I went from an Atari 800XL straight to a PC and jumped clean over the sixteen-bit years—no ST, no Amiga, none of it. Turns out one chip, the Motorola 68000, quietly built the entire world I skipped: the Amiga, the ST, the Genesis, the Neo Geo, the arcade. This is me finally walking into it—starting with the chip, and a slightly uncomfortable question.
Here's the uncomfortable question, right up front: did I choose poorly? In the late eighties I had an Atari 800XL, and when it came time to move up, I went to a PC. Sensible. Practical. The PC "won." And forty years later, my PC lineage has matured into spreadsheets, email, and an endless queue of software updates. Meanwhile the machines I skipped—the Commodore Amiga, the Atari ST, and their whole extended family—turned into a playground that is, somehow, still open. People are writing new games for them in 2026. Still making music and art on them. Still building new hardware for them. I didn't miss out. It's been here the whole time, waiting for me to come back.
And when you pull the thread on why all those machines are family, it leads to one small rectangle of silicon.
One chip under everything
The Motorola 68000, first shipped in 1979. If you owned a "sixteen-bit" computer in the late eighties, this was almost certainly its heart. And the old "16/32-bit" label wasn't marketing waffle: inside, it was a true thirty-two-bit processor that just happened to talk to the outside world over a sixteen-bit bus. The practical magic was memory—the 68000 could reach a big, flat sixteen megabytes without breaking a sweat, while Intel's competing chips were still slicing memory into cramped sixty-four-kilobyte segments. That headroom is a real part of why 68000 machines felt so open and so creative next to the buttoned-down PC I bought instead.
And it was everywhere. The Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST? Both 68000. The Sega Genesis? A 68000, with a little Z80 riding shotgun. SNK's Neo Geo, the arcade-in-a-cartridge? 68000. Japan's cult Sharp X68000—named right after the chip—plus the original Apple Macintosh, and a whole wall of arcade boards from Capcom and Sega: all 68000. One processor, an entire generation of the machines this hobby loves most. (I owe this rabbit hole to a book: 68000: The Flame Wars by Marco A. Breddin, from Microzeit—more on that at the end.)
The twist that stopped me cold
Here's the part that genuinely reorganized my brain, and it's aimed straight at anyone who grew up on an Atari eight-bit like I did.
In 1984, Jack Tramiel—the man who built Commodore, whose mantra was "for the masses, not the classes"—was pushed out of his own company. He promptly bought Atari, and the ex-Commodore engineers he brought with him built the Atari ST in roughly five months. So the ST is, in spirit, a sixteen-bit Commodore machine—made by Commodore's people, wearing an Atari badge.
Meanwhile Commodore, the company Tramiel had just left, bought a struggling little startup and shipped its machine as the Amiga. That startup had been founded by ex-Atari engineers, led by Jay Miner—the very man who designed the custom chips inside my Atari 800. Which makes the Amiga, in spirit, a sixteen-bit Atari, wearing a Commodore badge.
Read that again. The ST was the Commodore machine; the Amiga was the Atari machine; and they spent a decade at war with each other. The Amiga I never bought was, in a real sense, the grown-up version of the 800XL I loved—dreamed up by the guy who built my 800. I skipped my own family's next chapter and didn't even know it.
The flame wars, in one breath
Those two machines did not get along, and neither did their owners. The Amiga had show-off custom co-processors—thousands of colors on screen, sampled stereo sound, real multitasking. The ST was leaner and cheaper, with a razor-sharp monochrome monitor and built-in MIDI ports that quietly made it the standard tool in professional recording studios. The magazines literally split in half; the marketing turned vicious. That whole gorgeous feud gets its own post soon—it's far too good to cram in here.
But the thing worth saying now is that under all the trash talk, they were siblings. Same chip. Same 1979 idea. The "war" was a family argument.
So—did I choose poorly?
Kind of, yeah. But the joke's on the sensible choice. The 68000 world I stepped over never got the memo that it was supposed to fade away. There's a brand-new commercial Atari ST game I bought and wrote to a real floppy this year (Return to Blacktooth). There are people porting arcade and console classics onto the Amiga and the Neo Geo right now—one of them has his own post here now. There's a homebrew scene closing forty-year-old gaps on the little machines (Barbarian finally reached the Atari eight-bit last month). And I can boot any of it on an FPGA on my bench without owning a single original.
So here's the plan. I'm going back to walk through the world the 68000 built—the machines, the rivalry, the crackers and the demoscene, the music, the whole thing—as someone genuinely discovering it, not someone pretending he was there. If that sounds like your kind of detour, come along.
I didn't miss out. I'm just early. Forty years early, but who's counting.
Frequently asked
What machines used the Motorola 68000?
The 68000, first shipped in 1979, powered the Commodore Amiga, the Atari ST, the Sega Genesis (with a Z80), SNK's Neo Geo, the Sharp X68000, the original Apple Macintosh, and many Capcom and Sega arcade boards.
Was the Motorola 68000 a 16-bit or 32-bit processor?
Inside it was a true 32-bit processor that talked to the outside world over a 16-bit bus, and it could address a flat 16 megabytes of memory while Intel's competing chips still sliced memory into 64-kilobyte segments.
Why are the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga considered "family"?
Both ran the 68000; the ST was built by ex-Commodore engineers Jack Tramiel brought to Atari, while the Amiga came from a startup founded by ex-Atari engineers led by Jay Miner—so each machine carried the other company's DNA.
Who was Jay Miner in relation to the Amiga?
Jay Miner led the startup that became the Amiga and had earlier designed the custom chips inside the Atari 800, which makes the Amiga, in spirit, a 16-bit Atari wearing a Commodore badge.
Further reading
- 68000: The Flame Wars — Marco A. Breddin (Microzeit). The gorgeous, deeply-researched book that sent me down this whole path; if any of it grabs you, buy it and support the people doing the real work.
- Motorola 68000 — the chip, its history and the machines it powered (Wikipedia)
- Return to Blacktooth: a brand-new Atari ST game in 2026 (Attract Mode)
- Barbarian comes to the Atari 8-bit, 39 years late (Attract Mode)
- h0ffman: the many scenes the Amiga built, in one person (Attract Mode)
- What is MiSTer? The FPGA that plays every machine I don't own (Bench Notes)
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