Amiga Forever Video Archives

DVD 1:

• Launch of Amiga (1985, 17')
• Inside Commodore (1988, 40')
• Jay Miner Speech (1989, 49')
• Jay Miner Interview (1990, 9')
• History of the Amiga (1992, 43')

DVD 2:

• The Deathbed Vigil (1994, 118')
• Dave Haynie Interview (2001, 55')
• Amiga Faces Picture Gallery (1988-2005, 50')

Additional DVD features and details:

• Region 0 (all regions)
• CSS-free (no encryption)
• Video content in NTSC format (as in the original footage, also compatible with most PAL DVD players, including 100% of those tested by us in 2005)
• Dual-layer (i.e. about 9 GB each)
• Glass-mastered (no recordable media)
• Menus and subtitles in English and Italian

These are, in our opinion, "must see" Amiga documents, which took a lot of time and hard work to find, license and process.

This video collection will allow you to connect people and facts in new ways, as it better exposes the relationship between Commodore, the Amiga, an increasingly mature PC market, and the ups and downs of the video games industry. The videos also contain touching biographical parts, precious insights into the history of personal computing and multimedia, and many an interesting lesson in project and business management, with a special focus on areas such as IT, startups, the consumer market and the video games industry.

The original sources of all videos usually were NTSC VHS tapes, often chosen from the best version of multiple available ones, and in a few cases combining the best data from different tapes. The Jay Miner Speech video was digitized from a combination of Beta SP tape for the event footage and digital MPEG data for the original titles. The Jay Miner interview has its own story. The Dave Haynie interview was digitized from a combination of 8 mm video and an additional MD audio source. The videos were digitized, enhanced and encoded to the highest quality standards using the latest technology.

We took the extra effort of adding subtitles in multiple languages in order to make these pieces of Amiga history and culture accessible to the widest possible audience. In addition to consuming an enormous amount of internal resources, the transcriptions and the translations would not have been possible without the generous help of a group of several dozen volunteers from all over the world.

Future Work

We took the greatest care in handling and converting the original tapes, using professional conversion labs and equipment, and we kept digital copies (in part uncompressed) to preserve this data from the slow decay of analog tapes. This means that future versions may be superresolution-enhanced and/or be encoded using technologies other than MPEG-2 (a current DVD standard). Actually, superresolution technology (which combines data from multiple video frames to generate higher-resolution frames) has already been used to create some of the still pictures used on the Amiga Forever packaging and web site.

We also would like to release additional menu and subtitle languages, and in particular German, Spanish, French, Swedish, Finnish and Japanese. If you would like to help us, please let us know. We found this experience, which inevitably includes the repeat watching and listening to the same footage, to be very rewarding also from the point of view of getting an almost intimate inside view of the stories told in the videos. Of course, we would be topping this with some more material contribution as well.

We are always looking for new videos to preserve and make available. If you have an interesting video or suggestion, or if you found any inaccuracies in the transcripts or subtitles, please let us know.