In 1987 Amiga program Skyline BBS was the first BBS management program featuring an extension to ANSI Art as a true form of script markup language communication protocol.

Popular BBS software for the Amiga were ABBS, Amiexpress, C-Net, StormforceBBS, Infinity and Tempest.

Up to this time the PC ( warez ) scene did not have a powerful BBS software that could compete with the Amiga BBS software Ami-Express ( Short: Ami-X or simply / X ).

Because of their distinctiveness and quality they quickly spread throughout the Amiga community via the BBS network, with many ending up on Amiga Magazine coverdisks.

Although early Commodore advertisements attempted to cast the computer as an all-purpose business machine, the Amiga was most commercially successful as a home computer, with a wide range of games and creative software.

The quality of the Amiga's sound output, and the fact that the hardware is ubiquitous and easily addressed by software, were standout features of Amiga hardware unavailable on PC platforms for years.

Expansion boards were made by Richmond Sound Design that allow their show control and sound design software to communicate with their custom hardware frames either by ribbon cable or fiber optic cable for long distances, allowing the Amiga to control up to eight million digitally controlled external audio, lighting, automation, relay and voltage control channels spread around a large theme park, for example.

See Amiga software for more information on these applications.

Category: Amiga development software

Category: Amiga development software

As software developers shifted to these platforms, the Amiga lost value for mainstream consumers.

Other companies develop operating systems and manufacture computers for both Commodore and Amiga brands as well as software.

On March 16, 2005, KMOS, Inc. announced that it had completed all registrations with the State of Delaware to change its corporate name to Amiga, Inc. Several companies produce Amiga hardware and software today.

Because of its minimal overhead and low cost, the shareware model is often the only one practical for distributing non-free software for abandoned or orphaned platforms such as the Atari ST and Amiga.

Category: Amiga software

However, this hard disk support introduced some incompatibility with existing Amiga software because the memory used for hard disk control prevented some memory intensive titles from launching without adding additional RAM.

Unfortunately for the STE, the Amiga had already captured the market, and developers were reluctant to write software for the STE, preferring to stick with the larger established ST userbase.

* UAE ( emulator ), a software emulator for the Commodore Amiga

AmigaGuide is a hypertext document file format designed for the Amiga, files are stored in ASCII so it is possible to read and edit a file without the need for special software.

Since none of the popular expansions fit any more, the abbreviation no longer stands for anything, and the software is simply known as UAE — this occasionally gets backronymed as Universal Amiga Emulator or Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator.

For software, UAE may use disk images made from original Amiga floppy disks.

Some considered UAE to be attempting the impossible ; to be demanding that a system read, process and output 100 MB / s of data when the fastest PC was a 66 MHz 486, while keeping various emulated chips ( the Amiga chipset ) all in sync and appearing as they were supposed to appear to software.

A major improvement was made in 2000 by Bernd Meyer with the use of Just-in-time compilation, which significantly improved the emulation speed, to the extent that average PCs could now emulate some Amiga software faster than any real Amiga could run it.

WinUAE has reasonable compatibility for most software but, just like a " real " Amiga, for some old games it requires careful configuration in order to match the originally-supported hardware.

He was a pioneer in computer-generated art using Amiga computers that were introduced in 1985, just before his death in 1987.

The Amiga 1000 ( 1985 ) was the first model released

The best selling model, the Amiga 500, was introduced in 1987 and became the leading home computer of the late 1980s and early 1990s in much of Western Europe.

The first model was released in 1985 as simply " The Amiga from Commodore ", later to be retroactively dubbed the Amiga 1000.

The following year the Amiga product line was expanded with the introduction of two new models: the Amiga 2000 for high-end graphics and business use, and the Amiga 500 for home use.

The Amiga brand was then sold to another PC manufacturer, Gateway 2000, which had announced grand plans for it.

The Motorola 68000 series of microprocessors was used in all Amiga models from Commodore.

Commodore's design choice to remain with the 68000 architecture ensured that code was backward-compatible across the Amiga line.

The NewTek Video Toaster was made possible by the genlock ability of the Amiga.

The Amiga was one of the first home computers for which inexpensive sound sampling and video digitization accessories were available.

It is also possible to ignore the 68k CPU and run Linux on the PPC ( project Linux APUS ), but a PowerPC native AmigaOS promised by Amiga Technologies GmbH was not available when the PowerUP boards first appeared.

This was a powerful video effects board which turned the Amiga into an affordable video processing computer which found its way into many professional video environments.

The language was mildly successful within the Amiga community.

Today the language has declined in popularity along with the Amiga computer for which it was written.

By this time, however, many CBM users had shifted their attention to the 16 / 32-bit Amiga, and the 1581 was mostly sold to remaining GEOS users.

During development in 1983, Amiga had exhausted venture capital and was desperate for more financing.

The Atari Museum has acquired the Atari-Amiga contract and Atari engineering logs revealing that the Atari Amiga was originally designated as the 1850XLD.

At around the same time that Tramiel was in negotiations with Atari, Amiga entered into discussions with Commodore.

While this rivalry was in many ways a holdover from the days when the Commodore 64 had first challenged the Atari 800 ( among others ) in a series of scathing television commercials, the events leading to the launch of the ST and Amiga only served to further alienate fans of each computer, who fought vitriolic holy wars on the question of which platform was superior.