Amiga

This article is about the family of home computers. For other uses, see Amiga (disambiguation).

File:Amiga Logo.jpg

The original Amiga 1000 (1985) with various peripherals

The Amiga 500 (1987) was the most popular variant of the Amiga.

The Amiga is a family of personal computers originally developed by Amiga Corporation. Development on the Amiga began in 1982 with Jay Miner (1932-1994) as the principal hardware designer. Commodore International introduced the machine to the market in 1985, after having bought Amiga Corporation.

Based on the Motorola 68k series of microprocessors, the machine sported a custom chipset with advanced graphics and sound capabilities, and a sophisticated pre-emptive multitasking operating system. While the M68k was a 32-bit processor, the version originally used in the Amiga had a 16-bit external data bus, and the machine (along with its contemporary, the Atari ST) was generally referred to in the press as a 16-bit computer. The Amiga provided a significant upgrade from 8-bit computers such as the Commodore 64, and the Amiga quickly grew in popularity among computer enthusiasts, especially in Europe. It also found a prominent role in the video production and show control business, and was a less-expensive alternative to the Apple Macintosh and IBM-PC. The Amiga was most commercially successful as a home computer, although early Commodore advertisements attempted to place the Amiga into several different markets at the same time.

The name Amiga was selected by the developers specifically from the Spanish word for a female friend.

History

Main article: History of the Amiga

The Amiga was originally designed by a small company called Amiga Corporation, and initially intended to be a next generation video game machine, but was later redesigned into a general purpose computer . Before the machine was released into the market the company was purchased by Commodore. The first model, later known as the Amiga 1000, was released in 1985 as a successor to the Commodore 64 and as a rival to the Atari ST. Commodore later released several new Amiga models, both for low-end gaming use and high-end productivity use. Throughout the 1980s, the Amiga's combination of hardware and operating system software offered great value, but by the mid-nineties other platforms, most of all the PC, reduced or eliminated this advantage.

In 1994, Commodore filed for bankruptcy and its assets were purchased by Escom, a German PC manufacturer, who created the subsidiary company Amiga Technologies. They re-released the A1200 and A4000T, and introduced a new 68060 version of the A4000T.

However, Escom in turn went bankrupt in 1997. The Amiga brand was then sold to another PC manufacturer, Gateway 2000, which had announced grand plans for it. However, in 2000, Gateway sold the Amiga brand.

The current owner of the trademark, Amiga, Inc., has licensed the rights to make hardware using the Amiga brand to a UK computer vendor, Eyetech Group, Ltd, which was founded by some former UK employees of Commodore International. They are currently selling the AmigaOne via an international dealer network. The AmigaOne is a PowerPC computer designed to run the lastest version of AmigaOS, which was itself licensed to a Belgian-German company, Hyperion Entertainment.

Hardware

At its core, the Amiga featured custom designed coprocessors, useful for handling tasks such as audio, video, encoding and animation. This freed up the Amiga's central processor for other tasks (given that the coprocessors could keep up with the central processor's demands) and gave the Amiga an edge on its competitors in many situations.

Commodore released three significant upgrades: the Amiga 2000 in 1987, the Amiga 3000 in 1990, and the Amiga 4000 in 1992. These upgrades improved the platform's graphical abilities, allowing for more colors and different display modes, and added expansion slots and ports. The best selling models, however, were the much cheaper but still versatile console models -- the Amiga 500 (1987) and the Amiga 1200 (1992).

The platform also introduced other innovations. For example, the Amiga CDTV was the first computer to feature a CD-ROM drive as standard, as well as being one of the earlier computers to no longer include a floppy drive in the standard configuration. The Amiga was also one of the first computers for which inexpensive sound sampling and video digitization accessories were available.

In 2006, PC World rated the Amiga 1000 as the seventh greatest PC of all time, stating "Years ahead of its time, the Amiga was the world's first multimedia, multitasking personal computer". .

Central processing unit

PowerPC processor.

All Commodore Amiga models make use of Motorola CPUs based on the Motorola 68k architecture. Introduced by Motorola in 1979, the 68k CPU family has powered numerous computer and game systems, including the Atari ST, Apple Macintosh, Sharp X68000, Sega Mega Drive, NeXT and Sun Microsystems workstations and servers.

In desktop style Amiga models the CPU was fitted on a daughterboard (except the A2000) called a CPU card. Low cost Amiga models came with CPUs either socketed or embedded on the motherboard. On all Amiga models the CPU could be upgraded through an expansion card or direct CPU replacement. CPU cards were provided by both Commodore and third party manufacturers. These cards often came with onboard memory slots and hard drive interfaces, alleviating those tasks from the base Amiga.

The Amiga was not limited to solely the 68k CPU architecture; it was also possible to install a PowerPC coprocessor that could be used by PowerPC aware software and libraries, and later the AmigaOne used a PowerPC CPU instead of a 68k CPU.

Custom chipset

Main articles: Original Amiga chipset, Enhanced Chip Set, and Advanced Graphics Architecture

The Amiga's custom chipset, as the name implies, consists of a number of chips.

There are three generations of chipsets used in the various Amiga models. The first was OCS, followed by ECS and finally AGA. What all these chipsets have in common is that they handle raster graphics, digital audio and communication between various peripherals (e.g. CPU, memory and floppy disks) in the Amiga.

Graphics

The Amiga chipsets (OCS, ECS and AGA) can display full screen and animated color graphics. All Amigas can display graphics with 32, 64 (EHB Mode) or 4096 colors (HAM Mode). Models with the AGA chipset (A1200 and A4000) also have 128, 256 and 262,000 color modes and a palette expanded from 4096 to 16.8 million colors.

Genlock

The Amiga chipset could genlock — adjust its own screen refresh timing to match an NTSC or PAL video signal. When combined with setting transparency, this allowed an Amiga to overlay an external video source with graphics. This ability made the Amiga popular for many applications, and provided the ability to do character generation and CGI effects far more cheaply than earlier systems. Some frequent users of this ability included wedding videographers, TV stations and their weather forecasting divisions (for weather graphics and radar), advertising channels, music video production, and 'desktop video'. The NewTek Video Toaster was made possible by the genlock ability of the Amiga.

Sound

Main article: Original Amiga chipset § Paula

The sound chip, named Paula, supports four sound channels (2 for the left speaker and 2 for the right) with 8 bit resolution for each channel and a 6 bit volume control. The analog output is connected to a low-pass filter, which filters out high-frequency aliases when the Amiga is using a lower sampling rate (see Nyquist limit). The brightness of the Amiga's power LED is used to indicate the status of the Amiga’s low-pass filter. The filter is active when the LED is at normal brightness, and deactivated when dimmed. Older Amiga 500's simply turned off the power LED. Paula can read directly from the system's chip ram memory, using direct memory access (DMA), making sound playback without CPU intervention possible.

Although the hardware is limited to 4 separate sound channels, software such as Octamed uses software mixing to allow 8 or more virtual channels, and it was possible for software to mix two hardware channels to achieve a single 14-bit resolution channel by playing with the volumes of the channels in such a way that one of the source channels contributes the most significant bits and the other the least ones.

The quality of the Amiga's sound output, and the fact that the hardware is ubiquitous and easily addressed by software, were standout features of Amiga hardware unavailable on PC platforms for years. Third party sound cards exist that provide DSP functions, multi-track direct to disk recording, multiple hardware sound channels and 16 bit and beyond resolutions. A retargetable sound API called AHI was developed allowing these cards to be used transparently by the OS and software.

ROM

The classic Amiga Operating System consisted of Intuition and Workbench. In the Amiga 1000 model, Intuition was first loaded from a floppy disk, followed by Workbench. Later models held Intuition on a ROM, improving start up times. Models could be upgraded by changing the ROM.

There are hardware and software packages can "shadow" the Kickstart into memory. This will result in faster operation for functions depended on the ROM, at the cost of using main system memory to store the ROM data.

Three finger salute

The Amiga's three-finger salute (CTRL plus the two "Amiga" keys), which reboots the system (but does not erase or reload the Kickstart software), is actually implemented in hardware, unlike the software-based forms in many OSs. If the OS software fails to acknowledge the key sequence in a short time (due to a hung OS) the keyboard hardware will forcibly reset the CPU. Another kind of three-finger salute (CTRL plus the two "Alt" keys) was introduced with AmigaOS 4.0 which resets the machine entirely, forcing a reload of the Kickstart.

Third party hardware

Many expansion boards were produced for Amigas to improve the performance and capability of the hardware, such as memory expansions, SCSI controllers, CPU boards, and graphics boards. Other upgrades included genlocks, ethernet cards, modems, sound cards and samplers, video digitizers, USB cards, extra serial ports, and IDE controllers.

The most popular upgrades were memory, SCSI controllers and CPU accelerator cards. These were sometimes combined into the one device, particularly on big box Amigas like the A2000, A3000 and A4000.

Early CPU accelerator cards featured full 32bit CPUs of the 68000 family such as the Motorola 68020 and Motorola 68030, almost always with 32bit memory and usually with FPUs and MMUs or the facility to add them. Later designs featured the Motorola 68040 and Motorola 68060. Both CPUs featured integrated FPUs and MMUs. Many CPU accelerator cards also had integrated SCSI controllers.

Phase5 designed the PowerUp boards (BlizzardPPC and CyberstormPPC) featuring both a 68k (a 68040 or 68060) and a PPC (603 or 604) CPU, which are able to run the two CPUs at the same time (and share the system memory). The PPC CPU on PowerUp boards is usually used as a coprocessor for heavy computations (a powerful CPU is needed to run for example MAME, but even decoding JPEG pictures and MP3 audio was considered heavy computation in those years). It is also possible to ignore the 68k CPU and run Linux on the PPC (project Linux APUS), but a PPC native Amiga OS was not available when the PPC boards first appeared.

24 bit graphics cards and video cards were also available. Graphics cards are designed primarily for 2D artwork production, workstation use, and later, gaming. Video cards are designed for inputting and outputting video signals, and processing and manipulating video.

Perhaps the most famous video card in the North American market was the NewTek Video Toaster. This was a powerful video effects board which turned the Amiga into an affordable video processing computer which found its way into many professional video environments. Due to its NTSC-only design it did not find a market in countries that used the PAL standard, such as in Europe. In PAL countries the Opalvision card was popular, although less featured and supported than the Video Toaster. Low-cost time base correctors (TBCs) specifically designed to work with the Toaster quickly came to market, most of which were designed as standard Amiga bus cards.

Various manufacturers started producing PCI busboards for the A1200 and A4000, allowing standard Amigas to use PCI cards such as Voodoo graphic cards, Soundblaster sound cards, 10/100 ethernet and TV tuners.

PowerPC upgrades with Wide SCSI controllers, PCI busboards with ethernet, sound and 3D graphics cards, and towerized cases allowed the A1200 and A4000 to survive well into the late nineties.

Expansion boards were made by Richmond Sound Design that allowed their show control and sound design software to communicate with their custom hardware frames either by ribbon cable or fiber optic cable for long distances, allowing the Amiga to control up to 8 million digitally controlled external audio, lighting, automation, relay and voltage control channels spread around a large theme park, for example. See Amiga software for more information on these applications.

Models and variants

Main article: Amiga models and variants

The Classic Amiga models: 1000, 500, 2000, 1500, 2500, 3000, 3000UX, 3000T, 500+, 600, 1200, 4000, 4000T and others, were produced from 1985 to 1996. The PowerPC based AmigaOne was later produced from 2002 to 2005. Some companies have also released Amiga clones.

AmigaOS 4 compatible Models

AmigaOS 4 and beyond runs on both Amigas equipped with CyberstormPPC or BlizzardPPC accelerator boards, and on the PPC Teron series based AmigaOne computers built by Eyetech upon license by Amiga Inc. AmigaOS 4.0 for accelerator boards is available only to AmigaOS 4.0 developers. Due to the nature of some provisions of the contract between Amiga Inc. and Hyperion Entertainment the Belgian-German firm which is developing the OS, the commercial AmigaOS has been licensed only to buyers of AmigaOne motherboards. AmigaOS 4.0 had been available only in developer pre-releases for numerous years until the final update was 'released' in December 2006. Its sale being bound to hardware by license agreement but lacking availability of such, AmigaOS 4.0 is waiting for the release of new motherboards from ACK Software Controls announced for mid-2007.

Emulating the Amiga

Main article: Amiga emulation

Since around 2000 hardware has developed to a point where many different platforms have Amiga emulation programs available that reproduce the Amiga's hardware functions in software. This allows users to run Amiga software without the need for an actual Amiga computer.

Operating systems

AmigaOS

Main article: AmigaOS

File:AmigaOS 3 9 Workbench.jpg

Amiga OS 3.9

At the time of release AmigaOS gave the average consumer the experience of an OS quite ahead of its time. It was one of the first commercially available consumer operating systems to implement preemptive multitasking [5] Other features included combining a graphical user interface with a command line interface, allowing long filenames permitting whitespace and not requiring a file extension and the use of information files associated with other files to store icon, launch and other desktop data.

John C. Dvorak stated in 1996 that AmigaOS "remains one of the great operating systems of the past 20 years, incorporating a small kernel and tremendous multitasking capabilities the likes of which have only recently been developed in OS/2 and Windows NT. The biggest difference is that the AmigaOS could operate fully and multitask in as little as 250 K of address space."

Like other operating systems of the time, the OS lacked memory protection. This was necessary also because the 68000 CPU of the first Amiga computers did not include a memory management unit, and because there was no way of enforcing use of flags indicating memory to be shared. The lack of memory protection made the Amiga OS more vulnerable to crashes from badly behaving programs, and fundamentally incapable of enforcing any form of security model since any program had full access to the system. Later this memory protection feature was implemented in Amiga OS 4.

The problem was somewhat exacerbated by Commodore's initial decision to release documentation relating not only to the OS's underlying software routines, but also to the hardware itself, enabling intrepid programmers to poke the hardware directly. While the decision to release this documentation was a popular one and allowed the creation of sophisticated sound and graphics routines in games and demos, it also contributed to system instability as some programmers lacked the expertise to program at this level. For this reason, when the new AGA chipset was released, Commodore declined to release documentation for it, forcing most programmers to adopt the approved software routines.

Following Commodore's bankruptcy, two main clones of AmigaOS were developed: MorphOS, which runs on Amiga and Pegasos machines, and the free software AROS project.

*NIX

Commodore-Amiga produced Amiga Unix, informally known as Amix, based on AT&T SVR4. It supported the Amiga 2500 and Amiga 3000 and was included with the Amiga 3000UX. There are still enthusiasts running Amix but it was never supported on the later Amiga systems based on 68040 or 68060. Amix was sold primarily to college students. Among other unusual features of Amix was a hardware-accelerated windowing system which could scroll windows without copying data.

Other, still maintained, operating systems are available for the classic Amiga platform, including Linux and NetBSD. Both require a CPU with MMU such as the 68020 with 68851 or full versions of the 68030, 68040 or 68060. There is a version of Linux for PPC accelerator cards. Debian and Yellow Dog Linux can run on the AmigaOne.

There is an official, older version of OpenBSD. The last Amiga release is 3.2.

Also, Minix 1.5.10 runs on Amiga. Floppies are formatted using Atari ST 720 kB format so they need to be converted to ADF format in order to run under UAE.

The bootblock

File:Amiga kick34.5 askforwb1.3.png

If an Amiga 500 is rebooted or powered without a floppy this screen is displayed. The displayed OS is Kickstart 34.5 (AmigaOS 1.3), included in the Amiga 500 ROM.

When an Amiga is reset, the Kickstart code selects a boot device (floppy or HD), loads the first two sectors of the disk or partition (the bootblock), and passes control to it. Normally this code passes control back to the OS, continuing to boot from the device or partition it was loaded from. The first production Amiga, the Amiga 1000, needed to load Kickstart from floppy disk into 256 kilobytes of RAM reserved for this purpose, but subsequent Amigas held Kickstart in ROM. Some games and demos for the A1000 (notably Dragon's Lair) provided an alternative codebase to install, in order to use the extra 256 kilobytes of RAM for data.

A floppy disk or HD partition bootblock normally contains code to load the dos.library (AmigaDOS) and then exit to it, invoking the GUI. Any such disk, no matter what the other contents of the disk, was referred to as a "Boot disk" or "Workbench disk". Some entertainment software contains custom bootblocks. The game or demo then takes control of memory and resources to suit itself, effectively disabling AmigaOS and the Amiga GUI.

The bootblock became an obvious target for virus writers. Some games or demos that used a custom bootblock would not work if infected with a bootblock virus, as the virus's code replaced the original. Anti-virus attempts included custom bootblocks that advertised their presence while checking the system for tell-tale signs of memory resident viruses and then passed control back to the system. Unfortunately these could not be used on disks that already relied on a custom bootblock, but did alert users of potential trouble.

Amiga hardware clones

Long time Amiga developer MacroSystems entered the Amiga-clone market with their DraCo nonlinear video edit system. It appeared in two versions, initially a tower model and later a cube. DraCo expanded upon and combined a number of earlier expansion cards developed for Amiga (VLabMotion, Toccata, WarpEngine, RetinaIII) into a true Amiga clone powered by Motorola's 68060 processor. The DraCo can run AmigaOS3.1 up through AmigaOS3.9. It is the only Amiga based system to support FireWire for video I/O. DraCo also offers an Amiga compatible ZORRO-II expansion bus and introduced a faster custom DraCoBus, capable of 30 MB/sec transfer rates (faster than Commodore's ZORRO-III). The technology was later used in the Casablanca system, a set-top-box also designed for nonlinear video editing.

In 1998, Index Information released the Access, an Amiga clone similar to the A1200, but on a motherboard which could fit into a standard 5 1/4" drive bay. It featured either a 68020 or 68030 CPU, with a redesigned AGA chipset, and ran AmigaOS 3.1.

In 2006, two new Amiga clones were announced. The Minimig is a personal project of Dutch engineer Dennis van Weeren. Minimig replicates the Amiga OCS custom chip set inside an FPGA. The original model was built on a Spartan 3 development board, now a dedicated board has been demonstrated. The design for Minimig is expected to be released to Open Source in mid 2007.

Individual Computers has announced development of the Clone-A system. As of mid 2007 it has been shown in it's prototype form, with FPGA based boards replacing the custom chips in an Amiga 500.

Emulating other systems

Main article: Emulation on the Amiga

The Amiga is able to emulate other computer platforms ranging from many 8 bit systems such as the Commodore 64, Apple II and the TRS-80, to platforms such as the Atari ST, IBM PC and Apple Macintosh. MAME (the arcade machine emulator) is also available for Amigas with PPC accelerator card upgrades.

Amiga software

Main article: Amiga software

The Amiga was a primary target for productivity and game development during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Software was often developed for the Amiga and the Atari ST simultaneously, since the ST shared a similar architecture.

Much of the freely available software was available on Aminet. Until around 1996, Aminet was the largest public archive of software for any platform.

Amiga community

When Commodore went bankrupt in 1994, there was still a very active Amiga community, and it continued to support the platform long after mainstream commercial vendors abandoned it. The most popular Amiga magazine, Amiga Format, continued to publish editions until 2000, some six years after Commodore filed for bankruptcy. Another magazine, Amiga Active, was launched in 1999 and was published until 2001.

As of mid-2006, enough demand for the system remained for such expansion hardware to keep some small scale manufacturers in business.

New Amigas

When Hyperion released AmigaOS 4.0 in fall 2006, there were no machines that could run the OS, due to the production of AmigaOne machines ceasing some months earlier. In the same announcement, Hyperion stated that an undisclosed manufacturer would begin production of a new Power Architecture based machine that could run AmigaOS 4.0 later in 2007.

SAM440EP

Two weeks later, ACube Systems, a new Italian company was born. Their first product, called SAM440EP, is a PowerPC board based on the 440EP SoC made by AMCC . Their primary targets are the industrial and embedded markets, with some plan to reach the desktop markets with several operating systems.

• 400/533/667 MHz AMCC PowerPC 440EP SoC processor
• 128/256/512 MB 266 MHz DDR SDRAM soldered to the motherboard
• 1x DDR RAM slot supporting up to 512 MB RAM.
• 1x 32-bit, 66 MHz PCI slot
• 1x Flash memory device controller
• 4x USB2 ports, 1x USB1
• 2x Ethernet 10/100 ports
• 4x Serial ATA ports
• Cirrus Logic CS4281 and Realtek ALC655 audio
• ATI Radeon Mobility M9 graphics with 64 MB VRAM, s-video and DVI out.
• GPIO expansion connector
• Lattice XP expansion FPGA

ACK Software Controls

In late April 2007 Amiga and ACK Software Controls revealed that they were to manufacture both a Basic ($500) and a Power ($1500) model of a new hardware, intended to be ready for the market sometime mid-2007.

Minimig

Minimig is an Amiga 500 implementation with the custom chipset in FPGA and Freescale MC68000 cpu.

Notable users

• Andy Warhol, the famous pop artist, was an early user of the Amiga and appeared at the launch. Warhol used the Amiga to create a new style of art made with computers, and he was the author of a multimedia opera called "you are the one" which represents an animated sequence featuring images of actress Marilyn Monroe assembled in a short movie with soundtrack. The video was discovered on two old Amiga floppies in a drawer in Warhol's studio and repaired in 2006 by the Museum Of New Art. The pop artist also stated: "The thing I like most about doing this kind of work on the Amiga is that it looks like my work in other media."
• Laurence Gartel who is unanimously considered the "father" of the Digital Art movement, was the artist who physically taught Andy Warhol how to use Amiga at its best, due to the fact he was one of the pioneers using and enjoying Amiga.
• Arthur C. Clarke used Amigas to create screenshots of sightseeing on Mars and other planets by using terrain rendering programs such as Vista Pro.
• The Japanese composer of movie and anime soundtracks, Susumu Hirasawa, uses Amiga computers to compose his songs. He also uses Amigas in live performances featuring multiple monitors and using Scala Multimedia, OctaMED and Bars and Pipes to pilot the show.
• Actor Dick Van Dyke is a self-described "rabid" user of the Amiga.
• Amigas are still used in many theme parks, mainly at Universal Studios in Hollywood and Florida and Disney World, using Richmond Sound Design's show and sound control software (see related Wiki article on Amiga software).
• Amigas equipped with genlocks had a niche market among biologists analyzing video recordings (kinematic analysis) of organisms in motion, at a time when other systems capable of similar tasks were priced an order of magnitude more.
• The Mandala Interactive System from Vivid Group uses the genlock to do motion tracking and interactivity, 20 years before similar products like Sony EyeToy for PlayStation 2 video-game console. These Amigas were used in science museums to study gesture recognition capabilities and also featured in multimedia artistic exhibitions. See also: Vivid Group Mandala System.
• Amigas were used in various NASA laboratories to keep track of multiple low orbiting satellites, and were still used up to 2003/04 (dismissed and sold in 2006). This is another example of long lifetime reliability of Amiga hardware, as well as professional use. Amigas were also used at Kennedy Space Center to run strip-chart recorders, to format and display data, and control stations of platforms for Delta rocket launches. See also: Reportage: l'Amiga à la NASA; Obligement (Fr).
• The Amiga is still in use in US and Australian government agencies for topographical and GPS-integrated cartographical systems. For example United States Geological Survey used many Amigas to render DEM (Digital Elevation Map) data and show it in 3D.
• The US Navy used Amigas for piloting under sea ROVs and collecting data from oceanic automatic buoys.
• Musician and videogames music composer Bjorn Lynne used Amigas for many years.
• US Military Academy of West Point had a multimedia classroom equipped with a bank of Amigas running the videogame Universal Military Simulator I and II, which was found in those times extremely useful to train the cadets.
• Astronomer Charles Kowal, discoverer of Chiron (2nd most distant asteroid) and Leda (Jupiter's 13th moon), is a known Amiga user.
• Musician Betty Boo used Amigas in the production of her first album and used it as a sequencer in her first tour.
• Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons cartoon is also known to be an Amiga user.
• Musician Prince, formerly known as the Artist used Amigas equipped with Bars and Pipes to create music.
• In Scotland police used Amigas to pilot cameras during football matches and take digital photos of hooligans in the stadiums, discover criminals, and monitor suspects. Amigas were also used to study in optimizing flows of spectators walking the hall entrances of stadiums.
• Tom Fulp is noted as saying he used the Amiga as his first computer for creating cartoons and animations.
• David K. Buck originally wrote the POV-Ray raytracer to run on the Amiga.
• Eric W. Schwartz, the creator of Sabrina-online, which he uses to create the web site and manage it and even has the main character Sabrina use and promote over the PC and other systems.

For other notable users see Famous Amiga Users at AmigaHistory.

TV and motion picture usage

File:Chartshoworiginal.jpg

Amiga graphics as seen on The Chart Show in 1987

• Early episodes of the television series Babylon 5 were rendered on Amigas running Video Toasters . Other television series using Amigas for special effects included SeaQuest DSV and Max Headroom .
• The TV Guide Channel's predecessor, Prevue Guide, originally used Amigas to present local TV schedules using the Genlock ability to overlay a schedule on a video channel of advertisements.
• Musician Billy Idol used NewTek Video Toaster Amiga generated video walls in his video "Rock the Cradle of Love". Appeared on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno", Oct.1993.
• Todd Rundgren used Amigas with Video Toaster to produce a full-length video for "Change Myself" album in 1991.
• Director Steven Spielberg used Amigas in Jurassic Park for pre-visualization, in the seaQuest DSV TV series for special fx and rendering of underwater craft, and in the TV cartoon Animaniacs.

See also

• SCA virus
• Gateway 2000
• Amiga games
• Minimig

External links

• Amiga, Inc.
• Amiga Hardware Database - details of Amiga hardware
• Big Book of Amiga Hardware - Big Book of Amiga Hardware
• Amiga Lorraine: finally, the next generation Atari? John J. Anderson, Creative Computing, April 1984
• The Amiga A3000+ System Specification Dave Haynie, 1991 DevCon Release, July 17, 1991
• On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore Bagnall, Brian (2005), Variant Press, ISBN 0-9738649-0-7.
• Amiga.org
• Amiga Music Preservation The database for Amiga musics and musicians.
• Amigaworld.net - Official support forum for the AmigaOne.
• Amiga Wiki - Wiki dedicated to all things Amiga-related.