Girlfriend with Benefits: The Commodore Amiga

Chapter 2

In 1985, Commodore introduced the Amiga 1000. It was a quantum leap in performance compared to the 8-bit Commodore 64. It had a powerful 16-bit processor, the Motorola 68000 processor with a clock speed of 7,16 MHz. This new machine came with 256KB or 512KB of RAM and had amazing graphical capabilities. Depending on the graphics mode, it could display 32 or 64 colors out of an overall palette of 4,096 colors. At 320 x 200 pixels, the Amiga's lowest resolution was as high as the highest resolution that the Commodore 64 could generate. In it's highest resolution the "girlfriend" Amiga could display 640 x 512 pixel graphics interlaced with 16 colors. It featured far superior sound and music: capable of four-channel sampled sound.

When it was first introduced, the Commodore Amiga was framed as an artist's device, a tool for creating art. At the Commodore's presentation event for their new machine in 1985 in Lincoln Center, pop-artist Andy Warhol painted Debbie Harry on stage. ^[7]

The Amiga had custom chips for its graphics and sound that were begging to be explored by demo makers and exploited for even bigger and better demos.

Demo groups quickly recognized the potential of the Amiga and took to it like an artist paintbrush and easel or a musician their instrument.

Commodore Amiga 1000, the original Amiga
(Source: https://www.oldcomputr.com/commodore-amiga-1000-1985/ )

2.1. Technical Capabilities

When the Commodore Amiga was released in 1985, it was ahead of its time. It had a powerful CPU and it had specialized chips, akin to co-processors, that elevated its capabilities above those of other home computers.

Joe Decuir and Ronald Nicholson described ^[8] the machine's key hardware innovations as:

• "Accurate NTSC and PAL video timing (led to genlock & Toaster)"
• "DMA driven IO - offloading the processor"
• "Programmable video co-processor, aka Copper"
• "Bit-blitter: sprite splicing, area fill, programmable ALU"
• "Bit-plane video, with flexible priority"
• "Hold-and-modify as a compressed color encoding"
• "4-channel sampled audio synthesis engine"
• "Configurable interrupt system based on video timing"

The Commodore Amiga 500, the most popular model of the series
(Source: https://www.gamestar.de/galerien/commodore_amiga_500,97240.html )

Essentially, this meant that home users in 1985 had features that only became common-place a decade later at a higher price:

• Arcade quality graphics in computer games
• Artists could produce images with up to 4,096 colors nearly on par with much later and more expensive VGA graphics on the IBM PC compatibles
• Musicians could produce near-CD quality sound and music
• The operating system was capable of multi-tasking years before Windows and MacOS.

In other words, "the Amiga had an advantage which took years to reach for PCs."

The Amiga 1000 was the first model released. It had a PC form-factor with a desktop case with room for a monitor and a separate keyboard. It was succeeded by the Amiga 500, which, despite its name, had the same capabilities but cost less to manufacture. This was achieved by consolidating some of the electronics on the motherboard and redesigning the case to house the keyboard, the motherboard, and the disk drive. Through the years, other models were introduced to address the professional market, such as the Amiga 2000 that could be expanded with the faster Motorola 68020 CPU, a larger PC-like desktop case, and multiple slots for expansion cards; the Amiga 3000 with the even faster Motorola 68030 CPU, improved graphical capabilities and a more modern expansion card system; and finally the Amiga 4000 as the last professional-level model that again improved on the CPU, the graphics capabilities, and the expansion options.

By the early 1990s, the Amiga 500 had become one of the most popular home computers in Europe.

"Eon" by Black Lotus on the Commodore Amiga (Source: https://demozoo.org/productions/202831/ )

Dale Luck, one of the software engineers who worked on the Amiga graphics library, says in the Popular Mechanics article "The Cult of Amiga Is Bringing an Obsolete Computer Into the 21st Century":

"I think the attraction in the programming community was the complete openness of the architecture and the ability to get as much performance out of the hardware as possible. It allowed for the development of truly revolutionary games and colorful and easy to use UI." ^[10]

2.2 Mastering Amiga Power

At home, Amiga was mostly used for playing games. The system had beautifully crafted games like Defender of the Crown, Shadow of the Beast, Turrican, Lemmings, and The Chaos Engine. Well-programmed games on the Amiga could match and sometimes even exceed the quality of arcade games.

Graphics creation was another popular use of the Amiga. There were many art packages, but the Deluxe Paint series, developed by Electronic Arts for the Commodore Amiga, was the most popular one.

"Deluxe Paint", the remarkable pixel art application by Electronic Arts (Source: The Amiga Museum )

Deluxe Paint was instrumental in showcasing the computer's graphic capabilities and revolutionizing digital art creation. Introduced in the mid-1980s, Deluxe Paint (also known as DPaint) became the de facto standard for pixel art and bitmap graphics creation, leveraging the Amiga's advanced graphics hardware. It had a user-friendly interface and range of features, including support for the Amiga's 4096-color palette, which allowed artists to create detailed and vibrant images with ease. DPaint's influence extended beyond hobbyist use. It became a tool in professional video game development, animation, and graphic design.

The software's ability to create animations, coupled with its painting and drawing tools, made it a precursor to many modern graphics programs. The popularity and impact of Deluxe Paint on the Amiga platform cannot be overstated. It became a system seller because it not only demonstrated the Amiga's technical capabilities but also empowered a generation of digital artists, setting a standard for future graphic design and image editing software.

Deluxe Paint showed the Amiga's 2D graphics capabilities, but the Amiga was also capable of rendering ray-traced 3D graphics (albeit very slowly).

One of the most influential ray-tracing packaged was Sculpt 3D. This pioneering 3D modeling and rendering software that played a significant role in the early days of 3D computer graphics. Home users had never had access to this kind of 3D modeling programs.

"The Juggler Demo" was rendered by Eric Graham on a pre-release version of Sculpt 3D (Source: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=10776 )

Sculpt 3D opened up the world of 3D design and animation to a broader audience, leveraging the Amiga's advanced graphics capabilities. Sculpt 3D allowed users to create, texture, and render 3D objects with a level of ease and sophistication not previously available on home computers. Its ability to produce relatively high-quality 3D images on consumer hardware was groundbreaking and paved the way for the democratization of 3D graphics technology. Like Deluxe Paint, Sculpt3D also found use in professional environments, influencing early computer-generated imagery (CGI) in television and advertising.

Not long after the Amiga's original introduction, Eric Graham used a pre-release version of Sculpt 3D to create a ray-traced animation of a humanoid figure composed of shiny, colored spheres, juggling balls. This was released as the "Juggler Demo" and provided an early glimpse of the potential the Amiga held. In later years, upgraded Amigas were used to render the 3D space station and spaceships in the first season of the science-fiction series Babylon 5.

The Amiga found traction in the burgeoning "Desktop Video" market. Thanks to its accurate video timing, it could be used to overlay computer images over a video signal for titling and special effects. While this could be done "out-of-the-box" with an inexpensive Genlock device, the early 1990s saw the introduction of the NewTek Video Toaster. ^[11] This was a hard- and software solution to create computer generated graphics and edit them into video.

Creators from the demoscene leveraged the core hardware of the Amiga, trying to exhaust its graphics and audio capabilities. Yet the more thoroughly demo makers explored the system, the more surprises they found in the Amiga's hardware.

This gave creators room to implement their ideas, particularly demo creators. It was only the emergence of powerful consumer computers with enhanced capabilities in graphics and sound that enabled these "lay" creators to create their art. They demonstrated not only their aesthetic aspirations, but also their mastery of a specific and finite common toolset. Just as, at the time, artists in the commercial art world learned how to use computers to make art, young programmers, graphics artists, and musicians made art and, in the process, learned how to use computers as autodidacts.

In her seminal work on human-computer interaction "The Second Self", writer and researcher Sherry Turkle describes two categories of computer users: "soft masters" are creatively oriented computer users and use technology as a tool, while "hard masters" approach problems based on their technical skills. ^[12] In practice, the categories are not as cleanly divided, yet the idea can be used to describe the opposite directions that media artists and self-taught demo creators approach their tools from.

In his licentiate thesis, Markku Reunanen describes the Amiga demoscene as:

"Amiga demos of the 1980s mainly focused on numerous hardware tricks, and featured effects such as color bars aka 'copper bars', various kinds of scrollers and moving sprites, not too far from the C-64 roots. Wireframe and flat-filled vectors appeared already in the eighties and were perfected in the early nineties with features like pattern filling and transparency. Fast vector graphics almost became an obsession, and the programmers competed with the amount of polygons that could be displayed at a steady 50 fps, also known as 'in one frame'. The so-called design demos appeared halfway along the A500's lifecycle, increasing the audiovisual sophistication of demoscene productions considerably in the form of music sync, impressive still graphics, transitions between effects, and thought-out composition of visual elements." ^[13]

He identifies the highest point of the Amiga demoscene as the late 1980s to mid-1990s, with the Amiga being the successor to the Commodore 64 and itself succeeded by the PC as the ubiquitous platform for all endeavors, be they creative or business oriented. Yet decades later, there was a resurgence of the Amiga in the demoscene.

"Phenomena" by Enigma (Azatoth, Firefox, Tip, Uno) on the Commodore Amiga
(Source: https://youtu.be/iGpU3DicbLQ )

The first Amigas, the 1000, 500 and 2000 all had what was later called the "Original Chip Set" (OCS). As Aris Mpitziopoulos put it in his "Computer History: From The Antikythera Mechanism To The Modern Era":

"Amiga had amazing graphics and audio capabilities thanks to its dedicated circuits, called Denise (graphics) and Paula (audio). In addition to these two circuits there was also a third (initially called Agnus and after its upgrade renamed Fat Agnus), which provided fast RAM access to the other circuits, including the CPU. Agnus also incorporated a chip called blitter, and it was responsible for boosting the 2D graphics performance of Amiga. In other words, the blitter played the role of a co-processor and was capable of copying a large amount of data from one region of the system's RAM to another, helping to increase the speed of 2D graphics rendering." ^[14]

The slightly improved "Extended Chip Set" (ECS) was introduced with the Amiga 500+, 600 and 3000 and brought graphics modes with more colors and higher resolutions, as well as some internal improvements to access RAM faster. The final chipset was released in 1992 as "Advanced Graphics Architecture" (AGA), which put the Amiga 1200 and 4000 on equal footing with the much more expensive Windows PCs and Macs at the time.

The final architecture in development was the "Advanced Amiga Architecture" (AAA) but it was never completed. Commodore went out of business in 1994. ^[15]

Ultimately, IBM PC compatibles running MS-DOS and later Windows became the industry standard. Other systems like the Amiga became niches. Most failed fast. But others found their commercial renaissance like Apple with MacOS. In parallel to the commercial computing world, open source operating systems like Linux and BSD were developed. They were free to use and could be installed on any hardware. They dominated the server market.

The Amiga was one of the few systems that managed to keep a strong foothold with enthusiasts and hobbyists. It was a niche product without any official new hardware, but it was a niche product with a large and dedicated fanbase.

2.3 Dead Like Latin

Stephen Leary, the creator of the Terrible Fire accelerator board for the Amiga put it aptly in his interview for the Retro Hour Podcast: "The Amiga is dead like Latin is dead." ^[16] It is dead as a mainstream computing platform but still alive and well in the hobbyist sector. A cottage industry has developed around the Amiga to work on new hardware and software.

While the last officially produced Amiga was a 1994 reissue of the Amiga 1200 by the German company Escom that had acquired the rights from the bankrupt Commodore, this was not the last Amiga produced by enthusiasts.

Like Latin, the Amiga has gone through a number of minor evolutionary steps that have kept the platform alive. Users extended the life of their original Amiga hardware by building third-party accelerators into their machines so that their machine could keep up with the performance of contemporary PCs. On Amiga history sites, there are many dozens of historic accelerator cards listed. ^[17]

A number of potential successors for the original Amiga were released in the early 2000s by moving the platform to modern hardware. The AmigaOne X1000 and X5000 found a minor audience. They are built on a much more modern and powerful platform with PowerPC CPUs just like the ones used by Apple Macs from the mid-90s to mid-2000s. Some configurations are equipped with a graphics card that is capable of retargetable graphics that are similar to the ones in PCs and Macs of the early 2000s. Ironically, these much more capable machines do not feel like Amigas because they are too similar to machines running Windows, Linux or MacOS. ^[18]

The AmigaOS operating system was ported to the PowerPC platform ^[19] and was forked as MorphOS ^[20] and AROS ^[21]. Numerous recreations of the Amiga as Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) have been created through the years ranging from the MiST in the early 2010s to the MiSTer in 2019. ^[22] The most impressive FPGA-reimplementation is the Vampyre card that not only accelerates old Amigas but also expands them to be compatible with modern day monitors and input devices. ^[23] In parallel, officially licensed emulators have been released for modern Windows PCs and Macs that enable users to run their old Amiga games, applications and demos on contemporary hardware. ^[24]

Two different projects based on the Raspberry Pi target different uses: The PiStorm acting as a CPU-replacement for classic Amigas, boosting their performance significantly at a low cost. ^[25] Amibian turns the Raspberry Pi into a low-cost replacement for a complete Amiga system booting the Pi directly into AmigaOS. ^[26] And finally the A500 Mini was released in 2022, a tiny recreation of the original Amiga 500 with a preinstalled games library and a joystick for modern day retro gamers. With a software update and the installation of AMiNIMiga, you can turn the A500 Mini into a fully usable Amiga. The manufacturer, RetroGames Limited, even announced a larger recreation of the Amiga to be released in a year or two. ^[27]

Despite an official lifespan of only a decade, the Amiga hardware scene is alive and well within the enthusiast community.

Amiga Demoscene Releases 2012 - 2023 (2023 until end of Nov.)
(Data source: pouet.net)

The Amiga demoscene, however, is not only alive but thriving. The number of demos released every year has been steadily increasing since 2011. This is how the writers at Editions64K put it in their description for their upcoming book "Demoscene the Amiga Renaissance, Volume 3 1997-2023":

In 1991, 2266 Amiga demos were released making up nearly 50% of all releases. By 2001, that figure was 170 - just under 10% of releases that year. Naturally demographics had a strong influence too, as the once-young sceners had to prioritize jobs, family and other commitments instead of slaving away to create their unique blend of art and science.

For a decade, the Amiga - and indeed the overall demoscene - was moribund. The 53 Amiga releases in 2010 made up less than 5% of the total demoscene output.

2011, for the first time in a decade, the number of Amiga productions increased, despite the overall number of releases decreasing. And this trend continued, with over 100 demos released every year from 2014 onward. (As an aside, the C64 has followed a similar trend, with its leanest year in 2009 but growth since. PC productions have however been on a downward trend since then.)

Demos were back. The demoscene is back. In 1995, AGA overtook OCS demos in terms of the number of releases annually... until 2011, when OCS took over, and hasn't dropped back since. In 2021, just 10% of Amiga demos were AGA, with the rest being OCS.

This means that not only do more demo-makers choose the old and deprecated Amiga platform to create their demo art, but they choose the older "original" chipset (OCS) instead of the more advanced AGA chipset that provides greater graphical and processing capabilities. This is a deliberate choice by the demo-makers to focus on the core capabilities of the original Amiga and to limit the capabilities of the platform.

They are interested in the challenge of hardware-limitations.

From 2012 to 2023 a total of 39 demos were released for the more modern Amiga platforms that use a PowerPC CPUs and/or retargetable graphics (RTG) that are comparable to modern graphics cards and GPUs.

The total distribution of all demos among the top platforms from 2012 to 2023.
(Data source: pouet.net)

Let's take a look at the numbers for the largest platforms on pouet.net.

• 16,323 total number of demos released from 2012 to 2023 (again 2023 only has data until the end of November).
• 3,740 Windows demos from 2012 to 2023.
  22.9% of all demos released. This is on the Windows platform that is not only alive but the most used OS in the world with hundreds of millions of units sold.
• 3,084 Commodore 64 demos from 2012 to 2023.
  18.9% of all demos released. This is on the best-selling historic computer of all time with total sales of 20 to 30 million units.
• 1,402 Commodore Amiga demos (including OCS/ECS, AGA and PPC/RTG) from 2012 to 2023.
  8.6% of all demos released. This is the "dead" and defunct Amiga platform with total world-wide sales over history of 4 to 5 million units.
• 1,175 MS-DOS demos from 2012 to 2023.
  7.2% of all demos released, just for comparison for another "defunct" platform that had a much larger user base than the Commodore Amiga.

Percentages of Amiga demos compared to all others over time.
(Data source: pouet.net)