slovo | definícia |
amiga (encz) | Amiga,Amiga n: "16bit počítač" |
amiga (czen) | Amiga,Amigan: "16bit počítač" |
amiga (foldoc) | Amiga
A range of home computers first released by
Commodore Business Machines in early 1985 (though they did
not design the original - see below). Amigas were popular for
games, video processing, and multimedia. One notable
feature is a hardware blitter for speeding up graphics
operations on whole areas of the screen.
The Amiga was originally called the Lorraine, and was
developed by a company named "Amiga" or "Amiga, Inc.", funded
by some doctors to produce a killer game machine. After the
US game machine market collapsed, the Amiga company sold some
joysticks but no Lorraines or any other computer. They
eventually floundered and looked for a buyer.
Commodore at that time bought the (mostly complete) Amiga
machine, infused some money, and pushed it through the final
stages of development in a hurry. Commodore released it
sometime[?] in 1985.
Most components within the machine were known by nicknames.
The coprocessor commonly called the "Copper" is in fact the
"Video Timing Coprocessor" and is split between two chips:
the instruction fetch and execute units are in the "Agnus"
chip, and the pixel timing circuits are in the "Denise" chip
(A for address, D for data).
"Agnus" and "Denise" were responsible for effects timed to the
real-time position of the video scan, such as midscreen
palette changes, sprite multiplying, and resolution
changes. Different versions (in order) were: "Agnus" (could
only address 512K of video RAM), "Fat Agnus" (in a PLCC
package, could access 1MB of video RAM), "Super Agnus"
(slightly upgraded "Fat Agnus"). "Agnus" and "Fat Agnus" came
in PAL and NTSC versions, "Super Agnus" came in one
version, jumper selectable for PAL or NTSC. "Agnus" was
replaced by "Alice" in the A4000 and A1200, which allowed for
more DMA channels and higher bus bandwidth.
"Denise" outputs binary video data (3*4 bits) to the "Vidiot".
The "Vidiot" is a hybrid that combines and amplifies the
12-bit video data from "Denise" into RGB to the monitor.
Other chips were "Amber" (a "flicker fixer", used in the A3000
and Commodore display enhancer for the A2000), "Gary" (I/O,
addressing, G for glue logic), "Buster" (the {bus
controller}, which replaced "Gary" in the A2000), "Buster II"
(for handling the Zorro II/III cards in the A3000, which meant
that "Gary" was back again), "Ramsey" (The RAM controller),
"DMAC" (The DMA controller chip for the WD33C93 SCSI adapter
used in the A3000 and on the A2091/A2092 SCSI adapter card for
the A2000; and to control the CD-ROM in the CDTV), and
"Paula" (Peripheral, Audio, UART, interrupt Lines, and
bus Arbiter).
There were several Amiga chipsets: the "Old Chipset" (OCS),
the "Enhanced Chipset" (ECS), and AGA. OCS included
"Paula", "Gary", "Denise", and "Agnus".
ECS had the same "Paula", "Gary", "Agnus" (could address 2MB
of Chip RAM), "Super Denise" (upgraded to support "Agnus" so
that a few new screen modes were available). With the
introduction of the Amiga A600 "Gary" was replaced with
"Gayle" (though the chipset was still called ECS). "Gayle"
provided a number of improvments but the main one was support
for the A600's PCMCIA port.
The AGA chipset had "Agnus" with twice the speed and a 24-bit
palette, maximum displayable: 8 bits (256 colours), although
the famous "HAM" (Hold And Modify) trick allows pictures of
256,000 colours to be displayed. AGA's "Paula" and "Gayle"
were unchanged but AGA "Denise" supported AGA "Agnus"'s new
screen modes. Unfortunately, even AGA "Paula" did not support
High Density floppy disk drives. (The Amiga 4000, though,
did support high density drives.) In order to use a high
density disk drive Amiga HD floppy drives spin at half the
rotational speed thus halving the data rate to "Paula".
Commodore Business Machines went bankrupt on 1994-04-29,
the German company Escom AG bought the rights to the Amiga
on 1995-04-21 and the Commodore Amiga became the Escom
Amiga. In April 1996 Escom were reported to be making the
Amiga range again but they too fell on hard times and
Gateway 2000 (now called Gateway) bought the Amiga brand
on 1997-05-15.
Gateway licensed the Amiga operating system to a German
hardware company called Phase 5 on 1998-03-09. The
following day, Phase 5 announced the introduction of a
four-processor PowerPC based Amiga clone called the
"pre\box". Since then, it has been announced that the
new operating system will be a version of QNX.
On 1998-06-25, a company called Access Innovations Ltd
announced plans (http://micktinker.co.uk/aaplus.html) to
build a new Amiga chip set, the AA+, based partly on the AGA
chips but with new fully 32-bit functional core and 16-bit AGA
hardware register emulation for backward compatibility.
The new core promised improved memory access and video display
DMA.
By the end of 2000, Amiga development was under the control of
a [new?] company called Amiga, Inc.. As well as continuing
development of AmigaOS (version 3.9 released in December
2000), their "Digital Environment" is a virtual machine for
multiple platforms conforming to the ZICO specification.
As of 2000, it ran on MIPS, ARM, PPC, and x86
processors.
(http://amiga.com/).
Amiga Web Directory (http://cucug.org/amiga.html).
amiCrawler (http://amicrawler.com/).
Newsgroups: news:comp.binaries.amiga,
news:comp.sources.amiga, news:comp.sys.amiga,
news:comp.sys.amiga.advocacy,
news:comp.sys.amiga.announce,
news:comp.sys.amiga.applications,
news:comp.sys.amiga.audio, news:comp.sys.amiga.datacomm,
news:comp.sys.amiga.emulations, news:comp.sys.amiga.games,
news:comp.sys.amiga.graphics,
news:comp.sys.amiga.hardware,
news:comp.sys.amiga.introduction,
news:comp.sys.amiga.marketplace, news:comp.sys.amiga.misc,
news:comp.sys.amiga.multimedia,
news:comp.sys.amiga.programmer,
news:comp.sys.amiga.reviews, news:comp.sys.amiga.tech,
news:comp.sys.amiga.telecomm, news:comp.Unix.amiga.
See aminet, Amoeba, bomb, exec, gronk, {guru
meditation}, Intuition, sidecar, slap on the side,
Vulcan nerve pinch.
(2003-07-05)
|
amiga (jargon) | Amiga
n
A series of personal computer models originally sold by Commodore, based on
680x0 processors, custom support chips and an operating system that
combined some of the best features of Macintosh and Unix with compatibility
with neither.
The Amiga was released just as the personal computing world standardized on
IBM-PC clones. This prevented it from gaining serious market share, despite
the fact that the first Amigas had a substantial technological lead on the
IBM XTs of the time. Instead, it acquired a small but zealous population of
enthusiastic hackers who dreamt of one day unseating the clones (see {Amiga
Persecution Complex}). The traits of this culture are both spoofed and
illuminated in The BLAZE Humor Viewer. The strength of the Amiga platform
seeded a small industry of companies building software and hardware for the
platform, especially in graphics and video applications (see {video toaster
}).
Due to spectacular mismanagement, Commodore did hardly any R&D, allowing
the competition to close Amiga's technological lead. After Commodore went
bankrupt in 1994 the technology passed through several hands, none of whom
did much with it. However, the Amiga is still being produced in Europe
under license and has a substantial number of fans, which will probably
extend the platform's life considerably.
|
| podobné slovo | definícia |
panamiga (encz) | panamiga, n: |
panamiga (gcide) | panamiga \panamiga\ n.
Same as panamica.
Syn: friendship plant, panamica, Pilea involucrata.
[WordNet 1.5] |
panamiga (wn) | panamiga
n 1: low stingless nettle of Central and South America having
velvety brownish-green toothed leaves and clusters of small
green flowers [syn: friendship plant, panamica,
panamiga, Pilea involucrata] |
amiga e (foldoc) | Amiga E
An Amiga E compiler by Wouter van Oortmerssen.
Amiga E compiles 20000 lines/minute on a 7 Mhz Amiga. It
allows in-line assembly code and has an integrated
linker. It has a large set of integrated functions and
modules. V2.04 includes as modules a flexible type
system, quoted expressions, immediate and typed lists, low
level polymorphism and exception handling. It is written
in assembly language and E.
Version 2.1b
(ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/pub/aminet/dev/e/AmigaE21b.lha).
(ftp://amiga.physik.unizh.ch/amiga/dev/lang/AmigaE21b.lha).
Usenet newsgroup: news:comp.sys.amiga.programmer.
(1997-08-26)
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amiga persecution complex (jargon) | Amiga Persecution Complex
n.
The disorder suffered by a particularly egregious variety of bigot, those
who believe that the marginality of their preferred machine is the result
of some kind of industry-wide conspiracy (for without a conspiracy of some
kind, the eminent superiority of their beloved shining jewel of a platform
would obviously win over all, market pressures be damned!) Those afflicted
are prone to engaging in flame wars and calling for boycotts and
mailbombings. Amiga Persecution Complex is by no means limited to Amiga
users; NeXT, NeWS, OS/2, Macintosh, LISP, and GNU users are also
common victims. Linux users used to display symptoms very frequently
before Linux started winning; some still do. See also newbie, troll, {
holy wars}, weenie, Get a life!.
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amigade (vera) | AMIGADE
Amiga Digital Environment (Amiga), "AmigaDE"
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