15 replies to this topic

[MaximumRD]

Please post a comment answering the following: 

1. Your first exposure / introduction to THE COMMODORE AMIGA.
2. What attracted you to the AMIGA platform.
3. How did you use your AMIGA computer?

 

 

Let's kick off the new AMIGA Forum with a celebration of our favorite Amiga memories!

 

With this new category I really wish I could post images or talk about my own AMIGA hardware as it has always been my personal favorite classic computer. The sad fact is I just do not have any (other than possibly a mouse and a few floppies and CD's of software) but I wanted to kick off this section in a great way, celebrating our best memories of the Commodore Amiga!

 

Let's start with an "open tag" video I made on YouTube when a viewer invited me to respond with a video on my best Amiga memories and the 3 questions above. Of course for posting here nobody is expected or obligated to respond with a video but if any of you have personal history with the wonderful AMIGA platform please fell free to comment and share.

 

Thanks in advance to all who participate!  

 

 

 

 

Original Video Description

Your AMIGA RELATED MEMORIES GIVE THEM TO ME!

This is an OPEN TAG calling upon any and all AMIGA fans! PLEASE comment or better yet do a Video Response and share YOUR AMIGA related memories.

 

 

 

 

Please Stay On Topic To Sharing Your AMIGA Memories

 

Please stay on topic to sharing your Amiga memories. This is not a discussion about specs, dates, or a roster of engineer names. Remember we welcome and support all retro and classic platforms here. Old rivalries between Atari / Amiga must be left at the door and are not part of this discussion.  Feel free to respond in your own way to the 3 questions posted above.

 

 

 

[Rowsdower70]

I wish I could add to this topic, but unfortunately the Amiga was always just out of reach for me growing up.   By the time I was in high school, I had so many friends who were Apple junkies, and thought the Apple II G/S was the bee's knees.    I knew the Amiga would be a better machine if I could just get my paws on one!

I can still remember the first time I saw graphic renderings from the Amiga.  I was blown away by the realism.   I specifically remember the picture of King Tut's sarcophagus. 

[RickR]

For those that don't know...the Amiga is the true successor to the Atari 2600 -> 8 bit hardware. It was designed by former Atari engineers (led by Jay Miner) and was originally designed to be a game console.

[Yo-Yo]

 

Your AMIGA RELATED MEMORIES GIVE THEM TO ME! This is an OPEN TAG calling upon any and all AMIGA fans! PLEASE comment or better yet do a Video Response and share YOUR AMIGA related memories.

Please answer the following: 
1. Your first exposure / introduction to THE COMMODORE AMIGA.
2. What attracted you to the AMIGA platform.
3. How did you use your AMIGA computer?

THANKS IN ADVANCE ANY AND ALL WHO PARTICIPATE!

 

 

 

 

 

1. My first exposure was in a catalog. I saw it and thought it was cool. Then my friend's family had one. His dad did something with video production but I'm not sure if that's why they had the Amiga or not.

 

2. I was attracted to the Amiga because of its graphics and price. I had never seen graphics like that on a computer before. Most all computers were IBM PCs at the time. They had green monochrome screens and most of them were running DOS and had DOS prompts. Not really for gaming. We had Apple II computers in school which were really awesome, but the graphics were about the same as Atari. Macintosh had just come out around that time. I liked the Mac but it had nothing on Amiga and it was so overblown. It had a black and white screen and it was not really made for playing games. Plus it was so expensive. Amiga felt like the first true 16-Bit game system. Probably because thats what it was meant to be when it was being developed for Atari. It would have been their new game system by 1986, ahead of PC Engine, Genesis, everything.....

 

3. I used my Amiga computer to PLAY GAMES!! My favorite Amiga games at the time were Lemmings, R-Type, Cannon Fodder, Out Run, Golden Axe, and The Secret of Monkey Island

[Lost Dragon]

I was blown away with Amiga Desert Strike, the original being 1 of the 1st MegaDrive games i'd bought and fallen in love with, but they took the audio to an entire new level with the Amiga version, i had the Amiga hooked up to my speakers and the place was in danger of falling down around my ears

 

 

Just awesome.

[Lost Dragon]

As was:

 

Walker:

 

[Lost Dragon]

And Banshee:

 

Needless to say i used my Amiga 1200 purely for games, but with games like these i'd of been made not to of :-)

[MaximumRD]

All fine examples of AMIGA games for sure. Of course games were a HUGE thing for me using my AMIGA especially since back then for some time my main gaming machines were the AMIGA in before, after and in between my ownership of various 8 -16bit consoles while both living at home and later on my own many times if it had not been for my a500 and later the a1200 I would not of had a gaming platform at all. During this time sadly I would go through many downhill moments in finances having to sell or trade consoles and computers those many years ago but honestly and thank goodness for my own sanity whenever I had an AMIGA in my possession at the very least I was not wanting for games. I had like many a huge assortment of floppies a friend or two would supply me with copies of all the latest hit games and add to that all the PD / Shareware / Freeware etc I could "obtain" for little more than the price of a floppy disc and they would all auto-boot straight from floppy and I owned a nice little external floppy drive to go along with the internal so even multi-disc titles were not too troublesome. 
 
I also had a set of little amplified speakers hooked up ( I think many owners did ) so all these free, cheap games with stereo sound and great bass pumping sound. thousands of colors, layered scrolling etc accounted for endless entertainment. Whenever a friend, roommate etc popped by the first reaction (I would usually have a bass heavy motion captured demo playing) would be "What system is that?" or funny enough "What kind of PC is that?" , which even though was a fair enough term to use for an AMIGA I knew they specifically meant it as in "What kind of Windows machine is that?" so needless to say I always took much pleasure in going into my whole presentation about this platform that was little known or used in Canada comparatively speaking but pretty much totally unknown to 99% of the people I knew personally. To say I took joy in explaining how I had this unknown machine that had stereo sound, 4096 colors, parallax scrolling, multi tasking with everything running smoothly in 1/2 MB of RAM would be an understatement   Good times that I admit I have missed for many years, thank goodness for emulation (obviously I am NOT saying it is any kind of replacement) but at the very least it allows me to once again experience a platform that for me these days in my small part of Canada is just a little too pricey and rare to indulge in as I would like.

[Keatah]

My first foray into the Amiga platform was in the fall of 1985. I learned about through Byte and AmigaWorld. It was totally cool reading about a system so different than the 8-bit hobbyist computers I was used to working with. And it looked on-par with the Mac, with color. But the Mac was too expensive. So I got an A1000, 2nd drive, 256K memory module, and 1080 monitor from Farnsworth Computers near Oakbrook Mall. Despite it only costing me $1495, it didn’t work out for me for numerous reasons.

 

Mainly the system was way too new and nothing was available for it. And no one had them, let alone knew what one was. I had TextCraft and GraphiCraft, but it wasn’t enough. They seemed to be too different from what I was accustomed to.

 

Luckily I was able to sell it back to the store for about $1250. I took the money and bought some Team Associated RC car stuff among other things.

 

The second time around was in the fall of 1987 and based on the A500 + 512K/Clock expansion + 1084s monitor. This cost somewhere between $600 and $700. I got it from some place in Barrington called Protecto Enterprises or some store affiliated with them. It was like a warehouse in a barn - IIRC.

 

Shortly thereafter I also got a Digi-View digitizer and PhotonPaint. Got them from Software+ in Hanover Park / Streamwood. This was more like it now! These two tools made the whole platform cool and really worth it. I had loads of fun. I learned plenty of foundational techniques such as color mixing, dithering, brushes, cutting and pasting images, colorization, among all the special features contemporary “paint” programs of the day showcased. I also learned about what would become mainstay graphic formats and how to handle them and convert between them. Many of the techniques I learned on DeluxePaint, DigiPaint, and PhotonPaint have carried over nicely to modern-day Photoshop and Lightroom.

 

HAM mode was my favorite to work with because of the subtle shades of colors. And then eventually SHAM. And my style of working was to grab a digitized image, mod it, colorize it, and mix several of them together. Sometimes just using the camera to input shapes and shadows. Just enough to get perspective and an idea of the interplay of light in a scene. While I could do that stuff on the Apple II, with similarly styled graphic paint programs, the resolution and color mixing was severely limited by what was essentially 1970's hobbyist-class hardware. So I kept the Apple II for productivity, word processing, modems & BBSing, and other miscellaneous tasks while transitioning graphic work to the Amiga.

 

I was inspired by James Blinn from JPL. I ended up doing sci-fi art, and other futurism material in the same style. Animation didn’t matter too much to me at the time and the Video Toaster/Flyer was way out of my price range anyways.

 

I never got much into gaming on the Amiga. No one in my geographical area had one. So supply was limited. But we thoroughly enjoyed Flight Simulator II, Jet, F/A-18 Interceptor, Terrorpods, F-29 Retaliator, Marble Madness, and a few other assorted games. Often times till 1am in the morning.

 

So I continued graphics work, pro-level and recreational, till about 1992-1993. At that time I moved ALL my work from the Apple II and Amiga onto the PC platform. Pretty much out of necessity. Industry standard file formats, data interchange, colleagues having the same platform, raw clock speed, more standardized word processing and communications features. All that stuff. It was about that time that the PC began to match the Amiga’s static image resolution and color gamut at a reasonable price.

 

Somewhere in that timeframe I discovered emulation, first for the Atari VCS and some arcade games. Then more. Over the next 2 decades emulation grew to cover all the early 8 and 16 bit platforms. Amiga included.

 

In 2010 I sold the A500 and the few bits and pieces of hardware I had accumulated. I was beginning to feel the bulking strain of having too much old hardware around. All kinds of old hardware. Emulation was good enough to run the software I had in the 80’s and so that was that.

 

Today I dabble in the Amiga ecosphere from time to time via WinUAE.

[Starbuck66]

I had a friend, and his dad owned an Amiga, that was really my first exposure to it. I remember playing Test Drive II: The Duel, Lemmings, Kings Quest V, Hoyle Book of Games Volume 2, and some of the Space Quest games on it. Later, I had an uncle mail me his old Amiga, and I used it for a while, mainly to play Ikari Warriors and some other games that came with it, but unfortunately I don't remember what the other titles were. Eventually he found out that I had a PC, and encouraged me to give the Amiga to another uncle that lived fairly close to me that didn't have a computer, so I went ahead and did that. 

 

I remember the graphics and sound being really good for the time. I specifically remember my friend's dad upgrading from his Apple II GS to the Amiga, then eventually to a 486 PC. Just wish I would have had more games and more time with mine for the brief moment it was in my hands.

[MaximumRD]

I had a friend, and his dad owned an Amiga, that was really my first exposure to it. I remember playing Test Drive II: The Duel, Lemmings, Kings Quest V, Hoyle Book of Games Volume 2, and some of the Space Quest games on it. Later, I had an uncle mail me his old Amiga, and I used it for a while, mainly to play Ikari Warriors and some other games that came with it, but unfortunately I don't remember what the other titles were. Eventually he found out that I had a PC, and encouraged me to give the Amiga to another uncle that lived fairly close to me that didn't have a computer, so I went ahead and did that. 

 

I remember the graphics and sound being really good for the time. I specifically remember my friend's dad upgrading from his Apple II GS to the Amiga, then eventually to a 486 PC. Just wish I would have had more games and more time with mine for the brief moment it was in my hands.

 

 

Thanks for sharing. 

[dauber]

Please post a comment answering the following: 
1. Your first exposure / introduction to THE COMMODORE AMIGA.

My first exposure to it was, I think, at a homecoming week activity in 1991 at my school. A friend of mine brought his Amiga 500 and arranged to borrow a large-screen projection TV and had his Amiga set up with that Pinball Dreams demo that was going around at the time. Now...my friend had been talking for a long time about getting an Amiga, and in fact he sold me a buttload of his Commodore 64 stuff for $10 when he got the Amiga. (Most of it was boxes of floppies that had...well....games with a "cracked by" message )
 

2. What attracted you to the AMIGA platform.

Started when the aforementioned friend was going on about how amazing Amiga is, what with multitasking, more reliable than Windows, etc. That friend (whose C64 stash included a modem) turned me on to the BBS scene, and there were a lot of Amiga users on the boards. I went to a couple of BBS parties and saw Amigas in action and was just blown away. I NEEDED to get an Amiga!

3. How did you use your AMIGA computer?

For everything, really. My first Amiga was an Amiga 600 -- just the basic $299 package...1 meg RAM, no hard drive, and packaged with Robocopy 3, Shadow of the Beast III, Myth, Graphics Workshop (a paint program that I never did use, and you really needed a hard drive or at least a second floppy drive to run), and Microtext (a word processor). My main dealer at the time was Tenex, based in Mishawaka, Indiana. I got my A600 from them, and later on I ordered a 40-megabyte hard drive for a nice price. They called me back and said they were out, so I got an 85-meg hard drive. For $250. (wow.)

But yeah, I used that Amiga for everything: games, word processing, BBSing, homework, you name it. It was my computer, so I HAD to use it for everything computing related.

Used it to do music a lot. In fact...when I was a senior in college, I had to take a TV production class for my major. (I was shy four credits and had a choice of either that or photography -- and you had to buy your own camera for that class, and as such was the *only* class in the whole course catalog that required you to buy your own equipment, so I chose TV.) There were three main projects in that course: a 5-minute project, a 15-minute project, and a 30-minute project. The 5-minute project was for groups of 2 and 3, while the other two were for the entire class as a single group, so for both the 15- and 30-minute projects we came up with a really cheesy soap opera. My contribution: music! I loaded up OctaMED and sequenced a theme song and some background music. Everybody thought it was a hoot! In fact...at the annual radio and TV awards banquet that night, I won a plaque for music composition -- the first time they ever had to award it.

Anyhoo....I really souped up that Amiga 600. I added another meg of RAM via the PCMCIA slot. Hard drive got upgraded multiple times. Eventually added an Apollo 030 accelerator and 8 megs of fast RAM. Upgraded from OS 2.05 to 2.1 and then to 3.1.

After I graduated college, I had a friend who was still a student where I went (I went to a local college), so I'd hang out with him over there sometimes. One of the instructors form the journalism department saw me and told me she was getting rid of the Amigas (a 3000 and several 500s) and getting Macs, and if I could help her out with something (I think catalogging software, if I remember correctly) I could take whatever I wanted. I brought another friend I knew from the Amiga community to help out. He claimed the 3000, and I grabbed a 500 and decided that the 500 would be my "upgrade project." After I realized that my 600 was already technically an upgrade project, I just kind of put the A500 to the side. Same friend who got the A3000 said he wanted to buy the 500 from me for his nephew, so I said sure...

In 1998 I upgraded to an Amiga 4000. Used that thing for even more stuff that I won't get into now, just too much to talk about!

2003 -- AmigaOne G3 boards were out, with a new operating system (AmigaOS 4). Bought a complete MicroAmiga1-C, which was literally the size of a shoebox. I loved that thing. I had been considering buying a PC just so I could keep up with the rest of the world in terms of learning programming and stuff, but after I got that PC, my wife and I were at a financial hardship that was aggravated by my wife getting screwed out of a paycheck, so to guarantee that we could make rent I sold off the MicroAmiga1. Broke my heart to do that, but I actually got $300 more than what I paid for it originally because OS4-compatible boards were harder to find than Jimmy Hoffa at the time, so they were in huge demand. (There is a company that's making Amiga OS4-compatible boards again, btw.) So my official Amiga life came to an end in 2006, after thirteen steadfast years of dedication. When my wife and I got back on our feet the following year I couldn't find another Amiga OS4 board, so I decided to try the Mac world, and within minutes of using my brand new MacBook (which still works like a charm to this day, just a few days shy of nine years later!), I was like..."Wait, what's Amiga again??" heh. (Truth be told, I really am missing Directory Opus...)

Edited by dauber, 19 December 2016 - 06:58 PM.

[MaximumRD]

AWESOME RESPONSE guys! And Duaber thanks for sharing! 

[TeddyGermany]

1. In those days (1986) i had a C64 and was curious about the new Amiga. In 1986 i saw my first A1000 in a Commodore-Shop and was totally flashed about Graphics, Sound and first of all the GUI. Back at home, the C64 was soo outdated! But the costs of 6000 Deutsche Mark were my way back to reality!

2.Everything about the girl. The Games and the possibilities of that machine.

3. 1989 i got my A500 and was happy about it. Playing games was certainly the destiny of that machine. 1991 i bought an A2000, which later got a Turboboard, 41 MB RAM. Graphics board, CDROM and two harddiscs. I used the machine for my studies in university. 1999 i changed to PC, because there were no support for Amiga anymore. Since last summer the A2000 is back on my desk and i am really surprised again and again, how comfortable the Amiga OS 3.1 was and is.

[MaximumRD]

3. 1989 i got my A500 and was happy about it. Playing games was certainly the destiny of that machine. 1991 i bought an A2000, which later got a Turboboard, 41 MB RAM. Graphics board, CDROM and two harddiscs. I used the machine for my studies in university. 1999 i changed to PC, because there were no support for Amiga anymore. Since last summer the A2000 is back on my desk and i am really surprised again and again, how comfortable the Amiga OS 3.1 was and is.

 

Thanks for waking up this thread  ,

 

I agree completely, even today (though sadly emulation) when I load up workbench I remember it like it was yesterday, I got pretty into that OS, I use to put my own custom versions of Workbench together on floppy with my a500 and would cram as much of my favorite programs onto the single WB boot disc, I would customize the colors and even, because I could and it impressed my PC friends, use startup commands to make the Amiga "speak" to me lol, so workbench would load up while saying something like "Hello Rob, what would you like to do today?", yes I was a nerd. I loved it though. BACK THEN, I could not understand why my friends were bothering with ISA conflicts, sound card incompatibilities etc. I loved just throwing in a game floppy and it just loaded by itself!  A sad ending of Commodore and AMIGA but I would not change a thing in my personal computing history, to this very day (I am 50 years old now) and I still have very vivid memories of my days with A500 and later A1200, nothing felt quite like an AMIGA before or since and it seems only users from back in the day really understand that.   

[TeddyGermany]

Compared with DOS and early Windows, the AmigaOS was lightyears ahead. Even rockhard PC-Users i knew in that time had agreed about that.