I know that the Macintosh was very popular over there...

Also a ton of Games are for PAL and run properly smooth only at 50Hz.

The Amiga isn't the only machine that has gotten different sales in the US compared to the rest of the world. For consoles Sega Master System, Sega Mega Drive (Sega Genesis) and the Playstation 3 were/are much popular in Europe compared to the US.

The Amiga 1000 was my first computer. I loved it. Lots of good memories, and I'm from Canada. But yes it is true it did have more fans and users from Europe than America, although I'm not quite sure why. I haven't really thought about that. 😐

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I know that the Macintosh was very popular over there...

Also a ton of Games are for PAL and run properly smooth only at 50Hz.

Old Apple stuff in general is quite easy to find here. In fact, in storage I have two Macintosh Classics, an Apple IIGS ROM01 model with 1.25MB of ram, a Macintosh LCII, and a 1998 model Bondi Blue iMac G3. I also used to have an Apple IIe, but unfortunately at one point my computer collection was getting a little out of hand and I ended up chucking it because I already had the IIGS. This was before my grandparents offered to let me store things in one of the sheds on their property. 🤣

Lololipop wrote:

The Amiga 1000 was my first computer. I loved it. Lots of good memories, and I'm from Canada. But yes it is true it did have more fans and users from Europe than America, although I'm not quite sure why. I haven't really thought about that. 😐

No way, that's awesome! 😁 What games did you play on it?

And for a starting point I would recommend an Amiga 400, as it was the best. You will probably have the most luck getting one from Amazon or eBay. If you would also like to know some good games I would say:
Lemmings,
XCOM: UFO Defense
Syndicate
Worms
The Secret of Monkey Island
Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge
Civilization

There are a lot of other good games, but those are some of the best.

Don't forget amibay.com for all your amiga buying needs... 😉

I had several A1200s, A4000s and A200s with several configs, from a couple of hundred euros to a couple of thousands. All you need for retrogaming is an A1200+030 accelerator with 8MB or more of ram. Register whdload program and you have everything running from your HDD 😀

At school I was one of the few without an Amiga. I still had a C64 and was missing out big time. But then I got a 386DX with VGA and a Sound Blaster and from there on the Amiga didn't have a chance anymore.

But before 386/VGA/Sound Blaster the Amiga had the best versions of the games.

It was at least popular for many news stations and video production facilities (go Video Toaster!)

One of my Uncles is a computer scientist in California and had some Amiga back in the '80s and '90s. I used it once. Played a few games including It Came From the Desert and some surgeon sim.

Commodore 64 and various other home computers were popular. IBM compatible PCs dominated business and most homes as a result. In the primary schools Apple dominated because of deals they give schools.

Most of the Amiga and Atari ST games that were actually developed for those systems came from Europe. There were exceptions in the mid-to-late 80s. Dungeon Master was an ST original, the Cinemaware classics like Defender of the Crown and The Three Stooges were all Amiga originals. I believe MicroProse and some of Electronic Arts' developers had a few Amiga originals, but virtually all the US developers/publishers transitioned from the 8-bit machines to the PC, Amiga, ST, Macintosh and the IIgs, usually in that order.

By the mid-80s, IBM had firmly dominated the business market and Apple had strong in-roads in schools. While Commodore's earlier 64 could compete due to the low price, the Amiga was not a cheap machine. As a games' machine it was enormously expensive, and most people at this time did not buy a computer mainly to play games, they got a NES for that in the US. The advanced graphics and sound available in the machine was not considered a must-have, whereas PC compatibility was.

While EGA was king, the Amiga and ST ports were usually more than competitive, except for hard drive support. When VGA became mainstream in 1990, the Amiga had no quick answer and with no set hard drive, whatever market the console had in North America vanished.

I definitely remember seeing ads for Amiga PCs right beside IBM PCs. They phased out around 1995. They were kind of a high-end solution while the price of everything else plummeted. Seeing one in the wild was rare, like a Neo Geo or Turbo Express.

So, in a nutshell, the Amiga platform didn't do well in North America because IBM PCs dominated the business market, Apple dominated the educational market, and home users simply found the Amiga to be too expensive. 🤣

That's the short of it.
Commodore could've marketed it for graphic design and gaming easily, but they were too busy making horrible administrative decisions.

I still own an A500, A2000, and A4000. The main problem Amiga had in the US was the IBM PC. The HW architecture of the PC was non-proprietary and anyone could build add-on or even clones for much less than they could Amiga expansions. As an example, back in the day, a video upgrade for the PC (SVGA 24-bit 2 meg memory) ran for around $100. The same thing for the Amiga (Picasso II iirc,) was around $400. My A2000 used and stock, cost me $2500, while my first PC (486 25mhz and new) ran me $1000. What I found rather amazing is that my 12.5mhz Amiga outperformed my 486 even after I had upgraded it to 100mhz (though that no longer holds true.) Apple also had proprietary architectures back then as well (not so much now, I believe.) Their advantage was that they had a firm military contract that holds true even today.

Mostly, in the US, Amiga mainly sold to film and video production companies. They had the budget for the extra expenses, and Amiga had a lock in that sort of field. Only in the last few years has PCs started really competing with the old Amiga systems (with all the bells and whistles - Genlocks etc...) Never got into that much, I use them for the games 😀

I could wax eloquent on the major advantages that the Amiga systems had over the PC, but I'll save that for another time.

I noticed that the Amiga was relatively popular in Canada, and some of the northern US states...for a time. But Amiga pretty much just disappeared by 91 or 92.

As to why it wasn't as popular in North America as it was in Europe...I personally blame Americans. They always have to choose stupid bullshit standards like 115V 60Hz, CMDA and the Imperial system to name a few. If they had chosen Amiga rather than PC we'd probably be living in the future depicted in Star Trek: the Next Generation. Because they chose PCs the future we got looks more like the one depicted in Robocop.

I think most of the reason is that it was not marketed very well here. I know I never even heard of an Amiga until years after it went obsolete. If the electronics stores around here actually stocked them I might have actually considered one.

I think just about every Amiga 4000 sold in the US was part of a Video Toaster system. Other applications were use as a video bulletin board running Scala MM and running the Prevue Channel. The Atari ST also didn't catch on in the US for that matter.

The reason for both not doing well was that Americans could readily afford the more expensive IBM PCs (Tandys were popular and in the same price range and market as the Amiga, plus ran "work" programs), or they stuck with 8-bit machines. Remember that the Apple II dominated the educational market here and many people purchased the machines for home use as well. Whats interesting is that Apple's 16-bit entry (the IIgs) didn't fare that well either.

Commodore clearly saw PC compatibility as a selling point and marketed the Amiga with add-ons to support PC software from day one. Price kept it from being viable. Why spend all that money on an Amiga with bridge board when you can buy a PC outright for the same price and not have to worry about any odd compatibility issues?

I think that part of the problem was that many of the best games were only for Pal and not NTSC which hurt support a lot, the other might be cost and that the pc was catching on at the time.

I bought an Amiga 500 when they came out in 1987 then moved up to an Amiga 2000 about a year later. I also had an Atari ST. I think the main thing it had against it's success was that business was already entrenched with IBM, and in the 80s there really wasn't near the amount of people with home computers than the following decade. I knew a few people that never made the jump from 8 bit on their Atari 800/Apple/C64 but the majority of people that I knew never had a computer until the Internet took off in the mid 90s.