The Amiga was a quantum leap over comparable computers, it had color 320x200 graphics with stereo sound. All of the IBM machines of the time had green text and a "bleep bloop" internal speaker. Can't believe Commodore didn't sell millions of those.
The Amiga was a quantum leap over comparable computers, it had color 320x200 graphics with stereo sound. All of the IBM machines of the time had green text and a "bleep bloop" internal speaker. Can't believe Commodore didn't sell millions of those.
Actually, they did. About 3.5 million Amiga Computers were sold, if I recall correctly.
And the screen resolution wasn't 320x200 although that was available for some games, it was 640X400 (US NTSC) and 640X480 (PAL), essentially the same as a video screen, with the refresh equal to a standard video... which made it great for TV use.
The Amiga offered 4096 colors in standard mode when the IBM PC offered only FOUR and the Macintosh just Two (B&W). In a special "hold and modify" mode, the Amiga could display almost 56,000 colors on a static screen. The "Copper" chip allowed something that isn't duplicated to this day: the ability to change screen resolutions in mid screen, for example the top of the screen could be 640x400 the middle 320X200 and return again to 640x400. You could also play games with the interlacing and gain even higher resolutions at the expense of a headache from the screen flicker.
The Amiga was built from the ground up to support hardware multi-tasking and featured pre-emptive multitasking with re-entrant libraries instead of the cooperative multitasking used later by both PC and Mac... only recently (last five years) have those platforms embraced pre-emptive multitasking and re-entrant libraries.
The Amiga was far more powerful than any other microcomputer on the market in its day and even for several years after it ceased manufacture.