How many amiga computers were sold

On a preemptive system, any hung task slows the machine a small bit but doesn't kill it. Unsurprisingly, this dream machine did not come cheap. It was expensive, but not preposterously so. And the Amiga sold. Sales for the entire fleet of Amiga systems, which grew to around a dozen models, reached 4 million by the time Commodore closed its doors in That's pittance next to the C64's 17 million, but the Amiga was a premium machine.

And while the Commodore 64 still holds its retro appeal , the Amiga ascended to a higher plane of nerd. That loyalty it inspired may not have been enough to save Amiga in the s. But it was more than enough to resurrect it for a second life today. Niemuth wasn't even born until years after Commodore shuttered, but his connection to Amiga is strong. A self-described retro gamer, Niemuth got his start in Facebook groups by buying and selling old-school hardware, including cathode ray tube monitors and, of course, Amigas.

He has an Amiga —a model that's older than he is—that he uses to write chiptunes and to explore the games of the past in their natural habitat. His favorites are Battle Squadron , Ork , and a port of Galaga. One of his current projects is backing up Krueger's software library to a home server. There are more than 2, Amiga discs in his collection. Niemuth's Amiga isn't an off-the-shelf model straight out of an 80s catalog.

It's souped-up, with an ethernet port—though the machine's built-in browser that can barely handle the modern web—and has hardware tweaks as well, such as a video card to push resolutions past the limits of yesteryear. His goal is to build a machine that might even be cable of Twitch stream editing, someday. When you do so much custom tinkering, setting up the system can require a little troubleshooting.

During the process, Niemuth and Krueger try out a series of monitors from a collection in Krueger's basement, a stockpile of some 20 or so machines built up during his years working as a computer repairman. Many of those machines, unsurprisingly, are Amigas.

It wasn't just the computer itself he loved, but also its potential. Demos are often music videos or graphical hacks created for pleasure, to astonish spectators or to demonstrate the very limits of the hardware the run into. These are often being considered a modern form of art see Demoscene. Here follows a brief list of major known software for Amiga organized by these categories. To learn more, refer to main article Amiga programming languages.

Frying Pan and BurnIt! Archimedes computers were popular in Great Britain because they were adopted in schools of all grades. Young Amiga users there were 1,, Amigas sold in the United Kingdom spotted docks on Archimedes at school and asked for it on Amiga also.

Various launch bars or docking utilities were born as third-party hobby utilities many examples of early docking software for Amiga are still hosted in the Aminet repository of all Amiga free software, in the "Utility" directory and then Amidock was officially integrated in AmigaOS with version 3. Directory Opus was a file utility program.

When this software was released, the popular Amiga magazines [ clarification needed ] proclaimed that it was the most important software ever released for the Amiga and "should be built into the operating system". Directory Opus went on to create a "replacement OS" for Workbench which overlaid itself upon the system.

It started as a file manager, and then became a complete desktop replacement and an alternative to the official Workbench. Much shareware and free software was written for the Amiga and could be obtained via the Fred Fish disk series or from the Aminet software archive. Some processor-intensive software, such as 3D renderers, would disable the display during calculation in order to gain speed.

During the years, Amiga was able to emulate other platforms or game machines, or to run directly a vast range of other operating systems. Noteworthy are:. Games were an obvious application for the Amiga hardware, and thousands of games were produced. It was common for games to be produced for multiple formats in the days of the Amiga. Since the Amiga hardware was the most advanced of all, the games were usually developed on an Amiga, and the Amiga version would be the "gold standard" of the bunch.

The Amiga was a focal point for the " demo scene ". The Amiga thrived on public domain , freeware and other not-for-profit development. The demo scene spearheaded development in multimedia programming techniques for the Amiga, such that it was de rigueur for the latest visual tricks, soundtrackers and 3D algorithms from the demo scene to end up being used in computer game development.

Because the Amiga was one of the first game-oriented computers to feature a built-in floppy disk drive, which allowed for easy copying, it was also the scene of much software piracy. Many of the arguments pertaining to software copying, intellectual property rights in software, the open-source movement , and so on, were well-developed in the Amiga scene by the early s. It was not unusual for a demo group to be openly involved in software piracy. Several anti-piracy measures were introduced during the Amiga's reign.

One was the practice of distributing software on disks that contained secret "keys" on high-numbered tracks, which were officially unused. Official disk-imaging software would ignore these tracks, so that a duplicate of a boxed disk would not contain the key and the software would not work. A similar technique involved writing to sectors of the disk that would not normally be used. However, special copy software called "nibble" copiers appeared, which could exactly reproduce any disk an Amiga could read.

Publishers therefore turned to other methods. Hardware dongles were occasionally used for high-end software. Some software manufacturers would force a user to type a word from a particular page number and line number of the manual, meaning that successfully copying software included photocopying a large quantity of text.

Sometimes the text from which the key was chosen was designed so that photocopiers would produce illegible copies, meaning that pirates had to retype or handwrite the text, or else give up. These and other schemes led to pirates " cracking " software by altering a copy of the code bypassing the copy protection completely.

Later designs feature the Motorola or Motorola Graphics cards are designed primarily for 2D artwork production, workstation use, and later, gaming. Video cards are designed for inputting and outputting video signals, and processing and manipulating video. This was a powerful video effects board which turned the Amiga into an affordable video processing computer which found its way into many professional video environments.

Low-cost time base correctors TBC specifically designed to work with the Toaster quickly came to market, most of which were designed as standard Amiga bus cards. Other manufacturers produced hybrid boards which contained an Intel x86 series chip, allowing the Amiga to emulate a PC. Expansion boards were made by Richmond Sound Design that allow their show control and sound design software to communicate with their custom hardware frames either by ribbon cable or fiber optic cable for long distances, allowing the Amiga to control up to eight million digitally controlled external audio, lighting, automation, relay and voltage control channels spread around a large theme park, for example.

See Amiga software for more information on these applications. The original Amiga models were produced from to Several companies and private persons have also released Amiga clones and still do so today.

The first Amiga model, the Amiga , was launched in as a high-end home computer and became popular for its impressive graphics, video and audio capabilities. In , PC World rated the Amiga as the seventh greatest PC of all time, stating " Years ahead of its time, the Amiga was the world's first multimedia, multitasking personal computer ".

Following the A, Commodore updated the desktop line of Amiga computers with the Amiga in , the Amiga in , and the Amiga in , each offering improved capabilities and expansion options. However, the best selling models were the budget models, particularly the highly successful Amiga and the Amiga It was an early attempt at a multi-purpose multimedia appliance in an era before multimedia consoles and CD-ROM drives were common. Unfortunately for Commodore, the system never achieved any real commercial success.

Like the Commodore 64GS that was a video game console based on a computer, the CDTV was designed as a video game console and multimedia platform.

It had existed before the Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn , but had influenced them. Commodore's last Amiga offering before filing for bankruptcy was an attempt to capture a portion of the highly competitive s console market with the Amiga CD32 , a bit CD-ROM games console.

Though discontinued after Commodore's demise it met with moderate commercial success in Europe. Following purchase of Commodore's assets by Escom in , the A and AT continued to be sold in small quantities until , though the ground lost since the initial launch and the prohibitive expense of these units meant that the Amiga line never regained any real popularity.

Several Amiga models contained references to songs by the rock band The Bs. Most original casing was made from ABS plastics which may become brown with time. This can be reversed by using the public domain chemical mix "Retr0bright". It is mainly based on AmigaOS 3.

AmigaOS 4. Long-time Amiga developer MacroSystem entered the Amiga-clone market with their DraCo non-linear video editing system.

The technology was later used in the Casablanca system, a set-top-box also designed for non-linear video editing. The company was renamed to Met box in until it folded.

The NatAmi short for Native Amiga hardware project began in with the aim of designing and building an Amiga clone motherboard that is enhanced with modern features. It is compatible with the original Amiga chipset, which has been inscribed on a programmable FPGA Altera chip on the board. From a commercial point of view, Natami's circuitry and design are currently Closed Source.

As such, NatAmi is not intended to become another evolutionary heir to classic Amigas such as with AmigaOne or Pegasos computers. This "purist" philosophy essentially limits the resulting processor speed but puts the focus on bandwidth and low latencies. Later, the developers decided to create from scratch a new software-form processor chip, codenamed "N" that resides in the physical Altera FPGA programmable chip.

The first, the Minimig, is a personal project of Dutch engineer Dennis van Weeren. Referred to as "new Amiga hardware", [ 49 ] the original model was built on a Xilinx Spartan-3 development board, but soon a dedicated board was developed. A third party upgrade replaces the PIC microcontroller with a more powerful ARM processor, providing more functionality such as write access and support for hard disk images.

The Replay board is designed to implement many older computers and classic arcade machines. The second is the Clone-A system announced by Individual Computers.

As of mid it has been shown in its development form, with FPGA-based boards replacing the Amiga chipset and mounted on an Amiga motherboard. Support for Amiga software is planned.

Like many popular but discontinued platforms, the Amiga has been the target of various emulation projects so that software developed for the Amiga can be run on other computer platforms without the original hardware.

Such emulators attempt to replicate the functionality of the Amiga architecture in software. One of the most challenging aspects of emulation is the design of the Amiga chipset, which relies on cycle-critical timings. As a result, early emulators did not always achieve the intended results though later emulator versions can now accurately reproduce the behavior of Amiga systems. AmigaOS is a single-user multitasking operating system. It was developed first by Commodore International, and initially introduced in with the Amiga At the time of release AmigaOS put an operating system that was well ahead of its time into the hands of the average consumer.

It was one of the first commercially available consumer operating systems for personal computers to implement preemptive multitasking. Another notable feature was the combined use of both a command-line interface and graphical user interface. AmigaDOS was the disk operating system and command line portion of the OS and Workbench the native graphical windowing, icons, menu and pointer environment for file management and launching applications.

Notably, AmigaDOS allowed long filenames up to characters with whitespace and did not require file extensions. The windowing system and user interface engine which handles all input events is called Intuition. The multi-tasking kernel was called Exec. It acts as a scheduler for tasks running on the system, providing pre-emptive multitasking with prioritised round-robin scheduling. It enabled true pre-emptive multitasking in as little as kB of free memory.

Like other operating systems of the time, the OS lacks memory protection. This was because the CPU does not include a memory management unit and therefore there is no way to enforce protection of memory. The problem was somewhat exacerbated by Commodore's initial decision to release documentation relating not only to the OS's underlying software routines, but also to the hardware itself, enabling intrepid programmers who cut their teeth on the Commodore 64 to POKE the hardware directly, as was done on the older platform.

While the decision to release the documentation was a popular one and allowed the creation of fast, sophisticated sound and graphics routines in games and demos, it also contributed to system instability as some programmers lacked the expertise to program at this level.

For this reason, when the new AGA chipset was released, Commodore declined to release low-level documentation in an attempt to force developers into using the approved software routines. AmigaOS directly or indirectly inspired the development of various operating systems. Among other unusual features of Amix is a hardware-accelerated windowing system which can scroll windows without copying data. Community "chatter" continues to talk about total sales anywhere between million which is probably where I got my original number..

I hope this helps to answer the question once and for all. Regards, Lee ltstanfo. Tigger Finally came around to recheck "my" source. I had an A and A new back in the day still have the A If we could find Toaster sales figures you can easily figure out the minimum number of A sales at least. Just about every TV station had at least a pair, as well as most cable systems. Also, the A was used by Prevue for cable system program guides, so that could be thousands.

My local cable provider Time Warner Torrance only recently swapped their community channel normally an informational slide show with background music from an Amiga system to a Windows system. Now I get to see application errors instead of guru's