Amiga line

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The Amiga 1000

The Amiga is a series of computers released by Commodore, starting in 1985. It was a very powerful and capable machine for its time, featuring a Motorola 68000 and custom chips dedicated to IO, sound, graphics and more. This family of computers became quite popular, especially in Europe, spawning a huge library of games over time. It was even used by skate companies to edit their videos.

The later Amigas failed to advance vastly on the old models and the family lost its gain to newer video game consoles and other PC architectures. Eventually, Commodore became bankrupt and production of Amiga hardware and games were on the decline since. Despite this, there are still a handful of loyal Amiga users today and software continues to be developed for the classic machines, as well as a newer line of PowerPC-based Amigas released in the 2000s and beyond.

The Amiga was a tremendously complex machine, with multiple revisions to both its hardware and its system software. This can make emulation quite tricky, as figuring out the requirements for any specific game can be fairly difficult.

A commercial package exists, "Amiga Forever", from Cloanto, which elides past many of the complexities of Amiga emulation. It includes fully licensed ROMs, system disks, and (for applicable machines) hard drive OS images for every model that Commodore shipped. The package itself is basically a very sophisticated frontend for WinUAE and WinFellow but comes with pre-configured setups for many games. If you have sufficient expertise, you can manually do everything it's doing, but it's pretty convenient even for experts. It's also the easiest way to get legal copies of the original system ROMs.

Emulators

Name Operating System(s) Latest Version Libretro Core Active Recommended
PC
WinUAE Windows 5.2.0
FS-UAE Multi-platform 2.8.3
WinFellow Windows 0.5.7
MAME Multi-platform 0.264
Raspberry Pi and other ARM boards (Odroid, etc.)
Amiberry Linux (ARM) 2.19
Mobile
FS-UAE Multi-platform 2.8.3
UAE4ALL Pandora 2.5.3.4
UAE4Droid Android 1.13
Uae4all2 Android 2.3.7.5
Uae4arm Android 1.0.0.16
Omega 500 Android 0.2.3

Models

Amiga 1000

The Amiga 1000 was released on July 23, 1985 for $1,285 ($3,004.35 in 2018 money). It had a Motorola 68000 at 7.16 MHz with 256KB of RAM.

Amiga 2000

The Amiga 2000 was released in March of 1987 for $1,495 ($3,361.26 in 2018 money). It the same CPU as the 1000 but 1MB of RAM.

Amiga 500

The Amiga 500 was released in April of 1987 for $699 ($1,563.22 in 2018 money). It has the same CPU as the 1000 and 2000 but with 512KB of RAM.

Amiga 2500

The Amiga 2500 was released as a marketing name for the Amiga 2000 with a Motorola 68020 or 68030 CPU.

Amiga 1500

The Amiga 1500 was the Amiga 2000 for the UK market and was released in 1990 for £999 ($1,271.73 in USD in 1990 and $2,515.89 in 2018 USD).

Commodore CDTV

The Commodore CDTV was a Amiga 500 but for the console market. It was released in March of 1991 and retailed for $999 ($1,865.08 in 2018 money).

Amiga CD32

The Amiga CD32 (styled Amiga CD32) is an Amiga 1200-based console that came with a CD-ROM drive and was first released in September 1993. It could also be upgraded to mimic an Amiga 1200 PC by equipping it with third-party add-ons like a keyboard, floppy drive, hard drive, RAM and mouse. A hardware MPEG decompression module for playing Video CD was also released.


Worthwhile emulators to try for emulating Amiga CD32:

  • WinUAE
  • FS-UAE
  • Akiko
  • Amiga Forever (CD collection)

See more information about emulation of the Amiga CD32 below:

External Links

Amiga CD32: