alt Hacker News> I really wish they'd crammed a SID chip into the Amiga alongside Paula
This is something the Apple IIgs had. It had an extremely capable synthesiser with good graphics and performance capped so not to compete with Macs. It was a weird machine, a sharp contrast with the minimalistic Apple IIs that preceded, over complicated and trying to be too many things at once.
For the same reason I prefer the design of the ST over the Amiga’s. Amiga made lots of assumptions about the use that ended up tuning it well to platform games and NTSC video editing, but nothing else.
Replies
Important fun fact, this synthesizer was an Ensoniq chip (ES5503 DOC), designed by Bob Yannes, the inventor of the SID chip. The IIGS was actually a cool machine, not very successful unfortunately.
I'd love to have a IIgs in my collection these days, its truly the pinnacle computer of its type and era.
> Amiga made lots of assumptions about the use that ended up tuning it well to platform games and NTSC video editing, but nothing else.
I think certainly it was used mostly as a games machine by most owners, but then again so was the Atari ST (at least amongst my cohort at school).
As for tuning it well to games and video editing but nothing else... I don't agree.
For a long time an Amiga 500 with 1MB RAM expansion and a 24 pin dot matrix printer was my main and only computer, and I did everything on it: word processing, CAD, music, graphics. It got me through both GCSEs and A-levels: all my coursework was written on it, all my compositions were done with MED and OctaMED, all the code for my maths courseworks was written on it, all the design work for my technology project, every essay, etc., and so it goes on. I was even still using it somewhat at university into the late 1990s as I didn't have the cash for a PC.
You could do a lot with an Amiga, and there was a lot of software available to do all of it, along with plenty of hardware peripherials. The software side of things, well a huge library of applications in every category came within reach for cash strapped users later on when loads of formerly expensive software was being given away on magazine coverdisks. Sadly that also coincided with the decline[0] of the platform.
Of course, I played games as well: who wouldn't?
All of this you could also do on an Atari ST, although I'd argue that the Amiga had the better operating system. Regardless, it was all also basically unthinkable in any really serious sense on (most of) the previous generation of 8-bit machines.
I think people are too quick to write off the 16-bit home machines of the late 80s and early 90s as toys when, in fact, by the standards of the time they were both powerful and affordable general purpose computers.
[0] I won't say death because there's still a hardcore of dedicated users keeping the platform alive, as also for the ST.