http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/ Engadget Comments for Commodore Amiga celebrates its 25th birthday, Andy Warhol still dead http://www.engadget.com/media/feedlogo.gif http://www.engadget.com en-us Copyright 2012 Weblogs, Inc. The contents of this feed are available for non-commercial use only. Blogsmith http://www.blogsmith.com/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/
Doing "development" with Aztec C off a 3.5" floppy was...interesting...

Fun times - GREAT Personal Computer (if you didn't mind the outstandingly-BAD marketing behind the "Guru Meditation Error").
]]>Jul 23rd 2010 5:12PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/Me too, monitor and all. Mine was "hopped up" with a 68010 and a 1 meg external ram expansion. Last I checked my Genlock still worked also.]]>Jul 23rd 2010 5:24PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/
While Commodore "saved" the Amiga, at the same time, they were the cause of it's slow death in the marketplace... such a horribly run company, that had such amazingly talented employees.

]]>Jul 23rd 2010 5:27PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/
God I miss the Amiga. *sniff*]]>Jul 23rd 2010 5:41PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/Now the Amiga.. THAT was a truly "magical" and "revolutionary" product. At an unbelievable price..

How I loved my 500, a friend of mine that had a 1000 and told me to wait for the 500 to be released. Sold me the first 10 minutes I was able to get a demo .. best PC I ever owned, and I have the distinct feeling that the experience of buying that computer and using it over it's life will be something I will not be able to replicate with another platform.

It's going to be a very big hit..hit..hit..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6FzrxK8aw4&feature=related

Is Romeo Knight badass or what...]]>Jul 23rd 2010 6:32PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/
Yeah, Europe LOVED the Amiga (as well as the Atari ST), but still, it was an awesome computer that was run by an incompetent company.

At the time, I would get any and every computer magazine that I could get a hold of (Info, Compute, Byte, Amiga World), and when I went to Greece, I got all the UK mags like Amiga Format and a few other ones. Hell, I think I still have a few of them laying around. ]]>Jul 23rd 2010 6:34PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/
Aztec C? What? Real men used Devpac, Seka or AsmOne !

I kid :) I miss the Amiga. Still have an old 500 in the closet. Such a spectacular computer system with an OS light years ahead of its time. The games, the colors, the audio. Good times.]]>Jul 23rd 2010 7:14PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/The Natami team are amazing considering what they've done with the little money they have]]>Jul 23rd 2010 7:49PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/]]>Jul 23rd 2010 8:36PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/Had few A500s but the last beauty of a machine was my A1200 with expansion board that boasted 68030 CPU @50 MHz and 68882 FPU (floating poing co-processor man!) with 8MB RAM on the board for total of 10 phreaking megabytes of RAM! Including the original Commodore display that could display the amazing 1024x768 interlaced picture.

I used to load the whole installation of a game or other piece of software into RAM-disk and run it from there at blazing speeds (Wings, Elite II, Dune and Dune II - the beginning of RTS gaming anyone?, Alien Breed, Gunship 2000...).

I built a 3.5" hard drive into the Amiga's case, there was just about enough space, I custom built the cable adapter from 3.5" to 2.5" connector, since there were none to be had in the computer shops at the day. With the HDD, my GUI, multi-tasking Workbench OS would boot to fully functional desktop in 7 seconds.
7 seconds, for Christ's sake!

I was a poor student at the time and had to sell the system eventually. Why? Whhhhyyyyy.....? (sob)

Oh yeah, kneel before the Defender of the Crown!]]>Jul 23rd 2010 10:34PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/
Yea i remember all those magazines , my older brothers brought them for their commdore 64 and then amiga,

i remember reading them when all way from 5-10 years old barely understanding most of it. parents got me a super nintendo which i loved cause it was mine , but i would still jump on the amiga when my brothers where not using it. First small steps i made on the road to becoming a programmer where on those beautiful machines
]]>Jul 23rd 2010 11:07PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/
LDA #$07
STA $D021
BRK]]>Jul 24th 2010 1:46AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/I'd rather dark grey if you please .. :)]]>Jul 24th 2010 1:20PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/I was going to get a 1200 but my father wanted to do my homework mainly on that computer so he bought me a 486SX from a backstreet vendor...that broke down all the time. I would have traded in that 486 for a CDTV gladly. Thats how much I hated that computer and how much I loved Amigas.
One can only imagine if the 1200 was released a year earlier. Steve Jobs and apple were afraid of Commodore and the Amiga. They were better than the Macs of the time. If only...]]>Jul 25th 2010 9:00AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/
I lost my 1200 some years ago. Yes, you CAN lose a computer :-(
But I still have a copy of WinUAE running on my home computer.

O man, these nights playing Utopia ... !]]>Jul 26th 2010 3:53AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/
The Amiga was first and in many ways still best. Remember GoMF? - Get out of My Face? It would capture Guru meditation errors and let you recover from them. I still miss the operating system and wish they'd port it to run on x86 natively,

instead of over emulation.]]>Jul 26th 2010 2:05PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/
BTW: The spinning baby...thing creeps me out to no end.]]>Jul 23rd 2010 5:13PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/Jul 23rd 2010 5:14PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/Blasphemy.. it lives on... AMIGA FOREVER]]>Jul 23rd 2010 6:54PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/
For instance 64bit and multiprocessor software, there isnt enough of them or they are unstable.

Im looking at you lazy programmers. ]]>Jul 23rd 2010 5:15PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/+1

Nicely said.

Back in the Amiga days, you actually had creative programmers that could squeeze out performance from a piece of hardware that would have been considered unpossible.

Now you get lazy programmers that can't write code to save their lives... if it's not 2GBs in size and eats 1GB of RAM they can't do anything. Pathetic.]]>Jul 23rd 2010 5:25PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/Jul 23rd 2010 5:43PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/Jul 23rd 2010 7:13PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/This isn't completely true, the things (gaming wise especially) that are happening today are infinitely more complex than what was happening on the Amiga..

Hardware has come so far and production values have risen so far to the extent that if you wanted to say.. put Shadow of the Beast up against Crysis, it would be very tough to say who's got more graphical muscle or better immersion per cycle.. it's like apples and oranges..]]>Jul 23rd 2010 8:09PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/
Why don't you compare the amount of raw power that a PC has today to the Amiga... What those guys at Psygnosis were able to accomplish with 7.14Mhz and like 2 MBs of RAM blows away the ~2GHz and ~2 GBs that you'll need to run a modern game.

A modern PC has a processor that is something like 100X faster (multiple cores) and has 100X as much RAM, but no way in hell is it anywhere close to 100X better.

No one is disputing that CPU clock-cycles and the amount of RAM that modern computers have could crush what old computers had... but you are forgetting that code now a days is that much more bloated and programmers today don't give a crap about CPU cycles... back then they would find creative ways to eek out as much performance out of the hardware that they had. Now, no one gives a crap. ]]>Jul 23rd 2010 8:57PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/Well.. they are no longer coding ASM .. there is no way possible that big budget games of today could be done anywhere near enough time to make their money back without middleware, engines, and frameworks. Besides.. probably 5 textures from crysis would equal the entire size of SotB. (exaggerating.. but not really..)

Oh man.. the SotB soundtrack was phenomenal.. I can still hear it in my ears to this day... sigh...]]>Jul 23rd 2010 11:19PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/
Hmm I dont know about that, I'd consider Call of Duty to be about 100 times better than Gloom was.

Oh, Your right too, Amiga owners were the original fanboys. And if your not head over to the excellent WinUAE Amiga emulator site to become a convert!]]>Jul 24th 2010 3:19AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/Jul 23rd 2010 5:15PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/I'm guessing by your comment that was at most.. what.. 3.. maybe 4 years ago?]]>Jul 23rd 2010 7:03PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/Jul 24th 2010 7:02PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/Jul 23rd 2010 5:16PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/
Here's a bit of irony for you, I sold my complete pristine Amiga 500 system a few months ago in order to drum up funds to buy the iPad that I'm writing this on.]]>Jul 23rd 2010 5:19PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/Jul 23rd 2010 7:35PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/
WAY the hell ahead of it's time.

The Amiga came out at a time in which computers and the computer industry was still fun and interesting... now it's just corporate nonsense with incremental speed increases. At the time, the Amiga blew every other system out of the water. It wasn't just X% faster than the competition, but generations ahead in terms of thinking and design... and did it for way the hell less than anyone else. It was actually TOO cheap because few believed that you could get so much power for so little money.

I wish I still had my old A500 and every now and then I get the urge to bid on one on eBay.]]>Jul 23rd 2010 5:21PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/Jul 23rd 2010 5:39PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/
Ahead of its time? Maybe in 1985. The Sharp X68000 PC was released shortly after the Amiga and its graphics hardware blows the Amiga away in just about every respect:

http://nfggames.com/games/x68k_Gallery/index.shtm

Of course, it was only available in Japan.]]>Jul 23rd 2010 7:02PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/
The graphics hardware were far from the highlight of the platform, even in 1985.

The OS was, and still is, vastly superior however. Even today I'd rather take a PC with AmigaOS 3.1 over anything Windows, MacOS or Linux. The latter big three are at the point of acceptable usage but light years from being impressive from a software standpoint.

My 18 year old Amiga 1200 is also fully functional and quite capable for general computer usage with it's 50 MHz 68060, 16MByte or RAM and 10Mbit PC-card network. And people think you need 2GHz+ processors to browse the web. *sigh*]]>Jul 23rd 2010 7:26PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/
Not particularly impressed with any of those screenshots.

I honestly am not very familiar with Japanese computers from that era and I am reading up on it's capabilities right now. It does indeed look pretty impressive, but it's using a similar 68K processor that the Amiga line had. It looks like it had some custom chips like the Amiga did, but doesn't look like any of them were as "high level" as the Graphics, Sound and IO chips that made the Amiga so powerful.

And unless my Yen conversion is way the hell off, we are talking about $3000 to $5000 for some of these systems? That's rather absurd when the A500 was about $500.]]>Jul 23rd 2010 9:09PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/Jul 23rd 2010 10:28PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/Jul 24th 2010 12:11PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/
Just grab the emulator from Cloanto. It includes the WinUAE and it works fantastic. You can emulate everything from an a500 to the a4000 with no problem. The even give you the software to transfer Amiga files over to the PC (such as game saves).]]>Jul 24th 2010 12:59PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/]]>Jul 23rd 2010 5:22PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/
I do still have a place in my heart for my A500 and A1200 (still going strong). I still contend it was the best multi-tasker ever built.]]>Jul 23rd 2010 5:22PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/
Practically no-one had even heard of the Spectrum here in Sweden. It was the same in many other countries.
C64 and later the Amiga was really HUGE in Sweden.]]>Jul 24th 2010 1:46AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/Jul 23rd 2010 5:23PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/Jul 23rd 2010 5:24PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/
...then I picked up the C64 version and was, um... a little disappointed at the difference.]]>Jul 23rd 2010 5:25PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/
It wasn't just the C64 version that was disappointing.
Even the PC version - which ran on hardware costing 2X as much as an Amiga - paled in comparison to the Amiga's version. ]]>Jul 23rd 2010 5:29PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/Jul 23rd 2010 5:29PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/23/commodore-amiga-celebrates-its-25th-birthday-andy-warhol-still/
I loved my Amiga's back in the day. Started with a used Amiga 1000, then a new Amiga 500, then to the Amiga 1200. Last but not least, an Amiga 4000.

A cool little side note. Newtek and the Video Toaster started out in Topeka Kansas, where I'm at. Not sure where they are now but they are behind Lightwave 3D these days. A girl I dated maybe 10 years ago bought Tim Jenison's old house where rumor has it he coded Digipaint and or worked on the early hardware for the Video Toaster. I will say the garage in back of the house had several electrical outlets and phone lines added in as well as from what I remember, work benches. Not exactly Alexander Graham Bell Laboratory, but very cool nonetheless.

There was nothing ever like the Amiga and if you were young enough to own one during it's heyday then you will know exactly what I am talking about. I won;'t go into the specs now but it was years ahead of the PC.

]]>Jul 23rd 2010 5:32PM