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The Amiga Portal

The 1987 Amiga 500 was the best-selling model.
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Amiga is a family of personal computers produced by Commodore from 1985 until the company's bankruptcy in 1994, with production by others afterward. When introduced, it was one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-bit or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, and mouse-based GUIs. These include the Atari ST—the Amiga's primary competitor—Macintosh, Apple IIGS, and Archimedes. The Amiga differs from its contemporaries through custom hardware to accelerate graphics and sound, including sprites, a blitter, and four channels of sample-based audio. It runs a pre-emptive multitasking operating system called AmigaOS, with a desktop environment called Workbench.

The Amiga 1000, based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor, was released in July 1985. Production problems kept it from becoming widely available until early 1986. While early advertisements cast the computer as an all-purpose business machine, especially with the Sidecar IBM PC compatibility add-on, the Amiga was most commercially successful as a home computer with a range of video games and creative software. The bestselling model, the Amiga 500, was introduced in 1987 along with the more expandable Amiga 2000. The 1990 Amiga 3000 includes minor updates to the graphics hardware via the Enhanced Chip Set also used in subsequent systems.

The Amiga established a niche in audio and multimedia. The first music tracker was written for the Amiga, and it became a popular platform for music creation. The 3D rendering packages LightWave 3D, Imagine, and Traces (a predecessor to Blender) originated on the system. The 1990 third-party Video Toaster made the Amiga a comparatively low cost option for video production. Many video games originated on the Amiga before being converted to other platforms, such as Populous (1989) and Lemmings (1991).

The Amiga eventually started losing market share to IBM PC compatibles, which gained 256 color VGA graphics in 1987, and the fourth generation of video game consoles, eventually leading to Commodore's bankruptcy in 1994. Commodore is estimated to have sold nearly five million Amigas. Various groups have since released spiritual successors. (Full article...)

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NewIcons is a third-party extension to the icon handling system for AmigaOS 2 and newer. NewIcons was first invented and developed by the Italian programmer Nicola Salmoria. Subsequent development was done by Eric Sauvageau. The need for NewIcons arose from the poor overall quality of icons in AmigaOS versions prior to 3.0.

While the AmigaOS GUI had been revolutionary when it was first launched in the early 1980s, other operating systems such as Mac OS and Microsoft Windows quickly caught on and started to become more professional-looking. Standard AmigaOS Workbench icons were plain and uninteresting: limited to four colours, having no standard size, and viewed from a straight-on perspective that left them looking two-dimensional. (Full article...)

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Selected biography

Dave Haynie
Dave Haynie
Dave Haynie is the former Commodore International chief engineer on high end and advanced projects. He is still quite vocal in the Amiga community.

He started work at Commodore in 1983 as an engineer under Bil Herd. His first project was to help complete the TED systems comprising Plus/4, C16 and more. After completing the Commodore 128 Bil Herd left the company and Dave Haynie was promoted to chief engineer in the low-end group. After Commodore acquired Amiga, Dave Haynie ended up primary engineer on the expandable A2000 computer. Later, he joined Bob Welland on the A2620 CPU module, and launched the follow-up A2630 the year thereafter. These were delivered in the A2500/20 (1989) and A2500/30 (1989). In 1989 he started designing the Zorro III expansion bus architecture, and in 1990, with Greg Berlin, Hedley Davis, Jeff Boyer, and Scott Hood, created the Amiga 3000. (Full article...)

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A ROM switcher for the Amiga 500 computer
A ROM switcher for the Amiga 500 computer
Credit: Rafax
A ROM switcher for the Amiga 500 computer.
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Did you know...

... that the Amiga became one of the first widespread 3D development platforms?
Other "Did you know" facts... Read more...
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Topics

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Pen & Earth


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WikiProject Amiga

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