Are you new to the Amiga or old timer person to the Amiga.??????

[Retrofan]

New timer here. I never had one, not even a C=64 in the days, but I always wanted one as some of my partners had, and I also was using them (C64's) at school, learning basic (yes, I'm that old, 45). I only had an speccy then; 1984 and a lot of wonderful years more, as I keep it.

4 years ago I bought a broken C=64 with the idea of using it with a keyrah as a keyboard for my pc, but then I had the bad idea of repairing it.... and later a friend told me about the Amigas, and then I had another bad idea about searching in Wikipedia what was "that" as I never had seen one in person; no idea about the models and so.

Few time later another bad idea about getting one on Ebay; Complete A1200 boxed pack for 50 pounds from a Dr...

I started a good year, as mostly Cammy and sometimes Rebel used to be here and give tips and teaching about a lot of things.

Yes, I'm the rarest in this thread or in this Forum even, but I've got the idea that I've contributed a bit to the community in the last four years, maybe even from the first week when I made a tray system Cd drive for my miggy with the bezel made of an spare trapdoor I got.

That's why I am here . I know some of my mates here look at me as a beginner, which I am still, although if you just look for example my incomplete signature (I can't write more) you can see I haven't lost much time.

[Mark Wright]

I'm an OAP (Old Amiga Person) who landed on Planet Amiga in late 1988, FINALLY becoming the proud owner of one of the first UK KS1.3 A500s. I'd looked on jealously for several months as, one by one, school friends gradually upgraded from 8-bits and Atari STs to Amigas. I absolutely had to have one, but acquisition of this expensive holy grail (£499 RRP in the pre-bundle era) for a 14-year-old from a working-class family (i.e me) would depend on my successful deployment of every teenage trick in the book of parental pestering... No need to spoiler-alert the fact that I obviously got there in the end!

If memory serves, capitulation was achieved within less than two months, joyously culminating in the arrival in my bedroom of a brand spanking new A500 with modulator (plus the indy retailer's bonus pack including Photon Paint, Goldrunner, Karate Kid 2 and some "PD" disks the type of which are nowadays sold on eBay as "blanks") AND! a new colour portable telly to plug it in to AND! all before Christmas 1988! Lucky me, eh?

Over the years, I knocked out a slew of low-key creative efforts in the field of demos, music, magazine articles/reviews and miscellaneous aborted projects. I made records using my Amiga; I made a career in radio using my Amiga; I put my Amiga to lucrative use by identifying profitable niches that could be mined with the help of my trusty miggy. I remain (mostly) pleased that evidence of my tiny contribution(s) remain splattered all over the internet for all to see.

I eventually found myself being reluctantly dragged, kicking and screaming, into the world of Windows 95 - in 1996. As a hardened Amigan, and long-time Windows refusenik, this was something I'd resisted for as long as possible, but the switch was enevitable given the demands of my work requirements at the time. I could have moved sooner, but I deliberately held out as long as I could, waiting for word that a rumoured project had finally become a practical reality...

First and foremost, my brand spanking new 1996-vintage, P120, Windows 95 PC was necessarily set-up/optimised for the high-fidelity audio recording/editing/sequencing needed for work - but what else could it do? I'd heard that, with the appliance of certain alchemy, one could make it "be" an Amiga. In much the same way that I'd made my (dearly departed) souped-up A1200 "be" a ZX Spectrum (thanks to ZXAM) and a C64 (thanks to Magic64). Really..? Wow, really though?! HOW!?!!

The hobby of Amiga emulation consumed me entirely for a period of eighteen months - spanning late 1996 through to mid 1998. Upon the discovery of UAE, I was immediately fixated. The whole notion of being able to revive the "essence" of my beloved Amiga on a (grudgingly) modern platform very quickly became an obsession of mine. I launched the (controversial) website LAZARUS in 1997, initially to seek out like-minded others, and to act as benefactor for the then-miniscule community. During its existence, LAZARUS enjoyed not only massive popularity but also unfortunate notoriety. I was quite relieved when it was finally put to rest, its job done, in 1999.

Still reading? Blimey!

I bought an A1200 off eBay a few years ago and put an HD in it, filling it with WHDLoad-ified goodness, but never used it so sold it on. I got the bug again last year and bought an A600 in order to get back into OctaMED with zero-latency compared to emulation, but couldn't remember any of the commands or keys to press... for shame... so now it gathers dust. These days I mostly reminisce courtesy of YouTube watching things like this:

[ Show youtube player ]

and this:

[ Show youtube player ]

<rocks in chair... to and fro... rocks in chair.. t.... zzzzzzzz... zzzzzz.>

[B14ck W01f]

Most of the members of EAB are old timers, expect me. I wish there was an "English C64 Board".

[Oli_HD]

I got my first Amiga new in 1993 from Calculus (clearance CDTV Pro, my parents thought it was more practical than the CD32 I wanted.)

Im not a fan of the new Amigas, I like the hardware of the classic Amiga (It got me into electronics which has shaped my life waaay more than it should have) where as the new Amiga's are PC's with PPC chips, not interesting at all.

aros was great back in Os3.5 days where its updates was being back ported to the Amiga and its very cool to have an open source version of the Amiga OS but my PC is my work tool, my Amiga is my play thing and they shouldnt mix.

UAE is fricking amazing though and although I dont use it much Im very glad its here.

My favorite Amiga is the A4000T, it was the best thats ever been made and back in the day I drooled over the adverts sooo much, it seemed so powerful then but is still very nice to use now.

I lov ethe retro Amiga scene, all the DIY projects and hacking. Ive been to hackspaces and their groups have nothing compaired to what we have. Also love demoscene and I still grin when I hear Amigaaaaaaaaa

[willbloke]

Returning old timer i guess ?

Got a A500 in 89 , used it till I started University in 95 , got given an A1200 a couple of years back , fitted hard drive and loaded games onto it with CF card .

Just going to look at A600 and genlock !

[edd_jedi]

Originally Posted by Mark Wright

for a 14-year-old from a working-class family (i.e me) would depend on my successful deployment of every teenage trick in the book of parental pestering... No need to spoiler-alert the fact that I obviously got there in the end!

Yes similar story here, as a 13 year old in 1994 surviving on a paper round there was no way I could afford to buy myself an A1200, I couldn't even afford to buy games : I never had pocket money and my parents had modest incomes so the only way I could wangle it was to convince them it would help with school, and I did so by passing the 11+ and getting in to the local grammar school. I actually wanted to go to the local rough comprehensive school where all my mates were going. If that had happened I would never have got an Amiga, and I would also definitely not have the job I have now!

[trydowave]

Old timer. Started off with my beloved C64 around 1984 (I think). Got it from a camera shop in Watford called SRS. It was partly a game shop at that time in the late 80s early 90s.
After looking for some C64 games my eye caught a demo running on something that looked like a large C64C. That demo was Shadow of the Beast and the machine was the A500.
Once I saw it I knew I HAD to have that computer and THAT game! So I brought it straight away. £35 from WHSmith; collectors edition with t shirt. God knows how many time I read the manual and the back of the box to that game.
Few months later I even got to play it on a fiends Amiga. The flights of fantasy pack, along with Rainbow islands, planet of the robot monsters and F29 Retaliator. Happy days.

In the meantime I was on a massive saving quest! I was a poor kid and my mum scrimped and saved for my second hand C64 for a Christmas present. I was going to buy a brand new amiga myself and at the time it was £399. A huge amount of money for me (then and now

Got my first job when I was 14 years old working at a fish mongers/butchers place cleaning up all sorts of horrid stuff and generally getting abuse from all the adults around me in order to earn my massive £20 a week.

Took me a year to save up for the Screen Gems pack. I felt quite proud of myself when I got it home and set it up for the first time. A great pack that I still have a lot of fondness for.
Shadow of the Beast II blew me away and me and my sister loved playing Nightbreed the Interactive movie. The other games, Back to the Future II and Days of thunder. The less said about them the better.

I sort of drifted away from the amiga after owning the CD32. Even though I liked the machine it was obvisous commodore had lost the plot and they simply couldn't compete with the competition. Owned the Snes, Neo Geo and megadrive but never the playstation and beyond. 3D stuff never did it for me.

After a break I got into PC gaming in the early to mid 2000s with HL2 etc all the way until about a few years back. Then modern PC and Console gaming started to bore me to tears. I then decided to get all my old gear back.

Today im the proud owner of 2 C64 breadbins, 3 C64cs, 2 Amiga 500s (incl the screen gems pack) an A600HD and my fully kitted out A1200 all connected to a large CRT and aluminium brushed amp for that true retro feeling. Missed them and Im glad to have them back

[Cpt. Hindsight]

Another old timer here.
My first electronic gaming gears were the Universum TV-Multi Spiel 2006 with a light rifle and another Pong console that included a bike game (forgot the name) in the late 70's. They were sold to have the money for an Atari VCS. In '84 I got a C64 with a datassette (which was not a good idea since all my mates had a 1541). In '88 I bought an Amiga 500 from the money I earned in my apprenticeship. The money I got for leaving the army (sounds funny, but that's what they did at the Bundeswehr back then) was invested in a brand-new Amiga 1200, which was expanded with a '030 card and a cd-rom later on. It was sold around '98.

I restarted with original Amigas two years ago and am the proud owner of two A 500s (one with a HxC Rev. C) and an Amiga 1200 (with 4GB CF HD and an ACA1220) again.

Hey

Old timer I suppose. I am 35 years old, and got (well my Dad got) the Batman Pack A500 in December 1989. I was 10 years old, going on 11.

I loved it, and used it daily for the next 6 years. I learned how to use DPaint, program in AMOS, got really into the demo scene, taught myself how to do use a tracker (which I still use today, with Renoise), extract mods from demos and games, etc etc.

Best machine ever.

My Dad sold it, during a period of financial strife (I had kind of stopped using it so much around 1995 when I got more into girls, beer, bikes, etc).

I then bought an A1200 when I was 19, at Uni, and still have it to this day. It is not used though, and I haven't touched it for over a decade.

Decided to get back into it all, and finally teach myself Assembler, which seemed to cool and mysterious back when I was a kid, so that is what brought me here recently. I have WINUAE installed and am reading through a guide to 68k now, ready to unleash my creativity. Haha. If anyone can help out with Assembler, or point me in the direction of good tutorials, etc, that would be cool.

Anyway, cheers everyone!

[TCD]

I'm a late old timer Got my C64 in 1986 and my (first) Amiga 500 in 1989. I used my Amiga a lot until 1994 and after getting my first PC still on and off until 1996. Discovered WinUAE around 2003 and really liked it. Still got another A500 in 2009, but can't say that I use it very often. Today I'm a happy FS-UAE/OAGD.net user

[Photon]

Oldtimer. First laid my eyes and hands on an A500 in xmas break 87/88, before that A1000 at school but only Nebulus, speech synth and AmigaBasic..., the demo phenomenon had not quite reached us yet. So it didn't sink in what the Amiga could do from just Workbench use and a couple of games. Left the scene 1992-2005 but came back via WinUAE actually, soon had a working A500

While I support anything new that furthers the Commodore-Amiga platform, the Nextgen stuff is kind of a branch off that platform and well, I never got into that so I don't follow it as much.

[Ox.]

I'm an Old Amigan, got mine back in June 1987 (A500) just after they were released in the UK, before that I had an Atari ST M with separate floppy drive, before that a C128, then C64, Then ZX spectrum 48k, then Atari 2600 VCS. First game console was Binatone pong thing in the late 70's.

After the Amiga I had an expanded CD32 and then mostly PC's and a few other consoles, I've only recently decided to get back into retro-gaming with real iron and loving it, although it's not been without it's pitfalls.

Loving the modern storage and other solutions adapted for the old machines, I just simply wouldn't be doing this if I had to go back to cabinets full of disks/tapes.

Originally Posted by trydowave

Old timer. Started off with my beloved C64 around 1984 (I think). Got it from a camera shop in Watford called SRS. It was partly a game shop at that time in the late 80s early 90s.
After looking for some C64 games my eye caught a demo running on something that looked like a large C64C. That demo was Shadow of the Beast and the machine was the A500.
Once I saw it I knew I HAD to have that computer and THAT game! So I brought it straight away. £35 from WHSmith; collectors edition with t shirt. God knows how many time I read the manual and the back of the box to that game.
Few months later I even got to play it on a fiends Amiga. The flights of fantasy pack, along with Rainbow islands, planet of the robot monsters and F29 Retaliator. Happy days.

In the meantime I was on a massive saving quest! I was a poor kid and my mum scrimped and saved for my second hand C64 for a Christmas present. I was going to buy a brand new amiga myself and at the time it was £399. A huge amount of money for me (then and now

Got my first job when I was 14 years old working at a fish mongers/butchers place cleaning up all sorts of horrid stuff and generally getting abuse from all the adults around me in order to earn my massive £20 a week.

Took me a year to save up for the Screen Gems pack. I felt quite proud of myself when I got it home and set it up for the first time. A great pack that I still have a lot of fondness for.
Shadow of the Beast II blew me away and me and my sister loved playing Nightbreed the Interactive movie. The other games, Back to the Future II and Days of thunder. The less said about them the better.

I sort of drifted away from the amiga after owning the CD32. Even though I liked the machine it was obvisous commodore had lost the plot and they simply couldn't compete with the competition. Owned the Snes, Neo Geo and megadrive but never the playstation and beyond. 3D stuff never did it for me.

After a break I got into PC gaming in the early to mid 2000s with HL2 etc all the way until about a few years back. Then modern PC and Console gaming started to bore me to tears. I then decided to get all my old gear back.

Today im the proud owner of 2 C64 breadbins, 3 C64cs, 2 Amiga 500s (incl the screen gems pack) an A600HD and my fully kitted out A1200 all connected to a large CRT and aluminium brushed amp for that true retro feeling. Missed them and Im glad to have them back

This has probably been said before a million times but, if only Commodore hadn't lost the plot eh?

[LieutLaww]

If only is true, I loved my original Amiga 500 then my 1200, it would have been nice to know if we would still have had some sort of Amiga or other Commodore product today.

[Galahad/FLT]

I'm an old timer, got my first Amiga in 1988, but took a while to get there.

Had a BBC Model B, used it when I was younger, but kind out of 'outgrew' computers, which turned out to be a lie. It wasn't until I saw some stuff on Amiga that I though "Holy fuck, thats light years ahead of the BBC Micro!"

So, I had a chat with my dad, proposed he bought me an Amiga, and I pay him my wages from my part time job at Tesco.

And to my surprise, he agreed to it!!

So off we went looking for Amigas..... sold out everywhere. Went into Tandys (remember them kids? Americans call them Radio Shack), and the had Atari ST's with TWENTY GAMES!!!!!!!

"Yes sir, the ST is just like an Amiga but has 20 free games, you don't get that with the Amiga...... er, stereo sound? Yes, and it might be as many as 4096 colours!"

So, I settled for an ST.......oh...... dear!

No matter what I did, I couldn't get it to output in stereo, I had it for two weeks when my Dad came into my room and saw the look on my face.

"Whats up son?"
"er, well I don't want to sound ungrateful, but this thing sounds worse than the BBC Micro, it doesn't sound anything like an Amiga, everything is slow and jerky."
"so what are you saying?"
"The bloke in the shop lied dad, its a load of crap, everything is in a tiny window and it sounds awful and the scrolling makes my eyes water!"
"So what do you want me to do about it?"
"Erm, any chance we can take it back and go and get a proper computer?"
Pause........ "Suppose we could, I haven't shouted at a shopkeeper for a few months, pack it all up and we'll take it back."

Bought a second hand 1.2 A500 with lots of 'shush don't tell anyone' disks for £300 (still got it fact fans!), and even my old man was marginally impressed.

I had the Black Monks crack of R-Type, he set the computer up whilst I was at school and it took him half an hour to figure out how to get through the trainer menu (neither of us had used a mouse before), and even he commented that the title music was "pretty bloody good actually".

And the rest, people kind of know. I cracked stuff, I wrote stuff for software companies, I helped software companies, I met a few people in the industry that I cracked their games.....oh the laughs we had! :/

So, pretty old then!

[Washac]

Old timer here, got my first Amiga in 198? think I paid about £400 for a nice shiny new 500, it came with from what I recall Defender of the Crown and Goldrunner, think there was something else but cannot recall what, long time ago now. Sold that machine and invested in a 1200 which I still have to this day, have since got hold of another couple of 500s, and a 1200.

[Photon]

Yes, I know this is an Amiga forum and don't want to make too much of it, but these are selected excerpts sort of matching my experience

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

"Yes sir, the ST is just like an Amiga but has 20 free games, you don't get that with the Amiga...... er, stereo sound? Yes, and it might be as many as 4096 colours!"

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

"The bloke in the shop lied dad, its a load of crap, everything is in a tiny window and it sounds awful and the scrolling makes my eyes water!"
"Erm, any chance we can take it back and go and get a proper computer?"

I actually had (limited) experience with an Amiga 1000 before buying my ST (with single-sided 360K drive!), but "fell" for the same thing. The big factor was that Amiga 500s hadn't reached my town yet, and an Amiga 1000 cost (hold on to your seats) 1300 EUR (down from 2100 EUR! bargain!).

So I sold my MSX and with money that I'd saved, I bought an ST before the Xmas holidays. I do recognize the feeling of a letdown for the price when playing the games. Memory of some clipart fish I printed on my matrix printer, which my parents framed and hung in their bedroom but honeymoon ended swiftly.

Then just after, of course a mate at school showed me his Amiga 500 and after a month of saving another 100 EUR, the store actually took the ST back. And I lived happily ever after. Well, except for the dark witch of the north PC period haha :P

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

I'm an old timer, got my first Amiga in 1988, but took a while to get there.


Bought a second hand 1.2 A500 with lots of 'shush don't tell anyone' disks for £300 (still got it fact fans!), and even my old man was marginally impressed.

That's answered what i was going to ask you in that other cracking thread if you still had any real Amiga hardware or whether you were all emulation these days. What other Amiga hardware do you still have?

I really can't remember what happened to my old A1200 but i figure i must've sold it when i bought my first A4000. I killed that one and had to replace it with a second A4000 and i think I threw them out (one still working as far as I remember) around 2002.

[Cooljerk]

I saw an Amiga once back in about 1991. Just once. I was going to a birthday party and I stopped by the kid's house early, and he showed me lemmings running on what I'm fairly sure was an A500. Never saw or heard of them again for years.

I'm in the US, by the by.

I got into the Amiga about 2 years ago on a whim. I'm a retrogaming collector, and I do demoscene programming. I obviously knew about commodore's history in demoscene, which got me interested. Started dinking around in WinUAE and Amiga forever one saturday afternoon on a folly, and, well, a few weeks later I had a CD32 and A1200 ordered and shipped to me

I wrote Racketboy.com's article on amiga collecting. Really love these machines! I wish I had been apart of the amiga community during its heyday.

[TMR]

i s'pose i'd count as an oldtimer; my 8-bit history is VIC 20 to Atari 800XL and C64 (i still code for all three and consider myself to primarily be an 8-bit bunny) then got a second hand A500 with Kickstart 1.2 from a cousin which is still in my dad's garage. Then i got a job selling computers and am proud to say that i never even once lied to a customer to sell them an Atari ST - we used to leave Shadow Of The Beast running on the Amiga 2000, 520STFM and C64 and most make their own minds up and sold more C64s than STs! =-)

That job paid for an A590 (which eventually died but is, again, still in that shed) before i upgraded to an 8Mb A1200 '030 which is now CF converted and has a registered copy of WHDLoad installed. There's also a stock A1200 with a 4Mb expansion again with CF and WHDLoad which used to belong to the shop, a CD32, the A500 Plus someone gave me and a 2Mb A600HD with CF that i take to gaming events like the Play Expo to showcase newly released games.

And now i feel old. =-)

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by Phantasm

That's answered what i was going to ask you in that other cracking thread if you still had any real Amiga hardware or whether you were all emulation these days. What other Amiga hardware do you still have?

I really can't remember what happened to my old A1200 but i figure i must've sold it when i bought my first A4000. I killed that one and had to replace it with a second A4000 and i think I threw them out (one still working as far as I remember) around 2002.

I've still got every Amiga I ever bought, but in all honesty, I do it through emulation at the moment, although coincidentally that is about to change with an A600 with processor card and hard drive as the A1200 is too big to fit on the PS4 or PS3.

As for Amiga hardware, I still have: 4 or 5 A1200's, 2x A4000's (ex Gremlin), 1 A600, 3 A500, 1 CD32 (somewhere) and a B2000.

To my eternal shame I junked an A1000 back in 2000, I knew it was a mistake at the time, but hey, you make mistakes!