Podcast 106 – March (1 of 4) 2019 – The Commodore Amiga – Why is it so special?
We’re back to chat this week and a topic that’s a bit overdue. Adrian and Dylan’s meandering chats have proven so popular we’ve let them waffle on about the Commodore Amiga, vital in both of their gaming upbringings. Memories aplenty plus lots of facts about the hallowed machine and in particular how much modern PC architecture owes to it…
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The Boing demo was presented at CES before Amiga had any relationship with Commodore. That would be before 1984. Pretty sure Jan 1983.
Several different industry magazines assumed the Amiga hardware would be the next generation Atari, mostly because it was designed by the same people who made the custom chips for the Atari 8-bit computers, again, zero relationship to Commodore.
True true Ken, it was meant to be the next gen Atari gaming machine as we mention and Commodore didn’t step in until later on but if it wasn’t for their involvement none of us at AA would have owned one, thus this podcast would not exist (meta) 🙂
Former A500 & A3000 owner.
There are many chronicles of the Amiga’s demise. It was a technically superior product to its competitors during the late 80s, but the delays in launching AGA and poor marketing on Commodore’s part helped it fail.
It was a great gaming PC, but it was a great hobbiest PC with a wide ranging PD software scene and a creative demo scene.
In my opinion the failure of capturing and building on the success of the NewTek Video Toaster was what doomed the product.
Beyond the specialized chipsets in the hardware, the Workbench OS provided a good GUI with a wide variety of capabilities like pre-emptive multitasking, which at the time was unique.
Thank you Scott!