The Amiga No One Wanted

March 16, 2025 by Al Williams 57 Comments

The Amiga has a lot of fans, and rightly so. The machine broke a lot of ground. However, according to [Dave Farquhar], one of the most popular models today — the Amiga 600 — was reviled in 1992 by just about everyone. One of the last Amigas, it was supposed to be a low-cost home computer but was really just a repackaged Amiga 1000, a machine already seven years old which, at the time, might as well have been decades. The industry was moving at lightspeed back then.

[Dave] takes a look at how Commodore succeeded and then lost their way by the time the 600 rolled out. Keep in mind that low-cost was a relative term. A $500 price tag was higher than it seems today and even at that price, you had no monitor or hard drive. So at a $1,000 for a practical system you might as well go for a PC which was taking off at the same time.

By the time Commodore closed down, they had plenty of 600s left, but they also had refurbished 500s, and for many, that was the better deal. It was similar to the 500 but had more features, like an external port and easy memory expansion. Of course, both machines used the Motorola 68000. While that CPU has a lot of great features, by 1992, the writing was on the wall that the Intel silicon would win.

Perhaps the biggest issue, though, was the graphics system. The original Amiga outclassed nearly everything at the time. But, again, the industry was moving fast. The 600 wasn’t that impressive compared to a VGA. And, as [Dave] points out, it couldn’t run DOOM.

There’s more to the post. Be sure to check it out. It is a great look into the history of the last of a great line of machines. Maybe if Commodore had embraced PC interfaces, but we’ll never know. [Dave’s] take on the end of the Amiga echos others we’ve read. It wasn’t exactly Doom that killed the Amiga. It was more complicated than that. But Doom would have helped.

Lessons Learned, When Restoring An Amiga 1000

January 30, 2025 by Jenny List 9 Comments

In the mid 1980s, there was a rash of 16-bit computers entering the market. One of them stood head and shoulders above the rest: Commodore’s Amiga 1000. It had everything that could reasonably be stuffed into a machine of the period, and multimedia capabilities the rest wouldn’t catch up on for years. [Celso Martinho] has managed to secure one of those first machines, and has shared his tale of bringing it back to life.

The post is as much a love letter to the Amiga and review of A1000 peripherals as it is a restoration, which makes it a good read for retrocomputing enthusiasts. He recapped it and it wouldn’t boot, the solution of which turned out to be a reminder for the rest of us.

The machine had a RAM upgrade in the form of a daughterboard under the processor, its pins had weakened the leaves of the processor socket so it wouldn’t make contact. So don’t forget to replace sockets as well as capacitors.

The resulting machine is much faster thanks to a modern upgrade with a much quicker processor, memory, and an SD card for storage. He goes into some of the other upgrades available today, all of which would have had early-1990s-us salivating. It’s fair to say that in 2025 an A1000 is more 40-year-old curio than useful modern computer, but we can’t fail to admit to a bit of envy. The Amiga holds a special affection, here.

Remember The Tri-Format Floppy Disk?

November 12, 2024 by Lewin Day 16 Comments

These days, the vast majority of portable media users are storing their files on some kind of Microsoft-developed file system. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, though, things were different. You absolutely could not expect a floppy disk from one type of computer to work in another. That is, unless you had a magical three-format disk, as [RobSmithDev] explains.

The tri-format disk was a special thing. It was capable of storing data in Amiga, PC, and Atari ST formats. This was of benefit for cover disks—a magazine could put out content for users across all three brands, rather than having to ship multiple disks to suit different machines.

[RobSmithDev] started investigating by reading the tri-format disk with his DiskFlashback tool. The tool found two separate filesystems. The Amiga filesystem took up 282 KB of space. The second filesystem contained two folders—one labelled PC, the other labelled ST. The Atari ST folder contained 145KB of data, while the PC folder used 248 KB. From there, we get a breakdown on how the data for each format is spread across the disk, right down to the physical location of the data. The different disk formats of each system allowed data to be scattered across the disk such that each type of computer would find its relevant data where it expected it to be.

It’s a complex bit of disk engineering that allowed this trick to work, and [Rob] explains it in great detail. We love nitty gritty storage hacks around here. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Remember The Tri-Format Floppy Disk?” →

Hacker Chris Edwards demonstrating his wireless Amiga

Retro Wi-Fi On A Dime: Amiga’s Slow Lane Connection

October 13, 2024 by Heidi Ulrich 9 Comments

In a recent video, [Chris Edwards] delves into the past, showing how he turned a Commodore Amiga 3000T into a wireless-capable machine. But forget modern Wi-Fi dongles—this hack involves an old-school D-Link DWL-G810 wireless Ethernet bridge. You can see the Amiga in action in the video below.

[Chris] has a quirky approach to retrofitting. He connects an Ethernet adapter to his Amiga, bridges it to the D-Link, and sets up an open Wi-Fi network—complete with a retro 11 Mbps speed. Then again, the old wired connection was usually 10 Mbps in the old days.

To make it work, he even revived an old Apple AirPort Extreme as a supporting router since the old bridge didn’t support modern security protocols. Ultimately, the Amiga gets online wirelessly, albeit at a leisurely pace compared to today’s standards. He later demonstrates an upgraded bridge that lets him connect to his normal network.

We’ve used these wireless bridges to put oscilloscopes and similar things on wireless, but newer equipment usually requires less work even if it doesn’t already have wireless. We’ve also seen our share of strange wireless setups like this one. If you are going to put your Amgia on old-school networking, you might as well get Java running, too.

Continue reading “Retro Wi-Fi On A Dime: Amiga’s Slow Lane Connection” →

Amiga, Interrupted: A Fresh Take On Amiga OS

August 19, 2024 by Heidi Ulrich 20 Comments

Serena OS is not just another operating system—it’s a playground for hackers, tinkerers, and Amiga enthusiasts pushing vintage hardware to new limits. Born from modern design principles and featuring pervasive preemptive concurrency and multi-user support, [dplanitzer]’s Serena OS is far from ordinary.

Running on Amiga systems with a 68030 or better CPU, it challenges traditional OS concepts by ditching threads in favor of dispatch queues, akin to Apple’s Grand Central Dispatch. The result? A dynamic, flexible kernel that combines forward-thinking design with retro charm.

The real innovation in Serena is its kernel, which uses a virtual processor concept to manage system resources efficiently. Instead of threads, Serena dynamically adjusts a pool of virtual processors based on dispatch queue needs, ensuring tasks are executed with precision and speed. Interrupt handling is also unique: interrupts are converted into semaphore signals, allowing the code to handle these signals at its convenience without missing any, making hardware interactions more controlled, especially where timing is critical.

For Amiga enthusiasts already customizing their setups, Serena OS offers new possibilities. It shares some spirit with projects like AROS (Amiga Research Operating System) but adds its own twist with object-oriented design and cross-platform goals. Whether you’re developing software for your classic Amiga or exploring new hardware interfaces, Serena OS provides a robust and adaptable foundation.

The Amiga We All Wanted In 1993

June 4, 2024 by Jenny List 51 Comments

To be an Amiga fan during the dying days of the hardware platform back in the mid 1990s was to have a bleak existence indeed. Commodore had squandered what was to us the best computer ever with dismal marketing and a series of machines that were essentially just repackaged versions of the original. Where was a PCI Amiga with fast processors, we cried!

Now, thirty years too late, here’s [Jason Neus] with just the machine we wanted, in the shape of an ATX form factor Amiga motherboard with those all-important PCI slots and USB for keyboard and mouse.

What would have been unthinkable in the ’90s comes courtesy of an original or ECS Amiga chipset for the Amiga functions, and an FPGA and microcontroller for PCI and USB respectively. Meanwhile there’s also a PC floppy drive controller, based on work from [Ian Steadman]. The processor and RAM lives on a daughter card, and both 68040 and 68060 processors are supported.

Here in 2024 of course this is still a 1990s spec board, and misty-eyed speculation about what might have happened aside, it’s unlikely to become your daily driver. But that may not be the point, instead we should evaluate it for what it is. Implementing a PCI bus, even a 1990s one, is not without its challenges, and we’re impressed with the achievement.

If you’re interested in Amiga post-mortems, here’s a slightly different take.

Large Language Model Can Help You Develop For The Amiga

March 5, 2024 by Lewin Day 13 Comments

Developing for the Amiga used to involve reading dense programming manuals and trial and error. In contrast, developing these days can be as simple as barking orders at ChatGPT to spit you out some Python code. However, that technique doesn’t work so well for Amiga languages, as ChatGPT hasn’t read much about the now-ancient platform. However, as covered by AmigaNews, there is now a ChatGPT model trained specifically on Amiga development. Enter Amiga Guru.

The work of [Cameron Armstrong], Amiga Guru was built after his early experiments with ChatGPT spat out non-functional gibberish when Amiga-compatible code was requested. The model has been trained on a corpus of official Amiga programming manuals, third-party books, and even the documentation for AmigaOS 3.2 and 4.1.

Using the model yourself requires a subscription to ChatGPT Plus, which prevents this writer from testing it directly. However, it makes sense that having been directly trained on Amiga manuals, it would be more capable at answering Amiga programming queries than conventional ChatGPT 4.

It’s easy to see the value of such a system. Learning to program for older platforms can be hard, with less resources available for new learners. Having an AI to help could be useful for some eager to develop for the 68K-based machine.

If you’d like to try Amiga Guru, you can access it via this link. Be sure to let us know how you go, and whether you think it has any value for speeding up your own Amiga development. Otherwise, if you’ve been doing anything else nifty with the platform that Commodore bought and paid for, don’t hesitate to let us know!

[Thanks to Stephen Waters for the tip!]