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Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3→Archive 5

Rewriting the Hardware section

This article is geting big again. Thinking about reducing the article's size I read through the Hardware section and found that IMO it is too techincal and unfocused. Take this sentence for instance:

The Original Amiga chipset, or OCS, is more advanced than other architectures of its time: it has dedicated chips for real-time video effects, allowing users to work with genlocks to overlay graphics atop live video.

Then it goes on to talk about RAM, Cost, then bitplanes, and so on. This all under the headline chipset.

Furthermore the article is peppered with frivolous information like:

  • the Amiga also has a niche market among biologists analyzing video recordings
  • The Amiga was one of the first computers for which one could buy cheap accessories for sound sampling and video digitization.

While interesting, this information detract from the main article (which in this case is about Amiga hardware) and should be placed elsewhere (e.g. under trivia.)

I suggest summing the chipset article up with a short paragraph, eg.

There are three generations of chipsets used in the various Amiga models. The first is OCS, followed by ECS and finally AGA. What all these chipsets have in common is that they handle raster graphics, digital audio and communication with between various peripherals (e.g. CPU, memory and floppy disks) in the Amiga.

Then discuss the chipsets' abilities deeper in their own articles. Stuff about Genlock should be put under 'Genlock, while the bitplane stuff should have its own article with illustrative graphics and everything (if it doesn't already, let's see Bitplane, ahh there is an article, not very good thou.).

Anyone else feel the same way? Have a better idea? Strongly opposed?--Anss123 20:50, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

Follow up: I've started the rewrite. This is the "meat" of the old article: The Original Amiga chipset, or OCS, is more advanced than other architectures of its time: it has dedicated chips for real-time video effects, allowing users to work with genlocks to overlay graphics atop live video. The Amiga's overscan feature allows it to draw images past the visible borders of a television screen, allowing seamless fly-ins and scrolling from off-frame.
The machine is expandable and supports what was considered a large amount of memory at that time. The original machine shipped with 256K and offered an initial expansion to 512K. That first 512K of memory is Chip RAM, which means it's shared between the custom chipset and the CPU, with the chipset having priority. Additional RAM, up to 8 more megabytes, can be attached via the side expansion bus, and was visible only to the CPU. A mere 8 megabytes may seem laughably small to a modern reader, but at the time, that much RAM would have cost around $300 US. Memory efficiency was (and is) one of the strong points of the Amiga OS.
The Amiga has no text mode, offering only bitmapped graphics. It uses 'planar' graphics, meaning that display memory buffers are arranged in bitplanes. A 1-bitplane image provided 2 colors (usually black and white): this would be the equivalent of the early Macintosh display. Each additional bitplane doubles the number of available colors. Low-resolution modes support up to 5 planes (and, thus, 32 colors), while high-resolution modes support 4 (16 colors). Each color can be chosen from the system palette of 4,096. This planar arrangement is a bit tricky to manipulate with the CPU, because any given pixel on the screen can be represented by up to 5 disparate bytes in memory. The blitter handled most of this automatically.
To get around some of the color limitations, the Amiga also offers a unique HAM (Hold And Modify) graphics mode. In this low-resolution mode, a pixel can be any of the 16 basic colors, exactly like regular low-res screens. In addition, a given pixel can H)old the value from the previous pixel, and M)odify either the red, green, or blue value, which expanded the number of colors displayed to 4096. Once software was developed that could encode images this way, a striking set of amazingly realistic still pictures began circulating. This mode is hard to program, and in the early days was mostly used only for slideshows and video overlays.
The video chipset is configurable, supporting programmable resolutions and the ability to double the vertical resolution of the screen by switching to interlaced mode. This is intended for use with televisions, as their signals are also interlaced. This allowed the Amiga to be the first useful personal computer for video applications.
Programmable resolutions makes it possible for the Amiga to shift quickly between NTSC and PAL resolutions; the exact same hardware was sold in both areas. By specifying large overscan values, it can go past the borders of nearly all televisions. This allows it to 'fly-in' objects from off-frame, and was absolutely crucial to its success in the video market.
Due to flicker, many are unwilling to use the higher-resolution display offered by interlace. This led to a small market for flicker fixers. Early "fixers" were just a piece of smoked glass velcroed onto the monitor; decreasing the contrast reduced the apparent flicker. Later, there were hardware deinterlacers, and eventually Commodore shipped versions of the Amiga that could produce the higher resolutions natively.
The CPU needs access to Chip RAM only during the even cycles. The odd cycles were used exclusively by the chipset. The blitter, though, had a flag that, if enabled, would allow it to access Chip RAM during the even cycles, blocking the CPU. Sometimes, enabling it made a lot of sense since the blitter could do its job a whole lot faster than the CPU could emulate it, enabling the Amiga to do some kind of jobs in realtime that it could not do otherwise, or just to do them in a shorter amount of time. The copper holds an even higher priority accessing Chip RAM, because of its realtime nature. When the chipset blocks access to Chip RAM to the CPU, the CPU can still access the so-called Fast RAM, which chipset cannot access.
The Amiga's architecture, however, has a drawback in high-resolution modes. With the chipset sharing memory bandwidth with the CPU, overall system performance decreased with increasing resolutions and color depth. At 16 colors, for instance, it slows CPU access enough to cut the machine's speed roughly in half. Because of this, high-resolution 16-color screens were mostly avoided until later in the Amiga's evolution, when RAM (FASTMEM) expansion became routine.
Later Amiga models include improved versions of the chipset: The Enhanced Chip Set (ECS) and the Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA).
Now I wait for someone to finish up what I started :-) --Anss123 17:17, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

The brief description of bitplanes above seems a lot clearer than the dedicated article on the subject.--Drvanthorp 16:29, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Deletion

This article should be deleted. Nobody acutally uses Amigas anymore. Wikipedia is not the place for nonstandard computers to spread self-aggrandizing propaganda about themselves.--AirportTerminal 11:17, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

You soooo got pwned by one of the admins :P 83.76.220.226 16:11, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
Comment Hopefully people can refrain from responding to obvious flamebait. Thanks. Mdwh 11:30, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

People still use the Amiga!--TheGreatGiannaSisters 16:18, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Articles about the Univac, Illiac, and 57 Chevy should also be deleted on the same grounds.--Drvanthorp 16:33, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Requested move

Have you all lost your minds? What is the point in moving a page from itself to itself?--TheGreatGiannaSisters 16:14, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

(The above comment must have been added when the top of the page still said "It has been suggested that the article Amiga be moved to Amiga." This is because the article was originally called Amiga (computer), and someone put a merge suggestion on the talk page, and the article was moved to Amiga, but the merge suggestion wasn't removed. Now it is.) JIP | Talk 06:53, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

Other subjects

The description of the Video Toaster as a 3d rendering platform is incorrect, see the article on the [Video Toaster] for a much better definition.

"Today the most popular Amiga is the A1200" -- in what sense? Shouldn't this be phrased in the past tense?

Well, perhaps it should be clarified, but people do still use Amiga computers. They're quite a minority now, but they'll show in web server access logs, and they develop and share software and chat on IRC.
We may be a minority, but who polled us to ask the most used model? It seems to me that more of us use A4000s, A3000s, and A500s than A1200s. --tonsofpcs (Talk) 12:36, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
To an anonymous user who said that new Amigas were being planned in the summary field of an edit...perhaps you could find an announcement or something to quote or link to in the article?
--cprompt
According to Amiga inc, they are working on Amiga Operating System Version 4.0, along with the AmigaOne hardware. So it is at least being plannned. Alas, I don't have a link (other than www.amiga.com )-- Logotu

I think it ought to be mentioned that a lot of the Amiga's in use today are upgraded a great deal with various enhancement hardware available; disk-controllers, memory boards, CPU turbos, Ethernet cards and new graphics adapters. This way the original hardware is being build on, resulting in performance increase of many magnitudes.

And a lot of the Amigas in use today are also original hardware, many with Video Toasters (and some with Flyers as well), or other industry-specific hardware. --tonsofpcs (Talk) 12:36, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

The acronym I removed has no base in reality. The name Amiga was actually chosen from the spanish word for "girlfriend" or "female friend". --Taurik 16:13, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)

The AROS edit was improperly done, but it may be a good idea to check the history before deleting stuff that was there much longer... --Taurik 20:25, 30 May 2004 (UTC)

Why no mention of the CD32?

Removal of AmigaOne series

The AmigaOne series of computers were produced under license from the current holders of the Amiga Intellectual Property, and were sold bundled with AmigaOS 4.0, which is a continuation of the same operating system that shipped with Commodore Amigas. This is enough to justify their presence in the table of commercially released Amiga computers. --Lumpbucket 15:30, 08 Dec 2005 (UTC)

Pegasos

Someone added the Pegasos to the table of marketed Amiga models. While I can see the reasoning behind it, the fact of the matter is that the Pegasos with MorphOS was NEVER marketed as an Amiga, and never had the Amiga name officially applied to it, therefore it shouldn't be in a table of "Marketed Amiga models". I have added a reference to it in the trivia section, since the computer was created by Amiga enthusiasts and MorphOS is able to run Amiga applications under emulation.

"Aga superior"

Only the original amiga chipset was ahead of its time. By the time AGA was unveiled, it was simply not competitive anymore. (too low memory bandwidth, no chunky mode, low video bandwidth) Sorry, but lets stay by the facts.--Qdr 19:45, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

To anon user 62.101.126.233/81.135.36.201, When you make an edit that is removing content from the article, please explain why on the Talk page, or at least in the edit summary. Otherwise, your intentions may be mistaken, as was this case. If you remove content from an article again without leaving a comment or edit summary, you may be mistaken as a vandal. Also, if the comment on AROS needs to be rephrased, you could just mention it on the talk page. You could move the existing comment to the talk page too, if you feel so inclined. --cprompt 14:43, Jun 18, 2004 (UTC)


can't decode the cryptic caption

What the heck does this caption mean?

A just started Amiga 500 with kickstart 34.5 asks the user to insert the Workbench 1.3 floppy

Who or what is "A"? Also, the transition to "asks the using" doesn't make sense. Is this supposed to be "which asks the user"?

WpZurp 19:09, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Thanks Arpingstone for the clarification. WpZurp 16:46, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Amigas still rock. Long live the Amiga. (AmigaMan)


Lorraine

I think Lorraine should be mentioned either on this page or on the Commodore page. (For those of you who don't know: Amiga was a company that created a computer they called Lorraine. The company was bought by Commodore and the computer was released as the Amiga.)

Reverting recent edit

The most recent edit changed the text "Amiga Community Portal" on the link to AmigaWorld.net to "Amiga, Inc. corporate fan site". I'm reverting it (doesn't seem like NPOV from here...) but thought that I'd better justify it here - could be a divisive issue as some people seem to have a grudge against that site, and I've never edited Wikipedia before so it could all go terribly wrong!

I see it's happened again. The Wikipedia is meant as a place to store information with as neutral a point a view as possible - is this? Amiga.org and ANN.lu are similar sites but don't have the same insulting tone to their description. I've taken the descision to remove the description for AW.net completely, as its apparent that there are two completely seperate (and unreconcilable) views. Apologies if I've overstepped the mark, but perhaps the user who edited it could at least justify their reasoning?

total revamp

I totally revamped the page with these purposes:

  • separate Amiga from Commodore International (its successes and failures should be read in its page, not here!), and Amiga from AmigaOS.
  • reformatted text to make it more consistent and suited to an encyclopedia
  • removed all things that violates the NPOV rule of the wikipedia
  • removed many redundant external links: this is a wiki, not a search engine!!

Hardware Section vs. Trivia

Is it really important to mention, that Amiga could emulate the mouse by use of the keyboard ? Other systems do this as well, however, there the OS needs to be loaded (Windows i.e.). The Amiga had its OS partially in the ROM, so this might equal. However, I am not a hardware tech and not aware of how this has beeen implemented. If we keep it, I would suggest adding a Hardware section (such as the OS section) in which we go indepth on hardware-features, like the possibilitiy for several "screens" with different resolutions, etc. Also the copros could be mentioned here. I am not good a hardware insights to the Amiga so I will leave this to others. For now, I move the Keyboard-Mouse functionality to the keyboard section, since I do not see it significant enough for an own Trivia entry. Thanks.

I originally wrote the entry in question, and I agree with it being moved to the Keyboard section. 06:01, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)

--

Speaking of the trivia section, can anyone confirm the other "three-fingered salute", i.e. Ctrl-Alt-Alt? I have been an enthusiastic Amiga user for over a decade and this was the first time I've ever heard of it. Maybe I should dig out my A4000 and try it. 11:17, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The Ctrl-Alt-Alt reboot only applies to OS4, and probably only when running on the AmigaOne. Because kickstart is located on disk with OS4, Ctrl-Amiga-Amiga reboots like it does on the classic Amiga (basically, it jumps to the start of kickstart and boots), but Ctrl-Alt-Alt reboots back to the BIOS and loads the kickstart off the disk again before booting. - Lumpbucket
That explains it, then, seeing as I have never had OS4, only earlier OS versions. This should be mentioned in the trivia section. Oh, I see it already has been. Never mind. 12:59, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I added some text about the (traditional) three-fingered salute and found that the mention of the alleged second kind of salue became awkward, especially since I have no knowlege of it and the previous text didn't really explain what it did. I think the term "warm reset" that had been used was a bit misleading, as the effect of Ctrl-Amiga-Amiga is simply a CPU reset and reboot, and the fact that the OS might sometimes retain some lingering information in memory has little to do with the keyboard. The fact that kickstart survives is interesting, though. But the text as I've left it is not very good because it mentions the existence of the second kind of salute without explaining it. Since the second kind exists only in unreleased software for an unreleased product, I'm inclined to just remove its mention entirely. Mditto 12:31, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

'Commodore 64' vs 'Commodore C64'

I changed occurances of "Commodore 64" to "Commodore C64". This might seem nitpicking, but the "Commodore VIC20" was not the "Commodore 20" either. "C64" seems to be the common model name of the "CBM64" by "Commodore". I remember it also being called "VC64", but this might have been specific to Germany and thus is of no value here. Please check section Talk:Commodore_64#'CBM 64' vs 'CBM64' and 'Commodore 64' vs 'Commodore C64' for more on this. I should mention, that we need to keep conformance and consistancy on this issue, that is why I started the discussion over at the Commodore_64 article. Sorry for any inconvenience I might cause. Just trying to be accurate. Thanks.

On a side-note: Could anyone suggest why the link is messed up in my comment here and both links need to be different in editing ? I tried several variants and the long link always behaved strange. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 145.254.128.134 (talk • contribs) .

The Commodore VIC 20 wasn't called the Commodore 20 because it was a VIC20 made by Commodore. The Commodore 64 wasn't called the Commodore C64 because C64 from my understanding was a user contraction of the name Commodore 64, which is the full system name and merely doubles as a companyname devicename. Calling it a Commodore C64 in my view is therefore a grating rudundancy. If a company called VIC made the VIC 20 then it would seem equally silly to turn around and call it the VIC VIC 20.

To summarize, I think its poor form to call the Commodore 64, or C64, a Commodore C64. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 64.81.58.56 (talk • contribs) .

I am from the USA (commodore user since 1980). I have only heard of the "C= 64" as the "commodore 64" or "C 64". My $ .02

Microkernel?!

How can it be said that the AmigaOS is based on a microkernel? I've had discussions about this in the past, and people disagreed widely, and I don't even have a real opinion myself. But it seems quite apparent that the AmigaOS being a microkernel is not a fact. Does the AmigaOS have a clear distinction between kernel mode and user mode? I'm afraid not. Can you have a real microkernel without a clear distinction between kernel mode and user mode? I'm not sure, but I'm sure many authoritative people would say you can't.

So, I'm going to delete the references to microkernels if nobody objects in the next few days.

The AmigaOS has very little in the way of distinctive modes (kernel mode versus user mode) because it has very little in the way of security. Lack of memory protection and privledge restrictions leave very little room for the necessity of a "kernel mode".

That said, a definition of the Amiga kernel is necessary to continue with this. Is it the exec library, the entire contents of kickstart? If just exec, then perhaps it is a microkernel, if its all of kickstart it becomes monolithic and well in excess of the bounds I define a microkernel with.

exokernel seems to fit what there, what do you guys think?

Nope. Exokernel it is the name of a specific class of kernels.

There was people in Wikipedia who in the past wanted to delete Amiga Exec from microkernels [see Kernel (computer science) invoice into Wikipedia] but I found a good compromise who saved Amiga far from being deleted.

Exec is an "Atypical Microkernel". It has gained its own class into Kernels and we all must refer to it as already stated.

--Raffaele Megabyte 10:08, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

History

I feel this article needs a total rewrite, it lacks a lot of historical information don't you think? I feel the Atari ST article reads much better than the Amiga one, because it contains the historical context which this one seems to be lacking in right now. In fact it has more information about the Amiga's purchase than this one!

The whole saga of Commodore's purchase of Amiga corporation probably needs an article to itself though. I'm in the process of writing up a brief history about the origins of Amiga, but should I keep it short and put it in this article, or expand it and put it in a separate article? This article seems to be pretty long as it is...

Also certain things needs some reduction, like the info about the keyboard. (Was the Amiga's keyboard more important than the custom chipset!?) The more I read the article, the more random and disjointed it becomes. Agree or disagree? ADSR6581 10:27, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I very much agree. The whole article is a mess, doesn't emphasize the Amiga's unique strengths well enough, doesn't emphasize its advantages over other PC's of the time, and in general, contains a lot of ambiguities and confusing passages. It also fails to emphasize that the Amiga *still* has considerable advantages over other PC's, such as extremely low overhead, configurability, simplicity of design, dual GUI/CLI, ease of use etc.

It could really do with an extensive rewrite, at the very least to remove the many amibiguous or unclear passages. I'm reluctant to do the job myself as I'm not an IT professional and have limited time available, but I might try and clean up some of the text here and there if I can find the time. I made one small clarification today. Gatoclass 11:30, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Edit: I have deleted the following paragraph:

The OS was not without its flaws, however. Its method calling convention, for instance, was for performance reasons implemented in such a way that it made memory protection impracticable. Other problems included the OS being prone to memory fragmentation, the UI freezing while accessing menus and perhaps worst of all, applications making invalid assumptions about the OSs inner workings (which is arguably not a fault of the OS per se). - and replaced it with a couple of paragraphs of my own. While I don't consider this an ideal edit by any means, I wanted to remove the reference to the alleged problem of "the UI freezing while accessing menus" which is completely untrue, and the comment about memory fragmentation, since I'm not sure this isn't a problem for other platforms as well.

Other than that I wanted to change the paragraph because it gives the impression the Amiga wasn't a reliable machine, which is totally false.

Really though I'd like to rewrite the whole article. The segment on the custom chipset, for example, is much too long compared to the other sections, and does not even contain much useful information. By using the present tense it also gives the impression this is the current state of the hardware when in fact the OCS was superceded as long ago as 1993. Gatoclass 12:49, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Eh? The UI really does freeze while accessing the menus. This is one of the things that annoys me about the Amiga. Try it, open AmigaAMP or Frogger or similar, play a song and then access the menus. You get a similar effect in MS Windows if you hold in the X button in many applications (Media Player Classic for instance). Anss123 13:07, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, but I have to disagree Anss. I have owned maybe a dozen different Amigas, from the A1000 to the A500, 500+, A2000 and A1200, and I have never experienced this problem - EXCEPT as a result of other misbehaving programs.

The point is that the way the paragraph was written, it sounded as though the OS itself was responsible for the problem, ie that the OS menu routines were unreliable and didn't work properly, which just isn't correct. Gatoclass 05:44, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, I'm not sure we're talking about the same ting. I'm not talking about the OS crashing; I'm talking about small animations stopping up while in the menus. (e.g. The progress bar of a media player for instance). To me it looks like the OS is blocking some message queue, which something I consider to be a clear case of bad design. (But not overtly important in the large scale of things) Anss123 10:24, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

Gatoclass, not to be a grich but I have a couple of issues with the paragraph: The average Amiga user could usually quickly identify a misbehaving program and eliminate it from his software collection. However, lack of memory protection was arguably one of the deficiencies that contributed to chronic lack of interest in the machine from the business world.

The first statement can be applied to just about any OS (in that if an application misbehaved you could drop it), the sentence is also misleading as sometimes it could be very hard do (keep in mind that on the Amiga applications could step on each others toes; thus it was not always clear which application was the culprit for a system's instability). As for the second statement, few of the competing “business oriented” OSs (DOS/Windows, Mac OS and AtariTOS) had memory protection; therefore I have to wonder why the lack of it hurt AOS in the business world? Sure, it might perhaps possibly have made a difference, but that is a discussion in on itself.

With this in mind I deleted the paragraph, but if you put it back (for whatever reason) I will not delete it again. --Anss123 20:01, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Okay. I said I'm not an IT professional and while I know the Amiga fairly well, having programmed it right down to assembly language level, I'm not that familiar with other PC developments of the era (although of course I use a PC today :) ). However I'm aware that lack of memory protection was an issue frequently cited at the professional end of the market as a reason for Amiga's failure to gain more acceptance in the business world. Amigaworld magazine, for example, complained about it a fair bit as I recall.

All the same there were obviously other important factors that stopped Amiga from getting a foothold into that market, the main one being Commodore's own chronic inability to see the machine as anything but a gaming platform. So I'm not going to insist on the reintroduction of that paragraph. I already said I wasn't 100% happy with my edit anyhow, it was really just a quick fix while I contemplated some more considered edits. That's assuming I can ever find the time to make them ;) Gatoclass 05:44, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

Agree. I'm not sure about the history, it's true that the article could become quite long, but having a separate "History of the Amiga" article doesn't seem too sound to me, either. LjL 20:31, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I've been meaning to do more than the occasional tweak to these articles for a while now. I think that a vigorous history section would be great; if it got too big or detailed, it could be broken out into a new article at that point. Also, one of these days, I'm going to open up one of my A1000s and take a picture of the design team signatures (and paw prints) on the inside of the case, for the A1000 article. --Ray Radlein 23:54, Mar 31, 2005 (UTC)

I just corrected the missconception on the Amiga/Atari Inc./Atari Corp. relationship someone had put up in the trivia area. It's also wrong in the Atari ST entry. The updated info is based on current available material (including documents recovered by Curt Vendel of the Atari Historical Society) and my own interviews with Leonard Tramiel. --Marty Goldberg 16:31, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

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