Who owns a real Amiga ?

[Amiga1992]

I own my Amiga since 1993. Yep, I am a 'late owner', like with most of my machines (got my C128 in mid-1989). I tend to have an habit of picking up machines when they start to die ;/

It is an Amiga 600HD, with 2MB of Chip RAM, a 30MB HD (WOW! ), and not much else. I use it with my 1084S monitor which I got for my 128, and I have many joysticks/pads for it (even the Quickjoy Foot Pedal. I need a Freewheel though!). Also a good bunch of original software (like my original copy of Pirates, which is floating somewhere across the net), and many coverdisks with their mags.

I plan to upgrade it but only when I get an extra A600. Towering a 600 makes it loose its point, which is its awesome little size, and the only way to stick a backpack 030 accelerator and a hard drive is towering it. I would also have to put a fan in there, it needs cooling as it stands, and would need it even more with an accelerator.

Also I am planning to buy an A1200 next month, which I will pimp up with an 030@55, a bit of mem and a CD-ROM drive, just so I can play t-zero I will finally be able to play all those AGA games and demos!

Now, tell me a bit about your Amiga, if you own one, or if you plan to get one, or whatever.

[RCK]

My Amiga 1200 has died a few years ago, when I left my secondary school for being an engineer student (computer science of course).
and I always planned to get one again ! but no time, no place ...

question: can I play ALL the Amiga 500 progs and old OCS games with my new Amiga 1200 ?

I started off with a bog standard Amiga 500 in November 1997.

I then got an Amiga 1200 with a four meg memory fast mem.

I sold that to my brother in 1996 ish and then bought it back 6 months later, then sold it off again.

I got an Amiga 4000 in mid-2000 because (a) I missed it, (b) WinUAE at that time was shite so I thought I get the proper experience again and (c) I thought I'd be able to jump straight back into coding for it.

I use Cygnus Ed for writing my web site and used DPaint for some of my web site graphics. Even Photoshop lacks in some areas.

Have to admit that I got to expand the 4000. I want to get a Picasso board, a new CD ROM and the monitor is on it's last legs.

I have no problems with getting older stuff to work on my 4000 RCK.

Disabling the CPU cache or swapping to OCS mode cures most problems.

If not then Degrader or KillAGA will do the others.

[Amiga1992]

Nice one, khephren. DPaint can really be NOT replaced at some tasks. I made an experimental siet completely with DPIV gfx, now where did I put it?

About degrading: Most stuff will work but there is some soft that it just won't work no matter what. Specially software that _needs_ slowram. I once had a demo which only worked if you had theso-called slowram, and I found no program for my 600 that allowed me to fake this kind of memory. Also, many MArble Madness copies I found I didn't manage to make themwork. Only the HD-fixed one did.

However, it's the least of the lot. Most programs can be get to run when you degrade, and definitely use softkickers. They are a very helpful thing. I use TUDE to softkick onto 1.3, and skick to softboot onto 3.1 (I need 3.1 to use Musicline Editor and AHX)

[LaundroMat]

I first had an A500, then I bought myself an A1200, later on upgraded with a .5Gig HD and a Blizzard 030/50 and 8M Fast.

The A500? Well, I used it for gaming, natch.

The A1200? Err, well, also for gaming. Later on, when I got access to the internet through university (I'm talking early '90s here, I guess '92), I quickly learned about transferring files from PC formatted disks and through that:
*Aminet
*IRC DCC'ing (at the ole #amigawarez)
* AmigaE (there still are some in-utilities floating around Aminet)
* making keygenerators with AmigaE, thanks to some Brit called Ruskie. I used the handle Kn0b at the time (and yes, I know what it means )
* The Amiga F1GP Hall of Fame (thanks to the great Oliver whatever & his F1GP Ed - the first shareware tool I registered)
* ...

sniff. Where are the times (must be one of the must heard of phrases on this board

mod: The A1200 still works fine.

Owning an Amiga?

Er...I have a few: and mostly use my A1200 170MB HD (Small by PC standards but useful for an Amiga) Used for Octamed, Worms & Games now.

But I've also got my original A500 & second disk drive, which needs a new video adaptor port. Another working A500, an A600, two more A1200's (one with a broken disk drive & no mouse port & a half gig drive, the other with a half gig drive too: but with a tendency to crash: it's one of the later models when quality really seem to have dropped off...)

But of most amusment to all of you may be that I've wacked a CD32 in as a temporary CD player to my old Sony Amp... But it's been there for a year now!

You should see people try to grasp the controller after years of playstation - for starters it works the other way up!

[CodyJarrett]

I've got an A1200 in a Power Tower, with monitor, 4 gig hard disk, 32 meg fast memory, 030 accelerator, proper Amiga keyboard, 24x CD-ROM drive and a CD-writer when I need it.

I've also got a couple of A500s, with Action Replays 2&3, some A600s and a CD32.

I used to degrade old games on the A1200 with something like Relokick for the floppy games and Embedder (or others) for games on hard disk. Most worked okay, except for ones like Shadowlands and Rainbow Islands. But then WHDLoad and JST came along and lots of these old games started to work fine from the hard disk.

So, RCK, you can run nearly all games on an A1200.

[Tim Janssen]

I got my first Amiga 500 back in August 1991. Pity it had a faulty drive -it ruined all discs. Commodore promised to repair it, so after 2 months(!) I got that damn repaired machine back. I booted up 2 games, and the whole discdrive screwed up again. Back in the shops I demanded a sparkling new Amiga 500 and I got one.
My 'second' Amiga 500 has never disappointed me. Even after all those years. I expanded it to 1 Mb, bought a 1084S monitor for it, a second discdrive and a Technosound Turbo soundsampler. Never thought you could have so much fun for so little money.

In 1995, when I switched to pc, I put the Amiga on the attic. Two months ago I got nostalgic and installed the Amiga again and the whole thing still worked! I thought the Amiga would disappoint me Anno Domini 2001 but the graphics are so smooth & fast, sound is great and booting a game is a matter of seconds.

I have discovered that the biggest advantage of the Amiga is that games are not dependable from processorspeed, amount of memory or a graphics card. It really is plug'n'play -an area where a pc still fails nowadays.

[P-J]

Must be quick... I went...

A500 ---> A500+ ---> A2000 ---> A1200

That's me

[Amiga1992]

Hell yeah, the Amiga scrolls and moves shite on the screen as smooth as no other I've seen. You don't get 1/4 pixelscrolling in other machines

Emulation doesn' t make justice to teh real thing, it's just pish. You'll never get decent scrolling in a PC, this shows in Amiga and C64 emulation, for example. I think I've only seen one example of decent PC scrolling, and never again (the shitty PC version of Turrican 2. Who the hell said they should change the gfx? they scerwed up the game's looks!!)

[Burge]

Now I feel really old I owned and still own an Amiga 1000 which I obtained in about 1990. When you guys talk about your hard drives and your demos it makes me go 'wha...? An Amiga with a hard drive? You must mean PC...' In my day we had to make do with Kickstart and Workbench 1.1, 1 floppy drive and 512k RAM...

You people with Amigas with PC type specs make me sick. You never truly knew what it was lke to be an Amiga owner. It meant sacrifices and hard work, games that would stop working for no apparent reason, software failures and many other bad things... anyway, that's my rant for the day, hope I didn't offend anyone too badly Lastly, never let this board shut down, never...

[Amiga1992]

Cheers about that A1000. Does it have 256 or 512k of ram? or a WHOLE WHOOPPIN' MEG??

I need to get one of those someday... Saw one once but it had a screwed up keybaord ;(

[Fred the Fop]

I never owned one, but my pal Kraig owned a Amiga 1000...poor bitch. I owned an Atari St

[Twistin'Ghost]

Jeez, I have been through so many Amigas!

Currently I own an A2000@030/33 w/2 hard drives (2 gig & 350meg) and OpalVision card (absolute shite!). I have an extra A2000 in case mine ever dies (I picked it up for $100!). I have a box with 5 A500's in it, of various persuasions (one has 512C/512S, another 1megC, another with 512C only, another PAL 1megC/8megF, another...um, I forgot!).

In the past I have owned three different A1000's, an A1200, a CD32, and all manner of hardware (way too much to name - everything from AAR's to Emplant!) I mostly stick with various 1084 monitors, but have picked up some other CBM monitors cheap in thrift stores, which I have since sold.

To this day, I have found nothing to compare with CygnusEd for text editing. On the PC, I have access to most every graphics app, but there's still so many thing in graphics that I can only do on an Amiga! (Does anybody know of any PC prog that will let you take a brush/image and fill an area on screen with it like you would with a paint bucket solid color?) And I still love Directory Opus, as well. And the CLI/shell - untouchable!

[Amiga1992]

The Amiga really has untouchable apps, Twistin'... Directory Opus is brill, so is DPaint. And I cannot do some music stuff with some PC programs. Musicline Editor is an awesome tracker/synthesizer.

Of course, the whole AmigaOS is brilliant. The best multitasking OS I have ever used.

About paint programs... if you don't mind only being able to work with 8bit resolutions, you can get Deluxe Paint IIe. It's got many of the Amiga version's features minus animation. However most paint programs should have a 'pattern' mode which lets you do just that. No warping though.

Directory Opus was and is THE best file manager. I have been looking for one in Windows for years, but the best I found is Magellan and that is shite!

Deluxe Paint is what I learnt graphics on, and TG is right on what is sadly lacking in Photoshop 6. Even mega-buck programs like Maya and 3DS Max are not as friendly as their PC rivals.

BTW in Photoshop you can define a brush as a pattern and fill a selection or the screen with it.

I used to use Textpad on the PC to write my code, now I write it in CygnusEd and then port it to the PC for testing in MSIE. Bad way of doing it, but CED is just a programmer's text editing dream.

Finally to CLI/Shell. Absolutely pisses over MS-DOS, but I'd say that Linux console (pah! who needs KDE/Gnome!?) is better and far more flexible. Shame the editors are so crap.

[Twistin'Ghost]

OK, perhaps this response is a bit off-topic, but I have been unable to define a brush as a pattern for filling in PS (I have PS6). Where can I find how to do that?

I have EditPad on the PC for search/replace, but it still won't do column cut & paste. And even if I find a text editor that will, it's gonna be like all the others - bogged down by being fatware. CED is fast and fast and fast (and clean!), plus very configurable (but be careful of the macro editor if you accidently invoke it using keyboard shortcuts!) If I need CED while I am on my PC, I boot my WinUAE Workbench and I sort of have it on the PC that way. Same with DOpus.

It's not as elegant in emulation, but it's a start.

I hope to the proud owner of an Amiga 2000 this or next week. Problem is however that this guy has no disks for it what so ever anymore.

What kind of disks would I need to be able to boot into workbench and use the various ADF transfer programs to transfer all my WinUAE ADF's to the Amiga 2000?

I'm so looking for a SCSI controller so I can hook up an old 1GB SCSI-II HD with my new A2000 but.. darn these babies are expensive. :eek

If someone could help me on my way with a few disks, I'd be forever grateful!

:bounce I have an Amiga 2500 and its a big its bigger than some PC's I have seen and I have an Amiga 1200.