The heart of the computer is a 16-bit Motorola 68000 processor running at 7 MHz. The processor has 512 KB of RAM at its disposal and supervises the work of four specialized systems called: GARY, PAULA, FAT AGNUS and DENISE. Fat Agnus, probably named so because it is a large 84-pin chip in a square housing, controls 25 data channels, including disk operations and sound minimizing CPU interventions. In addition, it can quickly move memory areas without the participation of the processor, which allows very fast animation. Denise is responsible for the graphics. It generates an image in various resolutions from 320 × 20O points to 640x400, has a palette of 4096 colors, controls 8 sprites and displays text in 60 or 80 columns. The number of colors on the screen is limited only by the available RAM. Normally this is 32 (5 bits per pixel) at 320 × 200 resolution. 16 or 4 at 640x200 and 2 at 640x400 resolution. Paula controls the sound. It has four voices with a range of 9 octaves each, configured with two stereo channels. It uses amplitude and frequency modulation. This allows the Amiga to mimic anything that makes a sound from Ferrari to Pavarotti. In addition, Paula controls the floppy drive and I / O ports. Gary has less visible functions - he controls the data bus, organizes data for the CPU, and controls some functions of the floppy drives. The Amiga interfaces Centronics, RS 232, monitor, keyboard and mouse connect with the outside world. The Amiga can be connected to any monitor. The 1082 and 1084 proprietary monitors are recommended. The 1084 model is a more versatile monitor - it has RGB (digital) and RGB analog (for Amiga) and Composite Video inputs (for example Commodore 64). The keyboard is laid out similarly to a PC keyboard, with about 95 keys (it depends on the layout) works fine. It is well laid out and profiled. However, the mechanical system of the PC keyboard makes work more comfortable. Many peripherals have been constructed for the Amiga: an additional 5.25 "or 3.5" flexible disk drive, a hard disk, a color printer, a modem, a battery real-time clock with additional RAM memory. MIDI interfaces and image converters.
There are three floppy disks in the Amiga box: "Workbench", "Amiga Extras" and "The Very First". "The Very First" is a proprietary demo program for very beginners. The program shows how to handle the floppy drive, floppy disks and learn to use the mouse. Workbench is a system floppy. It contains character sets for Paula, system configuration data and the program allowing you to set them, programs that support the modem and several popular printers (currently rather not very useful), a clock, calculator, notebook, icon editing program, speech synthesizer, and for those who do not like icons and disgust the mouse CLI (Command Line Interface) allowing for communicating with a computer in a classic way (i.e. with a keyboard and command line).
A normally analogue or optionally digital clock is made in a very interesting way. The drawing of the clock itself, i.e. a dial with hands, is defined in vector. it always fills the whole window The alarm is an interesting function of the clock give yourself an alarm clock that will take us out of our creative drive at a specific time. The only disadvantage of the alarm clock is its little radical. It appears only once and is easily removed from view by closing or hiding the clock window. The alarm clock should save recently processed data to disk and suspend the system irretrievably. It would be a much more effective way to detach a person from the computer. The calculator offers nothing special, and the notepad is more a program for printing nice-looking texts than a handheld notepad. It offers several typefaces of different fonts (from 8 × 8 to 20 × 20 points). Each typeface can be tilted, underlined or bold and all of this can be printed on a printer. The process of starting the program itself takes a minute and for a handy notebook it is too long, especially since it takes up a lot of memory. The icon editing program allows you to design your own icons, but it is time-consuming because it does not offer graphic functions such as drawing lines, circles, etc.
CLI, apart from duplicating functions achievable by manipulating icons, such as disk formatting, renaming or copying a file, gives access to very useful procedures. First of all, to Disk Doctor, which is a program that repairs floppy disks, and allows you to edit the startup-seouence file (startup sequence, i.e. the set of commands that the computer executes during startup). The third "Amiga Extras" floppy disk contains Amiga Basic and some useful programs. Amiga Basic is not a revelation at least in my opinion, although it contains many functions that allow you to handle graphics and sound, including a speech synthesizer. However, the editor is the part it uses to be normal person is terribly slow and does not give comfort of work. Basic itself is far from the standard known to me from smaller computers (eg Atari 800 XL). It allows programming, let's call it, structural, no line numbering is needed, you can define your own procedures, etc. The "Tools" drawer has more interesting content: Micro Emac - full-screen editor, Fed - character editor, Key Toy - keyboard layout - (useful when we redefine the keyboard, for example on the Dvorak keyboard and want to return to the normal layout), Print Files _ program printing files, Icon Merge - a program that combines two icons in such a way that after selecting a given tool, when the icon is displayed, the second icon is displayed in reverse (you can get the effect of opening drawers). The program More displays the content of any file on the screen, Free Map - the size of free RAM and the PM with a funny drawing of a rabbit demonstrates one of the most interesting possibilities of the Amiga operating system: multitaxing (executing several programs at once). This applet draws a graph of RAM occupancy and the degree of CPU workload in real time. Only on this chart you can see how sweet life Motorola has in the Amiga. I started the music program (Sound Studio), Demos drawer, clock and PM at the same time, but I didn't manage to get the processor to work at full power for more than a second. The experience ended with the system freezing because there was no free RAM. Amiga belongs to the Home Computer class, which means that you can use it to write texts and transfer data. play with sound or image processing and shoot nasty aliens from time to time or even more often. It used to be a great computer and now, after three decades, it can bring a lot of fun.