piracy

[dreadnought]

I love ancient threads. I always wonder where are all these old Amiga heads now?

Me, I pirated absolutely everything. That was the status quo in my country: no (c) law, no shops, etc. But even if it wasn't so, I'd probably still do it anyway. Most of us were simply too poor to afford games. Heck, I could barely afford floppies to save them on. Had maybe only 30-40 at a time, and had to make some really hard choices of what to keep and what to rotate away.

[Adropac2]

I bought quite a number of originals but it was during a time when I didn't have access to getting them copied. There was a definite benefit to an original though I would say because something like Birds of Prey of Midwinter have these great boxes and a worthwhile helpful manual

Truthfully though none of us could afford to buy all these great games and would have missed out had it not been for those able to offer them for essentially the cost of the disk. It clearly can't have helped developers of course and I feel a little guilty but it was what is was

[Unknown_K]

One of the smart things I did 20+ years ago was buy up a wall full of original Amiga (and some ST) boxed games when they were a few bucks each in bulk.

These days you can download TOSEC of every game ever made plus WHDLoad installer for them, so pirating is just easier.

[outsiderz]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

I always wonder where are all these old Amiga heads now?

what do you mean? the real wa*e* og´s? the people who bring the stuff around?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

I always wonder where are all these old Amiga heads now?

They simply moved on from Amiga things Or moved on from visiting forums. Or both Things have changed quite a bit around here and I can't blame anyone for not sticking around.

[XPD]

I'll admit I pirated a lot for my Amiga back in the day, but was mainly because games were so expensive over here (NZ) at the time, and not that easy to come across apart from a couple of decent suppliers.

I did own a reasonable collection of legit games, but bulk were sourced via other means.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by XPD

I'll admit I pirated a lot for my Amiga back in the day, but was mainly because games were so expensive over here (NZ) at the time, and not that easy to come across apart from a couple of decent suppliers.

And now we know why.

I did own a reasonable collection of legit games,

Do you remember which titles you owned? What made you buy rather than pirate them?

but bulk were sourced via other means.

What were these 'other means'?

In 1987 I bought my A1000 from a shop in Auckland that was run by a friend of mine. Afterwards he occasionally sent me pirated games which I treated as demos, until they started coming with viruses. Apart from that I didn't see much in the way of pirated games because our local Amiga club had a strict no piracy policy.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by TCD

They simply moved on from Amiga things Or moved on from visiting forums. Or both

Well, obviously It was more of a rhetorical question...
I think some still lurk around though. A brief check on the names from page 2 shows that most of them logged in either in 2023 & 2024.

Originally Posted by TCD

Things have changed quite a bit around here and I can't blame anyone for not sticking around.

For me it's the other way: I stick around because things have changed for much better But, I'm talking about the last few years, can't compare to ancient times.

[Snoopy1234]

I had a friend in ACU/OmegaV that did swaps and gave a lot of titles. I did have a legal copy of DOTC. I've had fun collecting legit copies to replace them over the past few years as I sold my A1000 gear to a guy later to do Video titling in his studio.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

But, I'm talking about the last few years, can't compare to ancient times.

Now I feel *very* old

[CCCP alert]

BEFORE ST/Amiga piracy there were garbage games, THAT is why people pirated, they were pretty pathetic before adverts for disk swapping contacts appeared and the publishers with no respect for my wages got what they deserved. Deep Space by Psygnosis was like £30-35 and was shit compared to Star Raiders on the Atari 2600 let alone 800.

The talent was rarely there to justify the contracting of various coders/artists/musicians and the average usage of the technical abilities of ST/Amiga is far lower than those of ZX/C64 games.

Th n00b quality game reviews in mags didn't help either, utterly clueless about what the machines could do in the right hands and so reviews would not help you avoid a mountain of piss poor games. If you think piracy is the cause of these problems then you need to go get tested for dementia ASAP lol piracy saved many months of wasted earnings and technical game dev quality would not improve if there was zero piracy, FACT. Piss poor instrument samples from PD disks, no talent art college dropouts making graphics, coding not worth a shit or optimised for either....this is a publisher greed/lack of consumer respect issue from day 1 not piracy.

If every ST/Amiga arcade style game was done with Japanese 16 bit console developer talent/respect for consumer then fair enough, 99% of 16bit home computer games were shit in one way or another (including 16 colour ST graphics on 20% more expensive Amiga games). Lotus II is the only AAA title in both ST AND Amiga incarnations, console quality dev on both and each one optimised to buggery for host hardware.

[Dunny]

I pirated almost all of my games, until about 1994. The few games I bought before that date I did so because I had money. I pirated the games I could not afford.

After 1994 I discovered the local flea market and the guy who had a stall that sold Amiga games of all kinds for a couple of quid. That was a weekly treat