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In 1985... — Parallax Forums

In 1985...

Ahle2Ahle2 Posts: 1,179
edited 2011-08-14 06:12 in General Discussion
....the Commodore Amiga was born.
While PCs had CGA graphics (4 colors at 320x200 or 2 colors at 640x200), 5.25" disks and beeper sound, the Amiga hade 4096 colors (all at once if you wanted), 640x512 resolution (more with overscan), 3.5" disks, sample based audio and a full color, multi tasking graphical OS. It took ~5 years for PCs to catch up in most areas; And even then the Amiga had much faster graphics thanks to sprites and the blitter. Even if you had a PC that "was better" than an Amiga in 1990, it costed 5 times the money.

In Europe it was one of the most common (maybe even THE most common) home computer in 1987-1990. In the USA most people didn't even know it existed. Ironically it was made in the USA by an all American company.

Here is a clip of some games with music generated by the paula sound chip running on the OCS Amiga (Original Chipset from 1985).

The OCS chipset(1985) even outperformed the Nintendo SNES(1990) and the Sega Genesis(1989) for gaming in some ways.

(Btw, the Atari ST and Macintosh, while note being as powerful as the Amiga, also outperformed any PC in 1985)

Comments

  • TorTor Posts: 2,010
    edited 2011-08-10 04:45
    Everything was an improvement, agreed.. except the 3.5" floppies. I have tons of floppies (going back to the early eighties) which I have lately tried to recover to get to the content. Every 5 1/4" floppy (DD or HD) could be read just fine, except for two floppies which were part of a pair of some commercial software. They've probably been stored on a magnet or something.
    On the other hand I have not yet found a single 3.5" floppy which could be read without error (even though they are for the most part much yunger than even the 1.2MB 5 1/4" floppies I have). I first tried a number of different drives with the same result, until I consulted other people on the net: Everybody will tell you the same thing: 3.5" floppies won't keep, 5 1/4" will.

    -Tor
  • LeonLeon Posts: 7,620
    edited 2011-08-10 04:56
    I didn't know that, it must be due to the higher density. Not that it matters to me, I haven't used a floppy disk for three or four years. I remember the original 8" disks which I used on a TRS-80 Model II.
  • Dr_AculaDr_Acula Posts: 5,484
    edited 2011-08-10 06:04
    Well I guess the challenge is to get this working on the propeller!

    We have done text CP/M from the 1970s.
    We have done the color genie - probably one of the best graphics Z80 computers around. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_Genie

    I think we are now in the early 1980s in terms of what we can emulate. Time to push things further!

    Ok - graphics are going to be hard. That will probably require an external ram chip. '
    What microprocessor is at the heart of the amiga? Can we emulate it?

    Is this project a propeller project, a FPGA project, or a hybrid of the two?
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2011-08-10 06:18
    Dr_A,

    Never mind the graphics. The CPU by itself is pretty much impossible for the Prop. to emulate. Amigas had a Motorola 68000 which was basically a 32 bit CPU all be it with a 16 bit wide physical data bus.

    Perhaps a thought to keep in mind for the Prop II.
  • UnknownUnknown
    edited 2011-08-10 08:10
    Dr_Acula wrote: »
    Ok - graphics are going to be hard. That will probably require an external ram chip. '
    What microprocessor is at the heart of the amiga? Can we emulate it?

    Is this project a propeller project, a FPGA project, or a hybrid of the two?

    The Amiga is being emulated very well in FPGA at Natami.net and they might be willing to make a deal by some large company in exchange for monetary help in getting the FPGA converted into a chip because Altera's hardcopy service wants a lot of money to do it and it is a one shot deal because there is a lot of testing involved.
  • Shawn LoweShawn Lowe Posts: 635
    edited 2011-08-10 08:23
    I believe Babylon 5 used the Amiga for the computer graphics at the beginning of the show
  • GadgetmanGadgetman Posts: 2,436
    edited 2011-08-10 09:32
    But the most important with the Amiga is what it brought forth from artists...

    Most importantly, the comic http://www.sabrina-online.com

    and this picture:
    http://www.sabrinaonline2k.com/MHA/art/Cool_Duo.jpg
    (Which I use as a background on my Psion netBook )
  • Oldbitcollector (Jeff)Oldbitcollector (Jeff) Posts: 8,091
    edited 2011-08-10 10:12
    @Ahle2: Thank you for posting this! Awesome video..

    @Dr_A: I'll bet this will be possible with Prop2. (Or whatever they call it.)

    OBC
  • GordonMcCombGordonMcComb Posts: 3,366
    edited 2011-08-10 16:47
    I another life I used to do lots of computer hardware reviews for magazines, and the Amiga is one of the few I didn't want to return.

    Few may have been familiar with the Amiga, but it didn't go unnoticed in the video and film industries. Dana Carvey's brother co-developed and built the first Video Toaster, which basically launched the PC-based video editing and finishing biz.

    -- Gordon
  • localrogerlocalroger Posts: 3,452
    edited 2011-08-10 16:59
    The Amiga was far ahead of its time. It was nearly ten years before any other comparably priced platform appeared that was anywhere near the Amiga, and that stuff depended on vastly superior processing power, RAM, and bus speed to make it happen.

    I never had one myself but I had a friend who did and like many Amiga owners he was positively worshipful of the thing. Considering the comparison between Amiga graphics and what other non-supercomputers could do, I found this understandable.
  • rogersydrogersyd Posts: 223
    edited 2011-08-10 17:28
    Chuckz wrote: »
    The Amiga is being emulated very well in FPGA at Natami.net and they might be willing to make a deal by some large company in exchange for monetary help in getting the FPGA converted into a chip because Altera's hardcopy service wants a lot of money to do it and it is a one shot deal because there is a lot of testing involved.

    Check out the MCC-216... The Amiga core is coming along nicely, but the c64 core is fairly solid.

    http://mcc-home.com/
  • Ahle2Ahle2 Posts: 1,179
    edited 2011-08-11 02:38
    Where I grew up (Gothenburg Sweden), the Amiga was with out a doubt the most common home computer in 1990. I would say that about 80% of the neighbours who had a computer, had an Amiga. (it was VERY common in most parts of Europe)
    I used it for genlock graphics on home videos and made music with it. Of course I used it for gaming as well, because it was a very good gaming machine.
    The Amiga was used for graphics overlay(genlock) on Swedish television until the mid 90s.
    I still have got my original Amiga 500(bought in 1990) and Amiga 1200(bought in 1992). I have collected three more Amigas over the years for a total of five.

    I remember that I used to be amazed by how bad PC graphics and sound was compared to the Amiga, even when VGA and sounblaster became common.

    Here is a demo running on the original chipset from 1985!
    Everything is realtime rendered in 50 fps (PAL)
    Without the blitter chip in the Amiga, this would have run in maybe 10 fps.
  • potatoheadpotatohead Posts: 10,261
    edited 2011-08-11 06:20
    Great memories.

    My contribution will be to remember Jay Miner, designer of this chipset and the older ones found in the Atari 8 bit computers and VCS game machine. His chips were a lot of fun, because they were software video, utilizing the CPU for in-screen operations, sprites and such. Very hackable, and they have the wonderful quality of improving over time as people hack the silicon to get more.

    Our Props work in a very similar way, and it's one of the things I enjoy most about them.
  • Ahle2Ahle2 Posts: 1,179
    edited 2011-08-14 04:29
    There's a documentary about the Amiga in the making right now.
    Here's a teaser.
  • Ahle2Ahle2 Posts: 1,179
    edited 2011-08-14 05:42
    I found this video about making video and graphics on the Amiga 500.
  • Mike DenchMike Dench Posts: 13
    edited 2011-08-14 06:12
    You had to be there at the time to really understand just how awesome the Amiga really was. I used to give demos to people of my own machine just to show them what computing could be. Its impossible to over exaggerate its impact. I did an all Amiga video for NASA hoping to get a full time job out of my summer teacher internship and they were so blown away that they gave me fifteen minutes on their Cray as a reward, demonstrating their 3D interactive demo - you had to wear special goggles and you could walk through it almost like a Star Trek holosuite. Their MAC people were furious and I think probably the ones that got me the thumbs down.

    I live in hope that someone soon will do an all new cutting edge Amiga-2 because the strength of the Amiga was the software as much as the hardware, they had a red hot team of really dedicated people who got the most out of its potential and some of the shareware/freeware that was going the rounds of user groups was even better. Even today the best equipped PC's I have tried aren't as easy and intuitive to use, sure they can do various things better but they don't work well together. I used to play full stereo orchestral classical music at the same time as running 30fps animations and it still was able to do something else as long as it wasnt too resource demanding.

    The death of the Amiga was one of the saddest events of my techno-existence. It really was THAT good. Still for a few years I enjoyed being at the cutting edge!
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