Actions
Forum Thread Details
  • Replies 6 replies
  • Subscribers 507 subscribers
  • Views 471 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Related

From Bedrooms to Billions: The Amiga Years

cstanton

Did anyone else back the Kickstarter?

 

This documentary is about 2hr 30min long and covers from microcontrollers, through to the Apple computers and introducing the birth and life of the Commodore Amiga. It's pretty fascinating, contains a lot of great interviews and sketches of computer design.

 

It's about £10 for the digital copy: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/amiga

  • Rather than the BBC Model B it was seeing the Amiga that encouraged many people to have a software engineering career. I remember the incredible demo routines by bitmap brothers? pushing chips to the limit getting that extra bit of rendering and sound effects etc. I never owned an Amiga as a kid but I definitely wanted one! The next best thing was to study how computers worked image

    Is the video like the BBC Podfather documentary level?

  • I certainly was influenced by the Amiga and I still have my Amiga 1000. I along with most owners was extremely frustrated with the corporate shenanigans that actively prevented the marque from progressing and surviving. I doubt it is possible to document all the real reasons the Amiga died, but it is good to see someone is trying to deduce its effect on the industry.

  • in reply to shabaz

    I'm not familiar with BBC Podfather, however it does go into a lot of detail, it's interesting to see the schematics for the logic gates for various processor chips.

  • in reply to dougw

    I admit we have an A600 and A1200 in the house, we also have access to an A500. I've been intending on acquiring replacement EEPROM chips to up the A1200 to the workbench 3.1 ROMs, apparently it's possible to acquire like for like chips and use the ROM files you can download from the Google Play store.

  • Yep the Amiga revolutionalised a lot of things.

    Having a truly graphical interface is just one aspect, along with seperate chips sharing memory and offsetting some of the CPU load is another.

     

    I recall that TVNZ used one for the graphics as nothing could match it.

     

    Sadly they were ahead of their time, and like Beta v VHS tapes the marketing let them down.

    I do have some software floating around still.

     

    Mark

  • in reply to mcb1

    I loved the Amiga. The Cinemaware games were miles ahead of their time, and the demo scene stuff was awesome. Amazing to think about how these things managed to spread around the world without the internet -- just a few bulletin boards, but mostly from person to person. Staggering, when you think about it.