$bff The Amiga - Phil98's memories. ============================== $ff1 With the arrival of the Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga, the 16-bit home computer age had begun. The ST had the initial advantage as it was much cheaper than the Amiga (which was originally only available in the expensive "big-box" A1000 format). Many people immediately ditched their 8 bit computers to embrace the ST. More sensible folk saw the shortfalls of the ST (weak sound & little custom hardware) and waited a little longer for developments on the Amiga front - we had after all seen the "Juggler Demo" and other stuff that put the ST to shame. (I still remember someone on Micro-Live (remember that?) raving on about the arcade-quality graphics of Marble Madness:). Within six months the 512K Amiga A500 (and later the big box version: The A2000) were released and although still more expensive than the ST, the A500 sold by the truck load. We bought ours in 1987 and despite early problems like the famous "chips-loose-in-their-sockets" faults, we were hooked. Decent software was very hard to come by at first. Games mostly consisted of jerky arcade clones (remember the likes of Anco's dire "Rocket Attack"?!.. being impressed with the sampled loading music soon wore off:) Still, we tinkered about on Workbench, played Marble Madness and got brutally fleaced out of much dosh for blank disks! Suddenly, out of the blue came SCA's "Miami-Vice Digi", the first "proper" Amiga demo. It was just a big long sample with some wavy scrollers on screen but what a relief to see something the C64 couldn't do! SCA went on to produce the "Something wonderful has happened" SCA virus - another Amiga first - though this was obviously less welcome than their previous creations :) Gradually, more software began to appear, much of it from Europe (for some reason EVERYONE seemed to go mad on writing breakout clones in those early days (which got really annoying after the 114th version!). One title, however deserves note and that was "Crystal Hammer" - the first game I saw that featured a real "Soundtracker" tune rather than crude samples..Respect is due to Karsten Obarski for breaking the mould! There were signs of hope on the horizon with early releases like "Xenon" and "Sidewinder" but it was pretty gutting that most UK software houses could only manage to churn out awful jerky ST-ported games.. This caused much friction between the Amiga and ST owners because ST fanatics would not admit that the Amiga was a superior machine. All the main software houses had a port-over policy at first, stating pathetic excuses why the Amiga's custom hardware was not used. Eventually, most did see the error of their ways but one company never did: US Gold. Over the years they continued to deliver title after title of ST-ported rubbish. As time passed, a new phenomena dawned: The mega-demo - A whole disk packed with linked graphics routines and music that just got better and better. Some early ones of note were by "Dexion","Sodan" and "Red Sector". These coding showcases were really putting the software companies to shame. By now the Amiga Scene was growing at an amazing rate with everyone finally switching from the C64. 512K ram expansion boards were becoming affordable at £99 as were floppy disks and external drives:) And so the worldwide Amiga phenomena progressed. Public domain companies sprang up ten-a-penny, 3rd party developers began making peripherals, big demo groups like "Anarchy" and "LSD" dominated the UK scene and "Phenomena" and "Kefrens" were big in Europe. Disk-based magazines like "Grapevine" were very popular and the release-rate of software was incredible. In this, the A500's hey-day, many classic games were released: "Denaris", "Turrican 2" (top marks Factor 5!), "Battle Squadron", "Silkworm", "Sensible Soccer", "Pinball Dreams", "Alien Breed" to name but a few. In the early 90's, a few minor developments from Commodore brought us the A1500, Amiga A500+ and the Amiga A600. The A1500 was just a "big-box" A500+ (The plus being basically an A500 with more memory on board). The A600 was a cheaper, slimmed-down A500+ with PCMCIA slot and internal harddrive connector. A lot of users new to the Amiga came to it via the A600, which was unfortunate as a few months later the A1200 was released at roughly the same price! The A1200 (and its A4000 big box counterpart) had faster, real 32bit processors and a revision of the graphics chipset called AGA - which meant more colours and better resolutions. Unfortunately, the actual graphics engine: the blitter and sound chips remained unchanged - which was something of a massive oversight. Still, the A1200 was warmly received and sold very well. Software was slow on the uptake of AGA (hardly suprising with Commodore being so secretive about the new hardware specifications). AGA games were non-existant at first and with A500 demos of the time like Spaceballs "State of the Art", Sanity's "Interference" and Kefrens "Desert Dreams" out-classing early AGA-efforts like those from "Team Hoi" it began to look like AGA might never take off (though it was fun having loads of colours to muck about with on Deluxe Paint 5!) Eventually the hardware specs did leak out and at last impressive AGA demos started to appear. On the games front it was still a bit bleak.. Conversions of A500 games to AGA just resulted in them coming in on loads of disks and running slower because of the increased strain on the blitter. Quite a few AGA specific games were created but its hard to recall any real classics - most of the decent AGA stuff came from the Amiga "scene". It was around 1993 when things first started to go pear-shaped for the Amiga. Commodore failed to produce a CD add-on for the A1200 but came up with the CD32, a disasterously under-powered entry into the games console market. With losses going off the chart, CBM started to close many of their offices around the world and eventually the whole company folded in 1994. Between then and now, the Amiga rights have been bought and sold so many times that I've completely lost track of who owns them. There hasnt been any serious developments since Commodore's time and though its sad to say, the Amiga's time has passed. RIP Amiga - A damned fine machine in its day. $ff0[I think this article will generate some responses Phil... Kei] $fffend