On 2018-03-18, Dennis Lee Bieber  wrote:

> On 18 Mar 2018 03:14:41 GMT, Robert Riches 
> declaimed the following:
>
>> To be fair, IIUC, at least the early Amigas had some
>> special-purpose hardware assistance (the Copper and a
>> couple of other chips) rather than doing _everything_ in
>
>  Mostly for the graphics -- the blitter could handle moving sprites and
> overlaying windows... And DMA operations. I believe the main CPU still had
> to set up the sound forms.
>
>  I'd rounded to 8MHz but in reality, the Amiga base was closer to
> 7.2MHz -- but the chips handling the display allowed it to achieve better
> performance than the 8MHz Mac of the time (since the Mac processor had to
> handle the display scan, user code only got dedicated time during retrace
> intervals).

7.16 MHz, to be exact.  This was twice the 3.58MHz color burst subcarrier
frequency used in NTSC video, which gave the Amiga a leg up in video
processing.  Amigas were often used in local cable stations for things
like public service announcements, and the Video Toaster enabled the Amiga
to create all sorts of video effects which were quite impressive, especially
for the time.  Todd Rundgren's music video "Change Myself" was created with
a bank of ten Amigas.

The quirks in the Amiga's voice synthesis system were quite amusing,
especially here in the city of Van-cow-ver.

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