The folks behind the Internet Archive have added a huge trove of Amiga games and programs to the site, bringing the total to more than 10,000. All these games can be played on your web browser. The non-profit library first began adding Amiga software to its catalog in 2013.
Everybody who was into computers in the 1980s and 1990s remembers Commodore producing amazingly innovative, capable and popular multimedia and gaming computers one moment, and disappearing off the face of the earth the next, leaving only PCs and Macs standing. Much has been written about what went wrong with Commodore over the years, but always by outsiders looking in
The Amiga PCB Explorer is a browser application that was designed to assist people in various aspects of Amiga mainboard repairs. With this tool you are able to:
* Look up signal paths where physical traces have been damaged by battery acid or capacitor leakage.
* Find out which components are connected to the same signal net.
* Get a quick overview on chip pinouts.
* Locate any part on the PCB.
* Navigate around the PCB and marvel at its beauty
Currently available boards (more boards may be added later):
A500 Rev 8a, A1200 Rev 2B, A4000 Rev 2, A4000 Rev B, CD32 Rev 4.1
It was grey, ugly and had 0.0128% of an iPhone’s memory. But the Amiga 500 defied its limitations to power a series of astonishing dance tracks, from early jungle to Calvin Harris
“Phat as fuck.” This was how jungle legend Gavin King – AKA Aphrodite – described the powerful bass capabilities of his Amiga 1200 home computer in a 90s interview. Several decades later, it remains in his studio. With its drab grey buttons, it looks more suited to tax returns, but Amiga machines are instrumental in electronic music as we know it.
“The thing about the Amiga bassline is that it was constant volume, it didn’t waver,” King says now, “so when you pulled it up to the maximum volume that you could press on to vinyl, it made it, well, phat as fuck.”
In the early 90s, the artists who used these Amigas didn’t know it yet, but their experimentation would become central to the burgeoning hardcore, jungle and drum’n’bass scenes, and pave the way for the accessible home electronic music production of the future.
Today anyone with a laptop can make music, but, at the dawn of home computing, music production was prohibitively expensive. Back in 1985, Atari released its ST home computer, which instantly became a hit with gamers and DIY producers. Rival Commodore quickly followed up with the Amiga 1000, but things really changed in 1987 when the company released the Amiga 500. It may only have had 512 kilobytes of memory – that’s 0.0128% of what an iPhone 13 has – but the Amiga was transformational due to its four-channel stereo sound. “It went much further into that bass register than any computer of the time,”
In the early 90s, the artists who used these Amigas didn’t know it yet, but their experimentation would become central to the burgeoning hardcore, jungle and drum’n’bass scenes, and pave the way for the accessible home electronic music production of the future.
For Marlon Sterling, AKA drum’n’bass producer Equinox, the Amiga’s sound quality “wasn’t great” but it had a “certain sound”, which he loved for its gritty sampling and “Mentasms” – the grizzly hoover noises named after the Joey Beltram track.
When mentor and fellow Amiga user Bizzy B introduced Sterling to the Med V3 production software, it was a “massive gamechanger”, he says, giving him the chance to experiment with music on a budget. Equinox’s first tunes were recently released as Early Works 93-94 to a positive reception – “a shock, considering how bad my quality was”
Back then, you needed all sorts of hardware to make music, but just having the Amiga sound sampler and OctaMed, you could get great ideas down without the need to hire a studio. It was the poor man’s studio – even the software was free!”
Meanwhile, producers such as Dex and Jonesey broke into the Top 40 with Amiga-made tracks like their souped-up remix of Josh Wink’s Higher State of Consciousness, and even caught flak from the music establishment for daring to eschew the pricier Apple computers most professionals used at the time.
But the Amiga’s powerful bass sound and punchy, unique grooves were hard to imitate. Unlike music software such as Cubase or Logic Pro, which reads from left to right, Amiga’s equivalents cascaded from top to bottom in a lo-fi graphical waterfall of bits and bytes. “Because only eight things can play at once at any given time, it makes you work harder,” says King. “You need to go into the actual soundwave.”
Amigas have been employed by contemporary pop producers, too, such as Calvin Harris, who put together debut I Created Disco on an Amiga running OctaMed.
Back in the 90s, a buoyant “demo scene” coalesced around the Amiga, where home programmers put together animated music videos, fitting them on tiny 880k floppy disks. Pirated software, meanwhile, would usually feature home-brewed intros, complete with the pirates’ own music, that users had to sit through before they could access their bootlegged copies.
This “cracktro” scene had a “huge influence on electronic music that’s often overlooked”,
Wolfers and his peers would “load game discs or demos to hear the music and have it in the background. This was, for a large part, the first pure electronic music kids were exposed to intensely, making them more receptive to stuff like the techno emerging from Detroit.
“There were no YouTube channels explaining everything – maybe a few Amiga magazines gave pointers, but that was about it,” he adds. “You learned by analysing the music files that came with the software. It was fundamental in my career, giving me a chance to make music while having no access to expensive studio gear or synthesisers.”
Thirty-five years after the debut of the Amiga 500, a new generation of retro-curious musicians will have the chance to experiment with the machines, as the A500 Mini has recently launched. Perhaps it could be as loved as the original – King’s Amiga may now go unused in his studio, but it’s too difficult for him to say goodbye. “I was using it right up to 1997, even after Commodore went bust,” he says. “I just loved it.”
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5 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Internet Archive Posted 10,000 Browser-Playable Amiga Titles
https://games.slashdot.org/story/16/08/09/2011225/internet-archive-posted-10000-browser-playable-amiga-titles
The folks behind the Internet Archive have added a huge trove of Amiga games and programs to the site, bringing the total to more than 10,000. All these games can be played on your web browser. The non-profit library first began adding Amiga software to its catalog in 2013.
Internet Archive posted 10,000 browser-playable Amiga titles – go, play
https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/08/amiga/
Software Library: Amiga
Various
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_amiga#
Created in 1985, the Commodore Amiga was a sound and graphics powerhouse home computer, with multi-tasking and a wide range of software.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Real Inside Story of How Commodore Failed
https://m.slashdot.org/story/332343
Everybody who was into computers in the 1980s and 1990s remembers Commodore producing amazingly innovative, capable and popular multimedia and gaming computers one moment, and disappearing off the face of the earth the next, leaving only PCs and Macs standing. Much has been written about what went wrong with Commodore over the years, but always by outsiders looking in
a 34 minute long Youtube interview that surfaced on October 9th
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhTNR6XZJd0&feature=share
Tomi Engdahl says:
http://www.amigapcb.org/index.php
The Amiga PCB Explorer is a browser application that was designed to assist people in various aspects of Amiga mainboard repairs. With this tool you are able to:
* Look up signal paths where physical traces have been damaged by battery acid or capacitor leakage.
* Find out which components are connected to the same signal net.
* Get a quick overview on chip pinouts.
* Locate any part on the PCB.
* Navigate around the PCB and marvel at its beauty
Currently available boards (more boards may be added later):
A500 Rev 8a, A1200 Rev 2B, A4000 Rev 2, A4000 Rev B, CD32 Rev 4.1
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/01/retrocomputing-spray-paints-amiga-beige-commodore-and-atari-grey/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amiga! Yes, demoscene is mentioned
‘It was the poor man’s studio’: how Amiga computers reprogrammed modern music
‘I think the limitations back then made you more creative. It wasn’t the sound why I used the Amiga, it was all I could afford…’
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/may/02/poor-man-studio-amiga-computers-modern-music-jungle-calvin-harris
It was grey, ugly and had 0.0128% of an iPhone’s memory. But the Amiga 500 defied its limitations to power a series of astonishing dance tracks, from early jungle to Calvin Harris
“Phat as fuck.” This was how jungle legend Gavin King – AKA Aphrodite – described the powerful bass capabilities of his Amiga 1200 home computer in a 90s interview. Several decades later, it remains in his studio. With its drab grey buttons, it looks more suited to tax returns, but Amiga machines are instrumental in electronic music as we know it.
“The thing about the Amiga bassline is that it was constant volume, it didn’t waver,” King says now, “so when you pulled it up to the maximum volume that you could press on to vinyl, it made it, well, phat as fuck.”
In the early 90s, the artists who used these Amigas didn’t know it yet, but their experimentation would become central to the burgeoning hardcore, jungle and drum’n’bass scenes, and pave the way for the accessible home electronic music production of the future.
Today anyone with a laptop can make music, but, at the dawn of home computing, music production was prohibitively expensive. Back in 1985, Atari released its ST home computer, which instantly became a hit with gamers and DIY producers. Rival Commodore quickly followed up with the Amiga 1000, but things really changed in 1987 when the company released the Amiga 500. It may only have had 512 kilobytes of memory – that’s 0.0128% of what an iPhone 13 has – but the Amiga was transformational due to its four-channel stereo sound. “It went much further into that bass register than any computer of the time,”
In the early 90s, the artists who used these Amigas didn’t know it yet, but their experimentation would become central to the burgeoning hardcore, jungle and drum’n’bass scenes, and pave the way for the accessible home electronic music production of the future.
For Marlon Sterling, AKA drum’n’bass producer Equinox, the Amiga’s sound quality “wasn’t great” but it had a “certain sound”, which he loved for its gritty sampling and “Mentasms” – the grizzly hoover noises named after the Joey Beltram track.
When mentor and fellow Amiga user Bizzy B introduced Sterling to the Med V3 production software, it was a “massive gamechanger”, he says, giving him the chance to experiment with music on a budget. Equinox’s first tunes were recently released as Early Works 93-94 to a positive reception – “a shock, considering how bad my quality was”
Back then, you needed all sorts of hardware to make music, but just having the Amiga sound sampler and OctaMed, you could get great ideas down without the need to hire a studio. It was the poor man’s studio – even the software was free!”
Meanwhile, producers such as Dex and Jonesey broke into the Top 40 with Amiga-made tracks like their souped-up remix of Josh Wink’s Higher State of Consciousness, and even caught flak from the music establishment for daring to eschew the pricier Apple computers most professionals used at the time.
But the Amiga’s powerful bass sound and punchy, unique grooves were hard to imitate. Unlike music software such as Cubase or Logic Pro, which reads from left to right, Amiga’s equivalents cascaded from top to bottom in a lo-fi graphical waterfall of bits and bytes. “Because only eight things can play at once at any given time, it makes you work harder,” says King. “You need to go into the actual soundwave.”
Amigas have been employed by contemporary pop producers, too, such as Calvin Harris, who put together debut I Created Disco on an Amiga running OctaMed.
Back in the 90s, a buoyant “demo scene” coalesced around the Amiga, where home programmers put together animated music videos, fitting them on tiny 880k floppy disks. Pirated software, meanwhile, would usually feature home-brewed intros, complete with the pirates’ own music, that users had to sit through before they could access their bootlegged copies.
This “cracktro” scene had a “huge influence on electronic music that’s often overlooked”,
Wolfers and his peers would “load game discs or demos to hear the music and have it in the background. This was, for a large part, the first pure electronic music kids were exposed to intensely, making them more receptive to stuff like the techno emerging from Detroit.
“There were no YouTube channels explaining everything – maybe a few Amiga magazines gave pointers, but that was about it,” he adds. “You learned by analysing the music files that came with the software. It was fundamental in my career, giving me a chance to make music while having no access to expensive studio gear or synthesisers.”
Thirty-five years after the debut of the Amiga 500, a new generation of retro-curious musicians will have the chance to experiment with the machines, as the A500 Mini has recently launched. Perhaps it could be as loved as the original – King’s Amiga may now go unused in his studio, but it’s too difficult for him to say goodbye. “I was using it right up to 1997, even after Commodore went bust,” he says. “I just loved it.”