AmigaChromeA new chapter for the Amiga
About the name

Why AmigaChrome

People often ask us where the name comes from. It has two halves, and each one says something true about what AmigaChrome is.

Amiga: a friendly computer

The first half is the computer itself. In the early 1980s a small company in Santa Clara, California, set out to build a new kind of machine, with Jay Miner leading the hardware design. The company started life as Hi-Toro, but that name was already taken, so it became Amiga Corporation.

“Amiga” is the Spanish word for a female friend. It suited a computer meant to be friendly, and it had a happy side effect: it came before Apple and Atari in any alphabetical list. Commodore went on to launch the Amiga in 1985, and people have loved it ever since.

We build our own Amiga machines, from the A1200 board to the AC090 CPU, so the first half of the name was never in doubt.

The Boing Ball

Long before the Amiga had a box, it had a bouncing ball. In January 1984, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the Amiga team showed a prototype codenamed Lorraine. Its custom chips were still large breadboards wired together, hidden away from the crowd.

Dale Luck and R.J. Mical wrote a demo for it: a red-and-white chequered ball, spinning and bouncing across the screen. It moved so smoothly that visitors went looking for the bigger computer they assumed was really doing the work. There wasn't one.

That demo, Boing, became the unofficial symbol of the Amiga. Commodore chose a different logo, but for Amiga fans the Boing Ball stuck, and it still means “Amiga” to many of us today.

Chrome: it runs in the browser

The second half comes from how AmigaChrome works. Cradle, the manager where you set up and run your Amiga machines, is a web page. So is the browser runtime, which runs our Amiga machines compiled to WebAssembly. Both run in a Chromium-based browser.

On a Linux desktop, our launcher opens Cradle and your instances in their own app windows, looking for Chromium first. Our Debian package recommends a Chromium-based browser (chromium, chromium-browser or google-chrome-stable). On the Raspberry Pi card we build, Chromium is installed for you and is the only window on the screen: the Pi boots straight into Cradle.

About Chromium

Chromium is the open-source browser project that Google Chrome is built from. Google released it in 2008 and named it after chromium, the metal used to make chrome plating. Google's own code in Chromium is under a BSD-style licence, and the third-party parts carry their own licences. Anyone may build Chromium and share it, which is why Linux distributions ship it.

AmigaChrome uses Chromium. It is not a Google product, and it is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google.

Friend, and shine

So the name is a little of both: a friendly computer from the 1980s, running on the browser engine that so much of today's web is built on. We think the Amiga deserves both.

Amiga and the Boing Ball are trademarks of their owner. Chrome is a trademark of Google LLC. AmigaChrome is not affiliated with either.

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