Amiga

In computing, Amiga is a range of home/personal computers primarily using the Motorola 68000 processor family, whose development started in 1982, initially as a game machine. The original Amiga hardware was designed by Jay Miner; his machine was ahead of its time when it appeared in 1985, having a custom chipset with advanced graphics and sound features and a sophisticated multitasking operating system, now known as AmigaOS. The Amiga eventually became popular among computer enthusiasts, especially in Europe, as they upgraded from 8-bit computers such as the Commodore 64. It also found a business role in video production.

Technical features

The Amiga had some of the most impressive sound and graphics available for the home user. Indeed, it was also used for commercial entertainment production till the mid 1990s, aiding users in the Video editing and 3D fields.

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The very first model, the Amiga 1000, was designed with a 7.16MHz CPU so it could easily work with NTSC video. The CPU clock frequency was precisely double the 3.58MHz color carrier frequency. Continuing its video focus, the 1000 had a composite video output, which allowed it to be hooked up directly to a TV or VCR. However, the output signal was considered too "hot" (strong) by many to be useful for anything other than home use.

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The Original Amiga chipset, or OCS, was more advanced than other architectures of its time: it had dedicated chips for graphic effects based on the monitor's beam position and the use of genlocks was very easy; even today many broadcast corporations still use A3000s and A4000s for their real-time video effects. Many programs for making fansubs were written for the Amiga.

Related Topics:
Original Amiga chipset - Genlock - A3000 - A4000 - Fansub

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One unique feature the Amiga had was the ability to change the monitor resolution on the fly, within a scan line or two. This allowed multiple overlapping screens of different resolutions that could be pulled down or up in front of each other, completely without interfering with each other, controlled at the hardware level. The chipset included a blitter, which could not only copy and manipulate large area of graphics, making the Amiga well suited to arcade action games, but it also included line drawing and area-filling hardware, which helped advance the popularity of real-time 3D games.

Related Topics:
Blitter - 3D games

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