amiga

80 Articles

Now That Commodore Is Back, Could Amiga Be Next?

August 21, 2025 by 37 Comments

Now that Commodore has arisen from the depths of obscurity like Cthulhu awoken from R’lyeh, the question on every shoggoth’s squamose lips is this: “Will there be a new Commodore Amiga?”  The New Commodore is reportedly interested, but as [The Retro Shack] reports in the video embedded below, it might be some time before the stars align.

He follows the tortured history of the Amiga brand from its origins with Hi-Toro, the Commodore acquisition and subsequent Atari lawsuit, and the post-Commodore afterlife of the Amiga trademark. Yes, Amiga had a life after Commodore, and that’s the tl;dr here: Commodore might be back, but it does not own the Amiga IP.

If you’re wondering who does, you’re not the only one. Cloanto now claims the name and most of Amiga’s IP, though it remains at loggerheads with Hyperion, the distributors of AmigaOS 4. If you haven’t heard of them, Cloanto is not an elder god, but in fact the group behind Amiga Forever. They have been great stewards of the Amiga heritage over the decades. Any “new” Amiga is going to need the people at Cloanto on board, one way or another. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible– the new Commodore might be able to seduce Cloanto into a merger, or even just a licensing agreement to use the name on reproduction or new hardware.

While a replica C=64 was a no-brainer for the revived Commodore brand, it’s not quite so clear what they should do with the Amiga name. An FPGA reproduction of the popular A500 or A1200? Would anyone want newly-made 68000-based machines, or to follow Hyperion and MorphOS to now-outdated generations of PowerPC? All of these have been proposed and argued over for years.

We’d love to see something fully new that captures the spirit of the bouncing ball, but it’s hard to imagine bottling magic like that in the twenty-first century. For now, Amiga lies dreaming– but that is not dead which can eternally lie, and we hold out hope this Great Old One can return when the stars are right.

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Amiga Programming In 2025 With AmiBlitz

August 10, 2025 by 30 Comments

Having owned an Amiga microcomputer is apparently a little bit like having shaken hands with Shoggoth: no one can escape unchanged from the experience. Thirty-two years on, [Neil] at The Retro Collective remains haunted by the memories — specifically, the memory of BlitzBasic 2, an Amiga-specific programming language he never found the time to use. What better time to make a game for the Amiga than the year 2025 of the common era?

[Neil] takes us on a long journey, with more than a little reminiscing along the way. BlitzBasic may not have been the main programming language for the Amiga, but it was by no means the least, with a good pedigree that included the best-selling 1993 game Skidmarks. Obviously BlitzBasic was not a slow, interpreted language as one might think hearing “BASIC”. Not only is it a compiled language, it was fast enough to be billed as the next best thing to C for the Amiga, according to [Neil].

[Neil] wasn’t the only one whose dreams have been haunted by the rugose touch of the Amiga and its scquomose BlitzBasic language– you’ll find a version on GitHub called AmiBlitz3 that is maintained by [Sven] aka [honitas] to this day, complete with an improved IDE. The video includes a history lesson on the open-source AmiBlitz, and enough information to get you started.

For the vibe-coders amongst you, [Neil] has an excellent tip that you can use LLMs like ChatGPT to help you learn niche languages like this not by asking for code (which isn’t likely to give you anything useful, unless you’ve given it special training) but by requesting techniques and psudocode you can then implement to make your game. The LLM also proved a useful assistent for [Neil]’s excel-based pixel art workflow.

If you’re wondering why bother, well, why not? As [Neil] says, writing Amiga games is his version of a crossword puzzle. It may also be the only way to keep the dreams at bay. Others have taken to writing new operating systems  or reproducing PCBs to keep vintage Amiga hardware alive. If some gather under the light of the full moon to chant “Ia! Ia! Commodore f’thagan”– well, perhaps we can thank them for Commodore for rising from the sunless depths of bankruptcy once again.

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Whack-A-Disk

July 1, 2025 by 12 Comments

By now most floppy disks have been relegated to the dustbin of history, with a few exceptions for obscure industrial applications using legacy hardware and, of course, much of the world’s nuclear weapons arsenals. In fact, they’re so rare to see in the world anymore that many below a certain age don’t recognize the “save” symbol commonly used in application user interfaces. Without a use case, and with plenty of old floppies still laying around, [Rob] took a pile of them and built this Whack-a-Mole-style game.

The game has a number of floppy-disk-specific features compared to the arcade classic, though. First, there’s no mallet, so the player must push the floppy disks into the drive manually. Second, [Rob] went to somewhat exceptional lengths to customize the drives to that sometimes the disks jump out of the drive, forcing the player to grab them and put them back in to score points in the game. He did this without needing to install high-powered solenoids in the drives too. As for the game software itself, it all runs on an Amiga 600 and even includes a custom-made soundtrack for the 30-second game.

Getting the drives just right did take a number of prototypes, but after a few versions [Rob] has a working game that looks fun to play and is a clever use of aging hardware, not to mention the fact that it runs on a retro computer as well. Of course, for the true retro feel, you’ll want to make sure you find a CRT for the display somewhere, even though they’re getting harder to find now than old floppy disk drives.

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Unreleased Amiga Hardware Plays MP3s

May 25, 2025 by 33 Comments

The MP3 file type has been around for so long, and is supported by essentially all modern media software and hardware, that it might be surprising to some to learn that it’s actually a proprietary format. Developed in the late 80s and early 90s, it rose to prominence during the Napster/Limewire era of the early 00s and became the de facto standard for digital music, but not all computers in these eras could play this filetype. This includes the Amigas of the early 90s, with one rare exception: this unreleased successor to the A3000 with a DSP chip, which now also has the software to play back these digital tunes.

The AA3000, developed as a prototype by Commodore, was never released to the general public. Unlike the original A3000 this one would have included a digital signal processing chip from AT&T called the DSP3210 which would have greatly enhanced its audio capabilities. A few prototype boards did make it out into the hands of the public, and the retrocomputing scene has used them to develop replicas of these rare machines. [Wrangler] used one to then develop the software needed for the MPEG layer 2 and 3 decoder using this extra hardware, since the original Amiga 3000 was not powerful enough on its own to play these files back.

If you want to follow along with the community still developing for this platform there’s a form post with some more detail for this specific build (although you may need to translate from German). [Wrangler] additionally points out that there are some limitations with this implementation as well, so you likely won’t get Winamp-level performance with this system, but for the Amiga fans out there it’s an excellent expansion of this computer’s capabilities nonetheless.

Thanks to [Andy] for the tip!

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Kaleidoscopico Shows Off Pi Pico’s Capabilities

April 27, 2025 by 14 Comments

In the early days of computing, and well into the era where home computers were common but not particularly powerful, programming these machines was a delicate balance of managing hardware with getting the most out of the software. Memory had to be monitored closely, clock cycles taken into account, and even video outputs had to be careful not to overwhelm the processor. This can seem foreign in the modern world where double-digit gigabytes of memory is not only common, it’s expected, but if you want to hone your programming skills there’s no better way to do it than with the limitations imposed by something like a retro computer or a Raspberry Pi Pico.

This project is called Kaleidoscopio, built by [Linus Åkesson] aka [lft] and goes deep into the hardware of the Pi Pico in order to squeeze as much out of the small, inexpensive platform as possible. The demo is written with 17,000 lines of assembly using the RISC-V instruction set. The microcontroller has two cores on it, with one core acting as the computer’s chipset and the other acts as the CPU, rendering the effects. The platform has no dedicated audio or video components, so everything here is done in software using this setup to act as a PC from the 80s might. In this case, [lft] is taking inspiration from the Amiga platform, his favorite of that era.

The only hardware involved in this project apart from the Pi Pico itself are a few resistors, an audio jack, and a VGA port, further demonstrating that the software is the workhorse in this build. It’s impressive not only for wringing out as much as possible from the platform but for using the arguably weaker RISC-V cores instead of the ARM cores, as the Pi Pico includes both. [lft] goes into every detail on the project’s page as well, for those who are still captivated by the era of computer programming where every bit mattered. For more computing demos like this, take a look at this one which is based on [lft]’s retrocomputer of choice, the Amiga.

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The Amiga No One Wanted

March 16, 2025 by 59 Comments

The Amiga has a lot of fans, and rightly so. The machine broke a lot of ground. However, according to [Dave Farquhar], one of the most popular models today — the Amiga 600 — was reviled in 1992 by just about everyone. One of the last Amigas, it was supposed to be a low-cost home computer but was really just a repackaged Amiga 1000, a machine already seven years old which, at the time, might as well have been decades. The industry was moving at lightspeed back then.

[Dave] takes a look at how Commodore succeeded and then lost their way by the time the 600 rolled out. Keep in mind that low-cost was a relative term. A $500 price tag was higher than it seems today and even at that price, you had no monitor or hard drive. So at a $1,000 for a practical system you might as well go for a PC which was taking off at the same time.

By the time Commodore closed down, they had plenty of 600s left, but they also had refurbished 500s, and for many, that was the better deal. It was similar to the 500 but had more features, like an external port and easy memory expansion. Of course, both machines used the Motorola 68000. While that CPU has a lot of great features, by 1992, the writing was on the wall that the Intel silicon would win.

Perhaps the biggest issue, though, was the graphics system. The original Amiga outclassed nearly everything at the time. But, again, the industry was moving fast. The 600 wasn’t that impressive compared to a VGA. And, as [Dave] points out, it couldn’t run DOOM.

There’s more to the post. Be sure to check it out. It is a great look into the history of the last of a great line of machines. Maybe if Commodore had embraced PC interfaces, but we’ll never know. [Dave’s] take on the end of the Amiga echos others we’ve read. It wasn’t exactly Doom that killed the Amiga. It was more complicated than that. But Doom would have helped.

Lessons Learned, When Restoring An Amiga 1000

January 30, 2025 by 10 Comments

In the mid 1980s, there was a rash of 16-bit computers entering the market. One of them stood head and shoulders above the rest: Commodore’s Amiga 1000. It had everything that could reasonably be stuffed into a machine of the period, and multimedia capabilities the rest wouldn’t catch up on for years. [Celso Martinho] has managed to secure one of those first machines, and has shared his tale of bringing it back to life.

The post is as much a love letter to the Amiga and review of A1000 peripherals as it is a restoration, which makes it a good read for retrocomputing enthusiasts.  He recapped it and it wouldn’t boot, the solution of which turned out to be a reminder for the rest of us.

The machine had a RAM upgrade in the form of a daughterboard under the processor, its pins had weakened the leaves of the processor socket so it wouldn’t make contact. So don’t forget to replace sockets as well as capacitors.

The resulting machine is much faster thanks to a modern upgrade with a much quicker processor, memory, and an SD card for storage. He goes into some of the other upgrades available today, all of which would have had early-1990s-us salivating. It’s fair to say that in 2025 an A1000 is more 40-year-old curio than useful modern computer, but we can’t fail to admit to a bit of envy. The Amiga holds a special affection, here.