Commodore Amiga 1000 Trash to Treasure Part 2 | Was it really an Atari ST rival?

If you do a serious amount of retro-brighting you should consider making a black light box. Those mainly ultra-violet LEDs are very efficient. The box to prevent your contact with UV, which ages skin, can damage eyes, etc. Perhaps with a safety cut out when box opened. A turn table to even exposure, and possibly mirrors to direct more of the UV onto the item.

I so completely agree. I wanted a Mac II in those days, but couldn't come close to affording it. It's cheaper, but similar, competitors were the Atari ST and the Amiga 1000 at the time. All three used the 68000 processor. I finally bought the Amiga 1000 (a refurbished one) as it had, by far, the best built-in sound hardware and the ability to generate NTSC video out of the box. It was SOO much more powerful than the Mac II and even than the Atari when it was released (or it was way cheaper for the same abilities, either way), with a multitasking GUI and I loved it.

I bought my Amiga 1000 in 1986 with 256kB expansion and Amiga 1080 monitor for $1000.

I actually had an Atari joystick that was designed by Amiga (Amiga written all over the PCB). I guess this was at a time just before Atari wanted to purchase Amiga before Commodore stepped in at the 11th hour. It was the Atari Pro-line CX24 joystick.

The St wasn't bad but GEM was terrible compared to Workbench. Workbench 1.3 was ugly as sin, but I got my first Amiga as a A500+ and the new updated 2.0, which was nicer.

Great fun to see this legendary machine, and follow your commentary. And great music, LOL

Never got into the 16 bit computers. Went from C64 to a PC 386 and that was great for study and the games at that time where the same or better than on an Amiga.

So by the time you could buy an Amiga the Sinclair QL (which actually beat the Mac as the first 68xxx computer to market) had been and gone. A colleague did actually buy a QL but only because they were being sold off for about £200.

where do you buy the box?

An Interesting video, I'm am amazed how you repair these machines.

I think a lot of people don`t know that there was an upgrade on the graphics with the AGA Chip in later versions. With 262,144 colors in HAM8 Mode it was quiet good for its time (1992) But there was always the chance to upgrade the system with a 24bit graphics board like the Retina at least for the Amiga 2000/3000/4000.

I was in two minds on the one hand i really liked the st and the amiga what swung it wasa public domain demo pugs in space on the amiga and better sound though i did enjoy playing space harrier on the st in dixons in our swindon store .

You sound a bit crook Neil hope you are ok, don't push yourself too far mate. Love your series from day 1

Is it just me, or does you voice sound a little croaky in this video? If so, I hope you are doing well.

Love these Amigas, for reference the best product I have used for removing yellowing is Magic Eraser. I've used it on very yellow looking photocopiers which should be cream and it magically removes the yellow without damaging the surface. I couldn't believe how effective it is and quick too. Have you tried this method before as I'm sure it would save you time and agro ?

😣 𝕡𝐫ｏ𝕄ｏ𝔰𝓶

oh man I am a complete sucker for the trash to treasure series 💕 hands down my favourite on YT

Given the Amiga's AMAZING graphical powers, that letter seems suspect. Calling it lacking on graphics is a dead giveaway.

You got covid or summat?

This series is great.

Where'd you get that shirt ?

Back in the day my parents went, $1k for the kids computer is ok. It was a weird time in California USA. It was either a well old PC with nearly nothing, or an Atari ST. Two years later we saw the Amiga, it was really late in the states, and didn't have MIDI. At that point most Atarians I knew either upgraded to a mega st or high spec PC.

Neil very nice idea the naration through the magazines! It describes exactly the vibe of the industry and the feelings of the potential buyers! Great series! Pt3 please!!!!

Crazy in the context of the time really. That 256k alone is a sticking point.

A friend bought an A1000 new, back in the day. He invested quite a bit of cash into it at the time. Bought some external RAM and SCSI expansions for it for example. Then he bought a Phoenix replacement motherboard for it which I installed for him. Later he bought an A3000. Good times! Good man too!

Neil be careful with the heat wave that is hitting england

Why was Amiga successful? Mainly because of Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200 I guess. The design was quite smart and powerful. Definitely a huge upgrade in performance over any 80s 8-bit computers. In all areas. 68K CPU was great choice and it had really good operating system. 32bit with real multitasking. Yes, PCs and specialized workstations had better options, but for incomparable higher prices. In my part of the world it was Amigas and Atari STs as Macs were that strange, expensive American computers. Amiga was better equipped for games with many colors, fast sprites, bit blitter, video planes, four channel 8-bit audio with real samples. Atari had higher resolutions (in BW) so good for productivity. And the high res BW monitor was really nice. Both used the same CPU and both had the same amount of memory (Amiga 500 and Atari ST520). Gamers wanted Amiga more than Atari ST and as it was priced reasonably, it fit the role really nice.
PCs (IBM compatible) started to be a thing much later. They were more expensive and with less features. Even VGA wasn't capable of outperform Amiga or Atari until much later, for reasonable audio it required special card upgrade. CPU wasn't more powerful and FPU was very expensive upgrade. OS was joke on PCs in comparison to any other computers. It had no multitasking, no memory management, no drivers for any hardware. First real OSes on PCs were OS/2, Windows NT and Linux. Every developer who wanted to use any special HW was required to use it at the HW level. You wanted to play audio on that Sound Blaster? You had to directly program registers of that card and DMA the sample into it, while handling HW interrupt telling you, half of the buffer is played. You had to interact directly with ICs in the computer chipset like DMA controllers, Interrupt controllers, UARTs to use the HW present in the machine. Even the graphics card had to be controlled by HW IO, because BIOS was very slow and ineffective.
It is quite a miracle PCs have survived till the second half of nineties, where Amiga and other HW started to age and PCs started to support really useful gaming HW and games shifted from DOS to Windows (mostly 95), where suddenly drivers and API were available. After the success of some PC games lthat were able to get maximum out of it, more HW was created for PCs like SoudBlaster 16, GUS or 3dfx Monster. With accelerated 3D graphics, days of 16-bit computers were counted. In 3D there are no clever tricks with sprites and planes. Shear power is required. With PCs modularity being always a thing, this gave them great advantage over more compact systems. Their place was eventually taken by consoles, but PC remains main all purpose computer.

I hope you made good use of the heatwave!

Why? 1) Way more interesting graphics than PC. 2) GUI first workbench unlike DOS bs. 3) Object oriented OS at source/API level

Why? 1) Way more interesting graphics than PC. 2) GUI first workbench unlike DOS bs. 3) Object oriented OS at source/API level

Great video Neil, have you had the human malware recently? Sound a bit ick

I bought an A1000 a few years ago and it looks just as stunning as it did in 1985 when my local computer shop had one on display. BUT! The only "problem" is that is is much smaller than it appears in photos, so I really really wish (are you listening Steve Jones?) someone would take the design and scale it up until a regular keyboard would fit under it and it would be tall enough for expansion cards to fit.

Since I could afford neither an Amiga nor an ST when they came out and was into machine code programming and graphics I lusted after the machine which had the more impressive graphics I lusted over the one that had better graphics hardware, the Amiga. I had a friend who had some connection to Melbourne House and used to give me machine code programming tips and rumours of games that were still the works. He was the first one who started talking about the Amiga and making it sound amazing. Then a friend's older brother bought an A1000 with compensation money from a motobike accident and after being allowed to use it a few times I was utterly convinced. Looking at STs in shops didn't give me the same thrill. I scoured the classified ads until the first secondhand one appeared for sale. Somehow I had saved enough money. I think I paid $1000 Australian and it included a rare 1081 monitor with the Sony Trinitron picture tube. I sold off a huge collection of 48K Speccy games and hardware. I've always the Amiga generally was the spiritual successor to the Speccy and C64 as well since it was the bedroom coder's dream machine, especially when the A500 appeared later. Sadly, I never figured out how to program it in assembly. That had to wait until I got my A2000 with 030 years later.

I live in San Angelo Texas and 100 degrees is considered a cold front, what is the highest temperature that would be safe for retro brighting ?

I was never interested in the Mac but early in the period the Atari ST was the only sensible choice - the Amiga seemed like a fanciful dream - loads of potential but it would probably fail because no-one could afford it and it really only had ports of Atari software and games. Later on things flipped of course - and so did I - happily trading in my well used 520 STFM for a used A500.

Commodore marketing was crap. My Dad and I have read articles about the Amiga 1000 and thought, "okay, this is cool". It wasn't until we actually got to use one at a computer store did we realize, "holy crap this things amazing". But Dad said we couldn't afford it. When the Amiga 500 hit stores we both bolted to get our hands on one. We've stuck with it til a year after the Amiga 3000 was released which we only got because I was able to put up half the cost. Sad that it would be the last Commodore computer as a family we would ever buy. Fun fact: I was looking at the Atari ST (which was within our budget) but the old man said "Son, we're a Commodore family". I don't have that Amiga 3000, it disappeared when my parents moved 22 years ago. I have 2 Amigas (500/4000T) but just don't have the room to set them up so I've been using AmigaForever until MiST (I really wanted the Vampire but was always too late for the party). Now I'm on MiSTer which honestly is great.

It’s a dream machine for me. I have wanted o e for so many years

gross smokers ruin everything :( their lungs & the cases & fans of retro computers & PCs

I never expected there'd be a benefit to smoking! Still not recommended though.

Lost it: "🤣This keyboard desperately wants to be a banana"

Interestingly, you can run a clone of "TOS & GEM" natively on an Amiga now, even as a Kickstart ROM replacement in the form of EmuTOS. It fields so weird to see an Amiga boot like an ST and natively run Atari ST software - of course the software has to be OS friendly and not hit the hardware directly.

really enjoyed that! so interesting to see the amiga in the context of its time :) i love old magazines for that sort of insight

The real mystery to me is why it took off in Europe and never really did in the US. In 1986 my college had an Amiga in the art department, I remember my photography teacher demonstrating how you could digitize a color photo using a b&w video camera and red, green and blue filters, but then you didn't really hear about it again until Video Toaster was popular. Atari went away and there just wasn't anything competing at a lower price point than PC-compatibles ever again. Business folks had PCs, people who could afford them had Macs and generally kids didn't have computers at all until the web came along.