• Tag Archives Amiga 1000

  • Ahoy!’s AmigaUser (November 1988)

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    While there were a few Amiga specific magazines published in the U.S., it seems like most of them came and went pretty quickly. Ahoy!’s AmigaUser is an example of that. This was a spin-off of Ahoy! which was originally a Commodore 8-bit magazine. However, there were only a handful of issues of AmigaUser. The November 1988 issue includes:

    Departments

    • View from the Bridge – An announcement about AmigaUser going monthly.
    • Scuttlebutt – News about AmigaExpo, Commodore’s net income increasing 6x year over year, the Viking 1 19″ high-resolution monochrome monitor for the Amiga, Supra’s FD-10 10MB 3.5″ disk drive, Star Micronics’ NX-1000 Rainbow dot matrix printer, World of Commodore, the Ergostick joystick from Wico, and more.
    • Entertainment Software Section – A look at movie and TV licenses such as T.V. Sports Football, The Three Stooges, and Shogun among others. Plus reviews of Defcon 5, Superstar Ice Hockey, Bard’s Tale II, Empire, and Joe Blade.
    • Reviews – Reviews of Bus Expander (add expansion slots to your Amiga 1000), Zing/Spell (a spell checker for most word processors), AC/BASIC v. 1.3 (a BASIC compiler), Access-64 (a software/hardware package that allows the Amiga to use Commodore 64 devices including disk drives and printers), and CygnusEd Professional (a programmer’s text editor).
    • Art Gallery – Reader submitted art made with the Amiga.
    • Flotsam – Letters from readers about 1MB chip RAM upgradeability for the Amiga 1000, advertising for Amiga products, and more.

    Columns

    • Exec File – Tips for choosing the right software plus brief reviews of Marauder II, Deluxe Help, CLImate, and more.
    • Amiga Toolbox – Short routines for creating custom pant brushes, generating a BASIC listing of DATA statements from a BOB or sprite file, and more.
    • Eye on CLI – How to get to the Amiga CLI and a guide to creating batch files.

    Features

    • Hard Driving on your Amiga – A look at two SCSI controllers for the Amiga; the OverDrive from Pacific Peripherals and the SupraDrive interface card.
    • ABM – A type-in game for the Amiga that is somewhat like Missile Command.

    …and more!


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  • Commodore Amiga 500, 1000 & 2000 (1987)

    Posted on by Azrael Comment



    https://darth-azrael.tumblr.com/post/190612229973/yodaprod-commodore-amiga-500-1000-2000-1987



    The Amiga 1000 was first introduced in 1985 around the same time as the Commodore 128. It contained a Motorola 68000 CPU clocked at 7.16 MHz and 256Kb RAM. It had graphics and sound capabilities unlike any other computer available at a time at a price that was quite low given the features. The Amiga’s closest competition was the Atari ST which shared virtually the same CPU. While the Atari ST was a good bit cheaper, it had less sophisticated graphics and sound capabilities and a less sophisticated OS. Amiga was ahead of its time with all of these things.

    Two years later in 1987, Commodore introduced two successors. The cost reduced Amiga 500 and a more expandable Amiga 2000. The Amiga 500 was an all-in-one unit with the keyboard and a 3.5″ 800k disk drive built-in. It was almost half the price of the original Amiga 1000. Though it was less expandable, it contained double the memory of the Amiga 1000 when it was first introduced and was in every other way just as capable. This is the model that competed most directly with the Atari ST and would me the most popular Amiga model and the spiritual successor to the Commodore 64.

    The Amiga 2000 on the other hand was very expandable with a total of 9 expansion slots as well as 2 3.5″ and 1 5.25″ drive bay. It also came with 1 MB of memory instead of 512k. With the addition of a Video Toaster and the appropriate software, tt would become a very popular video editing platform.

    The ad above is from 1987, probably shortly after the release of the Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000 as the Amiga 1000 was discontinued later the same year. I’m not sure the origin of the ad (I found it on Tumblr) but I suspect it is from Canada or Australia as the dollar amount doesn’t match what the cost was in the U.S. An Amiga 2000 with 1MB of RAM and a monitor was $2395 at that time in the U.S. and the Amiga 500 was $699. By comparison, a complete Commodore 64 system (which is what I had) was about half the price of the less expensive Amiga 500.


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  • Deluxe Paint I (Amiga)

    Posted on by Azrael Comment


    Deluxe Paint I (Amiga)

    https://darth-azrael.tumblr.com/post/184627687133/koney-scanlines-deluxe-paint-1

    Did you ever wonder how game developers make artwork for their games? Well, at least in the 1980s and much of the 1990s, that answer was often Deluxe Paint (or DPaint). Deluxe paint is a bitmap graphics editor that was first released for the Amiga shortly after that platform was introduced in 1985. The Amiga 1000 was the first computer that could run Deluxe Paint.

    Deluxe Paint was produced by Electronic Arts and was originally an internal tool used by EA for their own games. As features were added, it was decided to release it as a commercial product when the Amiga was released. A PC/DOS version was released in 1988 and it became the defacto standard for many PC games.

    New versions of Deluxe Paint would be released up until 1995 when Deluxe Paint 5 was released for the Amiga. The PC version never made it past version 2 for some reason but there were different versions of version 2. The first release for PC was Deluxe Paint II in 1988, then Deluxe Paint II Enhanced in 1989 and finally, the most popular version, Deluxe Paint II Enhanced 2.0.

    Amiga releases included Deluxe Paint I in 1985, Deluxe Paint II in 1986, Deluxe Paint III in 1988, Deluxe Paint IV in 1991, Deluxe Paint 4.5 AGA (commissioned by Commodore) in 1993 and finally, Deluxe Paint V in 1995. If you are looking to make games for the Amiga or even other platforms like the Commodore 64 or PC then this is still a good tool to use today in terms of creating the artwork.

    Pictured above is the original Deluxe Paint running on an Amiga 1000.



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