By Anthony Becker, Executive Editor, See staff list for e-mail address
This is one of those tough things we writers are often forced to do. Pick only a few items from a number of innovative products. The Amiga seemed to attract innovation to it which was displayed in many of the pieces of hardware and software released by both Commodore and the third-party developers. With hardware from simple RAM cards to video boards like the PAR and Toaster and software from games and text editors to ray tracers, it is nearly impossible to pick just a few to call the best of all time, and then justify your decision to attempt to ward off hate mail from those with their own favorites. As hard as this task may be, I'm going to jump right in.
Graphics Software:
This has to go to the piece of software that inspired me to save up my hard-earned Gilders and buy my first Amiga 500, Turbo Silver. This was the ray tracing package released by Impulse in competition with the Amiga best, at that time, 3D software Sculpt 3D by Byte-by-Byte. It was at AmiExpo in NYC that I was drawn to the Impulse booth where the audience was enlisted to draw circles that the Amiga was to magically transform into spheres. While Sculpt's output at that time was considered by many to be more realistic, Silver's being half the price and a much faster renderer made it a better buy for the Amiga buyer on a budget. Turbo Silver 3.0 was the first software package I bought for my 512-k, one-floppy-drive, 68000 Amiga 500 and I could still sit down and create objects and render. By the time I traded in the 500 for a 2000 with hard drive the new version of Silver was getting an overhaul to its GUI and a new name, Imagine. The 2000 became the perfect rendering box, especially once the 68000 was retired by the 68020, FPU, and RAM card. Sculpt had long since ceased to be after its move to the Macintosh but Imagine's success ensured that the Amiga would always have a healthy choice of 3D ray tracing packages. Along the way it has sat beside Optics, Caligari, Forms in Flight, Videoscape 3D, Design 3D, Real 3D, Aladdin 4D, Cinema 4D, and Lightwave. Only a few are still left and so far only Imagine is one of the few to have survived the port to Windows and continued Amiga support with a new version just released and a constant update program allowing the Amiga owner to pre-purchase updates for a whole year. So many other programs disappeared shortly after a company decided to tap the manna from other operating systems. Sculpt being one of the first along with others like VistaPro, Distant Suns, Scala, and so many others. I look forward to more years of Imagine.
Game:
Oofah! Another hard one. Two games that got me heavily into the Amiga were Sidewinder (commercial) and Rocket Attack (PD). I was amazed by both, being a Commodore 64 owner and seeing these wondrous things on a friend's Amiga 1000. Rocket Attack looked like commercial software for any other computer at the time, yet was amazing in that it was free. The Amiga games market took off like no other software category for the machine. Not that surprising as its original design was as an expandable games console. To make a choice from such a large field is nearly impossible. I have to look at what kept me up the longest, and that was Populous 2. Any game that makes you a god with followers is heading for greatness and few do it as well as Populous does.
Word Processor:
An easier field to pick from as it has narrowed to just two current picks though both are very good. I have to choose Final Writer as I have never used Wordsworth though I guess both would suit the kind of use I have for them. I will say, Final Writer is far cleaner, far easier to use, and far faster than MS Word on a fast Pentium Gates Crate and my fastest Amiga has a 68030.
Hardware:
It was an even split between my 2620 accelerator from Commodore, a board that paved the way for so many enhancements to Amigas' speed everywhere by showing the easy upgradeability through the CPU slot, and OpalVision, the first truly popular video card for the Amiga. Now that I've cheated and mentioned both, my pick is the OpalVision. In the days way back when, Amigas could only display a maximum of 4096 colors in a low-res HAM mode. While it was good for many purposes and, at the time it was developed, impressive, true video work requires graphics that are more photorealistic. To this end came the Mimetics Framebuffer. A simple card holding gobs of RAM and having its own NTSC video in- and out-ports along its backplane. This card could freeze and save video frames or load an image to display in full NTSC and in full 24-bit color, and it was good but expensive and only useful for stills as an image takes long to load into the card's RAM. Along came many other cards, like the ones using Texas Instruments's 34010 processor, such as the A2410 and DMI Resolver. These guys could display animations in 256 colors but were super expensive. Then came a return to the framebuffer concept with the Video Toaster which linked up two buffers with circuitry that, along with the Amiga custom chipset, could manipulate video but still not truly animate or run software. To paint on a Toaster still you had to paint in a HAM representation and upload the altered image to the Toaster to check the actual changes. Then along came a godsend to the Amiga community: a relatively affordable video card that could display 24-bit images to a standard Amiga monitor, display animations, and actually run software and paint directly on its screens. Along came OpalVision, and Amiga users scooped them up. It did not hurt that Workbench and standard Amiga software could not be bumped up to the 256- and 16-million-color OpalVision screens, an ability that Amiga users were starting to want. If that did hurt sales, you did not notice as the card was bundled with a top-notch paint program called OpalPaint that not only allowed the user to draw in 24-bit, but is still considered by many to be the best Amiga paint program ever. This did not stop them from also including an animation player and a package for creating presentations. This shows that good software can move hardware, and great software can make hardware fly. Commodore would have done well to learn that. Alas OpalVision died too soon as its design allowed for add-ons in the form of a product being developed called the Video Processor. This would have given the OpalVision the video effects capabilities of the Video Toaster but unfortunately became one of the best-known examples of Vaporware. Though OpalVision has been eclipsed by the Picassos and CyberVisions which are faster, have higher resolutions, and support RTG systems for applying screenmodes to allow the operating system to display any properly written Amiga program right on the board's display, you cannot but marvel at the first video card to capture the hearts and wallets of so many Amiga users.
Odd Amiga Gadget:
I have bought many an odd piece of hardware for my Amiga. From an early voice recognition system (VoRecOne) to 3D LED shutter glasses (X-Specs) my joystick ports have always been full. I have to say, the one that has given me the biggest smile has been the mindEYE from Geodesic. It allows your Amiga to generate animated art from sound and music and has allowed both me and my Amiga to take a break from real work and just kick back and relax. It is also neat for parties where you can throw on some music and have your Amiga to visually entertain rather than be a blank screen in the room. The moment people realize that the images are not just random but pulse and move to the music, it becomes an instant conversation piece.