Commodore Amiga, brief history and some technical info.

[Squiddy200]

I remeber first seeing an Amiga in action in my favourite computer shop and I was amazed. I used to play starglider 2 on it.I had a speccy 128k at the time (the one you've got with the heatsink) I could never afford an Amiga:( I want to get hold of one now. Do you know the best place to find one and how much would is a good price to pay?

[SteveBenway]

@Squiddy200 The best place to find one will always be ebay. I don't know of any bricks and mortar shops that would have them any more, though some online retro stores might.

You could expect to pay between £35-£50 fo a 500 or 600, upwards of £70 for a 1200, and silly money (several hundred) for a big box Amiga like a 3000 or 4000.

[xkambing]

thumbs up if you watch this on 2012...

[selmerthegod]

I loved my Amiga 500 and later on my Amiga 1200 with a 170mb hard drive.

[haroof]

Commodores were the ultimate gaming machines.

From the 64 to the Amigas.

This is what I spent countless hours on growing up.

Thanks for that trip down memory lane.

[totalrandomcrap]

@haroof Don't forget the Commodore 16!

Mr. Puniverse was cool!

[RomanticLinguaphilia]

Awesome video... I've read all this before, but listening to you is more fun... I wasn't aware tower style 1200's exist, but then I don't get out much I guess :-D ... THANK YOU for sharing the chip names and showing them. Heartpound! I'd only add that the prototype Amiga was named Lorraine. Female naming was a big charm of the Amiga.

[GreatNorthWeb]

classic computing is for me what classic cars was for my dad.

[homebuiltindoorplane]

Long live the Commodore 64 and the TI-994a!! Call vchar call hchar! I still remember that old code haha. sprites and gotos, ahh. Thanks!:)

[starsiegeplayer]

This is a very nice overview!

[corey111997]

NICE a Commodore 1260

[MarcsLab]

Amiga computers are so old.

No offense but why would you want one ?

[SteveBenway]

@MarcsLab The fact that it's old doesn't stop it being great. I'm a retro gamer and collector, so age is a positive bonus.

[Zontar82]

@SteveBenway mroeover,those games are classic.can marcslab say the same for games made in recent years?

[RomanticLinguaphilia]

@MarcsLab Commodores were some of the most beautiful looking computers ever made

[snake2006]

@MarcsLab

Um because they are awesome computers.

The Amiga is what should still exist today, not Windows not Mac's since the Amiga was way ahead of it's time, it blew both PC's and Mac's away.

[xalalalala]

@MarcsLab Dude they are old... But i have three of them 500, 600 and 1200. AND I LOVE THEM :P

[tomperanteau]

@MarcsLab No offence, but if you had a valid question that was not on par with a troll, you would not have hid your profile.

[ser00n]

@MarcsLab Amiga computers are so old. No offense but why would you not want one ? It's retro, fun and amazing! Such a feeling and love in the games/progs compared to nowadays.

[dvamateur]

@MarcsLab Not everybody is 5 or 12 years old. Some people (like me) grew up in the '80s and this is when our aesthetic tastes and desires formed. For me personally, Microsoft Windows 7 or iPhone are totally ugly, uninspiring, and unexciting. However, computers such as Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, or Macintosh Classic, these are simply beautiful. But, as I say, it's subjective matter of taste.

[cube1024]

Is that a Commodore PET in the background?

[SteveBenway]

@cube1024 Not sure which point of the video it appears in, but there is indeed a PET in the room :)

[iVTECInside]

Love the Ti99 in the background.

[SteveBenway]

@iVTECInside It's a very nice machine :)

[wisteela]

Great bit of history there.

That 1200 tower is awesome.

I've got A500, A600, and three A1200s, one with hard disk.

So that's why they used that odd colour scheme. I'd not thought about high contrast for TVs.

[madcapoperator]

Ive been looking into the amiga walker which looks like k9 from dr who! Would have loved that system to have come out. No scrap that, I would just love the amiga to be around in a meaningful way still (the new systems and OS4 are pretty boring tbh simpy because the software isnt there)

[SteveBenway]

@madcapoperator Yeah, I don't think I can take any "new Amiga" seriously. Doesn't even matter how good the hardware is. It'll never succeed. Damned shame.

[Gooberslot]

Do you know if the A500+ had the 1mb or 2mb agnus?

[SteveBenway]

@Gooberslot I believe it was the 1mb Agnus in the 500+ and 2mb in the 600, but I may be wrong on that.

[amiger421]

Cool vid that took me back some .... I had a few Amigas in my native country of Poland. They were very popular as well as the Atari ST. I started off with the 500 then CDTV then the 1200, loved them all, they were so ahead of the times back then, the PC was like a pocket calculator in comparison ( as far as the multimedia stuff went)

[Lachlant1984]

As far as I know on early Amigas Workbench runs off a diskette, but on these later models does it run from ROM? What software do you use for writing CD's? Do you have or can you get a mounting cradle or cage for the hard drive in the tower? Does the other Amiga 1200 you show also work? What's the difference between the CDTV and CD32? Apogee Software released Mystic Towers for DOS, but according to the credits it was originally developed for the Amiga. Do you have it or have you played it?

[SteveBenway]

@Lachlant1984 Workbench always loads from either floppy or hard disk. Amigas can't boot from CD, except for the CDTV and CD32.

I do have a mounting cradle for the hard drive in my tower, but the cables don't reach it... Doh!

The other 1200 has a fault on the motherboard. It boots, but can't see the floppy drive.

CDTV=CD powered Amiga 500 (OCS chipset). CD32=CD powered Amiga 1200 (AGA chipset).

I've never played Mysteic Towers.

[turricaned]

@SteveBenway The Archos CD1200 peripheral (and I believe the original Squirrel SCSI) had a piece of hardware in the PCMCIA interface that would allow a 1200 to boot CDTV and CD32 games IIRC.

I'm pretty sure that the bottleneck when it comes to Workbench rendering icons was the disk (floppy in the case of your A500 there), not the CPU. Also, with an external HD floppy drive, CrossDOS (in WB3.x) could indeed read PC-formatted 1.44MB disks out of the box.

[SteveBenway]

@turricaned I had one of those Archos ones for a time, but don't recall ever being able to boot from it. That was a long time ago though, so I may be remembering incorrectly.

Nice to meet someone who knows a thing or three about the Amiga and its history :)

[turricaned]

@SteveBenway It was a complete hack - I think it required you to hold down the right mouse button at power up (both mouse buttons gave you Commodore's semi-useful compatibility options IIRC). Also IIRC the Archos product was so rushed that the "manual" consisted of a bunch of photocopied sheets stapled together in the middle and folded. "CD boot" was in there, but it wasn't prominent.

[turricaned]

@SteveBenway I used to do basic repairs to Amigas at my Saturday job in a small local computer shop (now long since out of business), so I worked out a few things about tricking the hardware. :)

I was actually given the last batch of Amiga spares when I left there, and had a semi-lucrative little business of my own - however at the end of that summer I went to Uni and I think it took me all of two weeks to piss the profits away. Curse you, Freshers' Fortnight!

[PSI236]

Great vid. Back when PCs didn't create the crapness.

[desiv1]

Actually, WHDLOAD is just a program that lets you run floppy games from the HD, and frequently fixes problems the games had running on different hardware. Many people use it to play their games legally on their HDs. Many more people use it to play pirated games, but they'd play off of pirated floppies otherwise. :-)

[SteveBenway]

@desiv1 I stand corrected. Thanks for the info :)

[ninja7x3]

Dentists? lol

[SteveBenway]

@ninja7x3 Yeah, I dunno how that came about :D

[Glurgi]

@SteveBenway Well I do :)

They were a group of a dozen or so who were in it for tax reasons. Apparently it would allow them to make write offs or something like that.

Must be hard to bee too rich - I wish I could relate, though :)

[DLiberator78]

PS: I agree the Amiga 1200 rocks and I have recently dusted mine off and taken it for a spin. Considering I haven't used it for 7 years it the HDD still works! Yay, will post some vids when I get myself sorted. I have a lot of nostalgia for it and I am going to post some Soundtracker/Octamed music vids as the Amiga had fantastic sound capabilities.

[dave4shmups]

I'd LOVE to get an A1200, but so many games were released in PAL territories. I've heard about something called WHDLoad, but I don't know if it's legal.

[SteveBenway]

@dave4shmups I'm only slightly aware of WHDLoad. As far as I know it allows you to install cracked games onto the virtual hard drive of emulated Amigas using UAE or suchlike.

It isn't technically legal, but I doubt that too many people will care about that.

[teknokrat1]

i knew before i clicked this video that the voice would be british....... so sad that america never got as enthusiastic about the amiga. =(

in fact, it's so bad that when nintendo released c64 games on the wii console, they gave us americans the PAL versions, not the NTSC ones!!! so the games run at the incorrect speed over here (music is too fast) and the keyboard layout even sports the british pound instead of the dollar sign. sighhhhhhhh.......

[mensiuscho]

hi all . i had a amiga years a go and it was great at time .. but can anyone tell what we can do with an amiga right now ,, i mean whats the benefit in that ? thanks great video

[SteveBenway]

Probably the most useful thing you can do with one now is 2D pixel editing. Deluxe Paint V is probably still a great tool for sprite design editing and designing, for games on something like mobile phones, or homebrew type games.

[desiv1]

As a U.S. Amiga owner, I bought an Amiga 1200 with AGA. I didn't hear the term AA until much later, reading the Amiga history. Also, I always understood it to be Advance Graphics Architecture. Why an engineer would would call something that wasn't an adapter, an adapter, I'm not sure..

[turricaned]

@desiv1 AA was the original internal Commodore codename for what the marketing boffs later christened AGA - essentially an evolution of the original 1985 chipset. During 1990-91 there was an effort to develop a revolutionary new chipset called AAA, which was not only more advanced than AGA, but would have given PC hardware of the day a run for it's money. Commodore in their infinite wisdom canned the AAA project, and AGA was released as a stopgap.

[madcapoperator]

@turricaned admittedly cost would have come into it, but more R&D could have resulted in AGA being released in around 1990 and AAA in 1993/ early 94

[turricaned]

@madcapoperator Oooh - don't get me started on Commodore International's management! I'm pretty sure AAA was in the works before AA/AGA was developed as a stopgap measure. CBM was fat, dumb and happy being just another PC clone manufacturer in the US market and didn't realise what they had. It wasn't just poor marketing though, it was a failure of vision. They could have cleaned up in the home and media industries in the US if they'd pushed it before the clones became ubiquitous.

[WINSTANLEYOBXa]

Excellent!

I thought the 600 came after the 1200,ie the 600 was a smaller version-1Mb

[Orlor]

I'm kicking myself in the pants right now for ditching my old 4000. I wish I had it back.

You were 100% correct about DOpus. That was the best program ever. I remember having to do move files when I first got my Windows machine. I was "Where is Opus when you need him!"

[boazandjiacinth]

yes, so true when you talk about icon and mouse systems, who would have thought that an icon based o.s would become what it is today.. I remember getting the GEOS for my 64 and thought it rocked.

[Pablos544]

Please, what is AGA? Can I use it? (I run an Amiga on an emulator.)

[SteveBenway]

AGA is the graphics chipset.

The Amiga 1000, 500, 1500 and 2000 all had OCS (Original Chip Set).

Then the 500+, 600 and 3000 had ECS (Enhanced Chip Set).

Finally the 1200 and 4000 had AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture)

I think emulators like WinUAE and Amiga Forever can handle AGA with no problem... but I wouldn't expect to see it on emulators running on handlelds like the PSP or GP2X Wiz.

[Pablos544]

Wew. Thanks!! I thought I going crazy.

[tommyjones1978]

@SteveBenway: ok agree but one correction: "AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture)" not "Architecture" AGA as to Advanced Graphics Adapter"

Agree with the rest!

[SteveBenway]

acronyms.thefreedictionary[dot­]com/AGA

AGA Advanced Graphic Architecture (Amiga chip set).

also on the same page...

AGA Advanced Graphics Adapter.

Only one of these refers to the Amiga, but whatever.

[tommyjones1978]

everything that you find online is truth... so, engineering speaking the graphics chip on a computer is not an architecture, is always an adaptor to show graphics. Saying that a graphics chip is an architecture is wrong, a computer is an architecture, a scsi controller is an architecture, a graphics chip is an adaptor never call it an architecture

[tommyjones1978]

*"...everything you find online ISNT truth..."

[SteveBenway]

Commodore themselves referred to AGA as being "Advanced Graphics Archirecture".

Now if you choose to call it something else, that is fine.

I choose to call it what it was called by the people who designed it.

[tommyjones1978]

show me where they call it then!?

[SteveBenway]

While I unfortunately don't have the magazines I collected on the subject in the 90s, I think this article in Wikipedia is pretty clear on the subject.

en[dot]wikipedia[dot]org/wiki/­Advanced_Graphics_Architecture

[tommyjones1978]

no secure font... that's what I tough...

[SteveBenway]

Eh?

[tommyjones1978]

You have not a secure font to prove it was as you say it is... so you pick the one you believe in...

[SteveBenway]

I have provided links to two web pages that back up my opinion, where as the person who is challenging my statement, the burden of proof actually lies with you.

You have provided no evidence whatsoever to back up your opinion,

As you said, not everything on the net is true, but I would believe wikipedia over the word of a complete stranger any day... not to mention my own memory of the specialist Amiga press from back in the day.

Now back up your claims with evidence, or be silent.

[tommyjones1978]

never-mind... you stay with your opinion, and I ll stay with mine... ok? btw: my explanation was made from an engineering view, not from a magazine... so... you believe in what you want to believe and i believe in what i wan t to believe... and that's ok for 2 of us...

[SteveBenway]

It's a pity you didn't take that view before telling me I was wrong.

Your view is from the engineering standpoint. Mine is from what it was named by its designers.

You should check your facts before challenging people.

[SteveBenway]

Now, I think this should settle it once and for all.

amiga[dot]com/about/history/in­dex.php?t=past&p=a60012004000

13th line down.

Just to make a point, being an engineer has no relevence at all when the issue at hand is a matter of history.

[BL1tt3R]

Both of you are correct.

From Amiga Inc, it is called Advanced Graphics Architecture but originally it was called AA [Advanced Architecture] Chipset and was later changed to AGA for whatever reason.

AGA is a group of Co-processors [ALice, Lisa, Paula] and not just a graphics chip :)

[SteveBenway]

No argument about the chipset being called AA in usa.

What I disagree with is that AGA ever stood for "Advanced Graphics Adapter".

That is a PC term, used to refer to graphics cards and has nothing to do with the naming of the Amiga chipset.

So no, we are not both correct.

tommyjones1978 is entirely incorrect.

[BL1tt3R]

@SteveBenway

Yep, totally agree but also agreed with the angle that tommyjones was trying to come from in the sense of graphic adapters (Didnt explain myself very well).

In reference to Amiga, he is wrong and I was trying to show why it is not called adapter, because its not, it is an architecture and always has been.

On a side note, you have a serious collection of retro goodness (am a little jealous)

Have a bunch of Amigas myself and a few other systems, would love that tower of yours..

[SteveBenway]

Ah, now I'm with you :)

Did the Amiga make much of an impression in Australia?

They were more popular in the UK and Europe than they were in the US, but I've no idea how they went down in your neck of the woods.

You can't have my tower though... lol

What Amigas do you have?

[BL1tt3R]

Amigas were pretty popular here, knew plenty of peeps with them, there were many clubs and still is quite a few today (mainly in bigger cities). Theres even a small demo scene today.

Amigas I have are

3x A500 [1 close to mint]

2x CD32 [1 ntsc & 1 Pal in close to mint]

1x A1200 030/40 with 4gb compact flash HD, 34meg and indivision AGA.

Back in the day

A500 in 1989

CD32 in 93 and with SX1 in 94

A1200 030/28 in 95 later with 060/50 13gb hd [miss that one]

ahhh good days.

[blade004]

@SteveBenway The Amiga really was quite popular over here in Australia :) You could go to virutally any department store that had a technology section and pick up an Amiga during that time including its software. I myself almost got talked into buy an Atari ST after owning a C64 until a friend of mine bought an Amiga 500 in 1990 and then my fate was sealed! I was a happy Amiga nut from 1990 until 2000 :)

So yes, in a nutshell the Amiga was well known here in Australia during that time :)

[28steryan]

Nice vid' and sexy tower system.

[factor6]

Wow, you have an Oric-1 :)

[GodofLegacy]

the 68020 (ec) is located below right of the Rom chips, and u forgot tto mention paula, (which is not the floppy controler but also houses the 4 channel sound hardware of the amiga.. im so jealous i miss my amiga 1200..

[malad1]

Workbench was developed by Microsoft if the manuals are to be believed.

[karadok666]

No, it was never developed by Microsoft.

[SteveBenway]

There's a reference to MS DOS in the manual, which may be what you're picking up on.

Workbench was created by Commodore International .

[Pablos544]

I beg to differ!! Workbench was created by a company called MetaCompo, licensed by Commodore. I read it somewhere.

[blade004]

As karadok666 said, you are quite off the mark, Microsoft had nothing to do with developing Workbench. There was a small program in Workbench to let you run Microsoft basic but that had zero to do with the Amiga's true operating environment and file structure.

[rudeydudey05]

Would you say that Amiga pioneered modern PC tower design?

[SteveBenway]

Not remotely. Mine isn't an official Amiga tower, and the very few that were made, the A4000T (and was there an A3000T?), were extremely expensive and hard to come by.

Most Amiga tower conversions were based around modified PC tower cases.

[atombat]

I can't believe they didn't release the 500+ in the States unlucky bastards :D

[Nextwave1980]

Do you by chance have any idea where to find a PPC or 060 accelerator for the A1200?? I have a 1200 with a 020 and an addon FPU card for it with 8MB of ram... need something a bit faster.. even a 030 would be nicer then what it has now.

[SteveBenway]

The only thing I could suggest is ebay. They do come up on there fairly often... even ppc cards, but they really aren't cheap.

Other than that... I really don't know.

[100percentmk]

1.20 thats exactly what happened with the amiga cd, no reason to buy one, well except maybe for collection

[SteveBenway]

I assume you mean the CD32, as opposed to the CDTV.

It didn't really fail due to a crash in the console market, so much as everyone knew the Playstation was on its way, and no-one was going to buy a clearly inferior console that was based on already existing hardware.

Better marketing may have helped, but by this time, Commodore were on the brink of going broke, and couldn't afford mainstream advertising outside of dedicated Amiga magazines.

[Sipie007]

The expanded A1200 in the tower did you build this yourself or did you buy it like that? What are the specs of it? you said you have a CD writer in there? What software did the Amiga use to write to cds?

[SteveBenway]

Yeah, I built it myself.

It has a 1200 motherboard, obviously, Phase 5 68060 Blizzard accelerator card with a SCSI adaptor card added on to it, Micronik Zorro II bus board, Ioblix serial card, Catweazle and Buddha card for multiple IDE and HD floppy drives, 32 Megs RAM, 1.5 Gig hard drive, and a SCSI CD writer.

If memory serves, the CD writing software is called MakeCD.

[Sipie007]

ok thanx for that! were some of the parts hard to come by? Also the version of workbench your running on the A1200 which one is it? You mentioned you changed the colour scheme from Blue to the purple colour but didnt the version of workbench that came with the A1200 have a grey colour as default? or is it Workbench 1.3 your running on it? You have a very nice collection there and that A1200 is fantastic. kinda making me want to get one myself :o)

[SteveBenway]

Most of the parts were mail order, though I was very fortunate to live near the company that distributed many of them, so often went directly to their offices to pick them up. They were all pretty expensive though. The 060 board would fetch a pretty penny on ebay now too.

I'm running Workbench 3.1, but y'know, now I think of it, I can't remember if the default colour is blue/grey, or just grey. I've had mine purple for so long, my memory fails me.

[Orlor]

"I'm running Workbench 3.1, but y'know, now I think of it, I can't remember if the default colour is blue/grey, or just grey."

I'm very certain that the default color on 3.1 was grey.

[ruutiveijari]

Hey now Steve, I loved the Amiga 600! I still have one as a cherished part of my collection.

[SteveBenway]

I like them myself, being so much more compact than the 500+, but we're very much in the minority.

[ruutiveijari]

True. And to be fair, the 37.299 kickstart did have a lot of problems.

[lettersfromtheleft]

Thanks Steve! Been waiting on this one.

[lukemorse1]

Honestly I think that you covered quite a bit of info in such a short period of time. Really impressive to think where the Amiga started from and how there were soo many transitions. Really seems like the machine was ahead of it's time and I think that to own one must feel pretty good. Great video.

[MaximumRD]

Still my favourite retro computer! So ahead of it's time, to bad Commodore screwed up it's future!

[Gamepopper101]

YAY AMIGA! FIRST!