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72-400: Scalos is a desktop replacement for the original Amiga Workbench GUI , based on a subset of APIs and its own front-end window manager of the same name. Scalos is NOT an AmigaOS replacement, although its name suggests otherwise. Its goal is to emulate the real Workbench behaviour, plus integrating additional functionality and an enhanced look. As stated on its website, the name "Scalos"

144-471: 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, a predecessor to Blender . Poor marketing and

216-583: 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),

288-406: 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

360-480: 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

432-472: 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

504-546: 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 Sidecar The Commodore A1060 Sidecar is an expansion hardware device developed by Commodore and released in 1986 for

576-415: 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

648-503: 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

720-443: 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

792-473: A system for drawing and managing windows (as in the standard Amiga Intuition system). Each window may have its own background pattern (sporting an optimized pattern routine and scaling) and automatic content-refresh. Menus are editable. Standard Amiga "Palette" and windows "Pattern" preferences have been replaced with new ones. Scalos maintains its own API and its own plug-in system for the benefit of developers who want to create software for Scalos and enhance

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864-408: Is a Workbench-compatible replacement which is declared by its developers 100-percent compatible with the original Amiga interface. It features internal 64-bit arithmetic which allows support for hard disks over 64 GB, and a complete internal multitasking system (each window drawn on the desktop is represented in the system by its own task). It is completely adjustable by the user, and features

936-461: Is a complete IBM PC XT system, with the exception of I/O devices and operations (which are handled by the Amiga). Early in its life, the Amiga was strong in entertainment and graphics software but lacked general productivity software such as word processors , spreadsheets and database software. These are the areas where the de facto business standard IBM PC excelled. Commodore's intent was to let

1008-561: Is also fully truecolor -compliant. Amiga The Amiga 1000 was released in July 1985, but production problems kept it from becoming widely available until early 1986. The best-selling model, the Amiga 500 , was introduced in 1987 along with the more expandable Amiga 2000 . The Amiga 3000 was introduced in 1990, followed by the Amiga 500 Plus , and Amiga 600 in March 1992, followed by

1080-463: Is sufficiently populated [to] support most MS-DOS programs, and the screen resolutions (320 by 200, etc.) are, by an amazing coincidence, identical to those for most IBM graphics cards. How hard would it be to build a box with the necessary CPU and ROMs that would turn the Amiga into an IBM-compatible machine? Not very hard, I would think—certainly not as hard as it has been for the folks at Dayna Communications to get MacCharlie , which attempts to get

1152-462: The Amiga 1000 computer. It is an IBM Personal Computer XT -clone in an expansion case which connects to the expansion bus on the right side of the Amiga 1000 computer. It sits beside the computer similar to a motorcycle's sidecar . The Sidecar is built around an Intel 8088 processor. All I/O from the PC side is performed by the Amiga. Software was included to allow data to be exchanged easily between

1224-589: 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

1296-475: 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 the Sidecar IBM PC compatibility add-on, the Amiga was most commercially successful as

1368-468: 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

1440-542: 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

1512-406: 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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1584-836: 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

1656-587: 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

1728-436: 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

1800-566: 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

1872-520: 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

1944-486: 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

2016-535: The Amiga Aminet official online repository. Scalos was finally open sourced in 2012. The last release candidate is version 41.8 RC1; it is compatible with AmigaOS 3 for the Motorola 68000 family of processors, with AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS on PowerPC machines, and with AROS , at the moment on computers with processors from Intel 80386 onwards. The Scalos project can be found on SourceForge . Scalos

2088-623: 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

2160-468: 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

2232-406: 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

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2304-465: The Amiga take advantage of PC compatibility to shore up its weakness in this category of software. Bruce F. Webster wrote in the October 1985 issue of BYTE , after seeing the Amiga for the first time: The 86-pin [expansion port] gives whatever is sitting out there complete control of the machine (if it wants control). The disk-controller hardware can already handle 5¼-inch drives ... the keyboard

2376-494: 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,

2448-451: 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

2520-488: 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

2592-569: The Mac run MS-DOS software, up and running. Webster, in September 1986, noted the Sidecar's announcement as fulfilling his prediction. Jerry Pournelle that month named the Sidecar his "number one pick of Spring COMDEX , stating that "it was eerie to watch Flight Simulator running as if on a PC and still see the famous Amiga bouncing ball in the background and a word-processing program running in

2664-672: 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,

2736-455: The PC and the Amiga side of the system. The Sidecar was available with an internal hard disk accessible from both the MS-DOS and AmigaOS environments. This was the first hard drive produced by Commodore for the Amiga. Video display and user input are performed through the Amiga's monitor, keyboard, and mouse. This allows the user to control both computers simultaneously. The Amiga Sidecar

2808-422: The aesthetic issues, other factors contributed to the Sidecar's lack of adoption. The Amiga 2000 provided internal expansion slots, allowing the optional Bridgeboard card to replace the functionality of the Sidecar without needing a bulky external chassis. The popular Amiga 500 could not be used with the Sidecar at all, due to the expansion slot on the A500 residing on the left side of the chassis, as opposed to

2880-518: 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

2952-550: 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

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3024-706: 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

3096-417: 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

3168-500: 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

3240-415: 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

3312-465: 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

3384-451: 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 the Amiga packaged as a game console,

3456-484: The foreground". The Sidecar was developed by Commodore Germany, as was all of the Commodore PC-architecture based development. It was relatively expensive and it required a non-trivial amount of desktop space compared to the Amiga 1000 by itself. The device was also taller than the Amiga 1000, which made it seem even more aesthetically disconnected from the main system. Besides the high price and

3528-507: 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

3600-421: 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

3672-441: 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

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3744-463: 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

3816-463: 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

3888-552: 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

3960-525: 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

4032-509: 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

4104-468: The right side on the A1000. Also, decent business and productivity software began to be released for AmigaOS , reducing the need to run MS-DOS applications on the Amiga. This concept was continued in the later Amiga 2000 unit, containing four ISA slots intended for PC emulation expandability. Two slots were in-line with the Amiga Zorro II bus to allow installation of a Bridge board which, like

4176-522: 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

4248-437: 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

4320-599: 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

4392-583: The system. Scalos supports as standard icon sets the Amiga NewIcons replacement icons, and the Amiga GlowIcons set on older versions like AmigaOS 3.5, including thumbnail previews of files as icons. It therefore represents a whole Amiga icon system Datatype capable of supporting various types of icons. This includes PNG icons with alpha channel and transparencies, and scalable icons (the aforementioned NewIcons and GlowIcons). Scalos

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4464-438: 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

4536-548: 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

4608-406: 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

4680-833: Was inspired by the fictional time-accelerated planet Scalos in the Star Trek episode " Wink of an Eye ". Scalos is a former commercial product originally written in 1999 by programmer Stefan Sommerfield for a software house called AlienDesign . The purpose was to recreate the mouse-and-click experience on Amiga, offering an alternative to the Workbench interface present in versions 3.0 and 3.1 of AmigaOS (at that time already considered obsolete). A group of English programmers known as Satanic Dreams Software (a software firm developing for Windows , Macintosh and Linux ) took over. The release versions 1.1 and 1.2 (internally versions 39.2) came out in 2000 as freeware . These may be found on

4752-532: 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

4824-625: 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

4896-488: 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

4968-434: 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

5040-683: 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

5112-407: 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

5184-480: 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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