale to VisCorp fell through, a U.S. Wintel PC manufacturer, Gateway 2000 , eventually purchased the Amiga branch and technology in 1997. QuickPak attempted but failed to license Amiga from Gateway and build new models. Gateway was then working on a brand new Amiga platform, likely encouraged by a desire to be independent of Microsoft and Intel . However this did not materialize and in 2000, Gateway sold

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