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Buying an Amiga 30 years later
- Jaruzel 8y agoAlways good to see people re-discovering the Amiga. It truly is a wonderful machine. My (current) collection: http://www.jaruzel.com/amiga/collection http://www.jaruzel.com/amiga/collection Not shown is the shelves and shelves of spare parts, expansion cards, cases, keyboards and broken A500s/A1200s I also have. Collecting them becomes addictive quite quickly!
- sundvor 8y agoThat's pretty impressive! Nice work man. I had the 500 with memory upgrade, then upgraded to the 3000 - where I got a new CPU, either the 020 or the 030, and my first ever HDD. I think it was a massive 50MB. I searched some of the demo archives and could find an intro of kinds that I wrote as a teenager. I was able to start it up in an emulator, and it was a fairly good representation ... memories long lost, revived! The most fun was probably reading the fantastic crap I wrote in the greeting scrolltext - it was like a portal into a former self. :) And, no, none of my folks had video records back in the 80s, so that's all lost.
- lathiat 8y agoI had 2x A500 including the commodore monitors that somehow got lost/thrown out in a family move somewhere much to my dismay :( Loved those machines, and AMIGA BASIC - between that and QBasic was the start of me learning to program. Always did want an A1200
- jacquesm 8y ago> I had 2x A500 including the commodore monitors that somehow got lost/thrown out in a family move somewhere much to my dismay :( I totally feel your pain. All my family heirlooms got thrown out because someone decided to give away the $5 ikea box they were stored in marked 'keep safely' and put them in a gray plastic garbage bag instead. On the plus side you might be able to find some replacement monitors somewhere. An easy way might be to tell your local recycling compound that that is what you are looking for, just ask them to toss anything labelled 'Commodore' or 'CBM' on a pile and promise to buy it by the pound once every month. You'll be surprised what turns up.
- ekianjo 8y agoOh I did not know you were an Amiga user back in the days :)
- jacquesm 8y agoI wasn't but I fixed quite a lot of them (and regular 64's in a 10x larger number). I used the ST quite a bit though, totally different beast software wise, the Amiga was a multimedia powerhouse whereas the ST was more like a 'Mac light'.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoFrom the perspective of now, getting rid of my Amigas turns out to have been one of my more short sighted decisions. I have no nostalgia for any of the 8 bits I had or any other machines. I have tons for the Amiga and there's still so much they did first or better. I really should have left them in that cupboard, as I was so reluctant to retire them in the first place. It was more to clear the two cupboards full of software, manuals and addons. Oh well. :) The future never arrived as instead of building on Amiga we built on PCs and Windows. Edit: Amiga Super Hang On not in the games list? Shocking! Anyone wanting some Dungeon Master nostalgia can get Legend of Grimrock on most platforms, which is a very nice re-implementation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_of_Grimrock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_of_Grimrock
- Kurtz79 8y agoThe A500 is my favorite machine ever, it basically merged the best of both worlds from PCs (interface, general purpose OS, programmability) and consoles (dedicated audio and video chipsets, you could use a normal TV as monitor). It took full adoption of the 256 colors VGA and Sound Blaster cards for the PC to catch-up and eventually surpass it (late games started coming out in 10+ floppy disks and it was clear it had reached its limits).
- welly 8y agoNice collection! Genuine question. What do you do with all these Amigas? Do you use them for anything productive, are any of them your "daily driver"? Or do you just fire them up from time to time for nostalgic reasons, or something else?
- Jaruzel 8y agoI just muck about with them when I feel like doing something different to my main 'PC' based computing. Right now, I'm trying to resurrect an old SCSI hard disk controller for the Amiga 500 using newer SCSI disks (which should be backwards compatible) but it's just not playing ball. :/
- fit2rule 8y agoI'm also into retrocomputing, although my collection is more focused around the 8-bit machines of the UK and Europe (Oric-1/Atmos, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, etc.) I was just wondering if you'd heard of the RaSCSI device, and/or one of its clones? https://github.com/fran-cap/RASCSI-68kmlaver https://github.com/fran-cap/RASCSI-68kmlaver Also, SCSI2SD? http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index.php/SCSI2SD http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index.php/SCSI2SD As I have a number of other items in my collection, studio-gear, with SCSI this is my next foray into keeping the machines alive: replacing SCSI with something modern/servicable...
- Jaruzel 8y agoI was hoping to keep the full retro experience complete with whirring disks and head clicking, but if I can't get these old controllers to talk to newer drives, then yeah, I may have to go down the SCSI-SDCard route. :( I'm also trying NOT to expand into Commodore 64/128 as well, as I'm rapidly running out of room... but I never owned a C128 back in the day, and I REALLY want one!
- fit2rule 8y agoYeah, I understand the authentic vibe, but there's something to be said about having every bit of software, ever written for the machine, on a single solid-state SD card. ;) Re: C128 - I know the feeling .. a pal of mine in the retro-computing group at a local hackrrspace recently set up his C128 for some great assembly hacking (he's building a new game engine for it in assembly) and it has totally inspired me to take another look at it as a machine. Retro-Computing really has such rewards!
- bartread 8y agoI've recently gone on this journey myself, having had an A500 as a teen, and now own an A1200 with 500MB HDD and 8MB memory. I've also recently purchased a 68030 accelerator with 68882 FPU, 128MB of RAM, real-time clock, and the 4GB CF card storage upgrade that I still need to fit. Just wish I still had all my floppies from the old days. Managed to find a few and was surprised to find they're still working flawlessly.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- stevenicr 8y agoI may have a box of amiga floppies in the garage, maybe an a500 as well. Wonder if populace is still in that mix. are you looking for software for amiga or just your old floppies with saved data? Had no idea people were still using them, after so many c64s were unusable with bad power supplies, I assumes no more would ever be made. Now I'm glad I kept some of the amiga stuff and sad to think I gave away a box of c64 floppies. Have a few xeroxed manuals for word processors and such from the commodore days I found while organizing garage stuff. To think that full blown word processors worked with such little memory so long ago.. and now we have huge code bases to save text these days.
- goniometer 8y agoI have recently bought an A1200 as well, but one thing that surprised me was the unbearable-ness of the refresh rate (50/60Hz ?) of the original monitor. I eventually had to buy a signal converter to connect the machine to some better display unit. I cannot imagine how I could have spent day-long gaming sessions in front of that display.
- rbanffy 8y agoIsn't the 1200 supposed to drive a VGA monitor?
- goniometer 8y agoMine (bothold one and the one I had bought now) has composite output. Maybe there were variants?
- rbanffy 8y agoI think all 1200's (all Amigas, in fact) have a 23-pin RGB output.
- scarygliders 8y agoI have a small card which fits over one of the chips of my A1200 and provides a VGA signal. Can't remember the name of the card offhand - haven't powered the A1200 up for about 3-4 years since the last time.
- rbanffy 8y agoI think that if you use the RGB output, you can get 640x480 at 60 or 70Hz.
- Jaruzel 8y agoProbably an 'Indivison AGA' (Or 'OCS' if you have a 2000/500). Fits over the Lisa chip, and grabs the video output and scan doubles it to work with a standard VGA type monitor either via VGA or DVI. Can support resolutions up to 1280x1024.
- jacobush 8y agoRabbit-hole: Vampire FPGA accelerator
- scarygliders 8y agoI still have my original A1200 and it still works. I have adapted an ATX PC PSU to power it - it needs an extra bit of power available to keep the 68040 expansion card+RAM, the VGA adapter card, and the internal IDE drive going. Haven't powered it up for about 4ish years. The floppy drive seems dead last time I tried it - and it was an upgrade High Density PC-style drive with its own special card to drive it, and I can't remember the name of the card/drive it was that long ago I did all this. :)
- gbin 8y agoOriginally I was an A500 user in my teens. I started recently to buy various models in bad shape (1000, 2000, 500, 500+, 1200...) to fix and restore them, I still don't really understand completely why but I enjoy that a lot. My next project will be to build a "new" amiga 1200: new cases have been produced, new keyboards are coming soon and I just bought an unpopulated newly produced motherboard. So overall, this is very little nostalgia but more an excuse to learn new skills like troubleshooting hardware and SMD soldering.
- alexyoung 8y agoI'd like to do something similar but with a Mister FPGA as the computer, although I'm not sure it'd fit in the repro A1200 cases
- gbin 8y agoThat is cool. Terrible fire is doing that IIRC: they have an end to end emulation running now based on their previous foga based accelerator. You are planning to use that as a base to redo everything from scratch?
- pjmlp 8y agoBeing the only PC dude among a group of friends with Amigas, always made me kind of jealous of them. Although I got to code on them during our bring your computer, get together kind of afternoons. Sadly my parents were actually right sponsoring my migration from a Timex 2068 to an 386SX instead of an Amiga 500.
- krylon 8y agoThe sight of the Competition Pro triggered some instant nostalgia. There were lots of cheap knockoffs around when I had an Amiga, but the original was much more reliable.
- 0898 8y agoWas the Amiga a British phenomenon or was it Stateside too?
- flohofwoe 8y agoNot sure about the US, but it definitely wasn't just popular in the UK alone. In Germany it was extremely popular, and the "natural upgrade path" from a C64. For me it was the ultimate dream machine (apart from a Silicon Graphics workstation or NeXT Cube of course). 3 days after the monetary union in 1990 between East and West Germany I drove to the nearest West German town and spent pretty much everything on an Amiga 500, a 1084 monitor, and a printer, all in all around 2.6k Deutsche Mark if I remember right (don't know why I was so keen on a printer).
- toyg 8y agoPretty popular in Italy too, although not as the C64 (it was more expensive). I loved my Amiga 500, so many joysticks destroyed by KickOff, Turrican, Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge...
- ekianjo 8y agoYeah the joysticks were horrible! I can't count the number of them that broke... :)
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoThree key markets seemed to be UK, Germany and US, I think in that order. Germany was why the 2000 existed, Commodore US wanted a box similar to the A1000, with another sidecar for HDD. UK was the most successful single region, and Commodore UK nearly succeeded buying out after the bankruptcy. In large part that was David Pleasance and things like the Batman bundle. From what I can tell, US was hampered by terrible advertising, but succeeded despite that almost entirely on word of mouth. Just as well, or there'd have been no toaster. :)
- lathiat 8y agoSeems to have been at least somewhat popular in Australia but I have no idea to what degree.
- sunpazed 8y agoI have my original A600 (1993) and C64 (1986) — great hardware that captured the imagination of a young kid. I still have fond memories, fooling around and coding games (my parents were too cheap to buy me more than a few retail games)
- bond 8y agoI remember playing R-Type and it was a blast at that time. The Amiga was really a beast compared to my spectrum and timex machines.
- azizinnn 8y agoI remember having nightmares from that 'intestines' level. Probably should not have played it that young :-)
- xedarius 8y agoAMOS on the Amiga was largely what got me into games programming. Loved my Amiga so much.
- ekianjo 8y agoI reluctantly moved to Windows/PC very late (probably 1997 or 1998) long after Commodore was done for. The scene was clearly losing many people but there were still a few magazines in circulation and I was amazed every time I went in Germany to see much more life on the Amiga scene. Nothing was ever the same after - the community of creators that had formed and thrived on the Amiga was unique, and while people moved on they did not find a proper alternative to reunite on. It's always good to see such articles about the Amiga, but it's a bittersweet feeling.
- C1sc0cat 8y agoWhen I first got a windows 3 machine at work (early 90's) it took about year to stop trying to drag down from the top of the screen to show the high res display. And I also used to be unofficial UK third line amiga support for PRESTEL and telecom gold - if they had some weirdness the normal help desk couldn't replicate
- 83457 8y agoI didn't get to try an Amiga growing up. What do you mean when saying "drag down from the top of the screen to show the high res display"?
- armitron 8y agoAmiga could support multiple "desktops" with different resolutions at the same time. You could (partially or fully) expose a different desktop by dragging the titlebar at the top of the screen. Here is a demo: https://youtu.be/H86miOXXS48?t=534 https://youtu.be/H86miOXXS48?t=534
- ekianjo 8y agoYeah, it's actually a hack that is well explained in the book "The Future was Here". It's not real desktops since it only works on the vertical axis. But even though, it was massively impressive compared to what other computers could do at the time.
- icedchai 8y agoI used to have an Amiga 500 with a RAM upgrade and HD (3 megs RAM, 30 meg HD. This was amazing for 1989!) I then later upgraded to a 3000 sometime in 1991. I foolishly sold the 3000 in college, and my parents gave away the 500. I also taught myself C programming on the Amiga. I got Lattice C, before it became SAS, for Christmas one year! This was back when software came on dozens of floppy disks and had huge spiral bound manuals. I love retro stuff. I wish I kept all of it.
- Kurtz79 8y agoI had no idea you could expand the RAM up to 3 Megs! I remember I had to save for months to be able to buy the meager 512KB "brick": https://goo.gl/images/jUzQVD https://goo.gl/images/jUzQVD It allowed me to play The Secret of Monkey Island, so it was totally worth it :)
- icedchai 8y agoNeat. I had that internal 512K expansion, and also a "Supra" brand SCSI controller and RAM expansion that attached to the left side. It gave me another 2 megs. It looked something like this: https://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=1245 https://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id...
- thomnottom 8y agoI remember being at a computer show in the late 80s/early 90s as a teen. The kind of place that you went to see new tech showed off by major brands (IBM, Intel, and MS were there), but also to get good deals from vendors on components instead of ordering through magazines. Anyway, I'm waiting in line to price out a motherboard, when this big guy walks up and buys 5 or so of the most expensive ones. People were pretty surprised and someone asked what he was building. He said they were going to be burning them later that day, something about "Amiga makes it, Intel makes it stupid." Made me think there was something seriously wrong with the people who used Amigas. That was probably my first experience with the toxic fanboy mentality. I realized much later how much that had turned me off from any kind of user community. It makes me a little sad/jealous when I read about people having such fond memories of those times and communities, because I never tried to join in.
- PavlovsCat 8y agoMust have been a false flag operation by an Atari ST user, Amiga users would never do that! Damn Atari ST users, always trying to make Amiga users look bad. I was probably too young to notice any of the "community stuff". Through scrolltexts or readme files I had an idea that there were people communicating and swapping, but for us kids, all that was needed to "join the community" was to have an Amiga, and/or games and demos. We might play mostly on the Amiga, but we weren't looking down on other systems, if it was fun, we were down. E.g. my friend's dad had a Spectrum CPC, so we tried all games we could manage to run on that, too (it didn't matter if they had "worse graphics" if they were fun and different from the games we already knew), and I played a lot of Empire Deluxe on the PC of another friend. I did have an "Intel Outside" Workbench background image for a while though :D
- thomnottom 8y agoHaha The fact that my dad worked for IBM and was able to procure my first computer from an office closure pretty much guaranteed my platform of "choice" anyway.
- gdubs 8y agoFor anyone too young to understand the fascination, the Amiga was far ahead of its time but suffered a premature death due to the gross mismanagement of the Comodore corporation. In the early 90s, non-linear digital editing for film and TV (as well as graphics, and titles) was limited to specialized machines that cost, literally, millions of dollars in 90s money. With an add-on product called the Video Toaster, these functions could be done on an Amiga — for a price affordable to many public access broadcasters. Lightwave3D which began as part of the video toaster brought 3d graphics to a ton of people — again, at a time when an SGI and something like wavefront would run around $40k. Lightwave was used to great effect for shows like Star Trek TNG, Babylon 5, etc. Even ILM used it for some shots theatrical releases, if I recall correctly. Then there was the huge demo scene and gaming cohort which pushed the Amiga to do things that seemed like they shouldn’t have been possible. An awesome time for personal computing.
- rossdavidh 8y agoI think it is somewhat like the fascination with historical figures who were assassinated. Had the Amiga simply lived out its commercial life and then gotten obsolete in a normal way, there would not be the sense of potential squandered, and thus perhaps not the ongoing fascination.
- Brockenstein 8y agoOh I dunno, fascination with a device ahead of it's time is always there, even if it lived a good life. And some people like history, or specific parts of history.
- rossdavidh 8y agoI am also remembering that the Amiga was "killed" several more times by the bankruptcy process, as the IP rights to it went through legal limbo and then through a series of companies that failed to rejuvenate it or market it properly. Gateway Computers was the biggest profile name on that list, but there were several.
- tCfD 8y agoJust a minor clarification - the Video Toaster was a switcher, a broadcast quality paint box, and could facilitate regular linear editing but did not have non-linear capabilities. It wasn't until much later, nearly at the point at which the Amiga had ceased to exist and become at best a peripheral of the video toaster rather than the other way around, did the video toaster gain NLE capabilities in the form of another product the Video Toaster Flyer. Source: video toaster serial number 000009 lived in my personal A2000.
- ollie87 8y agoHeh I donated my old A1200, all the games, and Philips monitor to the The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park, UK. Sort of wish I still had it, Monkey Island was in such good condition it was nearly BNIB condition. At the same time my dad donated his pristine Apple ][ in it's original box no less!
- cronix 8y ago> Sort of wish I still had it, Monkey Island was in such good condition it was nearly BNIB condition. You can still play those games with an emulator, like FS-UAE. All of the games (and apps) are around if you search. I've been having lots of fun lately lol.
- iosjunkie 8y agoAs someone who cut my teeth on an A500, I have quite the soft spot for all things Amiga. I came across a wonderful documentary of the Amiga saga on Youtube: Amiga Story by Nostalgia Nerd Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws3DJF7MbMU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws3DJF7MbMU Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcXcy2b1dRM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcXcy2b1dRM
- smacktoward 8y agoI would love to find a modern USB joystick in the form factor of that Competition Pro. Alas, these days, the only joysticks anyone seems to make are giant hulking flightsticks.
- cr0sh 8y agoI didn't grow up on the Amiga; I cut my teeth on the TRS-80 Color Computer line (2 & 3). My first brush with an Amiga (outside of a demo at a Babbages in the mall) was thru a guy I knew in high school who had one for video editing. He showed me (and others in our group - I had helped form a "Color Computer Users Group" and we met at this guy's house) a graphics demo - which completely blew me away. This was probably sometime in 1989 or so. After high school, and a year in a tech voc school (where I also got to use Amigas, because at the time industrial electronics used the 68k for controllers, so we had to learn how to code and interface to them - so we used an Amiga as the platform for that), I started my first software engineering gig, and at some point I convinced my employer (a small mom-n-pop shop) to lend me the money to buy an Amiga. I ended up getting an Amiga 2000 with a monitor and hard drive. I stayed on at that place long enough for them to give me two more loans (which got completely paid back); first for an Amiga 1200, then last for an Acer 486 PC (fell in love with Myst at Best Buy). I still have both Amigas, the monitor (1040s), software, tons of Fred Fish floppies...lol. I don't know if any of it still works; I haven't fired any of it up in decades. I got out of the Amiga around 1992 or so, and moved on to Windows. I honestly wished I had discovered Linux at the time, but it wasn't on my radar (I had some experience with Unix, specifically AIX and RS6000 hardware - at that first employer). I didn't discover Linux until 1995. Which I found to be a close experience to what I recall on the Amiga (it's more a feeling thing for me - definitely nothing like the graphics, sound, software, etc - but the discovery and freedom, that wasn't as there with Windows). Today, about the only thing I do with Amiga is occasionally purchase the latest version of Amiga Forever - at some point I want to build a dedicated emulation box running it.
- axilmar 8y agoWhile the Amiga was a very good 2d graphics machine, it really sucked hard in 3d. While the world was preparing for 3d, Commodore brought us ...CD32. If the Amiga had a good 3d polygon rasterizer chip in the beginning of the 90s, it may have been alive today.