Known at release as just ‘Amiga’, the Amiga 1000 is the first of the Amiga range of computers. Released in 1985, the Amiga 1000 was designed by Jay Miner and his team at Amiga Corporation. Notably, Commodore purchased Amiga Corporation in 1984, essentially saving the company from a dire agreement they had with Atari.
System Overview
The Amiga was seen as revolutionary. It utilises the Motorola 68000 processor, a powerhouse at the time. The system has custom chips which assisted greatly with it’s graphical and audio capabilities. Performance of the Amiga surpassed anything seen at the time, with PCs still being used as business machines.
When released, the Amiga 1000 only shipped with 256kb of RAM and did not have a built-in ROM. This was required to be loaded from a floppy disk. RAM was expandable up to 8.5mb in total thanks to the external upgrade slot. The Motorola 68000 is clocked @ 7.09mhz for PAL machines and 7.16mhz for NTSC.
Video performance was best in class for a system at the price point. The Amiga 1000 offered multiple video modes and a palette of 4096 colours.
Commodore did not initially market the product that well, on account of the wide scope of its abilities. By and large, the Amiga 1000 is truly a multimedia computer and way ahead of its time.
WHERE TO BUY THE AMIGA 1000
A lifelong avid gamer and computing enthusiast, Matt has decades of Retro Gaming experience. Now over 40 years old, Matt now even considers himself retro, but fortunately, nobody has developed a Matt emulator (not yet at least!).