I also like the Brian Bagnall books (beware: There are two multi-volume editions, the second edition is far larger which is good/bad depending on how interested you are) but they are much more for those already interested in Commodore, though "Commodore: The Amiga Years" on its own is worthwhile for people interested specifically in the Amiga.
Maher's The Future Was Here is much more accessible to people who has want a lighter read and/or don't have a personal relationship to the Amiga and Commodore, though.
(I remember 64738...)
I was not pleased to be the only guy on our highschool computing group with a PC, but at least there was plenty of home demoscene like parties across the group's places, that I knew enough Amiga stuff as if I also owned one.
Commodore did great in terms of sales in quite a few European countries, but their subsidiaries in those other countries didn't do as well as Commodore UK.
The other exception was Commodore B.V. in the Netherlands that also survived the bankruptcy and stayed afloat selling old stock until early 1995 (Commodore UK stayed afloat until August '95, so it's not like they survived very much longer).
If that were to happen, that would be amazing!
[0]: https://dfarq.homeip.net/amiga-bridgeboard-the-pc-compatibil...
You'd add the sidecar, add an MFM controller, MFM drive, and you could use it from the Amiga.
You had to boot off floppy for kickstart, and another to get access to the sidecar, but just awesome it was.
I don't recal the name.
- The 68k, of course + an 68020 accelerator
- The 8088 + a 286 accelerator
- A Z80 on the SCSI card
- A 6502 compatible SOC on the keyboard...
As an Amiga user it obviously pleased me immensely that the 68k controlled the lot.
Like you, I hardly used the bridgeboard, though. It's main role was to show off the ability to run a "PC in a window".
Such a large ROM would also have been expensive. It was entirely a practical matter - the OS was pretty buggy and Commodore knew it. It was smarter to distribute the firmware/OS on magnetic media vs burning it in forever.
The hard drive story may have been weird, but it was very flexible.
You could in theory design completely new storage hardware today and hook it up to an old Amiga, and the operating system would be just fine because the drivers can be loaded from the device itself.
The Boing ball was demo was completed the night before the show by two programmers who worked all night in the booth and left it running as they fell asleep on the booth floor. The normal booth staff arrived in the morning and got to be the first people to ever see it running. Amazing story and incredible that engineer Dale Luck saved so much of that original gear and has gotten it working again.
Hence why I find funny the discussion about the US point of view, educated playing games in consoles, about the raise of PC gaming.
In Europe, gaming and indie development (back then bedroom coders), was all about 8 and 16 bit home computers, our consoles were arcade machines, and wanting to code at home games that in our dreams would get close enough to them.
Amiga was one of the best options at that.
Sachs was of course also immensely popular, and did enough work that I have no doubt more Amiga users saw his pictures.
Here's a page with a lot more of his pictures[2], including the color cycling effect. (There's also a fantastic comparison far down that page of a sharp version vs. a VHS recording that shows just how much color bleed we had to deal with, and how it affected the art.
[1] https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue64/amiga.php
Wintamute•6mo ago
https://www.guru3d.com/story/perifractic-completes-commodore...
zozbot234•6mo ago
unleaded•6mo ago
at least his ideas seems less far fetched than a stadium in seattle and a brand new Amiga architecture but it's funny the same thing keeps happening