[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.