The system that launched a thousand games …

When it was unveiled 22 years ago, the Commodore Amiga was instantly recognized as a groundbreaking multimedia machine.

The computer’s consumer price point belied the Amiga’s prowess as a rendering tool for realistic audio and eye-popping visuals. Its usefulness in the field of animation — from Babylon 5 and Wallace & Gromit to Andy Warhol’s You Are the One — was equaled only by the smoothness and realism the computer brought to games.

The heyday for Amiga games was the late ’80s and early ’90s. The computer’s custom chipset and advanced (for the time) graphics capability led to sumptuous 2-D titles in a variety of styles, and even some basic 3-D games. Here’s a look at some of the more innovative entries in the Amiga game canon.

By Simon Carless

• Top 10 Most Influential Amiga Games

As an old demo group (GiGA Prod.) founder, organizer, main coder and 3D animator, I wouldn’t miss this opportunity to introduce ya’ll to the wonderful Demo Scene, a sub-culture of the Warez Scene, where people strived to outperform each other in the fields of programming (coding), graphics (2D+3D) and music (sounds and tunes).

Scene Rep - About The Demo Scene

Scene Zine Monthly

Mozillazine writes James “Kovu” Russell sent us a link to an Amiga.org article about the progress being made porting Mozilla to the Amiga, a project known as AmiZilla. According to the update, NSPR is “basically functionally complete” and XPCOM “seems to be mostly functioning”. The AmiZilla team first plan to port Mozilla to Amiga systems with 68k processors, before looking at native ports to the more modern AmigaOS 4 (which runs on PowerPC chips) and AmigaOS variants such as MorphOS and AROS.

Various projects to port Mozilla to the Amiga have come and gone over the years; MozillaZine first reported on the launch of an Amiga port in late 1998. The AmiZilla project dates back to 2003 when DiscreetFX started a bounty for the first person to port Mozilla to AmigaOS.

* AmiZilla Project Making Progress on Amiga Port - MozillaZine Talkback