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      /  Amiga Legacy Movie - is there one?
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edponpon 
Amiga Legacy Movie - is there one?
Posted on 4-Jan-2017 5:39:41
#1 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 8-May-2007
Posts: 314
From: USA, The World Police

Hey all.

After enjoying the classic Pirates of Silicon Valley I started wondering if there was an Amiga Legacy movie, similar in nature. I'm not necessarily talking about the Commodore documentary that you'd get with Amiga Forever, but something that directly compares how well/bad the Amiga was to the Apple or IBM/Windows clones. I've always wondered why the Amiga never got the respect from the industry as it should have. I've also wondered why computer history buffs always focus on just the Apple and Microsoft, other than for obvious reasons (Because they're both wickedly famous and powerful now). Any recommendations on film or books is appreciated. Thanks.

Ed

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g01df1sh 
Re: Amiga Legacy Movie - is there one?
Posted on 4-Jan-2017 9:56:42
#2 ]
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Joined: 16-Apr-2009
Posts: 1776
From: UK

@edponpon

Hi

Try these two

This one is not out just yet but very soon. https://amigafilm.com/

Have seen the below one and it is a good watch

http://www.frombedroomstobillions.com/amiga

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amigang 
Re: Amiga Legacy Movie - is there one?
Posted on 4-Jan-2017 10:26:51
#3 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 12-Jan-2005
Posts: 2018
From: Cheshire, England

@g01df1sh

BBC, Micro Men is a good one that focus on British computers Acron & Sinclair, not much Amiga, but still a great watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXBxV6-zamM

Kim Justice does a very good story of the Amiga video on youtube too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP1nLzT_t0o

and Lemon Amiga is currently doing a great documentary video series on the Amiga and silicon valley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaYJ6C43YNI

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Kronos 
Re: Amiga Legacy Movie - is there one?
Posted on 4-Jan-2017 11:04:25
#4 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 8-Mar-2003
Posts: 2553
From: Unknown

@edponpon

Quote:

I've also wondered why computer history buffs always focus on just the Apple and Microsoft,


Cos Amiga was the computer that could have been, but never was.....

The A1000 was a shock, but the lack of SW and the high price lead to it's production been stopped with no succesor.

Quite some time later A2000 (to late, no real progress over the A1000) and the A500 got released.

The A500 sold less than half of the numbers compared to C64 despite the overall market growing rapidly.

Outside of video and some other GFX Amiga made no impact in any proffesional field.

Few years later it was all gone.

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BigD 
Re: Amiga Legacy Movie - is there one?
Posted on 4-Jan-2017 13:58:04
#5 ]
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Joined: 11-Aug-2005
Posts: 7305
From: UK

@Kronos

It still made the big players (especially Apple and Atari) sit up and take notice and gave a lot of professional graphics artists and programmers their first big break. Why these professionals in the US centred global computing and gaming press bury the memory is beyond me Even Mega Man gets more love in the US and that character has no cultural relevance in the UK!

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BigD 
Re: Amiga Legacy Movie - is there one?
Posted on 4-Jan-2017 14:14:04
#6 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 11-Aug-2005
Posts: 7305
From: UK

@Kronos

Quote:
Outside of video and some other GFX Amiga made no impact in any proffesional field.


Electronic Arts invested heavily in the Amiga and released Deluxe Paint an industry leading paint package used for game development and animation, The PC was not a good development system in the late 80s and early 90s and the Amiga plugged that requirement amazingly. Since the US was obsessed with the previous generation NES at that point they missed out on a lot of the great games and serious applications their European counterparts were enjoying. Deluxe Paint was the Photoshop-like killer app of its day and PC version was rubbish! That Americans couldn't see a good thing even when geniuses among them designed this amazing product and it's quite frankly their loss Thank God for Newtek and the VideoToaster or America would have NO memory of the greatest home computer ever Then again half of the country probably have no idea who Alan Turin or Thomas Flowers were or that the Colossus was the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer! At least the UK honours its heritage whereas America only remembers the victors of business or marketing! Case in point; the original black and white Apple Macintosh was overpriced garbage the day the Amiga came out!

Last edited by BigD on 04-Jan-2017 at 02:34 PM.
Last edited by BigD on 04-Jan-2017 at 02:20 PM.
Last edited by BigD on 04-Jan-2017 at 02:19 PM.
Last edited by BigD on 04-Jan-2017 at 02:17 PM.

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BigD 
Re: Amiga Legacy Movie - is there one?
Posted on 4-Jan-2017 14:27:38
#7 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 11-Aug-2005
Posts: 7305
From: UK

@Thread

Back on topic now that we've justified the Amiga's place in computing history My recommendation would be Bedrooms to Billions: The Amiga Years.

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bison 
Re: Amiga Legacy Movie - is there one?
Posted on 4-Jan-2017 17:29:49
#8 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 18-Dec-2007
Posts: 2112
From: N-Space

@Kronos

Quote:
The A1000 was a shock, but the lack of SW and the high price lead to it's production been stopped with no succesor.

Quite some time later A2000 (to late, no real progress over the A1000) and the A500 got released.

That's not how I remember it. A1000s were being sold through 1986, at least where I live. The A2000 and A500 were announced early 1987 and shipped before the end of the year. Some people were holding off purchasing knowing that updated models were on the way, but I don't recall a shortage of A1000s. Maybe they just happened to be in stock in my area.

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Kronos 
Re: Amiga Legacy Movie - is there one?
Posted on 4-Jan-2017 17:37:03
#9 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 8-Mar-2003
Posts: 2553
From: Unknown

@bison

Guess I should have been a bit clearer....

By 1986 C= had such a huge stockpile of unsold A1000s that they stopped making them.

There was quite a real chance of that being the end of all things Amiga.

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bison 
Re: Amiga Legacy Movie - is there one?
Posted on 4-Jan-2017 18:40:07
#10 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 18-Dec-2007
Posts: 2112
From: N-Space

@Kronos

OK, I see what you mean now.

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BigD 
Re: Amiga Legacy Movie - is there one?
Posted on 4-Jan-2017 19:06:43
#11 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 11-Aug-2005
Posts: 7305
From: UK

@Kronos

Quote:
By 1986 C= had such a huge stockpile of unsold A1000s that they stopped making them.


That C= mis-marketed the Amiga should not diminish the role it played in computer history. Yes, C= used sepia posters rather than full colour which could have better demonstrated its colour graphics ability and advantage for creative and home use. Yes, they had video adverts that barely showed any footage of either the machine or the software in action and instead simply the awful slogan "unlock your potential" (were they going after the education market or something ?)

But underneath it all Hi-Toro/Amiga and C= produced an amazing machine which for the people that understood it was the best home computer in history!

Last edited by BigD on 04-Jan-2017 at 07:39 PM.

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Hypex 
Re: Amiga Legacy Movie - is there one?
Posted on 6-Jan-2017 14:24:18
#12 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 6-May-2007
Posts: 11180
From: Greensborough, Australia

@Kronos

Quote:
Outside of video and some other GFX Amiga made no impact in any proffesional field.


I was reading some comments on some Amiga youtube video and one guy was saying something like the graphics the Amiga provided was amazing at the time given that it could do things only seen on a Paintbox worth half a million .

And there are also the usual commments of how the Amiga got these guys into games development. So it certainly mattered to them.

In any case I think we must remember the Amiga was going against Atari. And the Atari pretty must outlasted the Amiga. Why do I say this? MIDI ports. The ST and Falcon were major tools used by musicians in the mid 80's and early 90's. MIDI was the killer port and Cubase was the killer app. Even today I read and see videos of musicians who demonstrate using an Atari ST. Loading software and samples off floppy disk. LOL.

Had Commodore done what they should have and included the MIDI ports on the Amiga this may have been a different story. Sure you can add it as a box but when you have to go out and get a box compared to being in the box what are you going to chose? I think doing things right out of the box matters.

Last edited by Hypex on 06-Jan-2017 at 02:34 PM.

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BigD 
Re: Amiga Legacy Movie - is there one?
Posted on 6-Jan-2017 15:06:17
#13 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 11-Aug-2005
Posts: 7305
From: UK

@Hypex

Quote:
Had Commodore done what they should have and included the MIDI ports on the Amiga this may have been a different story. Sure you can add it as a box but when you have to go out and get a box compared to being in the box what are you going to chose? I think doing things right out of the box matters.


I've watched Bedrooms to Billions and a Memory Protection chip would have only cost $2 more when designing the board (they left it out as they were still primarily designing a game console at the time)! I guess considering the cost of the custom chips and the fact that the A500 had to try and compete on price with the ST, the MIDI ports had to be left out. They did consider the speed requirements for MIDI when designing the serial port however so they knew it had to be considered.

I personally would have liked the ports built into the A1000/A2000/A3000/T//A4000/T as a minimum but back in the late 1980s my family bought a 1040STFM due to better price/memory included compared to the A500 and also skimped and bought the keyboard one model down from the model that had MIDI ports This demonstrates how most people would not have benefited from them being included as standard. I never used the ST's MIDI ports though the secondary school music department has one Atari ST (for a school of 800+).

In reality, until the Batman Pack was released the ST still had the lead in the UK and price and exclusive games/graphics software mattered more than MIDI for the Amiga to bounce back into profitability after the A1000. I remember when White Town released "Your Woman" in January 1997 there was some media interest in the fact it was produced on a ST but the platform and Atari were already commercially dead at that point!

Wiki quote:
Quote:
By 1996, a series of successful lawsuits[28] had left Atari with millions of dollars in the bank, but the failure of the Lynx and Jaguar left Atari without a product to sell. Tramiel and his family also wanted out of the business. The result was a rapid succession of changes in ownership. In July 1996, Atari merged with JTS Inc., a short-lived maker of hard disk drives, to form JTS Corp.[29][30][31][32] Atari's role in the new company largely became that of holder for the Atari properties and minor support, and consequently the name largely disappeared from the market.


So Atari Corp. still had money but no commercially viable products!! That's worse than the Commodore situation IMHO unless you are Irving Gould

=

Last edited by BigD on 06-Jan-2017 at 03:21 PM.
Last edited by BigD on 06-Jan-2017 at 03:16 PM.

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Kronos 
Re: Amiga Legacy Movie - is there one?
Posted on 6-Jan-2017 15:24:41
#14 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 8-Mar-2003
Posts: 2553
From: Unknown

@BigD

Quote:

BigD wrote:

That C= mis-marketed the Amiga should not diminish the role it played in computer history.


But it did.


Think of it this way, NextStep was about as much ahead in SW as Amiga was in HW, but hadn't it been turned into OSX it would have only played an insignificant role in computer history.

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BigD 
Re: Amiga Legacy Movie - is there one?
Posted on 6-Jan-2017 15:51:38
#15 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 11-Aug-2005
Posts: 7305
From: UK

@Kronos

Quote:
Think of it this way, NextStep was about as much ahead in SW as Amiga was in HW, but hadn't it been turned into OSX it would have only played an insignificant role in computer history.


But that is simply not true of the Amiga. The European home computer industry was built on the Amiga for a decade at least! The PC simply was not up to the job in the mid 80s to early 90s and the NES was released ridiculously late in Europe! The Amiga was a success here. That America didn't get it doesn't matter to its significance to Europeans. Not all history should be written by America as demonstrated by my Alan Turin and Thomas Flowers comments (and the film U-571). Americans would prefer to re-write history using pro-USA rose tinted glasses than actually tell the truth a lot of the time. European programmers programmed the best Amiga games (Team17, Bitmap Brothers, DICE and Sensible Software) getting the most out the custom chips and accelerators. Even on the serious application front the Amiga community didn't necessarily need Microsoft or Adobe packages back then as we made our own e.g. SoftLogic, Grasshopper LLC, IrseeSoft, Scala and Electronic Arts.

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Kronos 
Re: Amiga Legacy Movie - is there one?
Posted on 6-Jan-2017 16:07:57
#16 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 8-Mar-2003
Posts: 2553
From: Unknown

@BigD

Quote:

BigD wrote:

But that is simply not true of the Amiga. The European home computer industry was built on the Amiga for a decade at least!


Which decade would that be ?

Quote:

The PC simply was not up to the job in the mid 80s to early 90s .


Amiga was to expensive in the 80s, C64 ruled supreme and even the Sinclair (UK) and Apple2 (US) were ahead of Amiga in that regard.

When the A500 had dropped to XMas-gift compatible price level in 1990 it did rule only to be surpassed by PCs in 92 (A1200 to little too late) and to die in 94.
When ESCOM reentered the A1200 they didn't even manage to sell the 200-250k units they build before going under themselves.

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BigD 
Re: Amiga Legacy Movie - is there one?
Posted on 6-Jan-2017 17:07:45
#17 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 11-Aug-2005
Posts: 7305
From: UK

@Kronos

The peak of sales (since that is all you seem interested in) started in October 1989 with the release of the A500 Batman Pack in the UK.

Since I am talking about influence and the affect on the industry I would say the Amiga was dominant between the release of Defender of the Crown in 1986 and
Worms in 1995.

Counting each year inclusively, that is a decade long dominance of artistic and technological superiority outworking as European sales/platform dominance especially in the UK, Germany, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. Since home computers were the dominant form of Consumer Electronics in Europe at this time rather than the consoles found in America, the Amiga's introduction (especially the A500) led to a significant and long lasting affect on the European computer industry.

The global industry wide influence of the Amiga is far more wide ranging than either its sales figures or its global penetration. GPU advancements, multitasking and multimedia features as standard in home computers are as a direct response to the advancements made buy Hi-Toro/Amiga Inc.



Last edited by BigD on 06-Jan-2017 at 06:56 PM.
Last edited by BigD on 06-Jan-2017 at 05:23 PM.
Last edited by BigD on 06-Jan-2017 at 05:17 PM.
Last edited by BigD on 06-Jan-2017 at 05:11 PM.

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Kronos 
Re: Amiga Legacy Movie - is there one?
Posted on 6-Jan-2017 17:22:25
#18 ]
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Joined: 8-Mar-2003
Posts: 2553
From: Unknown

@BigD

Amiga in Europe anno 1986 was few 1000 uberexpensive A1000 so no matter how good Defender was it simply didn't matter at that time.

Don't know how you count "dominace in the homecomputer market" but for me the fact that the C64 outsold the Amiga both in HW and in SW throughout the 80s means that Amiga didn't dominated than.

As to when the PC took over in that field is debatable, but I'd say as soon as 3D really catched on in gaming.

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BigD 
Re: Amiga Legacy Movie - is there one?
Posted on 6-Jan-2017 17:30:35
#19 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 11-Aug-2005
Posts: 7305
From: UK

@Kronos

Quote:
Amiga in Europe anno 1986 was few 1000 uberexpensive A1000 so no matter how good Defender was it simply didn't matter at that time.


The install base of the PS3 is still bigger than the PS4 but the PS4 has all the game development resources directed at it. As soon as the Amiga was shown to be the future of gaming/computing i.e. as demonstrated by Defender of the Crown resources shifted and sales followed once the price dropped. Once Amiga exclusive games/software appeared proving what the custom chips could do a further sales spike appeared. There was no comparison between Lemmings 2 on the ST versus the Amiga or Cyber Studio - CAD-3D 2.0 on the ST versus Lightwave on the Amiga. The Mac was black and white in 1986 and the IBM was a green on black monstrosity and continued to be rubbish for gaming until 1995 on the release of Command and Conquer and Magic Carpet. The PC market got lucky with Doom as it was an early killer app which favoured chunky pixels. In reality, there was nothing that the Amiga couldn't do compared to the PC in 1993 other than get Id software to release Doom for 030 equipped Amigas (C2P was possible)!

Last edited by BigD on 06-Jan-2017 at 06:09 PM.
Last edited by BigD on 06-Jan-2017 at 05:34 PM.

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edponpon 
Re: Amiga Legacy Movie - is there one?
Posted on 8-Jan-2017 20:11:25
#20 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 8-May-2007
Posts: 314
From: USA, The World Police

@g01df1sh & amigang

Thanks. Both your suggestions were pretty much what I was looking for. I'll buy the blu-rays for the videos that offer it and the DVD for the other. These are definitely worth supporting. Now I have a follow-up question.

Have the original Commodore developers ever tried getting together and re-boot, no pun intended, the Amiga magic in someway? Have any of them ever expressed interest in making the next generation (AAA Chipset) Amigas?

Ed

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