I've talked about how the amiga has a delightful presentation on stage, how andy Warhol went on a flood pandemic with ProPaint, and how amiga's crowd was super impressed but now this part is all about the Amiga's hardware and what makes amiga stand out from the rest of the PC. if you haven't seen the previous part then be sure to check the previous part to get a better understanding of what I'm about to talk about. the links: part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4
The Amiga's hardware
The original machine was available as either a 256K variant or 512K via front expansion upgrade... something Jay has to plead with commodore to incorporate, knowing that 256K just wouldn't be enough after the Operating System was loaded into memory. Other than being able to read from disk, there was little in the way of ROM at this point, with kickstart loaded via disk into 256K write control store area of memory, which remained resident until power off. one reason for this was to iron out bugs in the code before incorporating a complete kickstart ROM chip.
At its heart was, of course, the Motorola 68K clocked at 7.16MHz(7.09MHz PAL). the custom chipset, later known as the OCS or the Original ChipSet comprised of our friends, Agnus incorporating the blitter block image transfer processor and the copper, co-processor. Denise is on hand to fetch planar video data from the Amiga's bitplane and translate it into color lookup as well as handling over video modes, she can provide a borderless display with 640x256 pixels on PAL screens, which can be vertically doubled for interlaced display. Denise could also handle 8 16 pixel wide sprites on 3 separate layers in 4 colors, including transparent, or 15 colors when combined. Paula is still handling input, output, including the floppy drive, serial port, and mouse ports, but also holds Amiga's audio capabilities. She comes with 4 DMA based 8-bit sample channels, split to allow the stereo audio, and also allow one channel to modulate another channel's output allowing for basic FM synthesis effects.
Data is held by a 3.5 double-density floppy drive offering 880KB of capacity and a single Zorro I card slot is provided on the right side of the machine for expansion. Port Wise the machine has a keyboard port, 2 mouse ports, an RS-232 serial interface, centronics parallel access and additional floppy drive connector. For video there's an analog RGB out, a TV MOD output that can be used with an additional RF modulator, and composite outputs.
That's all for this part. Part 6 can be found here