COMMODORE AMIGA (500)

Specification

cpu: Motorola 68000 at 7.16MHZ

RAM: 512K (up to 8.5MB)

Graphics: 4,096 colours at 320x256, 16 colours 640x512

Sound: Custom MOS Paula chip, 28KHZ

os: Amigaos 1.2

Storage: 3.5-inch floppy, optional hard disk

Released: July 1985

Launch price: £499

production: 1987-1996

Worldwide sales: 4.85 million

At first glance it appears the ST had the Amiga licked for price and power, but look more closely and the picture becomes very different. Both these machines use the 68K CPU, but the Amiga had a large colour palette and a proper multitasking GUI.

More importantly, the Amiga was designed around multiple co-processors for handling audio, video and memory access – thereby freeing up the CPU and outperforming the competition. Unlike the ST, the Amiga had a great sound chip, with advanced features that wouldn’t be available on the PC for years.

While Atari had found an instant market with music composers, the Amiga had its own niche: video editing. With the right hardware, Amigas could ‘genlock’ with video signals, matching their refresh rates and enabling video overlays and easy effects. For a few grand someone could get into professional video editing for less than a tenth of the cost of existing systems.

Modification was very popular, and it was common to fit Amigas with expansion boards with a second CPU, enabling Mac or PC functionality. It didn’t take long for the Amiga to branch off into different, more advanced models, but it was the budget Amiga 500 that was the real hit. Released in 1987, the 500 was almost half the price of the original. Costs were cut by repackaging the bulky desktop case into micro form, new chipsets enabled simplified design, and lower RAM prices allowed for 512K of RAM.