Amiga Appreciation

Love your Amiga: If you’re a longish-time reader of Tedium, you’ll know that we have a lot of appreciation for the Amiga, the Commodore-produced platform, loved by Andy Warhol, that basically set the stage for the visually-graceful computing world we have now.

Which is why the new documentary about the computing platform, Zach Weddington’s Viva Amiga: The Story of a Beautiful Machine is very much on our list of things to watch right now.

The doc, which takes a deep dive into why the Amiga was such an important phenomenon, makes the case that Amiga users simply won’t let something as basic as the passage of time take away their love for this computing platform.

“Amiga users make Macintosh users look like IBM users,” onetime Commodore engineer Dave Haynie says in the trailer.

Jeremy Reimer, who wrote the definitive text-based story of the platform for Ars Technica, recently gave the film his endorsement.

“Even as someone deeply familiar with topic, Viva Amiga does a great job of telling the story of why the platform’s legend remains active more than 30 years later,” Reimer wrote last week.

The film, currently available on Amazon and other platforms, is a great example of good things coming to those who wait: The film started nearly seven years ago (!) as a Kickstarter project.

And it’s not the only Amiga-related film out there, either. Last year, directors Anthony and Nicola Caulfield released From Bedrooms to Billions: The Amiga Years, which specifically highlights the Amiga’s role in forging the modern video game industry.

If you feel inspired after all this Amiga talk to try the platform for yourself, take a look at Amiga Forever, which offers a legal way to use Amiga emulators on modern Windows-based platforms.

(And check out my story from last year about how Amiga made the Prevue Channel possible.)