Where are your 'friends' from the Amiga scene?

Many nights spent at Speedy Dennis/QTX's house trading DMS files, and playing on his Super NES...

I remember driving to Watford in the early hours one morning to pick up a 210mb hard drive from Sprogg to replace to much smaller one that came with the Amiga 500 HDD add-on.

[WayneK]

Do you remember getting busted in NJ and cooperating with the authorities to run a 'sting' BBS and bust lots of the scenes best cellphone hackers to save your own skin?

[DDNI]

Originally Posted by WayneK

Do you remember getting busted in NJ and cooperating with the authorities to run a 'sting' BBS and bust lots of the scenes best cellphone hackers to save your own skin?

BITCH FIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!


wheres me popcorn!

[alewis]

Freaz!!!! Woh, my man! You still "down south" mate? Christ, I have moved *so* many times since then!

Drop me a PM mate, and we'll have a natter!

[Merlin]

I knew a few of the Miggy and SNES crowd around Manchester, such as Little John, Mr. Blobby (of the Blobby CDs fame), Paul who used to run the LowLife BBS (whose handle I can't remember), Mark, who had the most amazing buzz-cut haircut I have ever seen, Voodoo (who may be pushing up the daisies now), I will add more as I remember them....

Merlin

[Methanoid]

Originally Posted by PMF

I remember driving to Watford in the early hours one morning to pick up a 210mb hard drive from Sprogg to replace to much smaller one that came with the Amiga 500 HDD add-on.

Good old Sprogg provided most of the HDs powering Arcadia's humongous 2gb BBS - at a time when the competition had 100mb!! Seems ridiculously small these days. Haven't seen Sprogg in years but I still see Plunderer (other co-sysop) all the time...

[onkelarie]

One amiga friend is still my friend, but he moved on to the PC world completely in '95... I lost contact with another Amiga friend unfortunately... I sometimes wonder what has become of him...

[DigitalQuirk]

I was an "Early Adopter" when the A500 came out; I still have the original Workbench 1.2 disk. All of my "Friends" didn't follow suit; they all went from a Commodore 64 to a PC compatible. The few people I met in life after that never stuck with the Amiga for very long. I attended a few DAUG meetings at the local high school (the user group in my area), but that club was short-lived and small compared to the local PC user group meetings that always filled a conference room in the Michael Starr building downtown. I did convince my neighbour, a real estate agent, to get an Amiga 500, but it wouldn't run the MLS software he needed and quickly replaced his Amiga with a PC, never to ask me for advice on anything ever again.

Yep, I was pretty much a "Drifter" in those Amiga days; meeting people once or twice to swap software, never to see them again.

[darksun9210]

i had a 1.2 A500 as my starting point too, and stuck with it ever since...
mostly my "amiga friends" were similarly geeky mates at school. the amiga just gave us a common ground. we were from differing machines, commodore 64, speccy ZX81, Vic20, Amstrad CPC464... then i got an A500 and then someone else saw it, and pester powered their parents into getting one, then someone got the (wow!) 1Mb ram upgrade, someone else got an external disk drive... it got to the point where we'd all meet up at someones house for an entire weekend of linkup games, demos, octamed tunes... upto ten+ amigas running for 2 solid days in one room attended to by caffinated teenagers. great days.
people slowly upgraded to A1200's, but i stuck by my 3.1'd A500 with A570, 2Mb DKB megachip, ICD Add-IDE, and M-Tec 28Mhz 020+882+4Mb...
There were a few BBS's that we sat on, my best mate was on the "magic mushrooms BBS", i was on another one, someone else was on somewhere else, and we'd gather together and share what we'd got... i was the first with a 14.4 modem, a big jump from 2400, then people got 28.8's, and 33.6's...
it was when people started to split off for university it started to fall apart. but there is still a bunch (of which i am one) that meet up occasionally. its not so much totally amiga anymore, as a weekend celebration of beer, pizza, and multiplayer lan games.

Roll Call...
TomThumb, MIA, A1200, last seen being a PC games developer
Rory, MIA, A1200, last seen being a student,
Geff, MIA, A1200, last seen developing XML for mobiles
Axtel, non-active, A1200, accountant for an investment bank
Elton, non-active, A1200, Police Sergent
Witt, active, A1200, an accountant for a marketing firm
Scud, active, A1200, develops apps for symbianOS
Gobbo, active, A1200, webdeveloper in the london somewhere
Banksy, MIA, A500+, last seen being a student
Byrnes, non-active, A1200, Dentist in training
Chalky, MIA, A1200, last seen being a student
Parker, MIA, A500+, last seen being a student
Jollard, MIA, A500+, last seen being a fasion slave
Acrigg, MIA, A1200, last seen being a student
Me, Active, A1200, unix server admin

6 out of 15 ain't bad i guess

still talk to 5-6 of nvx even though the last thing we did was in 2000, except for the Mindcandy 2 dvd commentary for Relic 2 years ago. chat by email, msn and occasionally on the phone and we meet up once a year (maybe)...

Hullo all

I was in Destiny from around 1990-92 as a gfx artist. Greets to all ex DTY members! I particularly remember Tango, Venom, Tantalus, Thalium. I think I briefly met a few others at the Quartz Summer Conference, and have hazy (some might say drunkard) memory of a very disorganised Destiny party in Southport at some point... ?!

I also made a good few friends via mailtrading. Andy/Doom, Scourger/DTY Norway, Barbarian/Bronx, some Irish guys... memory errors. I had about 30 people I was trading heavily with, writing long letters, and am somewhat embarrased now that I cant remember more.

I do remember the good times though. I remember bunking down in a barn after the Quartz party, and being woken up by sheep wondering why a bunch of teenagers were asleep in their hay. I remember being woken by phone calls late in the night by euro sceners who forgot about the time difference, and then could barely speak enough english for us to converse anyway. And I remember the postman used to hate me. Gawd bless stampfaking.

After dropping out from the scene in '92 I've been on the fringes of the PC scene since, and was jaded by what I saw. It seems like modem trading destroyed a lot of the friendship I remember. It seemed to go from writing long letters and enjoying l33t 0 week mailtrading stuff, to obtaining new stuff faster than anyone else - and a lot has been lost.

Kudos to those that were a part of the amiga scene, and helped make my time there as enjoyable as it was

[Mungo]

Tantalus was a great guy. Are you still in contact with him?

I used to love really long letters from my Euro contacts.

Don't know about modem trading destroying the friendship. I met some really cool people on the boards. Some of the messages that used to fly around on the Anthrox boards were so very, very funny.

Though I do know what you mean about the 'l33t' thing. Thing is, these sort of guys would come and go. You just knew that you wouldn't be putting up with them for long.

It generally followed the formula:

- Buy 14.4 modem
- Modem trade 24x7
- Get four-figure phone bill
- Quit the scene

No sadly, lost contact with Tantalus when I left the scene. He was smart and fun guy. I remember he was well into PBX hacking, and setup a freephone number where he could leave voicemail reports on the Quartz party.

Mailtrading was the nuts. I had some Scandinavian guys that I used to beer trade with for a while. Like I say, the postman hated me.

[ennio]

None of my friends owned Amigas back in the day. My best friend in high school, an Atari ST owner, came over all the time though to join me in Speedball, Buggy Boy, Zany Golf, Time Bandit, and The Lurking Horror.

He's since moved to another state, but we're still in touch.

Originally Posted by MajicMushroom

Phil Douglas and Wildcard of Delirium were great guys too.

Just these two?

WOW, so glad to see this thread open!

Its 3am on a friday night and I have just been surfing through my old history.

Was a computnet pest in the 1980's with the handle Jonn and user ID JM41 on the commodore 64... Managed to wangle my own phone line at 15 (BT didnt ask my age) and proceeded to run up one £600 phone bill after another! Used to sell blank (of course me'lord) floppy disks to pay the bills. But it was worth it, used to hang out with a who's who of the c64 demo scene back then.

A guy some of you may know on here and another cnetter Sinbad (Dave) got me into doing graphics for his group SECS (south east cracking service) with Starr (Simon) and Axeman (Dave)... I think SECS achieved BUGGER all.. apart from we got drunk some times at Sinbads mums flat in london... I did some graphics under the name ABY$$

Then on the Amiga scene by 1988 and at a copyparty at Sinbads after a pcw or commodore show I found myself sitting next to the brother of my best friend as a little kid I had not seen for about 5 years who had grown up (and outwards) to become Robotron (Paul)... anyway, Robotron took over SECS and it Became Cyrus Corp, which made lots of noises and.... achieved BUGGER all.. Although we all did some coding, I did some graphics and logos.. some fonts.. dont know if they ever turned into anything.

During this time.. I went to some copy parties, did graphics for coders.. I remember a slipstream party here in Bournemouth which was... hmm.. well you had to be there.

Then another copyparty, a serious amount of alc, met up with Hobbs (irish guy cant remember names) Ashley, Dreamwarrior (James - Methanoid now?).. There was Jens there from TSL, Clacka (?) etc.. got introduced to drinking a serious amount of Beer coz of the Irish there and at some point, all the above people and Cyrus Corp members, became TSL (Silents) UK... (apart from Jens (not sure of his handle) of TSL and Jester (Colin) of Quartex.)

Then I did a massive amount of graphics for whoever asked for them in TSL.. some of them got used in Demo's and intro's sometimes with my signature of ABY$$ sometimes the fricking coder trimmed it off!!

Then I found myself doing graphics for "the Edge" or Softek as they were known for games like Punisher (lame) on the Amiga and ST, and Snoopy for the CDTV.. Sometimes I even got paid, but mostly I got conned out of money... Sinbad, Jester and Dreamwarrior (i think) also did music for Edge at one point.

At some point in all this I had a call once from Digital illusions (TSL) to do graphics for their games, but didnt think it would come to anything so passed... then they released Pinball Dreams and Pinball fantasies.. which kinda pissed me off for not taking them seriously.

Did some graphics work for Psygnosis.. got paid..

Spent a year doing graphics for a game called Cardiaxx and other projects for electronic zoo and got royally screwed (they owed me and Axeman about £150,000 by the time they screwed us over)

Rereleased Cardiaxx with Team-17.. got screwed again!

Anyway...

Its still a special part of my history and sad I didnt keep in touch with everyone on the scene... So if your any of the people above, I would love to hear from you!

Ahh.. happy (but financially crap) days back then.

Oh.. and the naughty things people got busted for.

I never did any of it.. Honest.. Never.. When I got busted I had just found the DTMF keypad on the call box and was just messing with it.

I also never carded anything, but I did used to have a USR HST Courier.. Not sure where it came from.

Calling cards? isnt that what the royal mail leave when your out and they try to deliver a parcel? (possibly a modem)

[BippyM]

Welcome aboard

Nice to see another old scener about, can't wait for more stories and to see some of your work (if you have any)

Somewhere in the loft I have boxes of disks from back then.

I really should dig them all out to see if I can get some of my graphics off them, if they still read.

I know about a year ago I did some searches for "the silents" or "TSL" and found some of my logo's in screenshots on websites.

There is also a game I worked on with a couple fantastic coders that was almost completed but never released.. I was telling them a year or so ago we should finish it, it was a scrolling 16 million colour game with ham bobs without fringing.. basicly an air hocky game, with lots of 3d graphics and lightwave rendered scrolling tables with images a bit like a pinball table.. all working in a standard a1200.

The annoying thing was that back in the day, TSL-UK had some talented people in it, but, the person in charge, kinda kept contact details of members under his hat, so that people had to go through him.. at copy parties we mostly got drunk, coded some stuff and were not organised enough to swap contact details.. so, with all the hassles of actually doing anything and the block of having someone getting in the way of making some demos and intro's.. nothing happened..

It was still fun though.

Also in the mix at one point, I am sure some back biting started and somehow some of us ended up in Scoopex.. I think I found out by reading a welcome message in one of comrade J's sine scrollers welcoming us to Scoopex, yet I didnt know it had happened.

I am a bit disapointed in ComradeJ being an expert witness in screwing someone over in the scene though... If it was T.I.W I could have understood it, he was always a bit of a hand grenade personality!

[andy]

They're some great posts, Aby$$! Thank you and welcome to the forums. I hope you stick around and I'm sure that I can speak for many here when I say that I'd be happy to see some of your old stuff, should you be able to rescue it and feel like sharing in some way.

Are you still doing anything with graphics - on a casual or professional basis? It's always nice to see when people have made that next step or even enjoy maintaining their skills after all these years, hence the question.