Commodore Amiga owners thread!

mistersprinkles · 21 Oct 2016 at 21:33

Did you own an Amiga? Let's talk about how awesome and ahead of its time the Amiga was, and how much better it was than the crummy Atari ST, its closest competitor.

I'm Canadian, and sadly, the Amiga was hardly a revered machine here. You UK folks are lucky to have had the spectacular run with the Amiga machines that you did.

I got my Amiga a little late in the game, in 1990. I got an Amiga 500 with the 512K RAM expansion along with a color Commodore monitor which if memory serves me right had a speaker built into it, a really terrible B/W dot matrix printer, a gravis gamepad, and two joysticks.

The Amiga bundle I got came with a bunch of games on diskette which if I recall correctly had sort of a gold colored label on them. It included titles such as Zany Golf and Ports of Call which were both awesome. I had some other games too like Wrath of the Demon and others. I got some games and programs from my school where we had an Amiga 2000: Duck Tales and Deluxe Paint III. Deluxe paint was fantastic for doing fun animations, although my 1MB of RAM meant I couldn't do overly long or complex ones like I could do at school, where the 2000 had more RAM and a hard drive.

Sadly, the main chain of stores my mom and I knew of for Amiga hardware and software, Compucentre, went out of business around 1992 or 1993, and I was left without any known sources to buy Amiga software. From time to time there would be some shareware bundles for $5 at local stores for the Amiga, but these were usually half-bummed efforts and I couldn't get any quality games.

I remember when my Amiga mouse stopped working in 1993 and my mom and I had to go through this whole saga to track down a new amiga compatible mouse.

Still, I really enjoyed my Amiga, and I occasionally fire up an emulated Ports of Call on my Windows machine to try to finally beat it. I've been within one point of beating it before but my save was corrupted.

Did you own an Amiga 500/600/1000/1200/2000/2500/3000/4000?
Do you still have it? Are you aware of the upgrade boards available such as the Vampire? Let's talk Amiga!

mistersprinkles · 23 Oct 2016 at 21:32

Wow! 3 pages of responses! I never thought this thread would be so popular. For those of you with yellowing Amigas, there is a product available called RETROBRIGHT. Follow the instructions. It will de yellow or de orange your machine for you.

Funny story- my dad broke my favorite joystick on my amiga playing ZOOM! which was a freakin' awesome game. I made a copy of my school's disk to get that one (shhh). We were playing and he was right into it and he snapped the neck of the joystick clean in half. He's always been a hyper sort and honestly I'm not surprised this happened looking back. That was one of the only games he ever played with me when I was a kid. The other one was on our Intellivision (I'm old) when I was really young but I don't remember what it was called.

Some of you have really awesome Amigas, 4000's and such. I never experienced an Amiga with anything more than a 68000 chip. I know you could do some amazing stuff with the later Amigas.

I remember when we went to buy my 500 we were in the store and I saw the 3000 there running this amazing looking (for the time) fireworks animation and I told my mom "I WANT THE 3000!!!!" and she looked at the price difference and laughed at me hysterically and then told the clerk at the store we would be buying the 500. Lol.

Looking back it's really amazing how much use I got out of that 500 considering that it had no internet connectivity or anything like that. I wrote countless homework assignments on it, did tons of animations, played tons of games. Good times. I remember it took me about a year to get past the first level of Wrath of the Demon, which is sad, because that's not a difficult game in the grand scheme of things. The graphics were amazing though for the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yULAmih--M

Looking at the first level on the horse I count ten layers of scrolling foreground and background. SNES couldn't do that even in 1994 with DKC. AFAIK SNES was packing a 68000 just like the Amiga.

Question: Video toaster people- do you still have any of your old Video Toaster projects laying around on tape anywhere? Any chance you could throw them on the youtubes for us to have a look?

Video toaster was so ahead of its time. Shows like "Home improvement" with Tim Allen (I know it's a long shot that anybody in the UK has seen this but it bears mentioning) were made entirely on zee toaster!

I wonder what kind of world it would have been if Commodore hadn't been run into the ground by idiotic management (I realize their management in UK/EURO zone was much better). What kind of Amiga machines would we have today? They'd be using Intel processors no doubt but what kind of wonderful things would you be able to do with an Amiga produced in the 21st century? Addon boards like the Vampire give us a sneak peak but they are not full blown powerhouses.

Here's a treat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyGCYoZ5Nlk

Computer Chronicles clip about the Amiga Video Toaster. Computer Chronicles is an amazing show and all episodes are on youtube. It's funny to watch them talk about things like "New: Hard disk drives!"

And here's a bigger treat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seznQmDp2pU

AMAZE-BALLS video toaster demo reel.

mistersprinkles · 24 Oct 2016 at 11:25

ZG002 said:
So what's the general consensus? A1200 the one to go for?

Been watching videos and looking about at eBay all last night lol

In terms of being able to turn it into a sexy beast with crazy upgrades, yes, 1200 is where it's at right now. Pick up a vampire 2 board with it.

mistersprinkles · 24 Oct 2016 at 20:51

Man... I miss my A500... I wish I hadn't sold it. Sold the damn thing for $100 back in 1996 with the monitor, printer, all my software and accessories.

I should have kept it. They really last. I probably would only have had to change the battery and maybe clean some contacts and I bet even the floppy drive would still work.

mistersprinkles · 11 Dec 2016 at 16:31

Reading about all the awesome Amiga hardware and software you guys had makes me realize even more so how much we missed out on the beauty that was Amiga here in Canada. What a different world it would have been if Amiga became dominant instead of the PC.

mistersprinkles · 3 Oct 2018 at 18:10

Cavallino said:
OP I thought PoC was never ending?
Was there an end to the game?

Yup you can beat PoC. You get points for stuff and once you get to twenty something points you win. The key to getting all the points is to dock in every single port in the world manually at least once. I can't recall whether you need to also manually leave those ports as well. I have not really played the game in almost twenty years. I had a game where I was 1 or 2 points away from winning and I had an epic fleet of like 10 of the most expensive kind of ship and then I got HDD corruption and lost the save. It was heartbreaking. This was back in the early 2000s.

When I originally played PoC as a kid on my Amiga 500 I was pretty bad at it but as an adult I was SO close to beating it.

mistersprinkles · 3 Oct 2018 at 18:18

davewhite04 said:
Brilliant memories of the Amiga. I moved to a new village, and had to change school at 15(different curriculum so failed everything). I made a lot of new friends but one in particular called Daz had an Amiga 500 with the memory expansion. Sounds identical to yours without monitor(a luxury item back then!). I was a gaming fruitcake, ever since the early arcades but particularly the home gaming systems starting with my first computer, the Tandy(I missed out on the Atari 2600). When I got my Spectrum 128k(without tape deck, probably rare now) my love for gaming exploded, also writing games was fun using BASIC. I used to get "backup" copies of a new game or 2 once a fortnight(I had virtually no money), which was perfect as it meant I finished every game I played as it was the only new game I had to last 2 weeks. Also my next door neighbour worked at Codemasters when they were a budget label and give me a few games a month. Amazing days.

Back to the Amiga. It was actually Kick Off 2 on the Atari ST I played first, it blew my mind completely! I soon made friends with Daz as we were in the same English class. I cycled up his one night to checkout his Amiga, flaming heck! What a night! Mainly 2 player games like North and South, Sensible Soccer, Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe taking turns on Test Drive, Stunt Car racer the works, it was Heaven. The graphics, the amazing sound(the biggest adantage over the Atari ST), it all blew my mind. His mother got "backup" games from work almost weekly, I was envious for the first and last time of my life. I couldn't stay away from his house! I was still using my Spectrum, my last game being a 2 player Baseball game that another friend whipped me badly every game, so I burnt the tape(original) on a football field, no lie.

At this time I was obseesed with the Amiga especially when Daz lent it to me and I completed the amazing Monkey Island, I was hooked on Point and Click adventures then on and that continued when I got my first PC, especially the Sierra ones, like Kings Quest, Roger Wilko etc. The Amiga changed my life.

The happiest time of my school days had changed from the Spectrum days to the Amiga days. I swear soundwise, it is still the best system ever! Even backup games had awesome demo's soundwise before games started!

I was obsessed with Amiga. Me and another friend carried my Spctrum collection in a huge box(took both of us to carry it) onto a bus, took 40minutes to get to the town, then we must have carried it 3 miles around second shops trying to trade it in for an Amiga, no luck.

So I never owned one. Now I do, pretty much the same setup he had, but his joysticks were amazing, I just have one amazing joystick. Not sure what computer I got the most fun out of. The Spectrum I owned and played religiously almost everyday, the Amiga for about a year(I then switched to the Mega Drive, Mega CD, SNES and somehow the Neo Geo I got my hands on! Another story. Basically swapped a SNES with an adaptor to play an imported Street Fighter 2 cart for Neo Geo with a game! Crazy, wish I still had it.

Sorry for going way off topic, but that is my life story, gaming wise up until I was like 17!

Shame the OP couldn't get his hands on more software, hardware etc. I feel for you man.

Yeah the Amiga was great. The sound really was highly impressive. I really was sad at the limited availability of software here. Honestly I never met anyone else who had an Amiga, and the only other Amiga I knew of existed at my school (Amiga 2000) and I got to use it in 2nd and 3rd grade (I think in UK this is 4th and 5th year???). I was lucky enough to sneak copies of some programs from school home but my teacher frowned on this. It's a real shame that the Amiga was so un-popular in North America. It was all about DOS PC's here, even though the quality of the games at the time was inferior.

Slightly off (but not really) topic, there was a game on my uncle's 386DX that I really loved called Secret Weapons of The Luftwaffe (SWOTL) which was a very low grade (by modern standards) WWII dog-fighting simulation. I loved that game. I later found out (last year actually) that there were similar games, also made by LucasArts (just like SWOTL) that came out on the Amiga. Sadly I had no access to this stuff. The Amiga was pretty well unknown in Canada up until the 500 came out and by 1992 or 1993 Amigas had completely disappeared and most computer shops didn't even know what they were, let alone carried software etc for them. I lived in Toronto and I literally had to go to the opposite end of the city to find a replacement mouse when mine broke. What a shame. Amiga 500 was basically a souped up SNES all the way back in like 1987. Amazing. I really wish I had kept mine but I sold it when I got an N64.