Amiga - Happy 30th birthday
Discussion
Ah, the nostalgia.
Believe it or not, I actually won an A500 in a magazine competition not too long after they came out.
But my first introduction to the Amiga was on a mate's one, watching the "Zowee Demo" by Jolyon Ralph.
Amazing at the time.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHqRUq7fxf4
Believe it or not, I actually won an A500 in a magazine competition not too long after they came out.
But my first introduction to the Amiga was on a mate's one, watching the "Zowee Demo" by Jolyon Ralph.
Amazing at the time.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHqRUq7fxf4
For me I think the first things I saw were Speedball and Shadow of the Beast something that the PS4 has only just caught up with - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YETncRA7fb0
Amiga original - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6Osnolfxqw
Amiga original - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6Osnolfxqw
I bought a 500 with my paper-round money back in 1990, I remember being impossibly giddy.
It was a hugely powerful machine at the time but Commodore was never going to be able to develop it into something with a future, the tight integration of the components meant it wouldn't have been particularly compatible.
The 3000 and 4000 models were half impressive but the PC had long since caught up and overtaken by then.
I remember getting frustrated with Commodore they seemed to be constantly blowing money on daft machines that no-one wanted, the CDTV, CD32, 600, 64GS, a million weird and wacky 8-bit machines, Christ knows how much money they blew on fruitless endeavours, I think that when the 1200 appeared which looked like a bit of a bolt on over the 500 the writing was on the wall.
I must have put thousands of hours into Pro-Tracker and coding demos and whatnot, at least it had a better keyboard than the ST.
It did have some killer games, Turrican 2, Alien Breed, Apidya, Baal, Blood Money, LED Storm, Lotus Esprit Challenge, X-Out, Another World. All those disc swaps and the hours spent looking at this screen:
It was a hugely powerful machine at the time but Commodore was never going to be able to develop it into something with a future, the tight integration of the components meant it wouldn't have been particularly compatible.
The 3000 and 4000 models were half impressive but the PC had long since caught up and overtaken by then.
I remember getting frustrated with Commodore they seemed to be constantly blowing money on daft machines that no-one wanted, the CDTV, CD32, 600, 64GS, a million weird and wacky 8-bit machines, Christ knows how much money they blew on fruitless endeavours, I think that when the 1200 appeared which looked like a bit of a bolt on over the 500 the writing was on the wall.
I must have put thousands of hours into Pro-Tracker and coding demos and whatnot, at least it had a better keyboard than the ST.
It did have some killer games, Turrican 2, Alien Breed, Apidya, Baal, Blood Money, LED Storm, Lotus Esprit Challenge, X-Out, Another World. All those disc swaps and the hours spent looking at this screen:
Nostalgia moment!
Got an A500 with GVP hard drive, and two A1200 in the loft each with a Blizzard A1260 accelerator and an A1230 too, complete with SCSI interface. It was all a new language to me at the time!
Keep threatening to get one down from the loft and revisit some of the games already mentioned.
I also understand the Blizzards could be worth a few quid nowadays, if I could bring myself to part with them
Got an A500 with GVP hard drive, and two A1200 in the loft each with a Blizzard A1260 accelerator and an A1230 too, complete with SCSI interface. It was all a new language to me at the time!
Keep threatening to get one down from the loft and revisit some of the games already mentioned.
I also understand the Blizzards could be worth a few quid nowadays, if I could bring myself to part with them
Got an Amiga A600 (who needs a numeric keypad anyway?) as an upgrade for my 520ST, still boxed in the loft with a load of games awaiting a bigger house/games room. One day...
Did 2 weeks work experience at The One magazine, writing half of this issue
mostly uncredited, but I did get bags full of games, joysticks etc as payment, so not all bad.
Did 2 weeks work experience at The One magazine, writing half of this issue
mostly uncredited, but I did get bags full of games, joysticks etc as payment, so not all bad.That passed by quick
a 500+ with a whole meg here, replaced by the 1200 a few years later.
Great games already mentioned - although I have to add
cannon fodder!
But yes lemmings, project x, another world, the list is endless.
Wasnt there a game released for comic relief one year, a sleeping boy and his dog, a platformer of sorts?
a 500+ with a whole meg here, replaced by the 1200 a few years later.
Great games already mentioned - although I have to add
cannon fodder!
But yes lemmings, project x, another world, the list is endless.
Wasnt there a game released for comic relief one year, a sleeping boy and his dog, a platformer of sorts?
Loved my Amiga so many great games and such a unique and powerful machine at the time. I still dont know of any machines that can run multiple graphics modes at the same time..
The Atari ST was made buy the guy who created Commodore (Jack Tramiel) then got fired after he'd bought Amiga but before he had made it to retail, the losses of the plus 4, c16 etd did him in.
He bought Atari (consumer electronics bit) then created the ST effectively from off the shelf parts to compete with the Amiga.
Amiga was created by an ex Atari guy (who made the 2600 etc) who got fed up with Atari not creating something new and was in part funded by Atari.
So in a weird way the St is more a Commodore, and the Amiga is more Atari...
I had an A500 with the trap door ram, and an A1200 with 68030 and 8mb memory and HDD...
TheAngryDog said:
I never did the commodore route. Spectrum then to atari St and then pc's
Its kinda funny. The Atari ST was made buy the guy who created Commodore (Jack Tramiel) then got fired after he'd bought Amiga but before he had made it to retail, the losses of the plus 4, c16 etd did him in.
He bought Atari (consumer electronics bit) then created the ST effectively from off the shelf parts to compete with the Amiga.
Amiga was created by an ex Atari guy (who made the 2600 etc) who got fed up with Atari not creating something new and was in part funded by Atari.
So in a weird way the St is more a Commodore, and the Amiga is more Atari...
I had an A500 with the trap door ram, and an A1200 with 68030 and 8mb memory and HDD...
I had an ST, but soon saw the errors of my ways and swapped to a 500Plus.
I used to love fiddling around in the Workbench (2.04?). I had a 52meg GVP hard disk expansion, with 1 meg (I think...) of memory hanging off the zorro port on the left hand side. Having Workbench run without endless disk swapping was something else.
The only thing I could never get my head round (I still can't), is how you could have more than one resolution on the screen at the same time...
The key difference with the ST and the Amiga was fiddling around writing for them. The ST was really just a big 8 bit machine, with no memory protection in the OS, so you could dump stuff into specific memory locations. Made things like reset demos and "hardware scrolling" (I vaguely remember that being something to do with pushing data through the keyboard controller and having it accidentally come back bit-shifted) possible even though they weren't meant to be. You could extend the display resolution into the overscan areas by very carefully tracking the progress of each scanline and turning the gun on when it was supposed to be off. I never managed this myself, though.
I also used to love the way chip tunes worked. A little bit of machine code with the tune data attached. You just had to call it on each vertical blank and the tune would play.
The Amiga, with it "real" OS just wasn't as much fun to write for even with the chipset's features.
I used to love fiddling around in the Workbench (2.04?). I had a 52meg GVP hard disk expansion, with 1 meg (I think...) of memory hanging off the zorro port on the left hand side. Having Workbench run without endless disk swapping was something else.
The only thing I could never get my head round (I still can't), is how you could have more than one resolution on the screen at the same time...
The key difference with the ST and the Amiga was fiddling around writing for them. The ST was really just a big 8 bit machine, with no memory protection in the OS, so you could dump stuff into specific memory locations. Made things like reset demos and "hardware scrolling" (I vaguely remember that being something to do with pushing data through the keyboard controller and having it accidentally come back bit-shifted) possible even though they weren't meant to be. You could extend the display resolution into the overscan areas by very carefully tracking the progress of each scanline and turning the gun on when it was supposed to be off. I never managed this myself, though.
I also used to love the way chip tunes worked. A little bit of machine code with the tune data attached. You just had to call it on each vertical blank and the tune would play.
The Amiga, with it "real" OS just wasn't as much fun to write for even with the chipset's features.
Edited by dxg on Tuesday 28th July 02:14
steveatesh said:
I also understand the Blizzards could be worth a few quid nowadays, if I could bring myself to part with them
Don't say that - I checked the prices on ebay about 5 years ago, and they weren't worth a huge amount, so let my 1200 plus HDD, 1230 expansion and 8mb go for about the same as a round of drinks 
qube_TA said:
I bought a 500 with my paper-round money back in 1990, I remember being impossibly giddy.
It was a hugely powerful machine at the time but Commodore was never going to be able to develop it into something with a future, the tight integration of the components meant it wouldn't have been particularly compatible.
The 3000 and 4000 models were half impressive but the PC had long since caught up and overtaken by then.
I remember getting frustrated with Commodore they seemed to be constantly blowing money on daft machines that no-one wanted, the CDTV, CD32, 600, 64GS, a million weird and wacky 8-bit machines, Christ knows how much money they blew on fruitless endeavours, I think that when the 1200 appeared which looked like a bit of a bolt on over the 500 the writing was on the wall.
I must have put thousands of hours into Pro-Tracker and coding demos and whatnot, at least it had a better keyboard than the ST.
It did have some killer games, Turrican 2, Alien Breed, Apidya, Baal, Blood Money, LED Storm, Lotus Esprit Challenge, X-Out, Another World. All those disc swaps and the hours spent looking at this screen:
i remember xcopy!! Want to see more screenshots of Amiga things...It was a hugely powerful machine at the time but Commodore was never going to be able to develop it into something with a future, the tight integration of the components meant it wouldn't have been particularly compatible.
The 3000 and 4000 models were half impressive but the PC had long since caught up and overtaken by then.
I remember getting frustrated with Commodore they seemed to be constantly blowing money on daft machines that no-one wanted, the CDTV, CD32, 600, 64GS, a million weird and wacky 8-bit machines, Christ knows how much money they blew on fruitless endeavours, I think that when the 1200 appeared which looked like a bit of a bolt on over the 500 the writing was on the wall.
I must have put thousands of hours into Pro-Tracker and coding demos and whatnot, at least it had a better keyboard than the ST.
It did have some killer games, Turrican 2, Alien Breed, Apidya, Baal, Blood Money, LED Storm, Lotus Esprit Challenge, X-Out, Another World. All those disc swaps and the hours spent looking at this screen:
I remember D-Copy too. 
I had an Amiga 500+, which was a really good computer.
I sold it as my housemate at the time had an Amiga 1200 and I didn't have room to set mine up too. We used to take all the gear in the car to a local computer club. Good times.
I actually bought a maths co-processor (AKA a Floating Point Unit) card for the A1200, so I could play about with ray tracing software like Vista Pro & Imagine.
FPUs were often an add on chip even on the PC at at the time. Motherboards would come with an empty socket for one - for CAD work as an example. I don't think they were integrated in PC processors until the i486 DX.
I had an Amiga 500+, which was a really good computer.
I sold it as my housemate at the time had an Amiga 1200 and I didn't have room to set mine up too. We used to take all the gear in the car to a local computer club. Good times.
I actually bought a maths co-processor (AKA a Floating Point Unit) card for the A1200, so I could play about with ray tracing software like Vista Pro & Imagine.
FPUs were often an add on chip even on the PC at at the time. Motherboards would come with an empty socket for one - for CAD work as an example. I don't think they were integrated in PC processors until the i486 DX.
I worked for a company who had the job of repairing Amiga computers that had been returned under warranty.
The agreement was that you send a bare bones computer to Commodore and you'd get a refurbished one back.
Every day we'd get 30 or so machines in, usually 1200's and 600's, we'd clean them up, fix what ever was wrong (usually a floppy drive) and send it out.
However quite often they'd have accelerator cards in, hard drives, extra RAM, custom Kickstarter chips and so-on. We had no way of knowing who the machine originally belonged to and the instruction was to bin any extra bits that someone had left in.
As quite a few of us in workshop were Amiga fans we'd rob these bits to upgrade our own, we found some really fancy CPU/co-processor upgrades, they would have been really expensive. Found one fancy hacked kickstarter chip that played music and ran a fancy graphic display when you powered the machine up.
If only eBay existed back then, would have made a fortune!
The agreement was that you send a bare bones computer to Commodore and you'd get a refurbished one back.
Every day we'd get 30 or so machines in, usually 1200's and 600's, we'd clean them up, fix what ever was wrong (usually a floppy drive) and send it out.
However quite often they'd have accelerator cards in, hard drives, extra RAM, custom Kickstarter chips and so-on. We had no way of knowing who the machine originally belonged to and the instruction was to bin any extra bits that someone had left in.
As quite a few of us in workshop were Amiga fans we'd rob these bits to upgrade our own, we found some really fancy CPU/co-processor upgrades, they would have been really expensive. Found one fancy hacked kickstarter chip that played music and ran a fancy graphic display when you powered the machine up.
If only eBay existed back then, would have made a fortune!
bakerstreet said:
I had an Amgia A600. Parents bought it for my birthday. Can't remember how old I was. I remember enjoying many happy hours playing Grand Prix. I think there were 6 floppy discs for that game!
I got a program on the front of a magazine that allowed you to change the colours of the cars/helmets and their relative performance - spent many hours at the start of each season setting things up "just right". Probably as much time as playing the game.Ah, Amiga. Spent many, many happy hours with my various ones. Had a 500, later swapped with my cousin for his 500+, later a CD32 which my brother and I added the expansion module with more RAM, a 260MB (!) hard disk and mouse and keyboard. Eventually we ended up with an A1200 in one of the pre-built PC tower case conversions, with a 68040 accelerator card and 16Mb of RAM. Think he still has that at his place, must get it back off him sometime and see if it still fires up.
That was my first experience of the internet too, had a dialup modem back then. Also used to use NetBSD Unix on it, which I guess eventually led to my current career as a Linux/Unix systems specialist.
Happy memories
That was my first experience of the internet too, had a dialup modem back then. Also used to use NetBSD Unix on it, which I guess eventually led to my current career as a Linux/Unix systems specialist.
Happy memories
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