Quarter-Century Amiga Retrospectives

I chucked around 400 DD floppys out last weekend when i was back in the UK.
My folks made me clear my old room out and found loads of pirated games (old school P2P swapped in the playground at school im not proud now but in my defense i was young and nobody really cared back then) and some old Amiga mags.

I also found some amstrad 3" disks (hard plastic things) and CPC mags.

No wonder my folks were doing their tree about me leave crap in the house for the last 15 years since i moved out.

Wish I still had the A1200 but it got stolen when i got broke into, including a 80mb hard drive that cost me a months wages. and an accelerator card i cant remember the name of?
Amiga format had allot to answer for giving away that copy of Imagine.
 
Them were the days. I was very fond of my Commodore 64, 128 and then the Amiga, in various guises. My mate had the Atari ST which was better at desktop publishing and music, but he was very envious of my Amiga 512 with all the great games. Brings back very fond memories of growing up.

Thanks for posting.
 
House said:
and an accelerator card i cant remember the name of?
Amiga format had allot to answer for giving away that copy of Imagine.
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Hmmm was it like a addon box that you plugged into the back of the computer? I had one of these bright red boxes which was some kind of external card - it gave you numerous cheats for games, accelerator options, and all sorts of editing things. It was actually very clever. I can't remember what it was called..
 
ic1male said:
LMAO. Guru Meditation message. Where did that term actually come from? Was the OS programmer a Sikh?
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I don't know how true it is but the rumours were that the original programmers were ex-hippies and surf dudes and used to sit and meditate on surf boards whenever the system crashed during development.
Probably an urban myth but I hope it's true :D

Other fun facts were that the chips were named after girlfriends of the designers - the Denise chip, I think the Lisa chip was part of AGA and of course Agnus and Fatter Agnus!
I miss companies that had a sense of humour...
 
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Memories..... I had the A4000/40. It cost me over £2000 back then also I had Lightwave that was a silly price, iirc around £700. I remember all the games that have been mentioned and then some.

Lightwave was amazing. Making funky animations and wireframe rendering and seeing it in all its smoothness then fully rendering it. 20 second animation of a few ships flying past a planet taking around 10 hours to finish..:eek:

Frontier: Elite 2 ran like melted butter on my 4000 when I used it on the 1200 is was like 3 f/s during massive space battles.:D
 
Oooh to have owned an Amiga A4000/40. Those were the things dreams were made of when I was running my A1200. I finally put my A1200 into a PC tower case, and managed to find a reasonably priced A4000 Keyboard and put a GVP 1230 /60 accelerator with a whole 4MB of expanded memory into it.

I had an Amiga A1200 in a tower with –

Some type of GVP (can't remember) SCSI /IDE controller device (you plugged it into a supported Zorro Accelerator board). It allowed for
1 x IDE 500MB hdd
1 x 1 x speed or something CD Rom drive (this was quite hard to get working if I remember correctly – it was SCSI based)
I plugged a GVP zorro II into the one available Zorro II slot (I think the A1200 was Zorro II) 1230 /60 accelerator
Added a single 4MB EDO Simm to this (cost me a fortune)
Amiga A4000 Keyboard
Two Floppy Drives
1 x SCSI Tape streamer – nightmare to get working but used to backup the 500MB hdd – 500MB hdd for an Amiga was insane at the time.
I had to use an external 33.6k modem, for BBS access.

I built it up over time during 1992 /93 and then commodore released a A4000T but I think the machine I built was better as it was more unique. The A4000T was really hard to get hold of. And very expensive. I loved to tinker with Amiga's reason I ended up going overkill with my A1200... It was a hobby... And with any hobby you tend to go a little OTT in the end.

Still my A1200 was really quick, and workbench would load within seconds, even with all the crude I had running the background…

I loved my Amiga, sadly it went many years ago. I ripped many of the parts out to help build my first PC clone, and my Amiga became just memories..

Neil, nice videos of the X1000. Is that really being released? Every single Amiga since Escom went bust has pretty much been all talk and nothing much more…
 
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iv-tecman said:
Neil, nice videos of the X1000. Is that really being released? Every single Amiga since Escom went bust has pretty much been all talk and nothing much more…
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It's supposed to be this year and late summer , if nothing comes out this year then i'd say no. Unlike other companies that talk about it , this is the first that's actually shown atleast some form of specs .
 
Neil79 said:
It's supposed to be this year and late summer , if nothing comes out this year then i'd say no. Unlike other companies that talk about it , this is the first that's actually shown atleast some form of specs .
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There is actaully a wiki page that seems to be updated, last I looked in Jan this year it was just a few lines..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOne_X1000

Least this company has actually shown a working machine, it looks interesting but who knows... Can't see it being anything more then a expensive way to bring back memories of the glory days.. :)

Still, nice looking case. Love the embossed boing ball lol
 
House said:
Amiga format had allot to answer for giving away that copy of Imagine.
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Oh good god yes it did!

My 'little' A1200 got a 2MB Fast Ram expansion, a second Disk Drive and a 80MB Hard Drive because of the that bloody little program!

Not only that, I made the trip up to Gordon Harwoods, and paid the ridiculous price for a Blizzard 1240 (68040 CPU!) expansion card.
 
Ooh, Gordon Harwoods! LOL. It was the most harrowing time of my life when I sent my Amiga off to them to have an internal HDD fitted.
 
Had the Amiga too, kind of odd progression for me. Acorn > TI994A [yes Texas Instruments did make a home computer, no matter what they say] BBC > Amiga > PC.

But the only game i remember on the Amiga, was a space game where you trained troops and attacked other planets for resources, half text base, half click and point game, lovely, but no idea the name.

not forgetting the racing game of Revs.... fantastic...

ColiN
 
ic1male said:
LMAO. Guru Meditation message. Where did that term actually come from? Was the OS programmer a Sikh?
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The Amiga was a famously advanced multimedia computer, considering that it was designed back in the primitive mid-1980s. But its most alarming error message was decidedly minimalist: red text on a black background, dressed up only by a flashing red border. Like many errors, it included some hexadecimal numbers that were meaningless to 99.9999999999999% of folks who encountered them. But it preceded them with the phrase “Guru Meditation.” When I owned an Amiga, I was never sure what that meant; the reference to a state of zen never did a thing to lower my blood pressure. Turns out that it was a self-indulgent reference to a game the Amiga designers used to play with their first product, the Joyboard–an Atari VCS joystick that you stood on. Har, har.

Like Windows’ later Blue Screen of Death, the Guru Meditation had a habit of showing up in the darndest places, thanks to the wide use of Amigas in the broadcasting industry and for other audio/visual tasks. Once I turned on my TV and saw a Guru Meditation onscreen, and reached to reboot my Amiga–until I realized that it wasn’t even the same room. My cable company’s channel guide, it turned out, had crashed.
 
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