[SavantIdiot]

Amigas were the go-to machine for electronic arts majors / digital MFAs in the late 1980's. Amiga had some crazy video editing software that blew everything else away. The dedicated hardware and HAM palettes were already 4096 colors @ NTSC and anti aliasing when PCs were still struggling with VGA at 320x200x8.

[LocalH]

PCs eventually outstripped the Amiga, sadly. The major benefit of standard VGA was the 256 color LUT in use and the chunky addressing - while the Amiga caught up in terms of color count with AGA (which also extended HAM to HAM8, maxing out at 262,144 colors), it was still a planar video memory architecture, requiring up to 8 separate writes to change the same pixel that the PC could do with one write. This greatly impacted the Amiga's ability to run software "3D" engines like the ones you'd find in Wolf 3D or later Doom, which were all the rage back then. Even adding a chunky-to-planar chip in the CD32 didn't help as much as they'd hoped.

I say this as a massive Amiga fan, so I'm not shitting on the platform, just recognizing its shortfalls.

[DerekL]

Commodore should have been updating their custom chips at a much faster rate. The AGA should have been ready in 1988 or 1989, and the blitter should have been four times faster instead of twice as fast. I don't know if the problem was lack of investment, or what.

[eggy]

Video Toaster - a great piece of hardware/software! I had a Vic-20, C64, Amiga 1000, Amiga 500, and an Amiga 2000 with the Toaster. They were fun times indeed! I had friends doing commercial video work with them, and others doing "multi-media" art with that setup.

[soylentcola]

Yep, and the same company makes TriCasters now (one of which we have in our little university video production studio).