Commodore Amiga owners thread!

Soldato
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29 Mar 2007
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Swindon UK
My first Amiga was an A600 towards the end of 1992, followed by an A1200 about a year later, moving on to a PC in late '94.

Maybe rose tinted spectacles but I have fond memories of some great gaming experiences during those two years.

F16 Combat Pilot
Various Microprose combat flight sims.
A320 Airbus (Thalion)
Desert Strike
Lemmings 1 & 2.
Alien Breed.
Sensible Soccer.
Jack Nicklaus Golf.
Team Yankee (tank game).
U688 Attack Sub.
Wing Commander (1).
Transplant - Asteroids style shareware but utterly addictive, broke a joystick on that one.
Plus various others.
 
Associate
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5 Sep 2012
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261
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Cambridge, UK
I had:

An A500 + 68030
An A1200 + 68030
An A4000 + 68060 + Picasso gfx
A B2000 + 68040 (which I ran my BBS on)
...and I still have a CD32 (mint and boxed)

Broke my heart to sell the 4k but C= left the systems to die. I probably owe my career to Amigas - fabulous machines.
 
Man of Honour
Joined
21 Feb 2006
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29,324
I had:

An A500 + 68030
An A1200 + 68030
An A4000 + 68060 + Picasso gfx
A B2000 + 68040 (which I ran my BBS on)
...and I still have a CD32 (mint and boxed)

Broke my heart to sell the 4k but C= left the systems to die. I probably owe my career to Amigas - fabulous machines.
If you want to sell the Cd32 let me know please
 
Soldato
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Kent.
Would you lot say it's worth rebuilding my old A1200? I tried loading up Zool the other day and met with a meditation error, no idea what it meant or the exact code sorry, is this generally a hardware issue? I'm wondering if a "clean, untampered" build would be better. I have 1.3 Kickstarts, tried installing WHDload and failing etc and the CF card, just worried it's a bit buggered. Some games play, others don't. I'm so lost.

By rebuilding I mean a new from one pieces, built.
 
Soldato
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Back in the day i got my 1st amiga in the late 80s, it was an A500 and came with wizball, barbarian (psygnosis) obliterator, terrrorpods and ECO... what a fantastic purchase. (years later I then upgraded the ram to a whopping 1mb for a cost of about £35 so i could play wings and dungeon master).

I replaced this with an A1200 - with 80mb hdd no less - and also bought a CD32 (which was a mistake if i am honest).

about 15 years ago i rescued an A1200 from a skip.... it had an .. i think it was 33mhz 030 accelerator (may have been 040) and 16mb of ram!.... I kept it for a while but could not justify the space in the end, however i happily gave it to a collector so it found a good home, much better than silicon heaven at least.

i miss my amiga and still play the games now, albeit on an emulator.
 
Permabanned
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Some of my best days of gaming were indeed on the Amiga. Friday night after work at age of 16 back in 1991. It came from the Desert along with Secret of Monkey Island and Panza Kickboxing
 
Soldato
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Thunderdome
Anyone planning on getting a Vampire V4 standalone?

Yes actually, though I can't find much info re release dates. Thinking about it over Christmas led me to purchase an ACA 1233n from Amigakit to beef up my immaculate Escom A1200. While there i picked up a new case and an optical mouse too (think i consumed too much festive wine).

I might need to bite the bullet now and get the machine recapped. I'd been putting it off as all the warranty stickers were in place and I'd wanted to keep it original.
 
Associate
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Probably the unpopular opinion but I honestly can't see a reason for the V4 other than to milk the wallets of nostalgia goggles for an overpriced FPGA emulator. I mean come on IDE and compact flash in at least 2019? It does nothing that either retropi or any modern PC running Amiga Forever doesn't do better and for a lot less money. I still have my original Amigas, and support projects like Terriblefire to offer cheaper paths to upgrade and more modern functionality but don't see how this is doing that.
 
Soldato
Joined
10 Mar 2003
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6,744
Vampire V4 is powered by:
FPGA : Altera Cyclone V A5 77k LE 28nm technology
RAM : 512MB DDR3 (up to 1GB/s)

And supports:
FastIDE with 40/44-pin connectors
Digital Video-out up to 720p@60Hz
Dual Kickstart-flashrom (for safety)
MicroSD Storage

I don't know of any other device that you can buy that will give the Amiga such a boost. Vampire products are normally very well received by the Amiga enthusiasts and this product looks really good.

Buying an accelerator on eBay, for example, can cost £300-500 easily.



M.
 
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Okay sorry not meaning to get repetitive and we seem to be agreeing to the fact its an FPGA emulator so took some time this morning to show you what i mean.

http://www.apollo-accelerators.com/ - there is no price displayed on there, you have to express interest and they mail you a price when you're allocated one. So here is the email you get when yours is ready from when I was allocated one:

https://i.imgur.com/UFaqitn.png

€320 for the V2+, I don't see the V4 being cheaper. This was the point I took a step back and really thought about what they are selling and questioned its worth at that price. Just looked at some resellers, this goes for closer to €400 now, wow.

I don't have a retropi set up but I do own Amiga Forever, so reinstalled and did a couple of tests on my PC (i7-6700k @4.8Ghz blah blah nothing extreme for the ppl who frequent these forums). Now if you look on the website above they have a screen grab of AIBB running the Matrix benchmark and attaining 179x the speed of a stock A600 and emulating a 680LC40 @11805Mhz, so no MMU and no FPU. Running the same bench on my PC emulating a full 68040 so with MMU and FPU I got 2279x the speed of a stock A600 and clock of 1457274.2Mhz.

https://i.imgur.com/OnPbS5A.png

and the standard Sysinfo speed check as well:

https://i.imgur.com/68622Po.png

So for the high price of €30 you can buy a copy of Amiga Forever, pretend to have whichever Amiga you want with any flavour Kickstart, Workbench and chipset. Dabble in PPC Amigas, use Picasso96, use SATA and M.2 drives output display to HDMI, displayport and still hammer a Vampire into the ground with a magnitude of power over it.

I get the Vampire, I really do and twenty years ago it would have been awesome. But it is an emulator and when comparing it to what is already available in emulation it is a very poor value for money offering. Especially when projects like Terriblefire or the HC508 exist for a much better value imo especially if you're just looking to build a WHDLoad Amiga.
 
Soldato
Joined
17 Nov 2005
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3,026
Location
Swindon, UK
Hello Amiga fans.

It's the South-West Amiga Group meet near Bristol on the 26th January 2019.

I've been to every meet in Swindon since the group's revival.

It's really good to hang out with some fellow Amiga nerds.

You can't just turn up, and please go through the official channels here if you'd like to attend.

http://www.southwestamiga.org.uk/

I have an Amiga 1200 with ACA 1221 with all things unlocked, CF drive and lots of peripherals which I'll be bringing.
 
Soldato
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Thunderdome
Monkeh, no the Vampire standalone likely won't offer good VFM, but not much in the area of retro gaming does. Same can be said for PC gaming, or maybe just gaming in general.

The Vampire is hardware emulation as you know, that will provide an experience as close as you can get to running an original Amiga, albeit with extra oomph and the associated bells and whistles. Software emulation has it's place, but hardware emulation is better in this context. VFM? Probably not, but for enthusiasts that want it and are happy to spend the money, it's great.

Maybe my accelerator will be enough for me, but I still like the concept of the Vampire and would love to try it. Not quite the same thing but I have a Super NT and soon a Mega SG. The NT for me gives an even better experience than an original console. Actually, compared to the prices for s/h 26 year old consoles, I'd say it was VFM.
 
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