Inside the Amiga 1000

In Pictures: PC World pulls apart this retro computer to see what makes her tick.

Benj Edwards writes: "In July 1985, Commodore released an impressive new multimedia PC called the Amiga. This system, once the object of a legal fight between Atari and Commodore, made waves in the press with its high-resolution color graphics and stereo sound.

Join me as I take apart this legendary machine to see what made the Amiga unique in the computer world."

[truegame]

Best Computer Ever Made. Ahead of its time. Special chips for graphics, sound etc. Cool OS, will full Multitasking before MS etc. I had a A1000, A500 and a A2500.. I still have my A1000 in my garage ... brings back memory's/

Arexx.....

[psycho360]

Haha i had Amiga500 with massive upgraded ram of 1GB. At age 18 i was dumb enough to wash it with soap and water in order to clean the keyboard of a spill.

Anyway it lives with me in form of UAE amiga emulator on my pc and i can play games like cannon fodder and tons of others. Also the emu not only works as 500 but can emulate all the way from Amiga1200 to Amiga4000.

Good times.

[DelbertGrady]

1GB of ram in an Amiga 500? Wow! Must have cost you a fortune. I always envied my spoiled friend who had an Amiga 1200 with the AGA chip :( I had to "settle" with the Amiga 500 but my god what fun it gave me.

I would probably count the Amiga years as the best I've experienced in gaming. There were so many creative breakthroughs made in games back then. Games didn't cost as much to produce and most devs had free hands to make their personal dream games.

I especially remember a game called Hunter 3D. It was an open world third person action game with vehicles such as cars, helicopters, boats, tanks and even bicycles. In full 3D. In many ways eerily similar to GTA 3. Although the world was pretty barren it was HUGE, and there was tons of exploration to be done and easter eggs to be found. Most surprisingly, they fit all of this on one disc(!).

Disc swapping could be a b!tch though. Damn you, Simon the Sorcerer, damn you...

[Penno]

Actually, it was one MEGABYTE. The Amiga 500 came with 512k memory as standard.

Edit: I remember Hunter! That game rocked. It even let you swim from island to island, something that GTA III lacked ten years later. You could also get attacked by sharks. Good times.

[zag]

Hunter was the squeal to mid winter, which was a world in pure snow all the time.

something happens at the end of mid winter to make it full on sun shine.

pretty much polar opposites

[psycho360]

@soda SORRY my bad it was 512KB and upgraded to 1MB.. Nowadays after using GBs most of the time i wrote GB.

Also how about ELITE? I remember spending 100s of hours on C64 version then we got teh upgraded one for Amiga. Man it looked as massive as Mass Effect looks nowadays.

[maawdawg]

I had a ton of fun gaming on that system.

xenon, Sidewinder, Space Quest, Double Dragon, Marble Madness, Arctic Fox, Silent Service.

So many fun games.

[truegame]

Shadow of the beast.. Lemmings, Marble Madness(fun fun)

You remember the CD32.. Many of the UK game companies started on Amiga before the went to consoles. EA was very big on the Amiga Electronic Paint etc..

Learn Arexx programming and Basic Unix on the Amiga.. Amiga OS 1.2 etc...

Bubbles for You!

[grumpysmurf]

The Amiga 500 was light years ahead of everything when it was first released. It didn't have a graphical rival until the SNES.

[Cajun Chicken]

Fact; I played on Amiga (500/1200's) since I was about 5 and only got my first own console in about 1998 which was a Playstation. Do I regret not owning a NES, Megadrive or SNES? Nope.
I still often play Amiga games on Winfellow and WinUAE, top notch emulators. Some of the best games on those machines.

[psycho360]

+bubbs for this. Yes i have UAE as well and play games like cannon fodder sometimes. YOu have to hand it to Commodore engineers for being visionary and could provide such an advanced piece of computing back when PCs were just beeps and green blobs on screen.

I wished the top managment of Commodore would have capitalized on their success rather than turn into a IBM kind of operation which brought them their downfall.

[neolit]

Had the best consumer combat flight sim of the time (Combat Air Patrol) and let us not forget the text to speech engine in the OS. Coming down from Amiga into PC world, back in the day, I felt going back in time.

Re Commodore's top management. Can not agree about the IBM analogy. Those clowns where crooks who stole from their own company. Commodore was robbed out of its existence by its own top level management.

[Penno]

The Amiga was the best gaming computer ever. Sensible Soccer, Speedball 2, The Chaos Engine, Cannon Fodder, Wings, Flashback; the list goes on and on.

[psycho360]

How about the flight sim called Interceptor. Our first look at the planes from outside in full 3d vectors and also could pull a TOP GUN style rear tail camera spin right off the deck of the aircraft carrier. Man i almost cried at those graphics.

[ravinash]

Oh god, I remember Speedball 2.
I used to play that till my hand hurt and they were shaking...probably didn't do me much good as a growing boy.

[neolit]

was the best re-imagining of the Rollerball ever!
http://www.imdb.com/title/t...

[jimboh2k]

Amiga rocks!

[Close_Second]

...was Commodore milked the cow for too long. The A1200 should have been out at least 18 months earlier.

I loved the Amiga and still say thanks for Commodore NZ for lending me an Amiga 4000 for a period of time in '93. That was a beast!

[Umb]

Amiga 500 was such a beast! Some many great games - IK+, the Cinemaware games such as Defender of the Crown, Wings, Lords of the Rising Sun.

The list just keeps going and going, many I want to play some these games now!

[maawdawg]

Wow, I had forgotten about Defender of the Crown. I spent a TON of time playing that game but I never improved at jousting somehow. Geoffrey Longsword and raiding castles was the way to go.

I also forgot my favorite Amiga game of all time favorites in my list in the reply up above. Bard's Tale 2: The Destiny Knight, Archon, Archon 2, Golden Axe, Apache(?) (helicoper game), the basketball and hockey titles were awesome as well.

The more I think about it the more I remember just how many awesome games there were.

[SOAD]

Hmmm, but can it run Crysis? jk.

This thing was beast back in its day.

No other computer or console has outmatched its rivals in terms of raw power quite as much as Amiga did.

[csimpson]

I would argue the first PlayStation showed a similar leap in technology -- the SNES and MegaDrive were still being sold at the time, I recall.

[zag]

lol, there was an amiga console before the playstation it bombed mainly being too new.

It had a cd drive for games, and all the amiga 600 hardware.

Think of it as a playstation, I have no idea if it had better hardware than the playstation

[neolit]

was too expensive (fail), a bit ahead of its time (win) and with not much games to show for (epic fail)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

[XactGamer]

Classic old school gaming never dies, it just gets emulated :)

[RedPawn]

Didn't it also have Archon and that Owl shooter game from Psygnosis.

[Penno]

The owl game was called Agony. It actually wasn't by Psygnosis, but the game makers swiped Psygnosis' logo for the main character. lol

[RedPawn]

Thanks I used to play this at a friends house all the damn time.

[jobboy]

Blitter, Copper and hardware Scrolling....it was fun to play and fun to program!

[Twiky]

common question 'Wich is your favorite system of all time' is always AMIGA.
I miss those Shadow of the beast afternoon sessions. I guess the feeling I had the first time I saw and HEARD that game is the one I try to find when playing new games nowdays. But I can never quite achieve it... ;)

[grumpysmurf]

I agree. The reason the Amiga gave you that special feeling was because it took amazing talent to get the music and graphics into such a small place. It made you feel proud to own it.

Like the music from Shadow of the Beast -- the fact it was coming out of your computer was astonishing. These days, they just hire an orchestra -- the sense of awe is no longer there.

[neolit]

have you ever played Walker?

[amiga-man]

the amiga was a machine that took computing to another level, It was a sound and graphical beast in its time, and software such as deluxe paint allowed for a totally new experience. it had a powerful multitasking operating system that again led the way.
To me this was the saddest part, as microsoft had cornered the business market with word etc, and would not develope them for the amiga, ultimatly holding back computing for years while the antiquated dos and pc played catch up.
Its nice to know it holds fond memories for so many people, as has been said the amiga a computer before its time.

[Aphe]

I was offered driving lessons or the money to get an Amiga for my 18th birthday. I chose the money and bought myself an Amiga 500. I loved it, I had a snes and a spectrum at the time and the Amiga just seemed to blow them away in power (especially the Spectrum obviously).

I have fond memories of playing Syndicate, Dungeon Master and Cannon Fodder into the early hours of the night. And I started making my own music on trackers, something that wasn't really possible on my old trusty spectrum, at least not with the same quality.

Great computer, shame it died out in the end but I'll always remember it.

[GMWPS3]

even teh C64 was amazing at that time. I remember playing a game featuring the Apache helicopter than a game featuring the Stealth Fighter. Both were awesome. I remember in one gaming session of Stealth Fighter I fly a mission into the Soviet Union and had a short time frame to drop my cargo and get back across the border. All the while dodging SAM sites and SAMs too. Then on my way back they launched migs to chase me and I had to increase speed to stay out of their range at the risk of running out of fuel before I crossed the border. I think I ended up crossing the border on fumes then had to eject before ditching the stealth fighter on friendly soil.

You don't get games like this anymore. Those were well paced, heart pumping games. These days we seem to just get Michael Bay over the top type action no real story and substance. Sometimes less is more!! The Ace Combat games just seem silly as you shoot down thousands of enemy planes in specific set pieces. They should go back to basics and have a game where you know the enemy has approx 40 fighters in one area and 10 in another and 20 in another so that you plan a route to fly into the enemy territory (including refueling in the air or on a friendly base), where you choose weather you need long range missiles, short range and you are limited to what the plane can carry in real life, not 100 missiles! When you shoot down the enemy planes, they should not re-appear on your flight back if you choose to take the same path. This would be an amazing game if it was actually made!

I think many developers spend too much time worrying about raising graphics than the actual game play (story, suspense, strategy etc) These are the areas they should be raising the bar on!

[sak500]

Yes C64 made me a gamer even though i played atari and handheld game & watch thingamabobs but c64 got me addicted to games.

How about paradroid by Andrew braybrook? also alleykat, elite, spyhunter, parallax, ghosts'n goblin, green beret (my most hated game cuz of difficulty), ghostbusters with the movie sound playing on the 3 channels etc. Man you would really appreciated teh games done by the small teams of genuises. Jeff minter, the guy who made sim city initally also worked on8bit computers. Those two brothers who started teh wing commander series pure genuises working in such limited resources and providing millions of people with entertaining games.

i wish there instead of flamebait here we have an article about 80s programmers from england, usa and europe, then and now. How about the publication i fondly remember buying copy of ZZZAP64 everymonth for news about new games , cheat codes which started covering amiga as well. Those days there wasn't interweb and everything just a click away. You waited a month to get news about technology etc.

[Aery]

Amiga 500 (and 512k extra memory), Amiga 2000, Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000.

Near two dead x360 and 1 dead Ps3, I still have my working Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200.

Incredible games and a fantastic machine to express your creativity.

The best.

[wissam]

HAHA. I remember this computer.

[Wikkid666]

I never heard of the 1000. I had the 500 and my dad had the 2000.

[jneul]

I had a C64 once, but that was before the amiga came along, when commodore died, I stopped gaming for a while the when ps1 came along, it reignited my love for games, long live sony and the most advanced console ps3!!

[Si-Pie]

25 years on and the Amiga is still remembered as the best computer of its time. I remember it being demoed on the BBC Micro program which you can see here http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Yes the Amiga was a fantastic computer and ahead of the competition at that time. Still have my Amiga 500 and it stil works :-). There is still a strong following and the Uae emulator is great. Just a shame it was left to stagnate and mismanaged by Commodore. It still lives on though :-).

[TheMART]

Still in my possession and working:

A500 + Memory card (from 512KB to 1MB lol)

A1200

And I had some hardware card that worked with codes to alter games to start in certain levels, add lives etc. I forgot its name. And an extra diskdrive to prevent too much swapping diskettes haha

Damn, so many good gaming times. As someone said above, those were pretty much MY golden years of gaming. I had so much fun with those systems. Not only games, but remember the demo's that the scene made? I still remember the PC guys crying having just a few colours on screen and their sound was terrible, where the Amiga had 4 channel pure digital sampling. This system lasted commercially from 1987 till 1995 or so, but mine was daily up and running till I think 2000 or 2001.

Sensible Soccer, damn so many hours playing that... But I must say my MSX-2 is close to the Amiga with games like SD-Snatcher, Metal Gear - Solid Snake II, Fray and more. Once in a while I fire up the emulators on my softmodded Wii to go retro. Must say I end up playing current gen right after it to get the eyes adjusted on full HD again instead of eye hurting pixels lol

[JohnnyAkiba]

Good PC

[cpuchess]

The biggest problem with this computer is that Commodore hardly advertised it until then end, then it was to late. The Amiga was an awesome machine.

[sak500]

Guess what i bought my Dad a NB on his birthday today. Thanking him as a payback for buying me C64 24 years back.