Why was the Amiga so awesome?

To the point of multitasking: its better to advertise "4096 possible colors on an Amiga" as as more people would buy one..

In true, that was limited to paint packages..
Games almost never used the full 4096 and even if they did, there is no way you could have super smooth,not to mention fast paced, at that depth,. of Amiga games..

BUT it got people's attention.. I actually wonder how many Amiga users realized that fact.

What's even more amazing despite the financial troubles Commodore were in, based on CEO's hot-piking all the money for there own with private yachts/planes etc...and engineers were given limited funds, they still managed to pull it off, creating a great machine.

I would argue Commodore "created" loopholes for developers to hack around... It gave them the ability instead of preventing them.. i.e. not checking and "verifying" memory areas read/written opened up a host of possibilities. To me, that why the Amiga was so successful All the way back to 8-bit machines like the Commodore 64 Color cycle etc.

No rules to follow... (unlike today) I still think the whole the who "Jay Miner wanted more memory" but we got let argument still related back to funds available.. They could only do with what they had but with the financial issues, and limited funding available, was a setback.. and allowed others to take over. If it wasn't for this, then i reckon Amiga would have survived

I have both an Amiga 500 with Fat Agnus and memory chip upgrades, and an Amiga 2000 with Video Toaster system, and dual time base correctors. Sadly, my 1084 monitor suddenly stopped working and they've been sitting in storage in my house. Really need to get that monitor working and see if the two are still functioning.
I started using computers with a Commodore Vic-20. Even wrote a basic artillery type game on it. At one point I stumbled upon a way to do a poor-man's HAM on the Vic-20, which basically doubled the number of colors you could put on screen at the same time. But it was a very poor implementation, since as soon as a graphic moved to one of the grids with the extra colors on it from one with the default colors, it would shift to one of the default colors, as the hardware just couldn't handle the demand. Re-applying the trick to the grid would work once the graphic moved off of it, however it slowed the machine down to a literal crawl.

The main reason it was awesome is its ATARI technology . The only thing that makes it a Commodore is that Commodore bought it .

Amiga OS Workbench was truly amazing. It was 10 years ahead of any operating system.

I still own 3 amiga500s and intend to get more...Terrific machine which made my teenage years so much more enjoyable.

More then anything it is the sound and music of Amiga games that hit me with nostalgia.

Commodore was the only company that could get away with using the same chips and selling things for 10 years in a row. While planer graphics was the Amiga's strength in 1985 ( to save expensive ram ), it later became it's weakness as the world moved to chunky graphics because ram became cheaper, and planer proved to be dog slow to have 8 bitplanes & 256 colours compared to 256 colour chunky graphics under VGA. Ram and CPU upgrades were mostly pointless on the Amiga if you were only using the machine to play games, and if you weren't then the OS was frozen in time from a design perspective of 1992-1994 (The Windows 3.1 era). After that Commodore went bust, followed by the Sony Playstation and the 3D graphics craze, and the Amiga hobbled along in the late 90's left behind technically hardware wise and OS standpoint wise with no decent owner prepared to invest the money necessary to bring it back to the cutting edge. It never really got memory protection either. The design decisions took in the beginning proved have to have backed the wrong horse, it wasn't pushed in eductation, business or design just games, and as we all know games machines only have a limited time in the sun. That along with shitty management and greedy executives. Tragic.

The one thing I really wished the Amiga 500 would have had is an internal Fast Ram slot.
The Amiga 1200 while being too little too late because of bad management had it right when it came to expansion slots.

When you looked at what the Amiga could do and had the potential to do it put the crude PCs and Macintoshes to shame. Color out the ying yang, multitasking, stereo sound, expansion slots, the ability to add a bridgeboard to run a PC in a window, and the ability to add boards with newer version of Motorola processors like the 68030, and higher with onboard high-speed memory. Then there was the amazing software. Amiga should have dominated the market, and today we should all be using an Amiga rather than PCs and Apples.

When you said the Amiga audio never advanced I had a knee-jerk reaction of "What about AGA?" You're right the Paula didn't change in any ways meaningful for sound quality from revision to revision including the jump to AGA. That's something I haven't really considered.
Great video. I enjoyed the trip down memory land and appreciated your well thought out presentation of what it was like to live 5 or more years in the future with Amiga.

Congratulation! great video that clearly explain the revolution made by amiga computer system! unfortunately blindfolded management ruined the future for a so awesome machine, can you imagine an evolute amiga on nowadays? RT like a movie in real time! Unfortunately this is only a weird dream 😭😭😭

I think it didn't stick around not because of the marketing, but because it was so good. The PC, on the other hand, for example, the guy needed to buy since it is out of a box a sound card, video card, everything, right from the beginning since the computer arrived and it didn't stop, every month new video cards, sound cards, etc. were launched and the model changed a little of the PC, the person had to buy everything again, as is still the case today. a bottomless hole where the user never stops spending, and for the market this has become a gold mine.

The amiga was the game computer for (wealthy) kids around here, I didn't meet any adult that took it seriously as a business / office machine. that's why they failed. My dad bought an IBM 286 clone that was 2 or 3 time more expensive, had no sound (we did have VGA though) and was in many ways slower than an Amiga. But it had the software he needed for work. So I became a PC gamer. And a few years later I would buy a sound blaster 16 upgrade myself to make it more on par with the Amiga

Apple didn't have or release a product called macOS in 2001.

Is that a trick question? Reality .... it wasn't awesome. In fact it was very primitive , and pathetic in its time.

I still have my 2000 model and all of the software so glad I kept it...

У меня дома Amiga500+ появилась в 1991 году. До сих пор она в рабочем состоянии и просто хранится. В детстве много времени мени провел занимаясь 2d и 3d графикой. Очень нравилась SpectraColor, DPaint4, Sculpt Animate 4d and more software

We went from Amiga 500 to an average IBM (Amiga to my room then) to a full-blown Gateway special in about 1997 or so that I was like yup I'm going to playing on that now because the new titles were PC-exclusive. Then later on I got into Quake and Half Life (wasn't allowed graphical games as a younger teen) and for convenience it's been pc's ever since. I would run internet demo discs from AOL (thanks guys) and get free internet every month. I had the Amiga in my room for a while and that was bliss. It really gave me so many happy memories. So many amazing games. Stoo from Sensible Software is still doing design stuff. Now I have a 3070 RTX with an i7 and no idea what games to get. Great video. Thanks for the memories.

I had an Amiga. Wonderful computer.

was... WAS ?!?!?! tsss tsss tsss ☝ Amiga still ruleeezzzzzzzzzz !!

Apologies for the long text that follows. My own observations comparing features and usability, as an Amiga & PC user in about 1985/6. It may help clarify how the Amiga was better all round than the other offerings mentioned here...

I compared PC, Apple, Atari and Amiga back in the day before buying my first Amiga, an A2000 with a 286 Bridgeboard. The Amiga Hardware's capabilities (especially with Kickstart 1.3 or better yet the later 2.0/2.1) made it better than its closest rivals.
The Amiga Multitasking being so far ahead of anything else, along with "free extras" like inbuilt speech synthesis, more colours onscreen, superior sound etc. (as covered in the video above) made the choice obvious to me.
The 286 and (early) 386 PCs of the day with dos/windows3.0 typically didn't even include a sound card or a mouse.
I was tasked with purchasing a windows machine for business purposes on the same day as I bought the Amiga for myself. A (admittedly faster 20MHz) 286 with 2MB RAM, VGA and a 40MB (yes MB) Hard drive was more expensive than the Amiga, but had no sound other than the onboard BIOS beep speaker. There was no GUI without a system on a hard drive, and configuring the loading sequence of a mouse driver and soundcard in DOS to try to maximise user Ram was frustrating. (Digital Research DOS 3.3 was far superior in memory management to MSDOS 4.)

I hated and still hate Apple's idea of a "two handed mouse" where you need to hit a modifier key on the keyboard while clicking its solitary mouse button to emulate "right click -> popup a menu," that's practically ubiquitous now..

A three button mouse was even better on the Amiga when coupled with a program which set it up to switch instantly (1/50th of a second or in a single redraw of the screen) between running programs. Nothing else came close, and to my knowledge nothing has yet. Even the alt-tab of modern Linux/Windows etc. feels clunky by comparison.

For cash-strapped users, the Amiga could be a usable tool for creating images, music etc. with two extra affordable floppy drives (and they were affordable once third parties started competing). One disk for the OS. One for the application with associated data like sound samples, and a third for the saved user files.
Hard disk expansions were expensive on all systems.

Most users simply didn't comprehend what "real" (preemptive) multitasking would enable them to do.
Friends would stand with their jaw dropping low, as the Amiga formatted 4 floppy disks while also running Deluxe paint or playing music or simple games as you prepared a whole box of new floppy disks for storage, instead of sitting, bored, waiting for a beep, to feed one disk after another into a PC or an Atari.

For users with a larger memory expansion, booting from a RAM disk that persisted until power was switched off was another feature. I also purchased a Blizzard Turbo Memory Board which connected to the CPU socket, with extra ram, and a faster (14Mhz) 68000 which could copy Kickstart into RAM (Faster than ROM).
After booting from a Floppy that set up and decompressed a Bootable system into a recoverable RAM disk, the Amiga could boot to a desktop in about 6 seconds, and the system drive in RAM was faster than a harddisk.
PCs couldn't do that without expensive Hard disk-emulating ram cards.

The above took a few days to configure, substituting smaller replacement system files written in assembler for files that had been coded in C in the c directory, and compressing other system utilities to get much more than one 880K AmigaDos floppy equivalent of OS, and testing for compatibility, but it all worked.
Loading a system utility from the Ram Disk, that was decompressed rapidly, was quicker than loading off a floppy and close to if not faster than an OS on a hard disk.

Atari found/made a niche market because they had a "killer App" in Midi Sequencers, with a convenient inbuilt MIdi port (I do have an Atari 1040STE, bought at an auction, and with its 1M RAM beside a 1M Amiga 500, it still doesn't match the 500 in usable capabilities - and the Atari clock is in an ungainly pass through cartridge port add on, jutting from the side). Comparing like for like, the Amiga hardware and OS were just years ahead (but I do appreciate the convenience of the Atari's internal Power Supply).

A MIDI interface for the Amiga Serial Port could be built for very low cost (I made one then for about $7 -- when a Midi Cable for a PC's SoundBlaster16 sound card was typically 4 to 6 times price of Amiga "homebrew Midi". - and you had to have a suitable PC sound card - )
If the Atari Midi Software had been available/ported to the Amiga, there would have been no real reason except possibly for a few unique-to-Atari games, to choose Atari before the Falcon/TT (top-tier, top dollar, units).

I had a friend around that time working in a business that had chosen Atari STE (later trying the TT) so I also had an opportunity for hands-on comparisons.

The Amiga died from Persistent Corporate Executive Neglect.. Those Execs were more interested in giving themselves perks from all accounts (like a rented apartment, car and driver on standby in the UK for monthly visits of a day or two), than funding the exceptional development engineers and programmers they had.

Only AMIGA makes it possible 🎵🎶

The Amiga OS was impressive up until around the XP release IMO. Agreed the Amiga stagnated, but also Motorola just could not/would not compete and the 68k CPU was underwhelming, and Commodore relying on bespoke custom chips meant the burden fell entirely on them for dedicated hardware advancement as few third parties developed zorro expansion hardware and when they did it was likely watered down PC chips (video cards looking at you), while on the PC entire industries worked on video cards, sound cards, drive controllers...........so Commodore never ever stood a chance against the Wintel behemoth.

When we were shopping for a home computer in 1989, an A500 was the OBVIOUS choice in the bang-for-the-buck dept.

The Amigas audio was soo way ahead of anything else. To get the equivalent sampling capability in professional sampling synthesizer keyboards would cost an absolute fortune by comparison!

I was a computer obsessed kid in the 80s with an Atari XE. A friend of the family gave me all his old Compute! magazine, and for some time, this was my only look at other systems (apart from the C64 - everyone had those). My memory from those magazines was a Commodore ad showing an Amiga with Deluxe Paint on the screen, with a an illustration of a shimmering waterfall. Even today, when I think about the Amiga, that waterfall picture comes to mind and how amazing that was to me at the time. I never owned an Amiga in it's heyday (we became a Mac family), but I remember at the time just the ads in Compute! gave me a sense that there was something magical about that computer.

Ahh, the initial so...

After spending decades away from the Amiga library I was heavily nostalgic for it.
After spending some time with it recently, I feel I was screwed over as a kid. Missed out on all the Amazing snes and megadrive games at the time. Amiga library in comparison falls a bit flat.
Some games have no music/ sfx , bad euro platformers galore , yea ….don’t get me wrong the Amiga has some great stuff but I have to say I was really disappointed.
Spent £100 on an A500 , got 60 roms and yea ….i feel screwed over

The Amiga was an amazing computer in 1985. The problem was, it was basically the same computer in 1994. It's probably coincidental given Commodore was already circling the drain in 1993. But the fact that no stock Amiga could run DOOM certainly did the platform no favors.

The Amiga downfall was games, it wasn’t taken as a serious business computer more of a gaming computer unlike the Atari ST/STE it’s built in MIDI made it attractive to the music industry and with built in 50KHz two channel 8-bit audio it was the machine of choice and still today used by some tho sadly the Amiga struggled to find its niche and was just seen by many for playing games and PC dominated the business side, the Mac the designer side and the Atari ST the music.

The Amiga needed a hard drive or cartridge with the OS as booting from floppy was a joke.

This was extremely insightful video. Thank you. Even as I began to embrace Windows 95, I still hated it. I do wish Amiga stepped it up. I truly loved what I could do on the Amiga, even though it was challenged with display color and resolution as Windows finally became useful. As I embraced windows, the old bad feeling of being disconnected started to wane. Market and developer pool seemed so much smaller than that of the PC. So here we are. It's the end of my first love, but not that big a deal really. We seem to have a good amount of choices these days. There's just not an underdog to root for anymore.. Linux maybe. ;) But again, smaller pool/market.

Simply the biggest leap, ever, the best computer ever when compared to what went before.

Amiga 500 era um sonho , que quase pude adquirir.
Sua capacidade gráfica, sonora e multitarefa eram incríveis!

Too pissed and leathered to say n e thing useful here.

So ill just say, I need to go for a serious leak and lol @ this channels name..


* proceeds to pee in his back garden instead.. Aaaaahh*

Because FAT ANGUS

A few minor points.

Pallet layout was not only common but typical back then. What made amiga a bit special was a wide palet and also a wide pallet array. Most systems at the day was 2 or 4 bit pallet and a 6-8 bit array, while amiga was 5+1 and 12 if i don´t miss remember.

About the memory, they way it was set up on amiga it was pretty much time shared between CPU and GPU/sound. Typically at this day, the graphic would have dedicated memory.

Amiga used a ROM-OS and not a Disc-OS saving a bunch of memory in loading up stuff like Workbench.

A version of copper does exist on EGA, but nobody ever used it because it was really buggy. Generally, the main problem with EGA was that it was buggy.

About overlay. From EGA forward (and more so on VGA) there was a 1 or 2 bit overlay graphics shell. That was what moved both the pointer and the outline as well as the Icons, Also the reason why the icons become monochrome when you moved them. In EGA game that use smooth scrolling they usually use a overlay for scoreboard. In theory they could use different pallets, as far as i know, nobody ever did that (because.. well buggy).

I do think that Amiga got the overlay function to, but i´m unsure exactly to what degree.

definitely chunk mode byte/word would be a completely different story, and it killed amiga prematurely in comparison to pc..
it was just a question of simple translation of memory content integrated into chip.. a few dollars more for total freedom

what exactly do you mean by "was"?

Speaking of HAM-mode not being used in games, there was a game that attempted this, DDT - Dynamic Debugger promised to use it in a side scrolling platformer, they even took out full page ads in computer magazines, but the game never materialized. Imagine paying for those expensive ads when the game is not even running as a demo.

HAM mode wasn't just good for still images & digitised photos. Where it really proved its use was in ray-traced animations. That, more than anything, set the Amiga apart from any other computer of its day. It was just light-years ahead of what anyone thought was possible with a home computer.

Overall a nice video though I don't agree about the 68000 being slow like an 6502. The 68000 could do in one operation taking eight cycles more than a 6502 in 20 operations with 50 cycles. Overall the 68000@8Mhz was considered 3 to 20 times faster than a 6502@1Mhz depending on the job (remember, Amiga hat 7,16Mhz, C64 0,985Mhz) - in hindsight though the 80286 in real 16 Bit mode was actually 15% faster than an 68000 in 32Bit mode at the same speed. Though If you used PC-relative 16Bit-Code on the 68000 the situation pretty much evened out. And while I rarelly saw a 286 running real 16Bit code the Amiga used a log of PC-relative 16Bit code. And with an 68010 you could actually write code running 10-50% faster than on 68000 or 286. By simply swapping a $30 CPU with pin compatible successor.

I have many fond memories of Amiga 500. But I have also admit that development of this computer stalled hideously way too early. Even AGA chips came too little too late. I've watched a video of someone playing first Doom on a heavily upgraded A 4000 - with turbo card clocked at 50 Mhz and oodles of Fast RAM. And it ran bad. As in 15-16 frames per second bad. My ancient, baseline Pentium 166 MMX with 16 megabites of RAM and crappy S3 card ran Quake II better. Commodore wasted Amiga's potential criminally.

Fantastic Guy with the late Jay Miner with graphic designer Amiga 500, 500+, 600, 1200 also designed the Atari 2600 with amazing 1986-1990s.

Late to the party - but great video! I think if you ever did a follow up it would be worth covering the open hardware nature of the amiga. I had a GVP A1230 Turbo+ Series II in my A1200, which effectively replaced the CPU and Memory - just by plugging in an expansion card. And there were a myriad of devices that exploited the open nature of the Amiga hardware platform. Anyhow, doesn't detract from the fact that this is a great vid ❤❤

"...doing it on Windows 11, so..."
GNU/Linux, git gud, my guy

Amiga, the best home computer system ever made. :)

On the subject of A500 RAM expansion slot... it was actually possible to convert those extra 512KB of RAM from CHIP to FAST, and vice versa, by cutting one line, and connecting two lines, directly on the motherboard. Instructions on how to do that had appeared in a local gaming magazine, and as any adventurous teenage boy would've done, I immediately got to work on it. I even improved upon it by taking an auto-fire switch from a broken joystick I had lying around, and turned it into a CHIP/FAST RAM switch sticking out on the side of my Amiga like it was always meant to be a part of her design. Some older games just wouldn't work with 1MB of CHIP RAM, so that was a perfect solution to the problem.

On the subject of the awesomeness of the Copper chip... if I remember correctly, each Copper instruction would take a couple of screen pixels to execute, so the obvious thing to do was to take one of those awesome level-loading screens from the Agony game, turn them into a Copper instruction list, and then... display that as a background image while working in the Workbench.

Ah, the good old days of Amiga... when you could load an application into AsmOne disassembler, change it so that it did what you actually wanted it do, and then recompile the whole thing into your own home-brewed version to use to your pleasure.

Never again will there be a system like Amiga... <sigh>