of all the home computer stories, amiga isprobably the most interesting, diverse and long. one reason for that is the number of machinescommodore produced for the amiga line in an attempt to diversify and capture the marketthroughout the 80s and 90s. for that reason and to ensure you have adequatetoilet breaks, this documentary will be broken
apple share price history 1980, into two parts, and following in the linesof chronological ordering, we begin, like all things, at the beginning. to do that, we have to travel almost 40 yearsback in time, way back in the mid 1970s..... atari were expanding.
having developed arcade machines for severalyears, they were looking to expand their technology into living rooms throughout the world. to assist with this, a gentleman by the nameof jay glenn miner was recruited to develop custom integrated circuits by harold lee. jay had been in the electronics industry fora number of years by this point, studying at electronics school in groton, connecticutand progressing to electrical engineering at california-berkeley university in 1958. during his early work career he worked atvarious startups including general microelectronics where he gained an impressive knowledge ofmos technology.
armed with his knowledge he successfully reducedthe atari 2600 display hardware down from a plethora of discreet components into a singletelevision interface adapter chip. the 2600, as we know, went on to be one ofthe most successful consoles of all time. immediately after jay would begin developmentof a new set of chips; the colour television interface adapter, alphanumeric televisioninterface controller and pot keyboard integrated circuit, offering input and output controlfor the line of new atari 8 bit home computers. at the time the designs jay created were impressive,offering 40 on screen colours and custom accelerated circuity, allowing the 8 bit line to livewell into the late 1980s. by this point, atari had been sold to warnercommunications to provide suitable funding
to market and deliver their home systems,but ray kassar ceo and the new corporate management was more interested in milking their currenttechnology rather than advancing development. jay and his team were keen to initiate a newproject based around the spanking new motorola 68000, but with atari uninterested, left thecompany in 1980 and went back to medical development for a company called xymos, helping to createa remote controlled pacemaker. another atari employee who had left at aroundthis time was the first 2600 programmer, larry kaplan. larry was unhappy with the lack of recognitionatari attributed to their designers and had left in 1979 to found activision.
the first third party game developer who putgame creators at the core of their work. in 1982 with the console market slowing somewhat,larry felt the urge to pursue something more exciting. after seeing the nintendo famicom at the consumerelectronics show, he contacted his former colleague jay, with the idea of creating anew company that would manufacture cartridges and peripherals for the atari 2600. investment was needed and along with a fewwealthy dentists who were keen to cash in on the video game craze, jay found additionalinterest, courtesy of his current employment. bert braddock, jay's boss at xymos was keento get both on board and on the company's
board. he quickly encouraging the texas owner ofxymos to invest, and agreed to the team using the xymos semiconductor labs. and so in june 1982, work began from a smalloffice at 7, 3350 scott boulevard, santa clara. with larry as vice president and jay in chargeof the hardware, a chief executive & president was also brought on board; dave morse, headof marketing at tonka toys (and yes, that's the same dave morse who would go on to headup epyx. as we're discovering with these documentaries,the same names crop up again and again). with a team in place and suitable investment,the name "hi-toro" was conjured for the venture,
sounding both hi-tech and texan. the founding idea was for larry to designgames for the atari 2600 and other systems whilst jay designed chips for the cartridgesand other new accessories. by october bert braddock was keen for nolanbushnell to come on board as board of director chairman. larry called up his old atari boss to suggestit, but in a twist, nolan ended up convincing larry to come and work for him. only a few months after setting up hi-toro,larry was gone, and dave would ask jay to take his place.
the company was then split into two segments;one division, under dave morse would continue work on software and peripherals for existinggame consoles, whilst under jay's guidance, the other would begin to focus on his olddream of creating a new computer system based around the motorola 68000 processor. this required some convincing for their dentistinvestors. but still excited by the growing games market,they agreed to jay's plans to create a new powerful games console, whilst jay slyly workedon the basis that it could be expandable to a full blown computer. codenamed "lorraine" after the wife of davemorse - a naming tradition formed at atari
for labeling new chips after girlfriends sooutsiders didn't realise what they were discussing; the hardware plan was to create an advanced16 bit gaming machine following in the open development practices of commodore's new 64machine. once the design was complete, the circuitswould be hammered out at the xymos labs. 1983 would see the company named changed tosomething friendly and welcoming with their investors unhappy that the current name soundedtoo much like a japanese lawnmower manufacturer, toro. after several suggestions, including amigo,the team finally settled on "amiga", a soft spanish word meaning "female friend"...
and i mean, the amiga kinda did feel likea female friend, i guess. also, like acorn computers, it came aboveapple and atari in the phone book - this really was cutting edge marketing for the 1980s. and so it was, the company was renamed toamiga incorporated, with one main objective and one side-line to supply funds and actas cover for their secret technology. whilst jay worked on hardware, the other divisionworked on devices such as the "powerstick" and "joyboard", a kind of early wii balanceboard, along with compatible titles such as surf's up and mogul mania. these products weren't really the successthe team had hoped for, hindered further by
the american video game crash of 83, whichalso brought with it a considerable degree of nervousness from their investors. thankfully computer systems like the appleii and commodore 64 were still selling well and having unprecedented foresight jay reassuredinvestors by convincing them that the new hardware could be sold as a full and powerfulcomputer system from the go. however additional investment was needed forwhich jay would have to re-mortgage his house and borrow from other sources to keep afloat. steve jobs also visited the company a fewtimes at this point but decided the hardware was too complicated to invest in.
throughout 1983, hardware development continuedaided by additional colleagues from atari and driven by jay's insatiable craving fordesign. the team jay chose to recruit, all had onething in common. they were looking to change the world, andjay's tolerant and flexible management style certainly helped this and crafted the feelof the amiga. members brought on board include programmersdave luck and r.j mical, designers joe decuir and dave needle and even jay's beloved coakapoo,mitchie who came to work on a daily basis. the custom architecture wasn't new to jay. the chips he'd designed at atari are whatmade their 8 bit line so impressive for the
time, offloading work from the 6502 cpu. lorraine was also built around custom chipdesigns, freeing up cycled on the motorola 68000 cpu, which although meaning it wouldbe more expensive to manufacture, also allowed for arcade rivaling graphics. something the entire team was very keen onnailing. the chips in question were originally namedportia, daphne and agnus, and each had a specific task. daphne would manage the display. portia was in charge of sound and i/o taskswhilst agnus synchronised them all to the
cpu and memory whilst also housing the copperand blitter circuity which gave the amiga such impressive animation abilities. one of jay's inspirations for daphne was a"link trainer" flight simulator machine, introduced to him by al pound at manufacturer singer-link. he wanted to use the blitter (which can pushlarge amounts of graphics around a screen quickly) to refresh frames fast enough tocreate a flight simulator in the home. this simulator was also the inspiration toincorporate a ham mode (hold and modify) that could place more colours on screen than memoryallowed by changing the hue and saturation of existing pixels.
this laid the path for the amiga's impressive4,096 simultaneous on-screen colour mode, although in these early stages it could onlymuster 324 at the same time. the complex designs were put together usingwire and large boards in an anti-static area with an entrance sign saying "ground thyself",as if you were entering a church of god, and in many ways, that's almost true. in september 1983, lorraine was completedin discreet form, which although unsuitable for retail, allowed some impressive demonstrationsto be coded up on the advanced hardware. along with amiga's sideline peripherals, oneof these, the infamous bouncing ball, was on show at the winter ces, but cutting itfine was an understatement.
at this point, the system had to be constantlymaintained as components failed on the fly. bob pariseau had been brought on as chiefof software design but hadn't had time to implement a suitable operating system, sorj mical and dale luck worked non stop at the show to come up with something worthyof presentation. lorraine didn't even have a keyboard at thispoint and software had to be uploaded via. a sage iv remote terminal. the result was a red and white checkered ballthat according to dale only bounced, at this point, up and down, with no horizontal movementnor sound effects. but even so, it was enough to spike the interestof several investors who witnessed the system
in a vip only back room, and god knows thatamiga needed the money again at this point... badly. even the transportation of their equipmentwas done on the cheap by booking an extra airline seat and wedging it between them underthe name of "joe pillow", with smiley face drawn on for good effect. amiga struggled on through the first halfof 1984, fueled by passion, loans and foam baseball bats which the team would use tosettle disputes in meetings. rj mical even wrote a meditation program forthe "joyboard" where you had to sit as still as possible, without registering it's sensors.
this became a running joke and the inspirationfor the fabled "guru meditation error" we're all very familiar with. the kit was condensed a little, although stillstrewn across a variety of bread boats and hundreds of msi logic chips, which accuratelysimulated the amiga, albeit at a somewhat slower pace, and the bouncing ball demo wasimproved akin to the version we're all familiar with today. bob pariseau, dale luck, rj mical and recruitcarl sassenrath had also got stuck into the task of creating a suitable operating systemfor the machine, and the team would arrive ready for the june summer ces with their latesthardware and bouncing ball demo, this time
on wider display. but what was it about this ball which garneredso much interest? well.. the initial draw was the sheer sizeof the ball. remember, this was an era when computer animationwas always on the smaller side. there simply wasn't enough power to chucka tonne of pixels around in unison. the boing ball was a whopping 140x100 pixelsand seemed to jig around the screen completely seamless and mesmerising fluidity, much likea modern 3d rendering. however, there were some cunning tricks behindlorraine's big bouncing ball, thanks in part to the design of the hardware, rather thanmapping out 14 frames of animation, the ball
was completed using just one, through clevercycling of colour registers. the sound echoing from the ball is also froma single sample simply by changing the speed and volume. bob pariseau was recorded hitting an aluminiumgarage door with one of those foam bats and an apple ii digitised it from inside the garage. the demo is a testament to not only the team'sadvanced hardware, but also to their sheer programming skill. creating something brilliant, in limited timeand with limited resources. but this wasn't their only trick.
by now rj mical had created the basis of anapplication programming interface called intuition. this was a window driven operating environmentwhich took seven months of 100 hour weeks and like others was based around an earlyxerox environment from the late 1970s. combined with the boing demo, the first glimmersof multi tasking, thanks to carl sassenrath's revolutionary multitasking kernal called exec- the core of the operating system - were tantilisingly evident, but really it was unncessary. by now several big names were interested inamiga's technology, keen to forge their place in the evergreen and rapidly evolving computermarket. the main two were commodore and atari whowere eager to jump onto the 16 bit bandwagon.
however with commodore kicking it's heels,it was atari who stepped up first, offering to buy 1 million shares in amiga at 3 dollarseach whilst keeping the financially struggling company afloat, with a $500,000 loan whilstbuy-out preparations were formalised. however, the contract for the loan was a strictone requiring amiga to repay the entire loan within a month or atari would be able to snapup their company for next to nothing. clearly a filthy move designed to work inatari's favour, but amiga were so desperate, they had no choice. strangely, atari weren't even interested infinishing the computer jay and his team had come so close to completing, instead theywere looking to use the custom chips in their
own machines. behind closed doors however, at atari's parentcompany, time warner, negotiations were taking place to find a buyer for atari as it wascurrently loosing some $10k dollars per day. james morgan, ceo of atari was even unwareof these negotiations himself, hence operations were business as usual. one of these negotiators, in early july wasjack tramiel. having recently left commodore over disagreementshe was looking for a new venture to sink into and atari seemed ripe for the picking. a deal was quickly drawn up and jack becamethe owner of atari's consumer division which
was renamed to atari corporation. he would have also become the proud new investor/ownerof amiga incorporated at this point too, if it hadn't been for his former company.... commodore. with jack and his team of engineers departedfrom commodore, the company was keen for a new machine and although late to the party,swept in before june was out and bought out amiga from right underneath atari's noses. this included the repayment (with interest)of the $500,000 loan and a $4.24 per share investment in amiga, taking ownership andbringing them in house as the new commodore
amiga incorporated. upon finding this out, jack was a little scythedand set about suing jay and commodore for breach of contract for $100 million dollarson august 13th, which would be finally settled out of court in atari's favour after a fewyears of shouting legalities at each other. still, disruption was minimal for jack ashe began work on his own, new 16 bit machine, which would soon become known as the st. back at amiga, commodore set about investinga further $20 million in the development of their new machine. jay and his team may not have been runningthings exclusively anymore, but they were
on safe and stable footing for the first timesince 1983 at the company jack tramiel had first founded in 1955. things were looking good. the first task was to move the team out of their pokey little office into a spacious facilitydown the road in los gatos, california. more engineers were brought on board to expediteproceedings and their single sage workstation was subsidised with another 10 so that everyonecould work simultaneously. work quickly progressed on two vital areas,the first was the chip design. daphne was renamed to denise, portia to paulaand a lot of refinement began, including some
technical improvements, an increase of memoryfrom 128k to 256k and of course condensing the massive prototypes on actual silicon chips. although the team, particularly rj mical hadcompleted some exemplary work on the exec kernal, graphical interface intuition andthe new operating system, which as a whole was dubbed caos (commodore amiga operatingsystem) at this point, it was still taking time to develop into a usable system and neededoperating system fundamentals such as file handing and resource routines. as part of the buy out, commodore had imposedtheir own strict deadlines to get the system to market and so employed metacomco to porta version of tripos and incorporate it into
the intuition code. tripos was originally developed at cambridgeuniversity on an ibm 3081, this was then ported to the motorola 68k by dr. tim king. it's fit with the motorola chip meant thatmodifying it for the lorraine chip set was reasonably straight forward, however the finalresults were still far below the original visions of jay and his team, lacking manyof the features they had intended, including resource tracking which would free up resourceson the fly and a technically advanced file system. still workbench, working alongside the kickstartboot rom still made for a cutting edge operating
experience compared to rival systems. this was still a time before windows 1.0 hadeven been released. aside from the technical aspects, there wasalso the aesthetics of the new computer to deal with. jay had a whole swave of design drawings whichhad already progressed, showcasing an elegant system in line with desktop systems like theibm pc junior, but some additional tweaks were put into place including a garage unitwhich allowed the keyboard to fit under the machine, suggested by dave morse, who wasstill present and managing the subsidiary, along with a pencil holder on the keyboardand a stereo start up tune.
not only did amiga put a lot of time intothe machine, but commodore did as well, fully in the belief that they had hit the holy grailof the computing world. just 11 months after the purchase of amigaincorporated, the commodore amiga was unveiled at a lavish new york show at the lincoln centreon 23rd july 1985. for this grand event, a full orchestra washired, all commodore and amiga employees were shipped over and a lavish display was presented. commodore's vice president bob truckenbrodehosted the show but it was bob pariseau who took charge of the machine's real demonstrations. in many respects, the event was designed likea flamboyant version of the apple macintosh
launch, and it showed the key stand out abilitiesof the new machine, but purpose and direction felt a little lacking. to end the display, the old faithfull boingball demo was back, this time running on a full blown amigaos with workbench file managementand intuition windows allowing tasks to be run simultaneously in the background whilstthe ball bounced on regardless. the ball had become so synonymous with amigathat it was originally uses for it's official logo (something that holds true in more recenttimes), but commodore decided to replace it with a rainbow checkmark, similar to the styleof their earlier commodore 64 detailing in a bid to identify the amiga as a continuationof their earlier, and somewhat equally as
impressive hardware. the show was finalised by andy warhol anddeborah harry (of blondie fame) joining each other on stage to show case some of the machine'sgraphical abilities, along with a helping hand of resident amiga artist, jack hager. the paint program in question, called propaintwas still in it's alpha stages and had known bugs with the flood fill tool, however blissfullyunaware warhol went off on a flood fill pandemic, seemingly pushing the software to breakingpoint, but thankfully for amiga, no freezes or glitches occurred. press coverage of the show seemed somewhatmixed.
people were clearly impressed with the amiga'sabilities, but the system was perhaps so far ahead of it's time, that many didn't knowwhat these features could even be used for. it seems a little absurd now, but the industrywas quite well entrenched in the ibm pc compatible landscape of blandness. the amiga was just pissing all over that andpeople didn't know how to react. the original machine was available as eithera 256kb variant, or 512kb via a front expansion upgrade... something jay had to plead withcommodore to incorporate, knowing that 256kb just wouldn't be enough after the operatingsystem was loaded into memory. other than being able to read to and fromdisk, there was very little in the way of
rom at this point also, with kickstart loadedvia. disk into a 256kb write control store areaof memory, which remained resident until power off. one reason for this was to iron out bugs inthe code before incorporating a complete kickstart rom chip. at it's heart was of course the motorola 68000clocked at 7.16mhz (7.09mhz pal) the custom chip set, later known as the ocsor original chip set comprised of our friends, agnus incorporating the blitter block imagetransfer processor and the copper, co-processor. denise is on hand to fetch planar video datafrom the amiga's bitplanes and translate it
into a color lookup as well as handling overvideos modes. she can provide a borderless display with640 x 256 pixels on pal screens, which can be vertically doubled for interlaced display. denise can also handle 8 16 pixel wide spriteson 3 separate layers in 4 colours, including transparent, or 15 colours when combined. paula is still handling input, output, includingthe floppy drive, serial port and mouse ports, but also holds the amiga's audio capabilities. she comes with 4 dma based 8 bit sample channels,split to allow stereo audio and also allows one channel to modulate another channel'soutput allowing for basic fm synthesis effects.
data is held by a 3.5" double density floppydrive offering 880kb of capacity and a single zorrro 1 card slot is provided on the rightof the machine for expansion. port wise, the machine has a keyboard port,2 mouse ports, an rs-232 serial interface, centronics parallel access and an additionalfloppy drive connector. for video there's an analog rgb out, a tvmod output that can be used with an additional rf modulator, and composite outputs. as a tribute to it's creators, who put theirheart and soul into this machine, the original models bear the molded markings of the entireteam's signatures, including a paw print from faithful mitchie, who jay apparently posedquestions to and based many a decision around
his k9 response. in it's sleek low profile package, the commodoreamiga looked ahead of it's time both technically and aesthetically, released for $1,495 forthe 512kb model and $1,295 for the 256kb iteration in north america. an analog rgb monitor was available for anadditional $300 bringing the cheapest package to $1,595. this was a price beyond most casual usersbut was still half the price of a 128kb macintosh at $2,495 and cheaper than ibm pc-at machines,whilst packing a hell of a lot more power. however, there was one, slight thorn in thisissue.
whist commodore amiga were frantically buildingaway, jack tramiel and his team of ex-commmodore staff over at atari had been working evenmore frantically and had been successful in launching the atari 520st a whole month earlier,and not only that, but at a far cheaper price. $799.99 with a monochrome monitor and $999.99for colour. if you consider that the amiga didn't evencome with a monitor as standard, this was one hell of a deal. of course it's true that the atari st didn'thave the same custom abilities as the amiga but even without those chips, jack's machinewas still pretty advanced in itself. it also had the head start, further confoundedby commodore not getting amigas out until
november. and crucially, it had the price. rather than unveiling a golden ticket unrivaledby other machines, jack had got back at his former company within just a few months andthrown commodore amiga into a furious competition from the go. by riding on higher development costs andchoosing a price point over $1,000 commodore had immediately placed their amiga into thehigh end computer workstation market, fighting the likes of apple and ibm. this was a market where software mattered.
where spreadsheets and productivity were king,and as a new machine, the amiga simply lacked a great deal of software. atari's pricing had placed their machine intobig player in an entry level price zone, opening up the system for a swathe of new users wantingto get into something new and exciting. this early discrepancy meant the st was initiallyoutselling the amiga and as a result gathering a reasonable degree of software houses lookingto work on it, including game developers. however, amiga did still have the wow factor,along with a few other cards beginning to fall nicely from their sleeves. one of these cards came from the then innovativeelectronic arts headed by the familiar face
of trip hawkins. before, after and during the amiga's debut,the aspect which received the most interest was its remarkable graphics capabilities. able to display 32 colours on screen froma palette of 4,096 in low res and 16 in high res, not to mention it's 64 and even 4,096colour ham mode, these abilities dumped all over apple's monochrome mac, ibm's 4 colourcga and even beat the atari st's maximum of 16 out of a palette of 512. amiga's various demos showcased these abilities,but if software was available which allowed users to really capitalise on this ability,then the purpose of the amiga would start
to become clear. deluxe paint, a rewrite of their prism packagefor dos really brought the tools to the table, and artists inspired by the appearance andcontinued work of warhol on the machine began popping up. in a shrewd move, commodore had given ea accessto prototype machines several months ahead of the launch date, allowing trip hawkinsand his team to really see the machine's potential. before this point, most programs had theirown file formats, in a bid to lock users into their line of software, however ea were thefirst to really integrate a literal interchangeable file format (.iff) into their package developedby jerry morrison.
this .iff format acted as a container, allowingimages, sound, graphics and animations to all adopt this universal format. combined with the new features offered indeluxe paint, which rather than presenting basic digital tools, seemed to re-create anartist studio in the computer, it opened up a door way for a generation of new artistsand graphical tweakers who could begin to unlock the wonders of this new machine orjust play around with a wealth of colour and bathe in its on screen glory. if the ibm had found it's niche with businessand spreadsheet programs, the mac with desktop publishing and the st with music production,the amiga was just beginning to find its footing
in the world of graphical superiority. released in november 1985, deluxe paint wasone of the first in a line of electronic arts releases which would help propel the amigaforward and solidify its place in computer history. strangely, games, the software genre the machinewas apparently ideal (and originally developed) for had barely got a mention so far. the launch party was devoid of any nod andcommodore seemed to be glossing over the subject altogether. this was alas, an early sign of the mismanagementthe amiga would receive as commodore tried
to establish its identity and purpose. the trap they had fallen into was the trapof "the serious". the notion that expensive technology can'tbe seen as a frivolous entertainment machine at the cost of losing credibility. this was in part a notion ibm and apple hadcome up with to make their machine's lack of graphical and sound abilities come acrossas a selling point. rather than breaking this mould and declaringhow revolutionary and ideal for the task their machine was commodore fell right into it,opting for the business computer pitch, and although games would also immediately beginto emerge on the system, they didn't really
showcase the hardware. mostly being conversions from other, lessermachines or just ports from games which were already available on the atari st. in part commodore still viewed their 64 asthe low end gaming machine, which indeed it was, but the market was ready for a leadinglight, something to shine the way, even at a high price. commodore were also under some strain, havingconfusingly launched their original line upgrade, the commodore 128 earlier in the year, alongsidethe poorly selling plus/4 range, their resources and profits were becoming thinner.
the commodore 64 was still being sold, andselling well, at big retail chains, but the amiga wasn't even stocked in them, with commodoreeven turning down an offer for sears to stock the new hardware, an outlet where atari stswere stocked and selling. instead commodore seemed to continue theiremulation of apple's sales techniques with a zombie based advert, similar to apple'sfamous 1984 ad and a bizarre presentation based on 2001: a space odyssey. the advertising continued, apparently tryingto sell alone off the amiga's abilities and even moved to soul-less comparison shots beforethe year was out. combined with the delayed production, lacklustrepersonality and muddled direction, the amiga
only sold 35,000 in 1985, and this wasn'thelping with commodore's cashflow, leading to the company bailing on the january 1986consumer electronics show. this didn't go amiss from the press who notedthat after establishing their brand at that very show, it was akin to russia resigningfrom the soviet bloc. thomas rattigan, former ceo of pepsico internationalwas installed as ceo in february 1986, replacing marshall smith, and immediately began a muchneeded plan to redirect the companies operations and make the most of their frankly, groundbreaking technology. by now the amiga was selling approximately10,000 machines per month. a figure the atari st was beating, along withdealer signups and software support, leading
to further software ports from the st whichjust made the amiga look like a high cost version of the st. rattigan's plan was to first cancel well overduelines such as the pet, vic-20 and plus/4 and then create 2 versions of the amiga hardware. the first would be a high end desktop aimedat the creative markets. the second would be a cost-reduced versiondesigned to replace the commodore 64 and 128 models. finally a clear path was beginning to be laid. whilst these plans were being laid, jay'soriginal team based in los gatos were clearly
still disgruntled by the handling of theirprecious technology. to this end, whilst working on workbench 1.1,an un-named engineer tucked an easter egg into the operating system that would appearwhen a certain combination of keys were pressed ("we made the amiga, they fucked it up"). rj mical discovered it and although findingit amusing, asked the engineer to change it. however, it was merely encrypted and the firstbatch of european pal amiga's flashed the message on screen for 1/60th of a second ifyou held down 8 keys and inserted a disk at the same time. apparently someone with keen eyes spottedthis, and recorded the output to a vcr, which
even with shoddy 1980s freeze frame ability,allowed it to be shown to amiga executives, who quickly pulled thousands of machines fromuk shelves. given that it was unlikely to ever be foundby users, pulling the machines and suffering a 3 month sales delay whilst new roms werefitted seems a costly and strange measure to take. but then it wouldn't be the first we've encounteredin the amiga saga. shortly after, commodore decided to move thelos gatos team closer to head quarters in west chester, pennslyvania, whilst makingseveral lay offs in the process, due to cost cutting.
some of the remaining team did as bade, howeverjay miner had had enough and decided to exit the endeavor and an official employee, andinstead work as an external consultant for the company from his home town. to further reduce commodore's overheads, staffand other internal projects were discarded. this included projects like the commodore65, the commodore 900 unix workstation and even commodore's office branding and supplieswhich had helped establish the company in its infancy. rattigan then set about his plans. proposals for the high end machine were firstgiven to commodore's german subsidiary, who
had recently been responsible for launchingcommodore's ibm pc compatible range. armed with this fresh pc knowledge their ideawas to incorporate an open architecture into the new amiga, expanding the bus and allowingisa cards as well as amiga zorro cards to be added. a dedicated video slot was also introducedallowing a genlock card upgrade. this allowed computer images to be placedon top of video seamlessly, and fitted perfectly with the amiga's native video editing abilities. the amiga was really defining the multimediaplatform as it went, and it would pave amiga's way into the standard machine of use in thevideo industry.
the final case and keyboard wasn't as elegantas the original model, but that's in part thanks to another cost cutting measure ofusing the cancelled commodore 900 workstation case as the housing. the new machine launching in march 1987 wouldbe called the amiga 2000, instigating a name change of the original commodore amiga tothe amiga 1000. it retailed for a hefty $2395, armed with512kb of ram as standard and including a monitor from the off. immediately its path was sown and advertisingwas launched hitting home the machine's intended niche and selling points.
at the other end of the scale work had alsobegun on a low end amiga, dubbed the 500. engineer george robbins was keen to jump onthe project from the go, having pitched for such a machine from the start, fitting muchmore in line with commodore's earlier systems and indeed the expectations of developersand consumers alike. commodore's core group of engineers were putto task on the machine with jeff porter in charge - who had previously been working ona cancelled commodore laptop. along with robbins, bob welland headed upthe engineering of the system who set about shrinking the amiga 1000 hardware, along withsome subtle improvements. one of these was the upgrade of agnus to fatagnus, allowing the system to be upgraded
with 512kb of pseudo fast ram. the motherboards were codenamed after a b52song rock lobster, which you can find printed on the boards.. a trend which would continuewith future amiga variations. the new case design was very much conceivedto flow on from earlier commodore machines and the recently revamped commodore 64c model,and so a sleek wedge case was molded offering floppy disk access on the side much like atari'salso updated 520stfm model. it seems whatever the amiga was doing, atariwere always so very slightly ahead. still, the amiga 500 was planned for launchin july 1987 but arrived a few months late in october for the budget price of $699 innorth america and â£499 in the uk, and was
ready to go head to head with the atari stand wangle its way into homes and living rooms throughout the world. not long after this the 2000 model, havingshipped 60,000 units was updated to include some of the 500s design improvements and afew updates with us based dave haynie and terry fisher taking the task to hand. a new buster chip was integrated to managethe expansion bus, also allowing plug and play functionality, another ahead of it'stime feature. a co-processor interface was added for cpuupgrades and of course fat agnus was integrated, giving the 2000 a much needed 1mb memory boost.
it appears that once again, commodore werefinding their footing. thomas rattigan had begun to turn things around,posting $28 million in profits for the previous financial year, but yet, this apparently displeasedchairman irving gould who seemingly had a bone to pick with rattigan, possibly an egotisticaldisturbance, its hard to be sure. but gould accused rattigan of conducting himselfin a "high profile manner", whatever that means... to me it sounds like he just didn'tlike the guy, and a consulting firm was hired to quickly concluded that rattigan shouldbe fired. this was promptly executed by gould in april1987, and rattigan found himself booted out of commodore the very next day to the bewildermentof fellow staff members.
he would subsequently sue commodore for breachof contract and finally win in 1991 for $9 million dollars, but be unable to completethe work he had begun. we'll never know what difference he wouldhave made to the greater picture of amiga, but for now commodore had 2 new machines,and a healthier set of accounts, and was about to launch the sidecar, allowing the 1000 toserve as a full pc-xt clone. so, what about software for these machines? after all, we know its pretty essential....... well, ready for the 500 in particular, onegame had shone the way since the late 1986 world of commodore show....
defender of the crown. defender of the crown almost defined a newgenre of game. it burst open the boundaries of experienceyou could reap from a gaming world previously filled with abstract concepts or frantic action. here was a game, which as it's appropriatelynamed creators had envisaged, was essentially a play along film. for the amiga, it was an experience whichtied well with the multimedia principles the hardware was designed for. underneath it's really a risk like game, dottedwith a plethora of mini-games, but it was
the colourful, high quality graphics whichreally caught the eye of gamers currently squinting at their 8 bit screens. older hardware really needed an overlay ofimagination to bring it to life. in defender of the crown, there was no need. bob jacob, cinemaware's founder was no strangerto game development, having worked on a number of commodore 64 titles, but having witnessedthe amiga in its early days, he really got a sense of what the machine could do and builta development company to specifically take advantage of that. although even the best amiga games were sellingonly 25,000 copies in 1986, commodore 64 versions
were selling over 100,000 more. jacob's idea was to wow the press and consumerswith the amiga game releases, and then follow them up with cut down versions on other hardware. it was a strategy which worked and reallyset the scene for the amiga as the games machine it was. rj mical was actually contracted to re-writethe amiga version and it turned out to be one of the best and most impressive incarnations. almost 200,000 amiga's had been sold by theend of 1986, but the new 1987 machines heralded a different approach, and keen to gloss overtheir earlier mishaps, commodore asked the
press to refer to the new machines as "theamiga, from commodore", with new logo designs on cases. this pushed the amiga as almost a separateentity, and helped dispense confusion from commodore's continued commodore 64 and 128lines. with the amiga 500 launched, sales began topick up in the all important home market, but the machines were still expensive andrelied on their impressive capabilities to sell. nintendo was currently dominating the homeconsole market with the nes in north america and sega was gaining traction with the mastersystem in other regions.
these consoles were cheaper than home computers,in part because they relied on receiving most of their revenue from game licensing models. this meant that although hardware was cheap,games were more expensive, and it was also harder to publish on them. one of the distinct advantages with machineslike the amiga, was their open platform. practically anyone could create their ownsoftware on disk and publish it. this quickly meant a wave of new softwarewas created for the machines. some conversions from the atari st, some brandnew and some was just coded by people at homeand released as public domain software....
an area which would grow rapidly over thenext few years. although the new systems were selling in america,it was over in europe where things were looking much more rosy. since it's launch, the atari stfm in particularhad gained a foothold as the must have computer upgrade for current sinclair spectrum, amstradand commodore 64 owners. this was a region much more used to plonkinga full blown computer in front of the living room television for both gaming, and generaltinkering. it's this tinkering which grew the numberof european development houses so quickly, and eager for new technology, many of thesedevelopers had moved onto the st when it arrived.
armed with motorola 68000 knowledge, the amigaseemed a natural and exciting progression and although in the uk only some 50,000 500'swere sold in the first year, soon games were released which really took advantage of it'scustom hardware. in 1988, the number of 500 systems sold increasedin the same region increased to almost 150,000 and it looked like commodore uk and europeanbased gamers, at least, were onto a winner. another key reason for this was the tacticswhich commodore uk employed over their american counterparts. instead of bundling the amiga 500 with businessand educational software, followed by further mundane adverts, david pleasance, the uk salesand marketing director set about creating
entertainment based packs, which echoed earlierbundles from commodore and even sinclair, under amstrad's rule. one of these packages in particular was thebatman pack, incorporating an a500, along with the new batman game, based on tim burton's1989 classic, as well as the new zealand story, interceptor and deluxe paint 2 for just â£399. a similar pack was also released for the commodore64, but the amiga was exciting, it was powerful, it was glorious. these key moves increased annual machine salesto over 200,000 by 1989 and what's more, the amiga was just getting started.
