Commodore Amiga owners thread!

mistersprinkles said:
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.
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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.
 
mistersprinkles said:
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!
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OP I thought PoC was never ending?
Was there an end to the game?
 
Cavallino said:
OP I thought PoC was never ending?
Was there an end to the game?
Click to expand...

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.
 
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.
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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.
 
Found an old photo of my original Amiga 500+ set up. As mentioned earlier in the thread, check out that CD32 expansion :cool: and Citizen Swift dot matrix printer. Oh and the null modem cable going straight up through the ceiling to my brothers A500+ upstairs.

desk.jpg
 
@Duke Great to see that. sadly I don't ave any pictures of my Amiga setup from back then, but it takes me right back. What games did you play with the null modem cable? I used to have regular Populous sessions with a mate using one (I think only Pop II had a null model option?)
 
I still have a A1200 its the Magic pack. I got it in 2005 and it still works. I fired it up a 6 weeks ago hoping to play a few games on the hard drive. Wings, Afterburner, Chase HQ 2, Wizzkid, Pang, and Rodland, but the hard drive died after the first boot :(, and I only had the standard 2mb and needed fast ram to run the games off the hard drive. But I had a A500 with a 2MB external expansion and had a lot of fun with it, I used to use a sound sampler and Sequencer one, for Midi connected to my Roland Keyboard, great times and a great computer, I made a PC in about 1995 and never looked back.
 
Yes the cable literally went through the ceiling and upstairs - the hole had to be the width of the 25 pin (?) connector as well so wasn't just a small one like you have with ethernet now :D

The only game I can remember playing over it was Lotus 2 and now Andy above mentioned it, Stunt Car Racer. On Lotus we used to do split screen, so 4 players in total :cool: We must have used it for a few others though.

Later when we moved onto PCs we replaced the cable with BNC for the first PC network.
 
Duke said:
Yes the cable literally went through the ceiling and upstairs - the hole had to be the width of the 25 pin (?) connector as well so wasn't just a small one like you have with ethernet now :D
Click to expand...

Surely you thread the cable and then solder the D pin on afterwards? Or was I the only one that made the cable themselves? :)
 
AndyCr15 said:
Surely you thread the cable and then solder the D pin on afterwards? Or was I the only one that made the cable themselves? :)
Click to expand...
We never had a soldering iron or made up cables like that ourselves at the time :) The hole is still there, it just has white tape over it now haha.
 
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