Another thing on that Commodore 64 - they want to bring back the Amiga!

[thewayne]

From their web site's FAQ:

Is Amiga part of Commodore?
Well, Amiga was a Commodore! Later, at least. But, officially, not yet - though we’d love it to be. And we won't repeat the mistakes of the past relating to that. We’re in open dialogue with the most relevant rights holder to explore a potential reunion, and techno-optimism is in the air. Commodore and Amiga belong together in spirit, and we hope to make that true in practice as well. We're just waiting for them to give the green light and let the fun begin.

The Amiga was an amazing bit of kit. It had true preemptive multi-tasking, not just cooperative multi-tasking. It had a very advanced operating system, far more so than Windows had for many years. And it supported multiple programming languages, as I recall. And currently, has an active user community online, one group is making improvements to the operating system and releasing it!

It also had truly incredible video capabilities. Remember the TV series Babylon 5? ALL of the CGI was rendered on banks of Amigas! The system was called Video Toaster, each rendering machine had 32 MEGABYTES of memory, and it took 45 minutes to render ONE FRAME OF VIDEO!

https://www.generationamiga.com/2020/08/30/how-24-commodore-amiga-2000s-created-babylon-5/

An FPGA version of the Amiga would be absolutely amazing and nuts! It would definitely be a lot more expensive than the C64, which is - let's face it - a fairly basic computer as it was a computer of its era. Kind of like comparing an Apple II and a Mac, apples and oranges - no pun intended. But still, once they get the kinks of the FPGA adaptation worked out, and they now have a lot of experience with those now that they've implemented the C64 on one - again, not that the two computers are comparable in complexity - it should be doable.

Interesting times may lie ahead. It'd be so cool to have a viable third hardware platform, rather than just PC and Mac. I really hope their acquisition and resurrection of the Amiga comes to fruition.

https://www.commodore.net/faq

Comments

[dewline]

I do remember. Back when I was in the Animation programme at Algonquin College - 1990 to '92 - our computer lab was all Amiga 2000 machines, with one of them rigged up with VideoToaster kit. Babylon 5 was very much on the minds of all of the students at the time!

[mtbc]

In high school media studies, we used an Amiga to add some (rudimentary) effects to a commercial we shot. If I recall correctly, my Amiga 500 had a 20MB hard drive. I recall rather liking the font in KindWords.

Like the C64, the Amiga was a great piece of design and technology for its time; reproducing the behavior of some of those custom ICs would be some work but a great choice of something worth preserving.

[gatheringrivers]

I wonder if the new AmigaOS will be compatible with the old hardware?

[thewayne]

The ones that are being updated by the community are, to the best of my knowledge.  I don't know if they're doing any burned firmware updates.

I don't personally know anyone currently running an Amiga, so I'm not really in that loop.

[disneydream06]

I'm trying to remember if the Amiga name sounds familiar or if I am thinking of something else. lol...
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

It was a very popular and powerful computer for its day, but the PC and the Mac ultimately clobbered it, plus a bit of corporate maleficence.

[disneydream06]

Corporate wouldn't do that, would they? :o

[gatheringrivers]

A *lot* of corporate maleficence.

[silveradept]

Having Amiga machines available again would be a great trick, indeed, especially of they could also be brought forward and possibly expanded into a more modern era. There would be so much more possibility there, especially if they ran the updated Workbench OS versions.

[thewayne]

Yup!  It's entirely speculative at this point, but I'm really curious how they'd go with hardware.  I can see them doing with something like DDR5 for memory as it's a very well-known standard, but if they are going with an FPGA implementation, could they implement a PCI-E bus interface for cards?  Clearly they were able to implement WiFi and USB for their C64, so advanced interfaces were within their capability.

[silveradept]

Yeah. It sounds like they could extend the originals to understand newer technologies. I'll bet the group that's been keeping Amigas alive will also be helpful if they decide to resurrect the hardware, just like how the C64s are working with people who have created retro machines of the C64 and implemented it in emulation. I don't want to call these things solely nostalgia machines, but I think it would be some very interesting programming challenges to implement larger memory allocations, video hardware, storage, and Internet capabilities for them, so that you could run something like Firefox on your C64 or your Amiga. I'd bet there are a lot of enthusiasts who would enjoy that very much.

[thewayne]

With this new C64 having WiFi, presumably there must be some way to connect it to the internet, I suppose someone has a browser.  I'm guessing it would be like those old text-only browsers?  It'll be interesting, if the Amiga ever happens, to see how they push its boundaries while keeping true to what it was.

[silveradept]

That would be interesting.

Also, I would like to see a revival of a text web, or similar, because of so many C64s browsing. (Obviously, C64s can handle graphics as well.) A web of C64 users, built specifically to be handled on C64 machines, would be neat to see. Doubly so with Amigas.