I was late to the Amiga scene! If you was, why whats your story?

[gazj82]

I was a real late comer to the Amiga, here is my story of how a late Amiga user ended up loving it.

198x - Primary school times
The first I ever knew about the Amiga 500 would have been from the Adverts in Commodore format. I knew they were way way out of my parents price range. I didn't even attempt to ask them about it. This would have been late 1980's at a guess.

1993-4 - Early secondary school around Year 7
The first time I ever saw an Amiga was round a friends house. His brother had an Amiga, I guess it would have been a A1200 (as they had the newest and best of everthing). He was heavily into football so I only ever saw him playing Championship Manager on it. Football was not my thing but I knew the Amiga was a pretty special machine just from this.

1996 at a guess
I had a friend who had an Amiga 1200 really gathering dust (this was the playstation era after all). Anyway he let me borrow it as I seemed fascinated by it and he wasn't using it.

He had the following games.
Nigel Mansell
Trolls
Zool
Beneath a steel sky (Man the loading times were a killer from floppy)
Manchester United Europe
Photon paint
SWOS - Copy
Brutal sports football - Copy
Skidmarks - Copy (Disks were really iffy)
Some golf game I had no interest in.
Desert Strike - Copy

Anyway I loved this machine. So much so I made any excuse not to give it back :S. (This must have been for about 18 months). Eventually he offered to sell it to me. I can't remember what I paid for it. But I guess it wouldn't have been a lot otherwise I wouldn't have been able to afford it.

Eventually I had to put my A1200 away when the mouse gave up. Most copied games needed a mouse press to get past the cracktro.

2010 ish till now.
A guy I met at our local Linux user group gave me an Amiga mouse he had spare. The Amiga was alive again!
Since then I have been recovering my lost Amiga years as I was so late to the party.
I have the same A1200 now with a 030 and 8gb hd loaded with whdload goodies. But even so I still collect original Amiga games whenever disposable income allows it. There is something about having the box, the manual, the sound of the original floppies spinning in the drive.

I kind of feel sad that I missed the Amiga when it was in it's prime. But the fact I could still get huge enjoyment out of it long after it's demise proves what a great machine it was.

Anyone else really late to the Amiga like me with there story to share?

[Cobe]

Oh if only you knew back than that fire on the joystick in port 1 is the same as Left Mouse Button...

[gazj82]

Originally Posted by Cobe

Oh if only you knew back than that fire on the joystick in port 1 is the same as Left Mouse Button...

Can't believe I didn't to be honest. Either way the broken mouse made me put it in a dark place for a lot of years.

[edd_jedi]

I guess I was relatively late to the Amiga game, I got my A1200 in spring 1994. I think Commodore were just about still in business then, but I do remember that shortly after getting it was the period when all magazines were guessing what was going to happen to the Amiga (and in truth post-Commodore it never really had a future, just a few bungled attempts at keeping it going. Escom probably did best but it was still a failure.)

However those short couple of years had some great new game releases, and there was obviously an amazing back catalogue to keep me going. I swapped my A1200 for an NTSC SNES in 1997, it was a console I had always wanted due to the enhanced 60hz speed and back then it wasn't so easy to get hold of import consoles. I then got back in to the Amiga in about 2009.

[ViLXDRYAD]

As with most popular things, i could not came more late lol

The amiga never was sold nor spoken about by here, there were no chance i could knew it if it were not because of some psx Paradox's cracktros and internet research about

I always loved those demo intros and how most of them show-off nice visual art along with the crack itself; also the amiga mod's are my favorite chiptune music format

It was just a few weeks ago i could manage to set-up workbench 3.1 on WinUAE and UAE Wii so i am literally just discovering the amiga lol

btw; regardless all the years, i am in love with this old OS; is so fun to use and to program into, the games are so good and the music this soundchip can generate is pure gold

[demolition]

I was also quite late to the Amiga. I got my first Amiga, an A500+ in 1992 but I was too young to afford much in the way of accessories so it stayed more or less stock until 1994 where I got a 486. I used my paper route salary mostly on floppies. The only other peripherals I got was a Canon BJ200 bubble-jet printer (they were not called ink-jet back then) and an Action Replay MkIII. Didn't even have more chipmem or an external drive for it (the drive would have been nice when copying disks ). I only vaguely knew that there was something called assembly but it was complete jibberish to me so the Amiga was not used much for programming except a bit of Amiga Basic and AMOS.

It wasn't until I got the PC that I had the age and money to experience the demo scene and join some gatherings. My first real computer party was The Party in 1995 which took place in my home town. On the PC, I started doing a bit of C and x86 assembly. Wish I would have been able to learn 68k Asm back then as x86 is horrible in comparison.

[zerohour1974]

I was incredibly late to the party. I could write it all out but I wrote it all down in my article in Issue 4 of Amigaville

[EugeneNine]

I think I got my a500 in 92 or 93 but by 94 or 95 had moved to a PC. Every so often I'd regret it and finally picked up a beat up old 2000 a few months ago.

[Shatterhand]

is 1991 late? I don't think anyone owned Amigas here in Brazil before the 90s... I personally only begun hearing about the machine in the 90s. My father got him an A500 in 91. It was either late 91 or early 92, Another World had just being released.

Here in Brazil there was a feud between MSX and Amiga users, because the biggest MSX magazine in the country changed half of its content to Amiga content (the magazine was split between Amiga and MSX), and many of the adverts in the magazine were already about Amiga stuff even before the magazine itself was about the Amiga.

This made lots of MSX users defend their machine, say it was a lot better than the Amiga, it had arcade ports, japanese games, 2 button joysticks, bla bla bla. I was a young kid at that time, but I was on this bandwagon too, ridiculuosly.

Then my dad called me (we didn't live together at that time), telling me he had bought an Amiga, and that he was going to dump all his MSX stuff away, that if I wanted anything, I should take it (and I took it and that's why I have 3 MSXs computers nowadays ), but I thought "OH NO, EVEN MY FATHER IS A TRAITOR!!! I CAN'T BELIEVE IT HE BETRAYED US LIKE THIS"

And then I went to his home and saw the Amiga.. at first I was really unimpressed "What the heck, this doesn't look a computer, it looks like an ass big keyboard".. the first game I played was Wings of Fury, and I was like "Neh... nice game and all, but no big deal, can't understand the fuss"

And then it came Speedball 2, Prince of Persia, Battle Squadron, Lemmings and..... Another World.

I played more games than those, but those were the ones that really made me go "wooow"... but Another World was really the killing blow. I was completely psyched with that intro, the atmospheric gameplay... I was completely sold. Fuck the MSX , I want an Amiga too.

I used my father A500 a lot, but next xmas he gave me my own Frankstein A600

The real cool thing is that the Amiga is taken as a "magical" computer by some here, and a really scewed up one by others. Most people who are into computers for a long time have heard about it, many times I said I own one, or that I owned one as a kid, I heard someone saying "OOOH AN AMIGA??? A FRIEND OF COUSIN OF A NEIGHBOR HAD ONE I SAW IT ONCE AND IT WAS THE MOST INCREDIBLE THING EVER I DONT BELIEVE YOU ACTUALLY HAD ONE!", but then among the retrocomputing scene here its like "AMIGA? THAT COMPUTER EVERYONE SAYS IS GREAT BUT ONLY HAVE CRAP 1 BUTTON GAMES?". I think it's the MSX feud thing going on 'til today

[gazj82]

Most of my friends had a Mega Drive, so I moved from my C64 to a mega drive too. Like I said my parents wouldn't have been able to afford an Amiga, but a Mega Drive with Sonic was a Christmas present that they could stretch too.

[puppypc]

I have to say, I am only 25 Years old and my family had nothing but Windows PCs! When we got AOL around 97-98, I quickly got into emulation for the NES and SNES consoles that my siblings and I had played for years.

I don't know exactly when, but probably around 2003 I discovered the C64 page on one of the long-defunct ROM sites, had no idea how it worked (very different from the MSDOS 5 & 6 commands that I knew), and then -finally- learned about the Amiga and WinUAE!

I mostly played platformers with it, and after a few months I got bored (!!) and went back to my PC games. Now, 3 years ago I finally had my retrotech collector flame rekindled, I bought myself a C64 and have gotten some good use out of it! Amigas are hard to come by in my area, but I picked up an A1000 at VCF-Southeast this past year and finally got the thing working a month ago. I'm in the middle of exams right now, keeping me from doing much so far but I'm excited!

[Shatterhand]

Now that is "late"

Welcome

[Daedalus]

I was late (though not as late as puppypc), I got my first Amiga (an A1200) in 1995 I think, bought it second hand from someone who was shifting onto PC or PlayStation. It came with lots of kids games and copied games, I think only one or two originals, but it was awesome. Bought Blitz Basic for it and have used it pretty much constantly since.

[Devlin]

I first saw an Amiga in 1993 when my dad bought an Amiga 600.
Got an amiga of my own when my dad upgraded to a 1200 in '97 so maybe not really late.

I got my current Amiga(A1200) in 2007, where I paid five pounds at a carboot sale for it.

It was unmodified(and sealed) until I got my grubby little mitts in it and added the Blizzard card, a CF HDD and am planning to get a CD32 pad in the future(probably a conversion kit for one of my existing pads)

[SunChild]

Originally Posted by Shatterhand

"AMIGA? THAT COMPUTER EVERYONE SAYS IS GREAT BUT ONLY HAVE CRAP 1 BUTTON GAMES?". I think it's the MSX feud thing going on 'til today

Well, unfair-and-secretly-just-jealous MSX users from Brasil can go f*** themselves (Caralho! Haha... ^^), coz the "ONLY" part of it wasn't (completely) true back then, and it sure as hell isn't now!! (WHDLoad rules and all, you know... )

[Master484]

I got my first Amiga around 1990 or 1991, and was 6 or 7 years old at the time. Although I don't know if this was "late", as 90-91 were still "golden years" for the Amiga. A500 was still "mainstream" and maybe the best gaming machine around: most PC games looked and sounded inferior at that time, and in the console side there were only NES and Megadrive.

I think that in the beginning I had a four boxed games: Lotus 1, Roadwars, Spindizzy Worlds and LED Storm. And the rest were demo disks from Amiga magazines; my dad bought new Amiga magazines frequently, and I got a lot of game demos that way. The first demo disks that I saw had some great playable demos such as Rodland, WarZone, Frenetic, PP Hammer, Sword of Honor, Metal Mutant and various sports games, and also some coverdisks had full games like Purple Saturn Day ( still one of my favourite games ) and Zombi ( which was almost too scary to play back then, as was a demo of Abandoned Places 2 ). Also I had a red coverdisk that had a demo of Thunder Burner in it, and I thought the 3D graphics in the game were amazing.

And one of my friends had an Amiga too, with lots of copied games, but back then my dad was firmly against software piracy, and I wasn't allowed to copy those games to myself lol. Although the Amiga that he bought came with a lot of disks, including two copied games: Test Drive and Flight Simulator, but these 2 pirates were seemingly OK, because my dad liked to play them, especially Flight Simulator. However, I could still freely borrow those copied games from my friend, and that way I could play some 100 extra games that I would have otherwise missed, including Battle Squadron, Chaos Engine and all 3 Turrican games.

But although back then my dad was anti-piracy, he at least bought me and my brother quite many boxed games, that we could freely choose. One of the best memories from childhood was when I, my brother and my dad went to a supermarket at winter, and we both could choose one Amiga game from the shop, and dad would buy them. And all Amiga games in the shop were located in a huge container. And from that container I picked up Blastar, and my brother picked up Volfied. And both games were great, Blastar was a great shooter with awesome techno music, and Volfied was maybe the best arcade conversion ever made for the A500. And both games came in big cardboard boxes of identical size, with big posters inside, and both were awesome.

So back then I experienced the Amiga games in the "real way", I had no pirated disks of my own, and so didn't have that many games to play. Mostly I only played boxed originals and coverdisk demos that came with the magazines. And I read everything in the magazines, learning english at the same time. And the coverdisks were an unique experience at that time when the internet didn't really exist...many coverdisks had great menus, lots of stuff and good musics; I remember that the menu music in the Cu Amiga WarZone demo disk especially striked like hammer when it starts.

And soundwise my Amiga experience was also blessed, because my dad was a musician, playing around with the Protrackers and other music programs, and the Amiga itself was actually connected to a complex home studio set-up, with keyboards, mixers and I kid you not: two 1 metre high disco speakers. So sound quality, volume and the depth of bass were excellent, without any doubt. I remember that especially the musics of Ruff'n Tumble and Blastar, and the big explosions of Desert Strike sounded awesome, capable of shaking the whole room at higher volumes.

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But after those golden years of 90-93, the end of the Amiga came very fast. As a kid, I didn't know that Commodore was bankrupt. Suddenly there just were less and less Amiga games in the shops, and monthly magazines stopped appearing one after another. But during that time in 94-95, at the age of 10 or 11 I think, I still lived in a sort of an "Amiga bubble", and I couldn't imagine that within the next 2 years it would all be over. Because during this time I saw awesome demos of many "next generation" Amiga games like Elfmania, Zeewolf, Kid Chaos, Vital Light, Crystal Dragon, Hired Guns, Worms, Alien Breed Tower Assault, and Stardust. And I got boxed games like Theme Park, Robozone (ugh), Cannon Fodder 2, Elite 2: Frontier, Civilization and Jungle Strike, and dreamed about upgrading my A500 to an A1200, so that I could play Super Stardust and Alien Breed 3D 2.

So even at 1995 to me it seemed that the future of the Amiga was bright. But suddenly, by the year 1996 or so the reality kicked in: everyone had moved either to Playstation, SNES or PC. The entire Amiga culture suddenly disappeared like it didn't matter anything. But then I got Nintendo 64 and Goldeneye, was 100% amazed by the fast 3D, and forgot the Amiga. Although when Playstation 2 arrived the cycle would repeat again; PS 2 games suddenly dominated the shops and N64 almost disappeared, and so on.

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But in retrospect, I think that 1990-91 was maybe the best year to jump into the Amiga bandwagon; at least gaming wise. It was the "golden middle time": not too late, but not too early either. All new games were of good quality, and awesome titles appeared on a weekly basis. Back then it seemed a like an endless spring of quality games and programs, with every coverdisk showing something amazing. New games were produced so fast: one month you would buy a magazine with a demo of Another World in it, next month you would get Lotus 2 and Zool, then maybe Fuzzball and Parasol Stars, followed by James Pond 2: Robocod, Syndicate and Lemmings. And for a 7 year old Amiga owner this was amazing, it was like candy raining from the sky. Even the plastics that the new magazines were wrapped in sounded like candy paper.

And even the PD games of the time were awesome (Transplant, Cybernetix, Ork Attack, Deluxe Pacman, etc.). And one time we visited a flea market, and one seller was selling old Amiga mags and coverdisks, and I bought an Amiga Format mag with a demos of two Blitz Basic games in it: Defender and Zombie Apocalypse. And my dad thought that Zombie Apocalypse was too violent, and I was barely allowed to play it. And these two games introduced me to Blitz Basic, although I couldn't really do anything meaningful with it back then, or even today lol.

[gazj82]

I love hearing these stories of peoples Amiga experiences. Plus it gives me lists of games people loved that I never heard of or tried before.

[s2325]

Yes, for me the best thread.

[mrbob2]

i was late in a sense to the party. I was a speccy users right up to its death in 92 and then got an amiga 500+

i have no idea just how good an amiga was until that point. it was always seen as a posh, expensive computer. A bit like how the iphone was seen when everyone still had nokias and sagems etc.

to this day, its a special piece of hardware that i treasure more than any other. My 1200 060 32mb 150mb HD amiga

sure, iv had wonderful times with speccy, c64, playstation and pc in 2000 but the amiga is still soooo good at animation and soundstudio.

i had the cartoon classics pack and the 1st game i tried was bart vs space mutants.

OMG the into! the huge gfx from the demo on my screen were incredible, the sound was "real" then captain planet looked amazing, sounded great with the music, lemmings was brilliant and of course, all my friends at school had amigas and Game Lists so you would go to school on a monday with your games list and 20 blank floppies, given them to your mate and give him your list, he would do the same with you and you would copy for him and vice versa.

of course, i bought loads of orginals, but the majority was cracked games.

what was sad is the amiga (i didnt realise at the time) was actually dying

the 1200 i got in 95 was to be the last ever proper amiga and in 98 i eventually hung up my mouse and got a psx in 98.

it was just a box that played games but i guess thats all you wanted. Instead of upgrading, installing from loads of floppies, you just put in a disc and played.

comparing F1 on the amiga to toca touring cars on psx was worlds apart. It was then i knew the amiga was dead.

but thanks to WINUAE and this incredible community, in a strange way the amiga is more alive now than ever was!

sure the hardware and commodore are long gone, but the games live on and the community is so strong and passionate.

as far as i know, there are no other computers or consoles that are anything like EAB and winuae is THE best emulator of any system ever.


so yes, some of us may have been late to the scene but by crikey were still here chaps

[EugeneNine]

I don't know if I can agree that winUAE is the best. Since it only runs on windows that gives a lot of overhead. FS-UAE is probably the better choice since you don't have to invest in windows.