Why was the Amiga so awesome?

I recall the sensation of transitioning to the PC in around 1994. The Amiga felt better, it was a solid user experience, even though its hardware specs had been superseded. I couldn't get my head around the fact the Amiga had fallen behind. It didn't make any sense at the time.

Amiga 500 was my childhood. Monkey island, Arabian nights, cruise for a corpse, Ben e factor, walker, odyessy. So many classics you just never get the same feeling from current games

The Amigas audio was soo way ahead of anything else. To get the equivalent sampling capability in professional sampling synthesizer keyboards would cost an absolute fortune by comparison!

I was a computer obsessed kid in the 80s with an Atari XE. A friend of the family gave me all his old Compute! magazine, and for some time, this was my only look at other systems (apart from the C64 - everyone had those). My memory from those magazines was a Commodore ad showing an Amiga with Deluxe Paint on the screen, with a an illustration of a shimmering waterfall. Even today, when I think about the Amiga, that waterfall picture comes to mind and how amazing that was to me at the time. I never owned an Amiga in it's heyday (we became a Mac family), but I remember at the time just the ads in Compute! gave me a sense that there was something magical about that computer.

One use of the blitter that may not be well-known is that it was used to do the MFM encoding and decoding for floppy disk read/write. I actually had to make my own custom implementation of the MFM encoder/decoder when I wrote "Dino Wars" because I had the game take over the hardware and do its own disk I/O. And that whole bit of code had to fit inside the floppy boot sector. I also used that same code in "Bill 'n' Ted's Excellent Adventure" too. As a result, both of these games would break on the faster Amigas from the 2000 onward.

"Why was the Amiga so awesome?" because it was the best all round system!

More then anything it is the sound and music of Amiga games that hit me with nostalgia.

The reason we're not using Amiga's today is because of Commodore. Commodore fell "ass-backwards" into TWO amazing computers. The C64 and the Amiga. The C64 put Commodore on the map and many at Commodore thought they could do no wrong at that point. The problem then became that Commodore didn't understand their own technology (they purchased Amiga...they didn't design it from the ground up). Commodore didn't understand they had a powerhouse of a "multimedia PC" at the time. No one really knew what a multimedia PC really was until other companies started doing it. Say what you will about Steve Jobs...he believed in good marketing and he was right. My kids know Apple. None of them know Commodore. Commodore always had terrible marketing. It's a shame, really. But to be fair, what would a modern, 2022 Amiga be like today anyway? I doubt it would have the same revolutionary design but instead be like any other PC like HP or Toshiba. At least it won't be dead anytime soon. I've been an Amiga user since I was 16 and there are many more like me. 🙂

So many things about the Amiga from a user's perspective that I miss today. The organization of the OS support files such as device drivers in the devs: folder and software libraries in the libs: folder, instead of both being combined together as cryptically named .dll files. The ability to use folder aliases so, for example, the root path devs: could reside anywhere in the filesystem. I miss the ram disk (though I started using the rad disk that would survive reboots), especially for truly temporary files. The way environment variables and settings were done where when you clicked "Save" the setting was stored on a disk, but if you clicked "Use" it was only stored to the ram disk. That way if you wanted to temporarily change a setting but wanted it to revert back to your preferred default on the next power-up it would. The way that ARexx was embraced by programs. I had written several ARexx scripts that controlled several programs. My most used one would take me online by first controlling the TCP/IP stack, check for new email and send any queued outgoing emails with my email program, and then take me offline. My script was smart enough to figure out if it needed to launch the programs, and if I started the script when I was already online it would remember that and not take me offline after the email transfers. Very important back in the day when the internet connection was via modem so I didn't tie up the phone line any longer than I needed, but was able to keep the connection when I was playing online when the rest of the family was asleep. I'm sure there are a few more that I can't think of off the top of my head.

One thing I always remember about the Amiga was how it 'felt' to use one... This is probably difficult for younger computer users to understand, but back in the day when I used a Windows PC I always felt somewhat disconnected from the underlying hardware compared to the Amiga.. The best analogy I can think of is like driving a formula 1 car compared to driving big family saloon car... Using the Amiga I felt 'connected' to the road so to speak, whereas with the PC running Windows I never really felt in control and didn’t know what the wheels were doing underneath. A fun little thing I always remember, one day I timed my accelerated (68030) A1200 booting into Workbench 3.0 OS from hard drive, it took just 7 seconds! Compare that to PCs and Macs from the same year 1992-1994, where a PC would take a minute plus, and with a Mac you could easily go away and make a coffee or tea and return and still need to wait for it to finish loading.

The Amiga truly was/is(?) a dream machine. I greatly enjoyed playing and also programming on it (machine language and C). I don't consider myself a very talented programmer. Still, one of my personal programming highlights was a blitter algorithm for a simple cellular automaton to emulate 2D oscillating chemical reactions (Belousov-Zhabotinsky type). If I remember well the Blitter algorithm was around 3-5x times faster when compared to the CPU machine language version of the same algorithm in comparison. Just imagine how this feat of a geeked teenager made him feel both excited and proud! Anyways, the Amiga creators and developers will always be my heroes! Thank you for this video!

The Amiga was incredible for 1985, but the lack of proper updates really screwed it when the 90s rolled around. More sprite capabilities, more sound channels, more blitter features were needed, but it relied too much on fantastic programmers manipulating the out of date hardware to make it seem like it was more powerful than it actually was. Way more work for what other systems were doing by design at that time.

We had an ST when I was a kid, and even I wanted an Amiga so badly. I still remember walking around the software store admiring the luscious Amiga games on the demo computers they had running.

I was 14 when I first saw the 1000 in a magazine, and I was smitten. I finally got a 2000 for a small video production business I started. I added the Toaster, and was pumped about the potential of the Flyer, but had to jump to Media100 on the Mac. I still have my 2000 + toaster and boot it every so often. ❤️

"It's eight cycles per instruction buddy" That was so incredibly charged with snarc but in the geekiest way possible, I love it so much I want it on a t-shirt

When we were shopping for a home computer in 1989, an A500 was the OBVIOUS choice in the bang-for-the-buck dept.

This was a fantastic breakdown of what made the Amiga so special. Makes me miss my old A500+ with it's amazing A530 turbo expansion. Also makes me appreciate the fact that I managed to copy all my old programs, anims, music, etc. off off of it and onto my PC. I still sometimes boot up WinUAE just so I can play around with all my old stuff.

I still have mine next to the STE and the C64. Love that machine, love its soul, it’s magic. Great vid btw, very interesting. Nice work, nice memories!

I remember the strange hostility against the Amiga users from the media back in the days where the users were called cult members and other nice things. A technology magazine ran a piece about a meeting for Amiga users and there was no end to the descriptions of what a bunch of idiots they were. This goes on to this day and every time they bring up the history of personal computers the Amiga is not there and it is basically erased from history.

We went from Amiga 500 to an average IBM (Amiga to my room then) to a full-blown Gateway special in about 1997 or so that I was like yup I'm going to playing on that now because the new titles were PC-exclusive. Then later on I got into Quake and Half Life (wasn't allowed graphical games as a younger teen) and for convenience it's been pc's ever since. I would run internet demo discs from AOL (thanks guys) and get free internet every month. I had the Amiga in my room for a while and that was bliss. It really gave me so many happy memories. So many amazing games. Stoo from Sensible Software is still doing design stuff. Now I have a 3070 RTX with an i7 and no idea what games to get. Great video. Thanks for the memories.