The Amiga 3000 is a machine with a place in history. It was one of the first consumer computers that was truly 32 bit, with 32 bit memory, 32 bit address space and 32 bit expansion slots. It could drive typical VGA monitors and it had incredibly fast SCSI for its time. The A3000T kept all the advantages and added more space for everything.
It's such a shame that it couldn't have been a product offered by a sane company :(
It was a fully 32bit machine except for the multimedia co-processors which were the Amiga's most distinctive feature!
The Enhanced Chipset (ECS) was just a minor improvement over the 16-bit DMA design of the original chipset (OCS). Due to the slow memory access, high-resolution VGA modes could use only 4 bitplanes (16 colors) and left very little free bandwidth for actual rendering, resulting in an unusably slow desktop experience.
Zorro III accelerated video cards appeared only later, with outdated PC graphics processors (Matrox, Cirrus...) and brittle OS integration (CyberGraphX, Picasso...). Audio was unchanged from the Amiga 1000 era: 8bit PCM with only 4 channels.
I was a very loyal Amiga user, but the Amiga 3000 is about the time when we started losing our technical edge over PCs. AGA machines arrived too late and were still designed around planar graphics... a fatal mistake.
"VGA" can also mean any graphics card with a VGA connector (including SVGA modes.) By the time the Amiga 3000 came out, the original VGA was 5 years old, and SVGA was very popular. SVGA is what the Amiga 3000 was competing with... at least 800x600 with 256 colors. ECS couldn't keep up with that. By the time AGA was released, it was too little, too late.
The saddest is that Commodore had the new Ranger chipset[0], by the original Amiga team (they finished it and largely left), design-ready in 1987. This chipset was superior to ECS[1].
But they cancelled it despite finished, because they deemed it "too expensive".
Commodore's mismanagement and cluelessness ran deep.
Superhires sure works better with interlace and some overscan.
The "Productivity" modes (equivalent to hires+interlace, without the interlace, double line clock instead, are extremely useful, even if you don't have FAST and are thus limited to 2 color for performance.
The productivity modes didn’t do much for the A3000 though. It had a built in de-interlacer. Maybe they were more useful on other machines, though I personally never knew anyone with a monitor that could use them.
Interlacing is easy, deinterlacing not so much. The scan doubler was a very welcome addition, and it worked much better with non-interlaced modes. Obviously, productivity modes were pass-through.
>Maybe they were more useful on other machines
Big box A3000 was not as common as the other machines with ECS.
These would be A500+ and A600, alongside A500 with upgraded Denise (upgrade kits were sold alongside AmigaOS 2.x disks/roms).
>I personally never knew anyone with a monitor that could use them.
DVD era, many TVs supported "progressive" mode. Before that, it was not exactly common, but some Multisync VGA monitors could take both the 15.6KHz and 31KHz modes.
I had an Amiga 3000 in 1991 (low-end, 16 mhz version.) I upgraded from an A500. It was amazing! Installing extra RAM was a bit of a pain, however (it used "ZIP" chips, not SIMMs) I taught myself C on that machine (Lattice, later SAS), a skill that served me for decades.
None of this was really the case though; the Macintosh II shipped in early 1987 and was a fully 32-but system. People get confused about its support for 24-bit addressing, but with the ROM update that came out in 1988 with the introduction of the IIx (which was basically a II with 68030/68882 replacing the 68020/68881/MMU) it could even address up to 128MB of RAM.
i never got to play with one as my family had a 16-bit income.
thankfully, there was the $600 atari 520st that you could plug into the tv if you had to.
amigas always seemed like they were mismatched to the market. obscenely expensive for hobbyist or kids' machines, but not really suitable to the business/prosumer market. (except for the video toaster, i guess, which seemed to be the niche they ultimately filled- other than overpriced home computers with limited software options)
interesting. i remember the 1000, 2000 and 3000 being "look, but don't touch" and i have vague memories of the 500 but i remember some good reason to dismiss it beyond "it's not what i have."
i wish i could remember what it was. i want to say high peripheral costs- or it was missing something big... but i can't remember now.
was it that the os was designed for more powerful machines and there wasn't much space left for user programs maybe?
The Amiga 500 had almost identical hardware specifications to the 1000. The OS ran fine. They just packed everything into a smaller, cheaper case with reduced expandability. Peripherals such as hard drives were expensive because it used a proprietary model-specific expansion port.
I never had an Amiga, but I don’t think the 500 owners necessarily interacted with the OS very much beyond launching programs. That kind of usage was commonplace since other popular computers (C-64, MS-DOS PCs) barely had an OS anyway.
I think it was fairly common to use TV output on the Amiga 500, since it was much more affordable than buying a proper computer monitor. You’re not going to do much GUI productivity multitasking on a PAL TV because of interlacing, but it worked fine for games and low-res text mode.
So really the Amiga 500 was directly for the Commodore 64 market, while the 2000/3000 were more like oddball low-end workstations — and didn’t have a clear market.
>You’re not going to do much GUI productivity multitasking on a PAL TV because of interlacing
As long as you had a good PAL TV, such as a Sony Trinitron with SCART (RGB) input, it was VERY feasible.
On a composite-only TV, for actual work, you'd be better off with the Mono "composite without color" output A500 had than the horror which is actual composite.
720x256 (overscan and no interlace) & virtual desktops (screens) enabled effective multitasking.
720x512 (interlaced) was of course better, but with great care taken on selecting screen colors to minimize interlaced-related annoyance.
This is true even with an A500 with 512KB CHIP + 512KB SLOW RAM and single floppy drive, on AmigaOS 1.3.
I know for a fact, because A500+A501+Trinitron was my setup for several years.
Some of the early Amiga models did support TV output but the display quality was so terrible as to be effectively unusable. I and all the other Amiga owners I knew used actual monitors.
Defender of the Crown, Bard's Tale, Dungeon Master, The Pawn... such great memories of these incredible games on my Amiga 1000. For me there hasn't been such an exciting computer in the last 30+ years.
A series of unlikely events resulted in me spending the mid-late 90s using an A3500, the prototype for the A3000T. The motherboard was laid out slightly differently (eg, there was no on-board audio input header for CD drives, and there was an extra set of sockets for ROMs with the original A3000 pinout), and the case is slightly different (it's literally the Commodore PC60 case with a different front bezel and port cutouts in the back).
Some 30 years after manufacture, it's now sitting under my desk and still bootable. It's got Amiga UNIX installed, and an MNT ZZ9000 (https://shop.mntmn.com/products/zz9000-for-amiga-preorder) in the video slot. I've got a partially written Amiga UNIX driver for the card, currently blocked on me reverse engineering MMU setup enough to be able to map the card's video RAM into userland - Amiga UNIX doesn't support Zorro 3, and Zorro 2 only supports 24-bit addressing so there's no way to expose enough video RAM to drive my UWQHD monitor at native resolution otherwise. It's the first computer I ever accessed the web on, and I hope to keep it running utterly ridiculous code for as long as possible.
It's such a shame that it couldn't have been a product offered by a sane company :(