Talk:Amiga

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[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] Requested move

  • Support — Nintendude moved the page unilaterally, which is bad form in my book. — Pixel8 11:34, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Support — I don't see the point if Amiga is just redirecting to Amiga (computer) anyway, and this just creates more work and hassle with updating redirects to avoid double-redirects (eg, Commodore Amiga). Mdwh 00:16, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
  • I think the move was quite a spectacular blunder, as it left Amiga as a redirect to Amiga (computer), which should never ever be done, and left literally hundreds of other articles linking to a redirect page instead of an article. I have undone the move and I don't think there is need for any more discussion. JIP | Talk 14:11, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

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)

[edit] 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?

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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.

[edit] "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)


[edit] 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)


[edit] 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.)

[edit] 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?

[edit] 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!!

[edit] 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)

[edit] '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

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] Operating system

I've just added some more paragraphs about AmigaOS, but then I realized there is already a separate AmigaOS article ;-) However, the structure of that article is such that I wouldn't really know where to put my stuff... what do you suggest? LjL 21:31, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Whoever wrote this section seems to think that hardware documentation is a bad thing. Amiga gave detailed documentation of the graphics hardware so that programmers would not be limited to what was spoon fed to them by a priesthood of API programmers. This ensured that the first generation of Amiga programmers would be able to push the graphics hardware to the limit. Perhaps this argumant is lost on programmers brought up on OS-heavy machines manufactured since Amiga's demise.--Drvanthorp 00:54, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

I would agree with you. It's rather POV by suggesting that going through the API would have been better (it may be unthinkable to suggest otherwise now, but things were much different with the limited hardware in the 80s), and seems to imply that the Amiga was alone in this choice (e.g., wasn't hitting the hardware common to some degree on DOS, and proper APIs only appeared with Windows 95?) I'm not sure how best to rewrite it - does anyone object to it being removed? There's not even evidence supplied that this was a significant cause of instability. Mdwh 22:25, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm going to take a look at this section. I have a bit of ... knowledge about the issue.  ;-) jesup 03:41, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
Yes, it was common practice on early personal computers to directly access the graphics and sound hardware. Some early machines had little or no API support for these features, so they were often accessed directly. The Atari 400/800 computers are a great example, because Atari actually intentionally left the best graphics features undocumnented in the belief that this would hamper third party game developement and give Atari an advantage in marketing their own games. These hidden hardware features were quickly discovered by programmers that dissasembled Atari's game software, and better documentation became available from third party sources, but never from Atari themselves. Commodore, on the other hand, published programmers reference guides describing the function of every byte of memory in the Vic-20 and C-64. Amiga was founded by hardwear-guru Atari defectors, and marketed by Commodore, so it was only natural that EVERYTHING was documented.--Drvanthorp 16:42, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
There was a classic series of arguments I had (I can't remember if it was comp.sys.amiga.tech or some such, or if it was on the BIX developer support forums) with some of the 3rd party game devs from Europe about going through the OS versus overriding it. With rare exceptions, it was better to go through the OS, even if you ignore whether the software works on the next minor rev of the hardware. And we worked HARD to make the OS not break badly-broken games - I once spent around a week with a hardware trace box tracking down why a (silly) children's program broke with the alpha of 2.0. Final reason: they depended on some scratch register (A1? D1?) to happen to get set to a device structure by OpenDevice() on the console (if I remember the details correctly). So we put one of many patches in to avoid breaking these programs that didn't follow the rules.
The ones that went totally direct to the hardware were worse: I analyzed a book written in the UK on how to access the floppy directly (targeted at game programmers). I can catagorically tell you that it would fail on some random percentage of Amigas because they didn't understand things like rotation speed tolerances. And in fact some games did fail when we changes floppy mechanism makers, even though it was totally in-spec. And this is just one of the simpler examples; ignoring how much some of the other stuff could help - or could get out of your way in a smooth manner while handling all the other stuff you didn't _need_ to access directly -- if you bothered to ask the OS, that is.jesup 17:04, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
I was thinking more in terms of stuff that demo coders did. These were the guys that wanted to do things with the (usually graphics) hardware that the hardware designers had never thought of doing, and which would not, and could not have been part of any OS or API that the manufacturer could have supplied. When you did this analysis on all of this software to try to keep the OS revisions compatible, did you ever run into any programming tricks of that sort?--Drvanthorp 20 October 2006 (UTC)
Pretty much no. "Demos" that nuked the OS pretty much were ignored. In fact, I don't even remember looking at any of the euroDemos at the time. We were interested in commercial games, and unlike now there was no very easy distribution of patches/updates (though it did happen), so avoiding breaking things was more important. And updates for copy-protected games were even harder. We had a whole series of patches just to keep things from breaking especially in 2.0 and 2.04. jesup 15:07, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
Of all the things that you would bypass the OS for, floppy disk access is not one that quickly comes to mind.--Drvanthorp 00:16, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] needs a rewrite

The opening paragraph is pretty bad. "memory mapped I/O"? weee. "plug and play"? Gratuitous reference to mainframes. No mention that the Amiga project started out as a game machine.

Then correct it! Everyone can edit - Adrian Pingstone 07:37, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Done. It's more factual and less hyped now.
Yes, I agree. I've changed it just a bit by adding a link to AmigaOS -- the OS is an important part of Amiga computers, and since there is an article that talks about it, I thought it should be linked somewhere very visible. I feel the need to justify my edit because there are already links to the AmigaOS article... however, I missed them myself the first time I read the article -- which might either mean that I don't read carefully enough, or that they aren't visible enough ;-)

[edit] Retromadness

Even with the link now pointing directly to the Amiga 4000T [1] page, I still think that link doesn't belong here. Look at the other links: they're all big sites with vast amounts of information (only pouet.net leaves me some doubts... it sure is a big site, but how is it Amiga-related, at least at a first glance?). The contrast with a page depicting an A4000T and briefly mentioning its hardware component is evident to me.

Before removing the link again, I'd like to hear some opinion, especially that of the link author. Thanks.

LjL 14:09, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Agreed, delete it. Mirror Vax 15:21, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] trueSpace

Another famous 3D program that originated on the Amiga is Caligari trueSpace. www.caligari.com

[edit] Article title: why not "Commodore Amiga"?

I have been wondering for a time now why on Earth the title of this article isn't "Commodore Amiga" rather than just "Amiga". Most, if not all, articles on other computers include the manufacturer's name in the model name, so I don't quite see why this doesn't apply to the Amiga as well. Please comment. If no reasonable arguments appear in favor of keeping the present title, I may change it before long. --Wernher 11:00, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I too have wondered this. I think it should be renamed as "Commodore Amiga". In the early days, Commodore (in the U.S) wanted to distance itself from the Amiga. Instead "Commodore Amiga", it was usually referenced as "The Amiga from Commodore". I don't know the official reason for this, but they could have been trying to stop the "Toy computer" image they gained in the early 80's from affecting the Amiga. Pixel8 11:18, Jun 3, 2005 (UTC)
If you're in a renaming mood, how about A1000, A2000, etc. Are you an administrator? Because of course the redirect pages would have to be deleted to enable the move. Mirror Vax 13:47, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for bringing that up; renaming the Axxx-articles should also be done. In fact, that's an even surer thing than the "Amiga" to "Commodore Amiga" one. I'm an admin, so actually performing the moves should be OK once we decide on the action as such. --Wernher 02:19, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I haven't decided yet whether to support a renaming to "Commodore Amiga". But perhaps the reason that it has this name now is that the Amiga computer had a history before Commodore bought the company. Amiga, Inc. manufactured joysticks (one of which I have) to support the development of the computer that they were developing. Val42 17:16, Jun 3, 2005 (UTC)
Of course, the Amiga also has some history after the demise of Commodore. An article by the name of Commodore Amiga would have to be purely historical.
These two points are the reason I haven't just done the renaming already; I thought we should take the time to discuss the pros and cons of a move to "Commodore Amiga". An argument supporting the renaming of the article is the fact that the Amiga was a CBM product for the majority of the period when it was a serious contender in the market. Before CBM, the Amiga was a mostly unknown (company/)product, and after CBM it must be said to (have) be(en) more of a hardcore CBM hacker scene thing (*ducking to avoid incoming burning arrows from the Amiga crowd*). Any comments on that? --Wernher 02:19, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I am strongly against renaming this article. Amiga != Commodore. It's true that it's been owned by Commodore for most of the time, but on these grounds, most articles should roam around all the time depending on the changing winds. It's just a stupid idea IMHO. LjL 23:22, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I agree with Wernher, the *most notable and significant* history of the Amiga happened during its ownership by Commodore. Everything else is a footnote in comparison... Besides renaming, I propose we should have the following articles:
Amiga Corporation: Early history (1982-1984), how the amiga came about, events up to the purchase by Commodore
Commodore Amiga: Commodore-Amiga, Inc. (1985-1994), more history, models etc.
Amiga Technologies: Escom/gateway era.
Amiga Inc. :
I know you wasn't sure about this LjL (see "History" section above), but I feel we cannot squeeze all this into the current Amiga article, it should copyedited to the relevant ones. The "Amiga" article could be turned into a chronological summary, bringing together the above articles. Just a thought... Pixel8 00:12, Jun 7, 2005 (UTC)
I still don't quite like it, but if it has to be done, then yes, I would definitely favour an "Amiga" article with links to the relevant "sub-articles" (and, perhaps, some content of its own, like a short summary of what's to be found in the sub-articles; also, if the articles is divided according to the owning company, the "Amiga" article should probably give some information about which technologies can be found under which sub-articles: while from a "company" point of view it makes sense to make the split Amiga Technologies / Amiga Inc., from a technical point of view it makes much more sense to separate Amiga m68k / Amiga PPC). LjL 20:34, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)


[edit] Fred Fish Collection

If we're going to mention Aminet I think we should have a mention of the Fred Fish collection. I don't know what became of the collection but as someone who used the Amiga extensively during its time, the Fred Fish collection was the best software collection there was and so it deserves mention, especially if someone knows a link to a currently hosted archive.

  • And while we are at it, why not name every single game and application out there for the Amiga? The Fred Fish collection was a public domain series, not that it didn't have great tools, but I'd rather point out succesful commercial software to show that the Amiga wasn't just a playfield for hobby-coders.
The Fred Fish collection was notable and unusual for the time. It presaged the rise of ftp/gopher (and later web) free software sites. Also, much of what was distributed was done in the public domain (not even modern OSS licenses).

Hobby coders were a big part of the picture in the US (and elsewhere, to a slightly lesser extent). Commercial programs are all well and good, but one hell of a lot of current top programmers got their start on Amigas in the 1980's and early 1990's. You can thank them for things like DragonFly BSD, ReplayTV, BeOS and more things than I can name. jesup 03:40, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Custom Chipset

I am missing info about Agnes, Denise, Paula chips, which made the Amiga what it was: More than the sum of it's parts. Also, if I remember correctly, back in the 90's there was a chip called "caipirinha" (by Phase5 / www.phase5.de) or something that was (for it's time) way ahead of time. Unfortunately it has never seen the daylight. Or am I mistaken?

Yes, Caipirinha (a microchip named after a cocktail, of all things) was definitely invented and designed. Whether it was ever produced and released I don't know. — JIP | Talk 13:42, 9 December 2005 (UTC)
There was also a "Fat Agnus" chip that came out, and (if I remember correctly) was required for certain accelerator boards to function properly. In general, the Custom Chipset section needs to be rewritten to better emphasize the importance of the architecture, how it contributed to a true multitasking environment, and how it was really so far ahead of it's time. --Prujohn 20:08, 6 July 2006 (UTC)
"Fat Agnus" was the standard A500 chip, I think. You might be referring to "Super Agnus", which could access 1 MiB of Chip RAM and switch between PAL and NTSC. Wonderstruck 11:10, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
Yes, that's what I was trying to remember. I needed the Super Agnes because we worked on PAL and NTSC projects, and (if memory serves) for compatibility with the "Picasso" 32-bit display board. --Prujohn 04:28, 30 July 2006 (UTC)
Caipirinha was meant to be included in the A\box by Phase 5, but neither the chip nor the computer ever appeared. I've added details about them under "Unreleased models (after Commodore)". Mdwh 23:02, 11 December 2005 (UTC)
I found the specs for the Caipirinha. They might be interesting, though I don't know if they belong here or should be under some "Never released CPU's" chapter of WikiPedia:
The corner-stones of the CAIPIRINHA design:
  • 128-bit high performance UMA (Unified Memory Architecture) controller, using fast SDRAMs with a clock frequency of 100 MHz and a maximum band width of up to 1.6 G-bytes/second
  • 64-bit processor bus with a maximum clock rate of 100 MHz
  • two 24-bit video DMA units with freely addressable access, with integrated 24-bit video DAC's
  • four 16-bit audio outputs, 44.1 KHz with any number of virtual tracks, sample output, FM and AM synthesis
  • video-in ports for 2 independent video inputs in Y/UV 4:2:2 quality
  • audio inputs in 16-bit stereo CD quality
  • LCD (TFT) controller according to the VESA standard
  • a PCI-bus interface for medium-performance I/O applications
  • a local 16-bit DMA bus with 66.7 MHz and a maximum band width of 132 M-bytes/second for universal low-cost applications
  • an integrated IEEE 1394 firewire controller for digital I/O applications
  • a desktop bus interface.
Funny thing is that, when looking at the specs, it pretty much explains why it is named after a cocktail.
More at http://hem.passagen.se/laoh/aboxe.html
Reading it again (at the time it sounded awesome) it seems more like a hoax (Phase5 is gone?) than something that would really be built.
Phase5 are out of business, but they were certainly a genuine company, who produced many Amiga hardware products both before and after the A\BOX announcement (including PowerPC accelerator boards). It's surprising that they decided to announce such an ambitious product (a new computer platform, new graphics chipset and a new OS), but I've never heard any evidence that it was a hoax. Mdwh 03:51, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] A curious question

Wikipedia may or may not be the best place to ask a question like this, but after much googling, WP is the only thing showing me any info for this, so here goes.

The page mentions community access TV channels being run from classic amiga machines. I happen to recieve one of these channels in my area (Even managing to see the system go down with a guru meditation error, on screen for a day).

Does anybody know of what software package(s) are used for this purpose? I have seen the "slides" if you will, being edited on the air via a popup menu, where one could select the background, font size, etc of the text. The top of the screen always shows the time and local temperature, the middle has the "slides", and the bottom is a scrolling ticker showing a local weather forecast.

Any information would be greatly appreciated! THANKS! 69.146.97.123 07:35, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

There are multiple ways of doing this, but basically any application that runs on the Amiga can be output to an analog television system with the onboard hardware, or overlayed and timed properly with an external (or internal) "Genlock" (it's a misnomer). --tonsofpcs (Talk) 07:35, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
My guess is you're looking for "Gala". I can't remember the publisher or author and Google is not helping either today, but I used to use this software and have seen it in use in many TV-stations.
You probably mean Scala. It started on the Amiga as broadcasting software (Scala 500) it is now available for PC as Infochannel. Many local TV stations still use Amiga Scala software for this purpose. Felsir 19:04, 7 March 2006 (UTC)
Dang... It was at the tip of my tongue... I meant Scala indeed. Sorry for that.

[edit] User Base:

Ive added an article on the Amigas userbase, i hope everyone finds it acceptible - i'm not sure if the last bit sounds neutral enough but i think it makes an important point to potential developers that they can learn something from 'old' hardware and principles - any comments or minor adjustments are welcome, especially if someone thinks it can be put in a better way - but i think this was an important point lacking from the article. --Insignia1983 17:20, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Remember that the style of writing which is good for something like an editorial or essay isn't necessarily good for an encyclopedia. I've tried to improve it - it's not so much that I disagree with what's said, but that we shouldn't be expressing subjective things like hopes and opinions in what we write for Wikipedia. I hope that makes sense. Mdwh 23:26, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
Thankyou for your adjustments Mdwh - i'm new to this, and although i tried to keep it encyclopedic i think i need more practise getting the language right. I can learn a lot from your adjustments so hopefully avoid the same pitfalls in the future. The essence of what i said is there, except now it sounds more professional and fluent! Thanks for your guidance! One point though... i thought Doom used the 'first generation' of very early 3d cards, you know the 2d/3d card combos i think existed? I must admit i wasnt a pc user at the time, but anyway i suppose its an irrelevant point as i was just trying to use an illustration for the point about getting more performance out of the machine. Are illustrations necessary in an article such as this or is it best to leave external sources to describing the details of the broad points made in the article? Thanks, id appreciate any advice you can give!--Insignia1983 00:32, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
Doom used software rendering as far as I know; it didn't use an algorithm comparable to what 3D cards do (i.e., drawing texture mapped polygons), instead it draws the walls in vertical slices (see Doom engine). Even Quake originally still used software rendering, and it wasn't until Quake II I believe that 3D hardware could be used as standard. I guess there are other illustrations that could be given (e.g., the various expansions for the A1200) but I don't have an opinion on whether it's needed. Mdwh 02:56, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
Doom never used hardware acceleration; it ran using the power of the CPU only. It didn't do proper 3D. It broke the screen into vertical lines, like scanline rendering but vertical. Amiga could never accelerate anything other than flat colour fills, stipple effects, lines of single pixel's width, and blitting. There was a game that used a Doom engine-like approach but it never came close to Quake-like 3D. The blitter just couldn't do textures. - Richardcavell 03:43, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
Actually there were "Quake-like 3D" games - indeed, Quake and Quake 2 themselves were ported - but yes, the Amiga's chipset couldn't be used to accelerate the 3D, which instead had to be done in software or on a 3D card. Mdwh 03:52, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
... and colour cycling, which is what gave the famous "Boing!" animation it's appearance of 3D rotation. Wonderstruck 11:13, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The scene

Hi, Amiga fans.

I added a considerable amount of material today. I added more of the hacking, the 'scene', the peculiarities of Amiga software, etc. Hope you like it. Please feel free to comment or modify the text, etc. - Richardcavell 14:26, 8 March 2006 (UTC) (confessed Amiga nostalgic)

[edit] This article needs to be split up

This article is now 35 kilobytes long and needs to be split up. But which sections to split? I'm thinking of moving the sections about the user base to another article but am not really sure how to group them or what to call the new article. JIP | Talk 06:01, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

The article should not be split up! It is obsolete ancient history with no relevance for today's world. It should be removed not split.--AirportTerminal 11:20, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

  • I am curious. What do you mean by "removed". Removal of the entire article?

[edit] Splitting the article

I'd suggest moving the emulated operating systems to their own article; they're a little tangential. Also, some of the stuff that I added could be given an article, but I'm not sure what the article should be called. 'Amiga culture', 'Amiga user base', etc... I'd like to add more, actually, about the relationship of the Amiga user base to the 'hacking' culture. I use the word 'hacking' in the legal, friendly sense of the term. - Richardcavell 06:46, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Guys, I've made some big changes here, all in good faith. Please be sure to look over and make sure you're happy. We need to shorten this article; I've created 'Amiga software piracy' and added some of my stuff to 'Amiga demos'. - Richardcavell 08:36, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

This article keeps on growing out of the 30 kilobyte limit. Maybe we'll have to move the entire hardware section to a new article? Or at least the custom chipset? JIP | Talk 11:09, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Made some rather large changes to reduce the article's size. I moved the blitter and copper stuff over to the OCS page. More importantly I rewrote the AmigaOS article. The new article is a bit negatively inclined, but I'm sure someone will fix that. (But do try to keep the size within reason).Anss123 08:21, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Amiga virtual machine

Noting that Amiga emulation was moved out from here, I thought I'd point out the article Amiga virtual machine which has also appeared recently, and is proposed for deletion. Comments from additional editors would be useful, as there appears to be quite a bit of disagreement over the issue. Mdwh 23:06, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

Yes! delete it. Please do not add it here as it just gives them more attention. Amiga died a long time ago. Let it die and quit cluttering up wikipedia with unnotable articles! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by AirportTerminal (talk • contribs).

Leave it. A HAL VM is different from a full emulation. The possibility of combination with a strong point of differentiation may be beneficial. --tonsofpcs (Talk) 04:28, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Maybe it's different, but the article simply covers Amiga emulators (which I've now removed at least - dunno if people will try to revert), and "full emulation" of Amiga software (e.g., Amithlon, or the emulation on MorphOS), with the only exception of Amiga Anywhere. So if there is a difference, the article isn't covering this different thing. If you mean it's useful to point out the difference between a VM and emulation, shouldn't that be done in a more general article, as it's not Amiga specific? Mdwh 11:28, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
Also, why don't we make a "Windows Virtual Machine" and a "DOS Virtual machine" article, as well as a "Macintosh virtual machine" one? After all, DOS programs run under MS-DOS (and derivatives, such as IBM DOS, FreeDOS...), but also as virtual machines under Windows NT and OS/2, and as "semi" virtual machines under Win16. Besides, of course, that those systems mentioned can themselves run under emulators such as Bochs, VMWare (emulator? VM?), etc.
Win16 programs run under Win16 (of course), and as virtual machines under WinNT, OS/2, Wine (which is a compatibility layer just like the ones, I think, AOS4 and MorphOS have, except with no CPU emulation); I think, though I'm not sure, there are some modifications of Wine to add a CPU emulators, or projects to that intent.
Similarly, let's consider Mac OS "Classic" 68k: programs can run, besides on the actual Mac OS, under a software emulator (VM?) like ShapeShifter, which on an Amiga uses no CPU simulator, or with a hardware emulator (as seen on the Amiga again), or under "full blown" emulators; they also run inside Mac OS 8 and 9, using no API emulation but CPU simulation with PowerPC Macs, and under Mac OS X using both CPU emulation and API emulation (while the programs still "look like" they're running natively).
So, if you consider all possibilities, you could probably write a hundred or so articles including this and that and some. Perhaps it would be (much) better to just address things inside their own articles? Like, MorphOS "VM" under MorphOS, Mac issues under Mac OS, Mac OS X and the like...... LjL 16:45, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] My thoughts on Amiga

Can't believe the first comment was someone asking to delete this article "because noone uses Amigas anymore". That's like saying "Get rid of all the spitfires, the Mustangs, Sopwith Camels and scrap Memphis Belle". The Amiga is part of the history of computing, a part that would leave a vast void with nothing to replace it. I still use my Amiga 1200 quite regularly, in fact I'm currently trying to hunt down a Siamese Networking System so I can have the Amiga and PC running on the same monitor, doing different tasks in different screen resolutions, all on the same desktop.

The Amiga invented "REAL MULTITASKING" something the PC still grinds to a halt on. The Amiga invented "MULTIMEDIA" Microsoft just gave it a name and tried to hijack the feature. In some ways I think if it wasn't for the Amiga and the Atari (to a lesser extent) the PC wouldn't have progressed so far so quickly. I can remember people selling their PCs in the thousands to buy Amigas. The Amiga became mainstream in schools and colleges for it's ease of use and speed. The PC market could have learned a lot from the Amiga, but they preferred the excrutiatingly slow disk based O/Ss and bloatware which is one of the main anchors of the PC tecnology.

You don't really need to compare deleting the Amiga article with anything; everybody reasonable knows it should stay. Some people, me included, have the same positive feelings as you have towards Amiga, but almost all people who know what an Amiga is realize that the Amiga article should stay, however they feel towards it. Just don't feed the trolls, and we'll all be happy. LjL 12:47, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

"When addressing memory all 32 bits of an address register are used" is not correct. the 68000 only decoded the bottom 24(?) bits of its address registers. Tfinn Mon May 29 23:54:46 PDT 2006

[edit] Trivia???

Honestly, the "trivia" sections of the article either need to be incorporated into the main text or deleted if the information isn't relevant. "Trivia" does not belong in an encyclopedia, it makes it look like a Junior High kid's report or something. Heavy Metal Cellist talkcontribs

A lot of the trivia can be put into the history section or corresponding main articles (e.g. Tidbits about the A1000 can be covered by the A1000 article). The Problem is that it is difficult to squeeze the trivia into the various articles without making them difficult to read (jump back a few revisions and you’ll find the trivia as articles littered with random - often of topic - facts). IMO some of the trivia is interesting and I’m against simply deleting it.--Anss123 09:24, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Good work ppl! - but what about emulators?

This article reads a lot better than it did a few months ago. I added a bit of polish myself today.

But as I was going through the article, I didn't notice anything about Amiga emulators for the PC. I'm not up with the latest, but wasn't there an AmigaForever emulator on the PC or something? If so, I think it should get a mention here. Gatoclass 18:56, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Yes there are a couple of Amiga emulators and they are mentioned here.--Anss123 20:04, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] External link cleanup

I just nuked most of the external links (I'm not the first to do so); before adding links it might be useful to read Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not and Wikipedia:External links. --Gribeco 18:49, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

What to link to

   (See new guideline proposal here.)

In Wikipedia, it is possible to link to external websites. Such links are referred to as "external links". Many articles have a small section containing a few external links. There are a few things which should be considered when adding an external link.

   * Is it accessible?
   * Is it proper (useful, tasteful, etc.)?
   * Is it entered correctly?
   * Is the link, in the context used, likely to have a substantive longevity? For example, it is not useful to link to a homepage that changes often and merely happens to have a relevant picture or article on its front page at the moment. Similarly, be very wary of citing an unstable page as a source.

[edit]

What should be linked to

  1. Articles about any organization, person, or other entity should link to their official site, if they have one.
  2. Sites that have been used as references in the creation of an article should be linked to in a references section, not in external links. See Wikipedia:Verifiability and Wikipedia:Citing sources.
  3. An article about a book, a musical score, a webcomic, a web site, or some other media, should link to the actual book, musical score, etc. if possible.
  4. On articles with multiple points of view, a link to prominent sites dedicated to each, with a detailed explanation of each link. The number of links dedicated to one point of view should not overwhelm the number dedicated to any other. One should attempt to add comments to these links informing the reader of their point of view. If one point of view dominates informed opinion, that should be represented first. (For more information, see Wikipedia:Neutral point of view – in particular, Wikipedia's guidelines on undue weight.)
  5. Sites that contain neutral and accurate material not already in the article. Ideally this content should be integrated into the Wikipedia article, then the link would remain as a reference, but in some cases this is not possible for copyright reasons or because the site has a level of detail which is inappropriate for the Wikipedia article.
  6. Sites with other meaningful, relevant content that is not suitable for inclusion in an article, such as textbooks or reviews.

[edit]

Occasionally acceptable links

  1. For albums, movies, books: one or two links to professional reviews which express some sort of general sentiment. For films, Movie Review Query Engine, Hollywood.com, Internet Movie Database, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic offer especially large collections of reviews.
  2. Web directories: When deemed appropriate by those contributing to an article on Wikipedia, a link to one web directory listing can be added, with preference to open directories (if two are comparable and only one is open). If deemed unnecessary, or if no good directory listing exists, one should not be included.
  3. Fan sites: On articles about topics with many fansites, including a link to one major fansite is appropriate, marking the link as such. In extreme cases, a link to a web directory of fansites can replace this link. (Note: fanlistings are generally not informative and should not ordinarily be included.)
  4. Very large pages should be considered on a case-by-case basis. Worldwide, many use Wikipedia with a low-speed connection. Unusually large pages should be annotated as such.
  5. External sites can possibly violate copyright. Linking to copyrighted works is usually not a problem, as long as you have made a reasonable effort to determine that the page in question is not violating someone else's copyright. If it is, please do not link to the page. Knowingly and intentionally directing others to a site that violates copyright has been considered a form of contributory infringement in the United States (Intellectual Reserve v. Utah Lighthouse Ministry). Also, linking to a page that illegally distributes someone else's work sheds a bad light on us (see Wikipedia:Copyrights and in particular Contributors' rights and obligations).
The guiding principle here is a few. Prior to my intervention, there were 40 external links, which seems grossly out of proportion to me. --Gribeco 20:51, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
There were certainly many that were just random links and shouldn't have been there, though some should perhaps go back. The article is now rather lacking in references, which some sites (e.g., [2]) could have helped serve as. I shall try and have a closer look at them. Mdwh 01:00, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
Bah oui, mais les contributeurs, en France, sont essentiellement des gens bornés. Et ça, c'est plus important que d'être raisonnable.

[edit] Past tense

I've just reverted several edits, which put the computer in the past tense. The Amiga concept and operating system are still in development even today and so the phrasing of the article should stay as it is. The revert also included some changes to belittle the significance of features of the computer when it was first released, again not valid edits, especially when referring to multitasking an era where the largest competitors did not have such a feature. ~~ Peteb16 00:41, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Amiga CDTV - first computer with CD-ROM?

Firstly, we should probably mention the CDTV somewhere - it may have been a failure commercially, but it was still significant (imo), being initially in "console" form, and including a CD-ROM drive.

But in particular, I note that Apple_Macintosh#Effects_on_the_technology_industry and Macintosh IIvx claim that the Macintosh IIvx was the first computer to have a CD ROM drive. I presume the distinction is being made between computer and console, in which case, when did they start selling the Amiga CDTV with keyboard, mouse, etc? I know that the original release date was 1990 - the Mac came out in 1992. (Note that the CDTV article states it as "the first computer to come with a CD-ROM drive as standard", in contradiction to the Mac articles.) I don't think we should let the Macintosh editors claim they had all the firsts ;) Mdwh 23:57, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Say" in AmigaOS 2.0?

The article says, "In the original 1.x AmigaOS releases, a Say program demo included with AmigaBASIC programming examples. For 2.0, Say became a standard utility program which did not need AmigaBASIC". Is that correct? I thought the narrator was dropped from AmigaOS 2.0. Also, I think Say was a standalone program in Workbench 1.2, but I'm not totally sure of this. Can somebody fact-check this? Wonderstruck 10:58, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

There's an utilities/say executable (V37.4, 6220 bytes), on my 2.05 Workbench disk, also the devs/narrator.device (V37.7, 65760 bytes). Femto 11:14, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
The Amiga speech synthesis has never needed AmigaBASIC. The Say program demo with the animated mouth and all might have, but it is possible to make the Amiga speak from the command line, with the files Femto pointed out. The files are no longer included as standard from 2.0 onwards (because of licensing issues), but if copied there, they will work perfectly. JIP | Talk 06:56, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
I'm sure it's a slip of the keyboard, but Say was still available in 2.0, it was removed in 3.0. —Pixel8 07:46, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
Could be. I have never owned a 2.0-based Amiga, I went straight from a 1.2 500 to a 3.0 1200. JIP | Talk 08:45, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
Meh, IIRC say was removed in 2.05, IOW first release of 2.05 had say but it was later removed. I recall this because the say in 2.05 was better than the one in 1.3.--Anss123 10:55, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] First commercially available operating system with pre-emptive multitasking?

UNIX could be purchased from AT&T before the amiga existed, there was also OpenVMS, Multics I am sure I am missing a tremendous number of others, they might not have been afordable but they were available.

Hmm okay, it needs to be changed. First home (or personal?) computer with one? Mdwh 11:39, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Time-Line

A time-line of dates, models, and features would be nice.

[edit] Wikipedia:WikiProject Amiga

Since there are so many articles related to the Amiga here, as well as many Amiga enthusiasts, I've started a WikiProject, Wikipedia:WikiProject Amiga. --Anivron 05:09, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Tense for article

I see GatoClass has been modifying the tense of the article from present to past. Up to this point, the article has been written in the present tense (and I've tried to match that in edits). It is arguable what the tense should be - is the Amiga "in the past" and therefore past tense, or do you write the article based on the fact that Amigas still exist and are still being used and some software work done, in which case present tense is appropriate. Comments? GatoClass, you must have an opinion... jesup 20:22, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

I think that present tense should be used when describing the technical parts. I.e. The sound chip, named Paula, supported four sound channels... reads worse to me, and is arguably wrong as Paula never stopped supporting anything.--Anss123 21:21, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
I propose to move the tense back to present tense (and make a pass over it to check - some uses of past are correct). GatoClass: could you comment? I'm in no rush; it doesn't hurt the article for now. jesup 22:18, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] YouTube links

This article is one of thousands on Wikipedia that have a link to YouTube in it. Based on the External links policy, most of these should probably be removed. I'm putting this message here, on this talk page, to request the regular editors take a look at the link and make sure it doesn't violate policy. In short: 1. 99% of the time YouTube should not be used as a source. 2. We must not link to material that violates someones copyright. If you are not sure if the link on this article should be removed, feel free to ask me on my talk page and I'll review it personally. Thanks. ---J.S (t|c) 04:35, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

It would be copyrighted, but depends whether it counts as Fair Use I guess (as with all the copyrighted images on the article page)? Mdwh 22:43, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
It would likely not be fair use on YouTube. I'll review it personaly in a bit. ---J.S (t|c) 00:04, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
Definitely not fair-use on YouTube. ---J.S (t|c) 15:43, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] HAM image issues

The HAM image is not a very appropriate one (personal signature is 1/3 the screen), and the copyright info on the image is wrong (it's not a game image). A better image should be found for HAM for both here and the HAM page. jesup 03:26, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

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