Bridging the gap between the glory
days of the 8-bit home computers and
the dawn of modern-day Windows
PCs, the Amiga came into prominence
during an era where gaming was
beginning to find both its feet and its
identity, and that was reflected in its
vibrant and varied software library.
While you’d still find the odd offering
that was produced by one or two
bedroom programmers (and it had
a very healthy public domain scene),
increasingly we’d see games built by
much larger teams of specialists.
The result: games that were bigger
than ever before, both in size and in
scope. Often larger than the Amiga’s
puny floppy disk format could handle,
in fact, meaning many games came onmultiple disks (sometimes, such as with
the LucasArts adventures, in excess of
ten), which meant disk-swapping was
a way of life for Amiga owners. After
the pains of 1980s cassette tape decks,
however, the Amiga was considered the
very definition of convenience.
In its later years, the Amiga found itself
under pressure not from its rival Atari
ST and IBM PC systems, but from a
new breed of 16-bit consoles such as
the Sega Mega Drive and the Super
Nintendo Entertainment System.
To combat this, Commodore introduced
various hardware revisions – from
the sleek A600 to the ill-fated CD32- but compatibility woes and a lack of
developer support meant that by the
mid-90s, the line had run out of steam.
Commodore’s beauty was big, bulky and relentlessly beige,
but its games were a riot of colour and fun
AMIGA
This model is an Amiga
500 running Workbench
version 1.3. It came out
of the box with just
512kb of RAM, but
this could be doubled
with an expansion.