Portal:Amiga

The Amiga Portal

The 1987 Amiga 500 was the best-selling model.

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...)

Selected article

Hold-And-Modify, usually abbreviated as HAM, is a display mode of the Commodore Amiga computer. It uses a highly unusual technique to express the color of pixels, allowing many more colors to appear on screen than would otherwise be possible. HAM mode was commonly used to display digitized photographs or video frames, bitmap art and occasionally animation. At the time of the Amiga's launch in 1985, this near-photorealistic display was unprecedented for a home computer and it was widely used to demonstrate the Amiga's graphical capability. However, HAM has significant technical limitations which prevent it from being used as a general purpose display mode.

The original Amiga chipset uses a planar display with a 12-bit RGB color space that produces 4096 possible colors. (Full article...)

Selected biography

Gillen at the 2011 New York Comic Con
Gillen at the 2011 New York Comic Con
Kieron Gillen (born 1975) is a British comic book writer and former computer game and music journalist. He is known for his creator-owned comics Phonogram and The Wicked + The Divine, both created with artist Jamie McKelvie and published by Image Comics, and for numerous projects for Marvel Comics, such as Journey into Mystery and Uncanny X-Men.

Gillen has worked for publications such as PC Gamer UK, The Escapist, Amiga Power (under the pseudonym "C-Monster"), Wired, The Guardian, Edge, Games Developer, Develop, MCV, GamesMaster and PC Format, among others. (Full article...)

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Boing Ball
Boing Ball
Simulation of the Amiga Boing Ball.

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