[the_third_wave]

What the Amiga has which more modern systems lack is:

* a stable - as in non-changing - platform from which to extract as much performance as possible by way of programming prowess instead of throwing a few more gigahertz/bytes at the problem

* a compact and rather elegant operating system which' state can be kept in the head of a single person, this makes it possible to reason your way through most problems

* the combination of the above created a thriving demo scene which, if they want to keep active, need access to compatible hardware so they can be sure their exploits can be demonstrated on "real" Amiga hardware

The same is true for e.g. the Commodore 64, the Sinclair ZX-Spectrum and a host of other popular systems. The Amiga was revolutionary at its time and as such attracted those who were looking for a machine to explore hence it gained a large following. While the absolute performance parameters fall in the dust compared to modern hardware [1] it still remains an impressive demonstration of what can be done with a relatively slow CPU combined with the custom circuitry and the OS which made the Amiga different from e.g. the Atari ST.

[1] pulling down from the top of the screen running some program to reveal the workbench (desktop) on an Amiga 500 (512K, 7MHz 68K CPU) preceded the Android notification shade (which Apple later copied into iOS) by a few decades, using hardware less powerful than what is integrated into the SIM card in that same device. On earlier versions of Android (1.x without hardware compositing, tested on a Qtek S200 which originally ran Windows Mobile) this was quite laggy...

[mrweasel]

For people interested in building/fixing computers these old systems are wonderful. Even without training you can teach youself enough about electronics to reason about how they work, well enough to fix them.

Sure much of it is nostalgia and those who owned Amigas in the 80’ and 90’ now have the time and funds to tinker.

I still wonder about the custom chip. Could you just send a handfuld to China and have them reversed engineer? Sure an FPGA is easier and cheaper, but many want real hardware. The custom chips are almost the only thing you can’t get as a new part.

[spamizbad]

It was before my time, but based on what I can read and see on YouTube, it strikes me what made the Amiga special in its day was its pile of custom chips that aided graphics, audio and kept assembly costs down by integrating tons of IO and glue logic into a chipset. Everything else seems to built down to cost keeping the overall system price from going into the stratosphere.

And while those custom chips are fine, they seemed almost targeted at sprite-based gaming and cost reduction. Again, I’m just looking at it through other peoples nostalgia, but it seems like it just wasn’t that remarkable of a machine for general purpose usage.

[vidarh]

At the tine it was the only game in town for "general purpose" use in a sense in that everything else lacked applications for entire large subsections of use that could compete with what an Amiga could do out of the box.

E.g you could draw higher quality art on an Amiga than machines with far fewer colours or no bitmap graphics at all. You could compose music on an Amiga that was not achievable on any other computer in it's price class without extra peripherals.

And so on.

It's simply false to suggest the primary function of the custom chips was cost cutting - there was nothing that provided what they did when they were introduced. Making it cheap enough was certainly also critical, but making it cheap enough is irrelevant without making it possible first.

I think the problem with looking back at this without a very clear timeline is that things did move very fast. In '85 it was astounding and revolutionary. By '87 it started seeing some competition, and without considering that most of the competition was too expensive it starts looking less impressive. Then prices for PC cards kept dropping. By '91 it was getting dated, and Commodore was desperate to survive and get AGA and AA chipsets completed. By '93 it was all over.

In '88 the custom chips would have looked like just cost cutting if introduced then, but when they were introduced they were expensive and extravagant compared to what was on the market.

[pjmlp]

And by 2000, sound cards and 3D accelerators on the PC removed all the advantage, with BeOS looking like a possible replacement for the Amiga generation, oh well.

I guess those ideas now live on macOS and Windows platforms, to some extent.

[perl4ever]

It was when the A3000 came out that Macs started looking more attractive to me. Originally, it was like "4096 colors, cool!" but once high resolution screens became more common, flickering interlace mode and 16 colors was underwhelming.

16 bit color made HAM irrelevant and was more exciting than pre-emptive multitasking and graphic acceleration.

BeOS was almost acquired by Apple to replace the Mac OS, but it wasn't, and it makes you wonder how history would have been different.

[pjmlp]

Indeed, it would have been mostly C++ based, and not offer the scenario of buying Apple systems as pretty UNIX, as big alternative universe.

Ironically there was a group of engineers at Commodore that was big into trying to merge Amiga OS and UNIX.

"VCFMW 11 - Bil Herd: Tales From Inside Commodore"

https://youtu.be/-Zpv6u5vCJ4

[spamizbad]

I feel like we hit this point way before 2000. By 1994 you could buy a Pentium machine with CD-quality audio and SVGA graphics on a fast PCI bus. You could browse the web! Just 2 years later in 1996 you have 3D acceleration and sophisticated graphics APIs mainstreamed on PCs: not to mention the arrival of the Pentium Pro and MMX extensions.

[tom_]

My recollection is that the Amiga was 99% dead by 1995, at least in the UK, and by 2000 it was 100% gone.

The PC killed it off. Even before 3D accelerators came along, there'd been years of year-on-year performance improvements, each time at the same or lower prices thanks to competition between suppliers of commodity parts. You also had byte-per-pixel display memory, and much better ALU throughput than the Amiga, so the games would look more interesting even when they weren't the nice high production value stuff you'd now be able to get from US developers.

[vidarh]

Doom was basically the end for Amiga gaming. There were still some noteworthy Amiga games after that, but it was the point where chunky graphics modes definitively were shown to be necessary to keep up.