Originally posted by AKH
The Amiga was a great games machine that Commodore tried to sell as a business machine, whereas the ST was a great business machine that Atari tried to sell as a games machine.
I suppose they both paid for their mistakes.
the Amiga had the ability to do both
Was also the first to do true multitasking and multimedia (actually they first coined the term)
with the right add ons, namely an IBM bridgeboard. and a Mac Rom chip and drive.
It had the ability to Run Amiga Stuff, IBM stuff, and Mac stuff.
And run them all at the same time.
Had Commodore done more agressive and better marketing on all fronts.
The computer world might be much different today
Some interesting AMY notes.
"The platform also introduced other innovations. For example, the Amiga CDTV was the first computer to feature a CD-ROM drive as standard.
The Amiga was also one of the first computers for which one could buy cheap accessories for sound sampling and video digitization. This means that not only can the Amiga produce computer-generated images and sound, but users can input "real" images and sound for editing, composition, and use in computer games."
"The Amiga could display graphics in 32, 64 (EHB Mode) or even its full complement of 4096 (HAM Mode) colours long before the IBM PC compatible or the Apple Macintosh. Its revolutionary visual processor made it one of the first home computers used to do digital effects for a TV programme"
"The sound chip, named Paula, supports four sound channels (2 for the left speaker and 2 for the right) with 8 bit resolution for each channel and a 6 bit volume control. The analogue part of the chip is connected with a low-pass filter, filtering out the many high frequencies often created in computer systems
In the PC/Amiga/ST rivalry, the quality of the Amiga's sound output, and the fact that the hardware is ubiquitous and easily addressed by software, were standout features of Amiga hardware that the PC lagged behind for years. "
"Phase5 designed the PowerUp boards (BlizzardPPC and CyberstormPPC) featuring both a 68k (a 68040 or 68060) and a PPC (603 or 604) CPU, which are able to run the two CPUs at the same time (and share the system memory). The PPC CPU on PowerUp boards is usually used as a coprocessor for heavy computations (a powerful CPU is needed to run for example MAME, but even decoding JPEG pictures and MP3 audio was considered heavy computation in those years). It is also possible to ignore the 68k CPU and run Linux on the PPC (project Linux APUS), but a PPC native Amiga OS was not available when the PPC boards first appeared."
Perhaps the most famous video card in the North American market was the Newtek Video Toaster. This was a powerful video effects board which turned the Amiga into an affordable video processing computer which found its way into many professional video environments. Due to its NTSC only design it did not find a market in countries that used the PAL standard, such as in Europe. In PAL countries the Opalvision card was popular, although less featured and supported than the Video Toaster.
Various manufacturers started producing PCI busboards for the A1200 and A4000, allowing standard Amigas to use PCI cards such as Voodoo graphic cards, Soundblaster sound cards, 10/100 ethernet and TV tuners.
PowerPC upgrades with Wide SCSI controllers, PCI busboards with ethernet, sound and 3D graphics cards, and towerised cases allowed the A1200 and A4000 to survive well into the late nineties as modern and competitive machines.
At the time of release AmigaOS gave the average consumer the experience of an OS quite ahead of its time. It was one of the first commercially available consumer operating systems to implement pre-emptive multitasking [2] Other features included combining a graphical user interface with a command line interface, and allowing long filenames permitting whitespace, not requiring a file extension
Emulating other systems
Main article: Emulation on the Amiga
The Amiga is able to emulate other computer platforms which were in its same price range, most notably the IBM PC, the Apple Macintosh and the Atari ST. There are also emulators available for many 8 bit systems such as the Commodore 64, Apple II and even the TRS-80. MAME (the arcade machine emulator) is also available for Amigas with PPC accelerator card upgrades
Amigas are still used in many theme park installations, mainly at Universal Studios in Hollywood and Florida and Disney World, using Richmond Sound Design's show and sound control software (see the related Wikipedia article on Amiga software
Early episodes of the television series Babylon 5 were rendered on Amigas running video toasters [4]. Other television series using Amigas for special effects included SeaQuest DSV and Max Headroom
Todd Rundgren used an Amiga with a Video Toaster to produce a full-length video for "Change Myself" in 1991.
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