The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-bit or 16/32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphics and audio compared to previous 8-bit systems.

The Amiga differs from its contemporaries through custom hardware to accelerate graphics and sound, including sprites, a blitter, and four channels of sample-based audio.

[4] When complete, the team began developing a much more sophisticated set of chips, CTIA, ANTIC and POKEY, that formed the basis of the Atari 8-bit computers.

Nolan Bushnell had sold the company to Warner Communications in 1978, and the new management was much more interested in the existing lines than development of new products that might cut into their sales.

[9][failed verification] A further developed version of the system was demonstrated at the June 1984 CES and shown to many companies in hopes of garnering further funding, but found little interest in a market that was in the final stages of the video game crash of 1983.

A late change was the introduction of vertical supports on either side of the case to provide a "garage" under the main section of the system where the keyboard could be stored.

[15] Bad or entirely missing marketing, forcing the development team to move to the east coast, notorious stability problems and other blunders limited sales in early 1986 to between 10,000 and 15,000 units a month.

[19][self-published source] The machines were most popular in the UK and Germany, with about 1.5 million sold in each country, and sales in the high hundreds of thousands in other European nations.

Commodore UK's Kelly Sumner did not see Sega or Nintendo as competitors, but instead credited their marketing campaigns which spent over £40 million or $60,000,000 (equivalent to $130,000,000 in 2024) for promoting video games as a whole and thus helping to boost Amiga sales.

[22] In spite of his successes in making the company profitable and bringing the Amiga line to market, Rattigan was soon forced out in a power struggle with majority shareholder, Irving Gould.

[31][32] The Amiga has a custom chipset consisting of several coprocessors which handle audio, video, and direct memory access independently of the central processing unit (CPU).

From a developer's point of view, the 68000 provides a full suite of 32-bit operations, but the chip can address only 16 MB of physical memory and is implemented using a 16-bit arithmetic logic unit and has a 16-bit external data bus, so 32-bit computations are transparently handled as multiple 16-bit values at a performance cost.

OCS was eventually followed by the modestly improved Enhanced Chip Set (ECS) in 1990 and finally by the partly 32-bit Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA) in 1992.

The Amiga chipset can genlock, which is the ability to adjust its own screen refresh timing to match an incoming NTSC or PAL video signal.

PowerPC upgrades with Wide SCSI controllers, PCI busboards with Ethernet, sound and 3D graphics cards, and tower cases allowed the A1200 and A4000 to survive well into the late nineties.

[66] The CDTV, launched in 1991, was a CD-ROM-based game console, Computer and multimedia appliance based on the Amiga A500 with the same v1.3 Kickstart ROM, several years before CD-ROM drives were common.

The cost of CDTV media production and the CD-ROM drives at the time discouraged potential buyers and the system never achieved any real success.

Following purchase of Commodore's assets by Escom in 1995, the A1200 and A4000T continued to be sold in small quantities until 1996, though the ground lost since the initial launch and the prohibitive expense of these units meant that the Amiga line never regained any real popularity.

[69] Due to the nature of some provisions of the contract between Amiga Inc. and Hyperion Entertainment (the Belgian company that is developing the OS), the commercial AmigaOS 4 had been available only to licensed buyers of AmigaOne motherboards.

[74] Starting with release 4.1 update 4 there is an Emulation drawer containing official AmigaOS 3.x ROMs (all classic Amiga models including CD32) and relative Workbench files.

[76] In 2012, A-EON Technology Ltd manufactured and released the AmigaOne X1000 to consumers through their partner, Amiga Kit who provided end-user support, assembly and worldwide distribution of the new system.

DraCo expanded upon and combined a number of earlier expansion cards developed for Amiga (VLabMotion, Toccata, WarpEngine, RetinaIII) into a true Amiga-clone powered by the Motorola 68060 processor.

In 1998, former Amiga employees (John Smith, Peter Kittel, Dave Haynie and Andy Finkel to mention few) formed a new company called PIOS.

The NatAmi is the second Amiga clone project after the Minimig motherboard, and its history is very similar to that of the C-One mainboard developed by Jeri Ellsworth and Jens Schönfeld.

The minimig uses the FPGA to reproduce the custom Denise, Agnus, Paula and Gary chips as well as both 8520 CIAs and implements a simple version of Amber.

A third party upgrade replaces the PIC microcontroller with a more powerful ARM processor, providing more functionality such as write access and support for hard disk images.

John C. Dvorak wrote in PC Magazine in 1996: [AmigaOS] remains one of the great operating systems of the past 20 years, incorporating a small kernel and tremendous multitasking capabilities the likes of which have only recently been developed in OS/2 and Windows NT.

While the decision to release the documentation was a popular one and allowed the creation of fast, sophisticated sound and graphics routines in games and demos, it also contributed to system instability[citation needed]as some programmers lacked the expertise to program at this level.

Since the demise of Commodore, various groups have marketed successors to the original Amiga line: AmigaOS and MorphOS are commercial proprietary operating systems.

There is also AROS, a free and open source operating system (re-implementation of the AmigaOS 3.1 APIs), for Amiga 68k, x86 and ARM hardware (one version runs Linux-hosted on the Raspberry Pi).