10 Amazing Commodore Amiga 500 Facts

I used to store my cannabis resin in my A500's trapdoor. I knew there was no way my parents would ever find it

I still have 3 amiga500s in their original boxes..i tend to emulate these days..terrific computer.

I loved my Amiga, especially the Team 17 games - Superfrog, Alien Breed, Project X, Worms etc.

I am 45 years old, I have never seen an Amiga commercial ever in my life, this is awesome!!!

When I lived in Silicon Valley, I used to live right between the former headquarters of ATARI and Amiga. My heart would shrink and I'd feel a pang of pain any time I passed them both by on my way to work, remembering how great it was to be in Europe in the late 1980's and early 1990's and own an Amiga, and play on the ATARI ST... I'd pass the former Sun Microsystems warehouse in Santa Clara, and my chest would hurt even more. Tears would stream down my cheeks in silence on many an ocassion of traveling to and from work, remembering the good, more innocent times...

I still have a working Amiga 500 (first owner) , but I've recently found out that my A501 trapdoor expansion has broken. I really love the fact that the Amiga community is still living today. There's still Amiga stores active where you can buy Amiga hardware and software for a reasonable price. This week I bought a new trapdoor expansion + RTC with a more commonly used replaceable button cell battery to be expected next week. Can't wait.

The Commodore Amiga has been for many years an alien entity for me, since it never came to Brazil in more official terms... I remember to read about in games magazines and getting screenshots of it for some games... I am very surprised to remember that, at least, the Amiga CD 32-Bit came here, though, but badly advertised. Maybe it was a niche product. And, so, thanks to emulation (and my boredom during the pandemic), I've gotten the chance to really meet the Amiga and play with it. Anyway, when I think about the Amiga, I see that it's a very symbolic machine to understand the Western development of computers... It's an incredible achievement for 1985/86. However, in a worldwide perspective, when I compare with the high advancement of the Sharp X68000 in 1987, I think that maybe the game developers for Amiga were a step behind in not taking full advantage. If I go to technicalities of the hardware, we could see some of the reason why as well. (And the Sharp X68000 was an even more distant machine to me...) Sometimes I think that the Amiga wasn't taken to its full potential many times in its heyday, and it's kinda sad. (Anyway, thanks to homebrew community, it's good to have the opportunity what could be, for example, a Street Fighter II for the Amiga if developed correctly for the machine!)

When the amiga 2000 came out it was a game changer. It had flexibility, power and built in capability that could rival a $7000 apple quadra for a fraction of the cost. The PC platform was woefully behind in terms of GUI, graphics and sound. For the same cost as an a2000, an IBM clone was bare bones. No sound card. You'd be lucky to get 256 color VGA.

just bought a 1200 and needs work re-cap etc had a 2000 back in the day so cant wait to get it up and running. love your vids keep it up..

I got my Amiga 1000 new in November 1986, selling it after getting a used A500 in May '89. I stayed with that - mainly playing games, but also my first dabblings with a modem, what we used to call 'comms' - up until 1994. I got the extra 512k RAM and a second floppy drive, but expansion past that was pricey. In '94 I got an A4000, so was able to use cheaper hard drives and RAM.

The interpretation that Amiga was more Atari than Commodore is often portrayed because Jay Minor was ex Atari. However, Jay created a machine that revolved around two MOS/Commodore CIA IO chips. This architecture has its roots in Commodore's family history of design with either two PIAs (PET), VIAs (VIC20) or CIAs (C64) for the IO components. Also, the Amiga has a MOS 6500 (6502 based microcontroller) in its keyboard. So even if Atari ended up owing Amiga (or anyone else) the machine would have had MOS/Commodore parts in it. There were no Atari ICs or parts used in the design. So, hardware wise, from the outset, it was more Commodore than Atari. Also, the original Atari ST was hampered by its single sided drive. Which was kind of ridiculous in the 16bit world.

The first computer I ever played with. I still have pretty sweet memories of Agony (a huge part of my gaming heart belongs to that game), Darkman and Shadow of the Beast. Not the best games ever of course, but still quite fascinating.

I had this unit in my tv van for graphics back in the early 90s.

I really look forward to these videos, great work mate keep it up !

The custom chipset available in the Amiga 500 (OCS) was a great chipset which went way beyond the blitter (fast copy of bitmaps). For instance, the Amiga version of Pacmania (1988) put the Atari ST port to shame with a killer soundtrack and a full-screen, overscan-mode playfield. But this was done with surprisingly relatively little use of the blitter. Most of the animation relied on the Amiga's default capabilities (dual playfield, ease of doing parallax scrolling)

I loved and still love the amiga, I had a 500 and later a 1200, PC wasn't quite there yet and the amiga was way more interesting, then doom happened and I had to get a pc

Back in my youth, the A500 was the Playstation 5 of the time. Everyone desire one as the Holy Grial of home computer gaming.

Your Amazing Facts videos are the most interesting you produce. I never used one or played the games, being a console user.

You just gained a new sub. Thank you for the video it was awesome. I had no idea games looked that good on the Amiga.

I had an Apple IIGS as a kid. A lot of my friends had an Apple II (or a PC or Mac in later years). I only read about the Amiga and Atari ST but never knew anyone that actually owned one.