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The Amiga Portal

The 1987 Amiga 500 was the best-selling model.
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Amiga is a family of personal computers produced by Commodore from 1985 until the company's bankruptcy in 1994, with production by others afterward. When introduced, it was one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-bit or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, and mouse-based GUIs. These include the Atari ST—the Amiga's primary competitor—Macintosh, Apple IIGS, and Archimedes. The Amiga differs from its contemporaries through custom hardware to accelerate graphics and sound, including sprites, a blitter, and four channels of sample-based audio. It runs a pre-emptive multitasking operating system called AmigaOS, with a desktop environment called Workbench.

The Amiga 1000, based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor, was released in July 1985. Production problems kept it from becoming widely available until early 1986. While early advertisements cast the computer as an all-purpose business machine, especially with the Sidecar IBM PC compatibility add-on, the Amiga was most commercially successful as a home computer with a range of video games and creative software. The bestselling model, the Amiga 500, was introduced in 1987 along with the more expandable Amiga 2000. The 1990 Amiga 3000 includes minor updates to the graphics hardware via the Enhanced Chip Set also used in subsequent systems.

The Amiga established a niche in audio and multimedia. The first music tracker was written for the Amiga, and it became a popular platform for music creation. The 3D rendering packages LightWave 3D, Imagine, and Traces (a predecessor to Blender) originated on the system. The 1990 third-party Video Toaster made the Amiga a comparatively low cost option for video production. Many video games originated on the Amiga before being converted to other platforms, such as Populous (1989) and Lemmings (1991).

The Amiga eventually started losing market share to IBM PC compatibles, which gained 256 color VGA graphics in 1987, and the fourth generation of video game consoles, eventually leading to Commodore's bankruptcy in 1994. Commodore is estimated to have sold nearly five million Amigas. Various groups have since released spiritual successors. (Full article...)

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Selected article

Hunk is the executable file format of tools and programs of the Amiga Operating System based on Motorola 68000 CPU and other processors of the same family. This kind of executable got its name from the fact that the software programmed on Amiga is divided in its internal structure into many pieces called hunks, in which every portion could contain either code or data.

The hunks in an Amiga executable file could exist in various types. There are 32-bit hunks, 16-bit hunks, and even some 8-bit hunks.

Types of hunks were standardized in AmigaOS, and well documented in The AmigaDOS Manual edited by Commodore to explain to programmers how to code on the Amiga, during the years in which Commodore manufactured Amiga computers. Their structure was officially codified and could be changed only by a Commodore committee, which then communicated the modifications to the developers for new releases of the Amiga operating system.

The structure of an Amiga hunk is very simple: There is a header at the beginning of the hunk indicating that that kind of "portion of code" is a known and valid Amiga hunk type, then follows an ID which indicates the length of the hunk itself, and at the bottom is the segment of the hunk which contains the real code or data. (Full article...)

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Selected biography

François Lionet is a French programmer, best known for having written STOS BASIC on the Atari ST and AMOS BASIC on the Amiga and (along with Constantin Sotiropoulos). He has also written several games on these platforms.

In 1994, he founded Clickteam with Yves Lamoureux, producing the Klik series of games-creation tools, including Multimedia Fusion. (Full article...)

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Commodore Amiga 2000
Commodore Amiga 2000
Credit: Morn
Commodore Amiga 2000, hardware revision 6.2. Inside of case. RAM and the custom sound and graphics chips (Agnus, Denise, Paula) are on the right half of the motherboard, obscured by the power supply/hard drive/disk drive assembly.
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Did you know...

... that AtheOS was originally intended to be a clone of AmigaOS?
Other "Did you know" facts... Read more...
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Topics

Pen & Earth
Pen & Earth
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WikiProjects

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WikiProject Amiga

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