29 Facts About Commodore Amiga

Commodore Amiga 1000 was released in July 1985, but production problems kept it from becoming widely available until early 1986.

The best-selling model, the Commodore Amiga 500, was introduced in 1987 along with the more expandable Commodore Amiga 2000.

The Video Toaster hardware and software suite helped Commodore Amiga find a prominent role in desktop video and video production.

Poor marketing and the failure of later models to repeat the technological advances of the first systems resulted in Commodore Amiga quickly losing market share to the rapidly dropping prices of IBM PC compatibles, which gained 256 color graphics in 1987, as well as the fourth generation of video game consoles.

Commodore ultimately went bankrupt in April 1994 after a version of the Amiga packaged as a game console, the Amiga CD32, failed in the marketplace.

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Since the demise of Commodore, various groups have marketed successors to the original Amiga line, including Genesi, Eyetech, ACube Systems Srl and A-EON Technology.

Commodore Amiga hardware was designed by Miner, RJ Mical, and Dale Luke.

Commodore Amiga approached Amiga offering to fund development as a home computer system.

Commodore Amiga immediately implemented an ambitious plan that covered almost all of the company's operations.

In 2019, Commodore Amiga, Inc sold its intellectual property to Commodore Amiga Corporation.

At its core, the Commodore Amiga has a custom chipset consisting of several coprocessors, which handle audio, video and direct memory access independently of the Central Processing Unit .

General Commodore Amiga architecture uses two distinct bus subsystems: the chipset bus and the CPU bus.

Later Commodore Amiga models featured higher-speed, full 32-bit CPUs with a larger address space and instruction pipeline facilities.

Towards the end of Commodore's time in charge of Amiga development, there were suggestions that Commodore intended to move away from the 68000 series to higher performance RISC processors, such as the PA-RISC.

Custom chipset at the core of the Commodore Amiga design appeared in three distinct generations, with a large degree of backward-compatibility.

The brightness of the Commodore Amiga's power LED is used to indicate the status of the Commodore Amiga's low-pass filter.

Keyboard on Commodore Amiga computers is similar to that found on a mid-80s IBM PC: Ten function keys, a numeric keypad, and four separate directional arrow keys.

The Commodore Amiga keyboard adds a Help key, which a function key usually acts as on PCs .

Commodore Amiga was one of the first computers for which inexpensive sound sampling and video digitization accessories were available.

Commodore's last Amiga offering before filing for bankruptcy was the Amiga CD32, a 32-bit CD-ROM games console.

Several Commodore Amiga models contained references to songs by the rock band The B-52's.

The developers recreated the entire Commodore Amiga chipset, freeing it from legacy Commodore Amiga limitations such as two megabytes of audio and video graphics RAM as in the AGA chipset, and rebuilt this new chipset by programming a modern FPGA Altera Cyclone IV chip.

In 2006, two new Commodore Amiga clones were announced, both using FPGA based hardware synthesis to replace the Commodore Amiga OCS custom chipset.

Commodore Amiga Sidecar is a complete IBM PC XT compatible computer contained in an expansion card.

Until the late 1990s the Commodore Amiga remained a popular platform for non-commercial software, often developed by enthusiasts, and much of which was freely redistributable.

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Name Commodore Amiga was chosen by the developers from the Spanish word for a female friend, because they knew Spanish, and because it occurred before Apple and Atari alphabetically.

In later marketing material Commodore Amiga largely dropped the checkmark and used logos styled with various typefaces.

Early Commodore advertisements attempted to cast the computer as an all-purpose business machine, though the Amiga was most commercially successful as a home computer.

Commodore Amiga Active was launched in 1999 and was published until 2001.