Commodore Amiga 500

The Amiga 500 was a lower-cost version of the Amiga 1000 which was aimed at home users. As a 16-bit computer, it offered many improvements compared to earlier 8 bit machines, such as more processing power, excellent graphics and sound, and also introduced multitasking for the first time in a low cost machine. It proved to be much more successful then the Amiga 1000, especially in Europe. The machine became the market-leading games platform and a huge number of titles were developed for it. Its closest rival was the technically quite similar Atari ST range, which shared the same Motorola 68000 CPU and which also had many of the same games. Compared to the ST, the Amiga featured more custom chips and a more sophisticated operating system.