Garry Cardinal
Welcome to my
Amiga Page.
Amiga? Vas ist das, "Amiga"?
Amiga is a personal computer. A very personal computer.
When my daughter was about 9, we used to make weekly pilgrimages to West
Edmonton Mall. On the way to the theme park we usually passed Compute Or
Play next to the Ice Palace. I was intensely interested in the computer
image slide show on the Amiga monitor. I bought my first Amiga in early
1986. When I set up my new Amiga 1000 on the kitchen table I was trembling.
Not just because it was a major investment, it was something magical, more
than just a computer.
I have used Amiga personal computers ever since.
An Amiga can have an aura of being alive, existing for her user. How
true this is depends entirely on the user.
The name Amiga is Spanish for "female friend". I can think of no more
appropriate name for this dear companion. She is intelligent, alert,
capable, non-judgemental, and forgiving. She helps me do what I need to do
without the constraints of lesser machines. She helps me understand myself
and the world and comes along with me and continues to challenge me. I love
my Amiga.
The magic is still there. I expect that to be so for quite some time.
In addition to my pre retirement day job as Electronics Technologist, I
worked part time doing Amiga hardware and systems support at a former Amiga
retailer, Software Supermart. I have personally acquired service manuals and
spare parts for Amiga systems during the Software Supermart liquidation. I
am available to perform professional Amiga system support locally on site and
from my home. Please contact me by email for details.
I typed this on my dear Amiga 3000, eight years old, upgraded somewhat but she had the same soul. Fast forward to 2021. I have to admit that I haven't turned on my 3000 for years. I use a Certified Data Ryzen desktop, mainly for the CPU horsepower to process 1080p video. WinUAE runs my Amiga environment which I use daily for personal accounting, record keeping and special text processing and image processing. Although screen switching is agonizingly slow compared to a real Amiga, it's nice to run Amiga tasks over 140x faster than on an Amiga 3000/040.
History
The Amiga began as the "Ultimate game machine" to be developed by Amiga
Corporation funded by 3 California doctors. The development team insisted on
hardware graphics and sound support and a multitasking kernel. Amiga
Corporation ran out of funds and was entertained by Atari's Jack Tramiel then
by Commodore.
The Amiga 1000 was released in 1985 and development of Amiga technology
continued with models 2000, 500, 2500, 3000, 1500, CDTV, 600, 4000, 1200,
CD32, 3000T and 4000T. Commodore declared bankrupcy during the spring of
1994.
The Commodore intellectual assets were bought by Escom, a large european
technology corporation during the summer of 1995. Amiga became "Amiga
Technologies GmbH". Escom eventually went bankrupt probably because of
overextending and the cutthroat competition in the PC clone arena.
Viscorp, a US company, engaged in negotiations regarding acquisition of
Amiga technology. Viscorp was interested in using Amiga technology for
internet "Set Top Box" implementation. Philips has since released a variant
of CDI for their STB. Viscorp lost it's bid for Amiga technology. The story
finally emerged that the Amiga engineers hired by Viscorp tried valiantly to
produce Amiga STB prototypes but all efforts were met with indifference by
Viscorp.
Gateway2000 acquired Amiga Technologies, Amiga Technologies became "Amiga
International". Gateway was interested enough to appoint an executive to
evangelize the future Amiga as an "Internet Appliance". After a flurry of
positive energy and positioning to divert revenue from the wintel consortium
that executive suddenly left Gateway to "seek other opportunities".
Now a bunch of Amiga fanatics are acquiring the rights to Amiga.
Fourteen years after a machine is first released, five years after Commodore
goes bust, then three subsequent buyouts.
In 1985 the Amiga 1000 shipped with:
- 25 hardware DMA channels, each allocated from 3 to 80 intervals every video horizontal scan line (525 x 60/1.001 per second)
IBM-PC-XT had 4, IBM-PC-AT had 7
- A preemptive multitasking operating system
Most computer users were saying, "Multitasking? Who needs multitasking?"
- Narrator device
The synthetic voice in IBM's TV commercial "Welcome to Aptiva." (1995), Steven Hawking's voice synthesizer
- Four channel 8 bit stereo sound
- Hardware sprites
8 of them, including the mouse pointer, considered as screens.
- Multiple simultaneous screens
Simultaneous foreground, background, overlapping, transparent capable,
double buffer capable screens each with any resolution up to 640x400 and up to
4096 colours.
- Multimedia
Recently the term has become popular hype to sell CD-ROMs.
- AmigaBasic
Arguably Amiga's worst Basic interpreter, written by Microsoft.
Emulation
The Amiga is a clever machine. A good demonstration of this is the fact
that it can emulate other machines. Not just a graphic of some easily
recognizable screen or sound, the emulations are functional and useable with
all the personality, or lack of personality, of the original machines.
After eleven years, no other platform successfully emulated an Amiga.
Certainly not it's personality. Those machines that can do a very limited
emulation and require massive processor resources compared to the little
Amiga 500 they try to impersonate.
My Favourite Emulations: They all multitask -on my Amiga!
Apple II
Apple Macintosh II (System 7.6)
Commodore 64
Commodore Vic 20
DEC VT-220 (Handshake by Eric Haberfellner)
IBM-PC/AT486 (MSD622,W31 and W95)
Emulations possible that I have no particular interest in:
6809
68HC11
8085
Amstrad CPC
Atari 2600
Atari 800
Atari ST
BBC
Calculator, various
Cuckoo Clock
CP/M
GameBoy
IBM PC
IBM PC/AT
NES
Oric
MSX
PIC
Sinclair Spectrum
Sinclair ZX81
Tamagotchi
Terminal, various
TI 99/4A
TRS80 Model 2
TRS80 Model 3
Z80
Garry Cardinal,
mailto:mail@garrycardinal.ca,
http://garrycardinal.ca/