If you really want to read about all things Commodore, pick up Brian Bagnall's books [1]. They're not really for those with a casual interest (though you have the option of the 500+ page single volume first version or the second version which ballooned to a trilogy of 500+ pages each, plus the upcoming Commodore: The Early Years covering Commodore's pre-computing history), and there's plenty of dreams, intrigue and backstabbing (the always fraught relationship between Jack Tramiel and his staff and Irving Gould features heavily alongside a lot of in-depth descriptions of the tech.

[1] Beware, the Amazon listings are a confusing mess; the first edition is "The Story of Commodore: A Company on the Edge"; the second edition is a massively expanded three volume set, starting with "Commodore: A Company on the Edge" (ignore what Amazon says; it's not book #2), followed by "Commodore: The Amiga Years" and "Commodore: The Final Years". They're all 500+ pages.

Thanks for the recommendation! I've read enough of your comments to instantly pattern-match your username with "this person really knows about Commodore" ;)

I'm happy to hear that more people are discovering this article series. It was my (very) long-running dream to write this, and I'm happy that Ars Technica supported me during the entire journey. Plenty of Amiga people back in the day ended up having fascinating careers in video, television, and movies, and I'm in touch with (and even working with) some of them today.

Hey Jeremy, I just started reading it and it looks very promising (in fact, I'm trying hard to resist the temptation to read one page more instead of working). Thanks for writing it!

In the US there was definitely a sense of embattlement having something that wasn’t the standard PC. I paid through the nose for a second disk drive and a laptop hard drive that fit under the keyboard. So for that effort it needed to be worth it.

I do remember smugly bragging to someone about it having 4096 colors, and he responded that his Mac Quadra had 16 million.

Was that 4096 simultaneous colors? If so, it would have given VGA a run for its money -- only 256 colors for the active palette (though of course many more to pick from).

In HAM mode it could do 4096 simultaneously but that was mostly limited to static images. For games it was 32 or 64 colors.

But this was in 1985. VGA didn’t exist until 1987 and didn’t become ubiquitous until 1990. And was much more expensive.

If Commodore had been properly run they would have had their next gen chipset out by then. But they weren’t, so it wasn’t until 1992 they came out with AGA which was a only little better than VGA and by then it was too late anyway.

A lot of games used more than 32/64 colours using the copper too though. E.g. things like background fades. Interestingly quite a few of the games with the most colours did not use the 5 bitplane 32 colour mode or the 64 bitplane Extra HalfBrite mode, but a combination of "dirty tricks" with sprites + copper.

E.g. Shadow of the Beast used 120+ colours, but used dual playfields, which gives only 8 colours per playfield without anything else. But then it overlays sprites, and uses the copper to change palette repeatedly:

https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-bea...

Yes and no, there were tricks to displaying nearly all the colors and each row of pixels could have its own palette, but in general use it was 32 colors + 32 half brights.

The early history of computing has been rewritten by those who survived: Apple and Microsoft. But in reality it was driven by Commodore.

There are others like Bell Labs, DEC, and Atari as well. IBM is sort of implied but worth mentioning.

Don't forget Tandy and Texas Instruments!