In the history of electronic gaming and the development of personal
computers there are certain significant events and developments that,
although it eventually came to an abrupt end thus signaling the death
of the device, has left a lasting impression and a legacy of
innovations that are still being felt to this day.
Such is the case with the Commodore
Amiga, probably one of the more
advanced and visionary computers to be developed but never having the
kind of success that it should have garnered which eventually led to
its demise.
The Amiga is a family of home/personal computers that have been
originally developed by the Amiga Corporation. The Amiga was envisioned
as an advanced home entertainment and productivity device.
The development of the Amiga began in 1982. The principal hardware
designer for the machine was Jay Miner. By 1985, the development has
been finished and Commodore International (which had acquired the Amiga
Corporation) introduced the machine to the public. The
Commodore Amiga,
as it has come to be known, possessed a custom chipset that had
advanced graphics and sound capabilities. It also had a very advanced
(for its time) pre emptive multitasking operating system, which shall
eventually be known as the AmigaOS.
Amiga's
Custom Hardware
The hardware of the Amiga itself is quite impressive. That early, it
was already sporting 16 bit and 32 bit processors, which was a
significant leap from the 8 bit computers that were in vogue then like
the Commodore 64.
This strong showing in the hardware front made the
Amiga a great success among consumers who had different plans for the
machine. It was especially popular among computer enthusiasts (most
prominently in Europe). The Amiga actually became the machine of choice
in the video production and show control industry.
The Amiga showed a fine pedigree
when it
first came out. In fact, it possessed a number of features that could
be considered as visionary and revolutionary. It was the first computer
to use multimedi and multitasking capabilities successfully. These
qualities actually made it a far more affordable alternative to the
Apple Macintosh. But despite these impressive qualities the Amiga
actually fared poorly in the market, a fact that can be attributed to
very poor marketing on the part of Commodore.
By 1996, the Amiga has
ceased production.
Before the Amiga bade its final goodbyes in 1996 though, it went
through a number of significant model upgrades designed to make it a
better machine, not to mention a lot faster.
The Amiga had three significant upgrades, these are not counting the
other non Commodore
technologies. The first Amiga to come out is the
Amiga 2000 which was released in 1987. The next Amiga to come out was
the Amiga 3000, released in 1990. The Amiga 4000 was released in 1992.
These successive upgrades were made in order to further improve the
platform’s graphics abilities, thus allowing the machine to
render more colors as well as different display modes. Each successive
Amiga machine also brought with it more additional expansion slots as
well as ports. But, most obviously, the models that sold the most units
were the cheaper consoled models. These models may be more affordable
but it still possesses the impressive versatility of its
“older” brothers. These console models were the
Amiga 500,
which possessed a 68000 CPU and OCS chipset, and later on, the Amiga
1200, which had the 68020 and an advanced AGA chipset.
The Amiga may have been a popular machine because it performed
exceptionally well in tasks like video editing, graphical rendering and
show control. But the machine is also a gaming console at its heart. In
fact, there were many games that were also released for the Amiga
during its lifespan. In fact, the machine was part of the main focus
for development by many productivity and game developers during the
late 1980s up to the early 1990s. The unique thing about the Amiga is
that virtaully all Amiga
software runs on all of the Amiga models and this
would actually include the original Amiga1000 that was first released
in 1985 and the budget Amiga 500.
Amiga
Gaming
The games
that came out for the Amiga
were some of the most visually
arresting for that time. Because of the Amiga’s strengths
when it
came to graphics and sound, the games that were developed for the
machine took advantage of these. The graphics are far more colorful
which made playing them more entertaining. Some of the games that can
be considered as Amiga staples and good examples of what the Amiga is
capable of were Blood Money, Shadow of the Beast,
Out of This World,
among others. Different game genres were available on the Amiga as
well, from shooters, to platformers to adventure games.
With
the death of
the Amiga in the early 1990s the Amiga community still would not give
up its ghost. It actually still continued to support the platform even
after the mainstream vendors have stopped carrying it. In fact, even
the Amiga fan magazine, Amiga Format,
continued to publish issues of
its magazine until 2000, which is a good six years after the demise of
the Amiga.
Amiga
Emulation is the Answer!
Now the Amiga community is also using the Windows PC to keep their love
for the Amiga alive. Emulation
is the new frontier for these Amiga
enthusiasts. Emulation is done by actually trying to
“emulate”
the actual machine on modern hardware
instead of
just running the software on the original machine. This is a tactic
that is becoming very popular because not very many people own
Commodore Amigas but they most definitely own the modern hardware i.e.
Windows PC.
With emulated software enthusiasts can now play their favorite
Commodore Amiga
games in their own Windows enabled PCs. They do this by
running a piece of emulation software that would mimic the environment
of the actual Amiga machine and from here they would
“insert” the Amiga game rom into the software in
order to
play the game. It is now possible to acquire these Amiga games online
and be able to compile
an Amiga game library in their PCs, which they
can play whenever they want to on their emulators.
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