Buying an Amiga 30 years later
vintagewave.net
vintagewave.net
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 $40k. Lightwave was used to great effect for shows like Star Trek TNG, Babylon 5, etc. Even ILM used it for some shots theatrical releases, if I recall correctly.
Then there was the huge demo scene and gaming cohort which pushed the Amiga to do things that seemed like they shouldn’t have been possible.
An awesome time for personal computing.
And some people like history, or specific parts of history.
They could have been the "SGI for the masses"; if they'd really been able to push the idea of commodity hardware dedicated for gaming and effects they might have been first to market with gaming 3D accelerators.
Apple and PCs were easily selling for 1000$+, while a basic A500 started at 600/700$, it came with more advanced audio and video capabilities, and you could hook it up to a normal TV instead of a dedicated monitor.
It was also a great gaming machine that you could convince you parents to buy, since it was "useful for studying", unlike a console :)
For the interested (or nostalgic) Arstechnica had a retrospective in many parts:
Apart from its advanced functionality, I also have fond memories of the "feel" of the system. Others will probably describe this better than I ever could.
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.
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
Here is a demo: https://youtu.be/H86miOXXS48?t=534
For instance, if you have an interlaced mode showing under a non-interlaced mode, then the entire screen displays at ~480i (to use modern terms) with the non-interlaced portion doubling its scanlines. But if the interlaced screen gets covered up, then it snaps to ~240p non-scandoubled.
The biggest modern problem with this is that displays turn themselves off to resync on mode changes, which always annoyed me greatly.
Granted, today's computer systems can be used toward creative ends much more advanced than anything I ever saw done with an Amiga. It's not as if today's computers are lacking technologically. It's really the mindset, the community, the sheer joy, that seems to be gone.
My (current) 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!
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.
Always did want an A1200
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.
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
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).
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
Also, 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...
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
Amiga Story by Nostalgia Nerd
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.
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. :)
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.
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
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.
I cannot imagine how I could have spent day-long gaming sessions in front of that display.
Thanks!
It's been so long since I really concentrated on the A1200/Amiga stuff in general, I've forgotten most of it :)
An RGB monitor gives the highest quality picture, and allows you the widest selection of the Amiga's many display modes. Several types of analog RGB monitors can be used with the A1200, including multiscan, 15 KHz, and VGAlSVGA monitors. A multiscan (multiple horizontal scan rate or "multisync") RGB monitor provides the greatest flexibility. A multiscan monitor is required if you wish to use display modes that have different horizontal scan rates. A 15 KHz analog RGB monitor can display only the Amiga's default display mode and other 15 KHz scan rate modes. A VGA or SVGA type monitor can display the Amiga's de-interlaced and higher resolution modes, but not the standard 15 KHz video modes. Connect a 15 KHz monitor with a 23-pin female connector, such as the Commodore 1084 or 10848, directly to the A1200 VIDEO port. For a monitor such as a multiscan, VGA, or 8VGA model that has a small 15-pin VGA-style connector, connect the 23-pin to 15-pin adapter included with the A1200 to the VIDEO port, then connect the monitor cable to the adapter. With the proper adapter cable, a television with a SCART input can be used as a 15 KHz RGB monitor. See the "SCART Televisions" section below for more information.
These days I use the OSSC to convert the output, A device that barely introduces a few scanlines of latency and I can't recommend enough.
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.
I remember I had to save for months to be able to buy the meager 512KB "brick":
It allowed me to play The Secret of Monkey Island, so it was totally worth it :)
It looked something like this: https://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id...
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).
I loved my Amiga 500, so many joysticks destroyed by KickOff, Turrican, Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge...
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. :)
Atari ST were hardly seen, PC were mostly for school and work related tasks, with the Apple devices beyond reach to everyone not at the university shared labs campus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_Lib,_Inc.
Then Yamaha, Roland, SoundBlaster, ... and nowadays most people don't care what their audio chip looks like, unless they are doing professional audio.
Endless hours spent with Protracker. :)
I remeber a guy at school getting a MS-DOS driver that would drive the speaker in such a way that we could hear midi/mod files instead of the typical lousy beeps.
Still, it required lots of teenage imagination to think it sound anything worthwhile listening to.
An Amiga 500 was the first computer I bought with my own money - $NZ1900 (my entire life savings at 15). I taught myself C and never looked back.
But the window for Amgias was short. By about 1993 the price of the clones was dropping and they were starting to get fast enough to overcome their hardware limitations. Once MS started marketing Windows machines to home users (especially when Win95 came out) the market for Amigas dried up completely.
To illustrate, my parents would periodically drive me a few miles to a store that sold ST and Amiga software and magazines, mostly so I could buy a magazine and ruminate on which software to save up to buy. We could have gone right down the street had I been using a PC or Mac.
At the same time my dad donated his pristine Apple ][ in it's original box no less!
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.
If the Amiga had a good 3d polygon rasterizer chip in the beginning of the 90s, it may have been alive today.