Revisiting the Amiga

[MGAmiga90]

Hi,

Just thought I'd post about my recent Amiga nostalgia trip....and where it started.

Having first seen the Amiga 1000 in a magazine around 1985 showing off the graphics capability of the upcoming machine - I knew I had to have one! Especially as I was a Spectrum owner at the time and colour graphics were not its strong point...but as a school kid it was way out of reach.

Little did I know it would be another 5 years before I got my hands on one. I went through Spectrum/Electron/Atari ST ownership before it finally happened.

Early 1990 came, I had a job and that was it, time for an A500! £299 cheque written and sent a mail order to Dowling Computers. It arrived a week later, with a copy of Katakis. I was blown away by the music on loading Katakis....listened to that for a couple of minutes, and then starting the game, it crashed. Several attempts later and random crashes I realised it was a faulty machine - a good start!

I managed to get a working replacement a few days later. What a machine! The ST was quickly forgotten and was sold. My raytracing and sound sampling hobbies were so much better now. I upgraded to 1MB RAM (those were the days!), then a 4Mb fast RAM unit. Realising I really needed a hard disk, I bought a 52Mb GVP SCSI drive - which didn't work with the 2 week old memory expansion.. then a few weeks later, a 120Mb SCSI drive + 4Mb RAM were ordered as I'd filled the 52Mb drive.

These upgrades were followed by a VXL-30 accelerator (cheapest at the time, but had issues and no 32-bit RAM was available, so had to wait to unleash the power of the 030). I finally received the 2Mb 32-bit RAM module weeks later and it transformed the A500 - Loved the machine even more at this point - even more so when my multi-sync 14in monitor arrived a couple of pay packets later.

As I was into graphics, the announcement of the AA chipset was my dream come true - I had been looking for 24bit graphics for the A500 but this was expensive - the A1200 was £299 when it appeared so I grabbed one - the HAM8 mode was superb and was fine for my amateurish raytracing efforts, but the machine was so slow compared to my A500, no accelerators or RAM were available immediately so it went into the wardrobe for a few months.

As soon as an 030 accelerator appeared I ordered one to match the A500 for speed - a new era of high quality graphics was upon me!

I used the machine till 1993, when one weekend a friend brought his PC along, and produced a copy of DOOM....2 days later a bank loan was arranged and £1430 sucked from my account for a 486-dx33 and the disappointment that was Windows 3.11 - The A1200 was sold shortly after for a ridiculous £99 and that was that.

I bought an A500+ in 2001 for nostalgia purposes (£30 bargain), and stored it away on a shelf for the future, with the odd boot here and there to make sure it was still working.

Then in 2021 - I dug it out, removed the clock battery that still hadn't leaked and decided to go for some upgrades. I bought a 1Mb chipram board, a PiStorm, and RGB2HDMI and a Gotek over a few weeks. Really brought back the feelings from the 80's/90's - just missing the CRT monitor and a real 030/040.

This then led me to regret selling the A1200, so I now have one of those - bought an Apollo 1220 28Mhz board with FPU and RAM, CF drive and CF PCMCIA adapter to transfer files from the PC. Nostalgia overload and quite a sad bank balance.

I'm hoping to learn some assembler coding finally - never did much coding on the Amiga back in the day for some reason.

What a great few weeks it's been, re-living my youth!


Sorry for the long post....I stripped out as much waffle as I could too

Cheers
Darren

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by MGAmiga90

Hi,

Just thought I'd post about my recent Amiga nostalgia trip....and where it started.

Having first seen the Amiga 1000 in a magazine around 1985 showing off the graphics capability of the upcoming machine - I knew I had to have one! Especially as I was a Spectrum owner at the time and colour graphics were not its strong point...but as a school kid it was way out of reach.

Little did I know it would be another 5 years before I got my hands on one. I went through Spectrum/Electron/Atari ST ownership before it finally happened.

Early 1990 came, I had a job and that was it, time for an A500! £299 cheque written and sent a mail order to Dowling Computers. It arrived a week later, with a copy of Katakis. I was blown away by the music on loading Katakis....listened to that for a couple of minutes, and then starting the game, it crashed. Several attempts later and random crashes I realised it was a faulty machine - a good start!

I managed to get a working replacement a few days later. What a machine! The ST was quickly forgotten and was sold. My raytracing and sound sampling hobbies were so much better now. I upgraded to 1MB RAM (those were the days!), then a 4Mb fast RAM unit. Realising I really needed a hard disk, I bought a 52Mb GVP SCSI drive - which didn't work with the 2 week old memory expansion.. then a few weeks later, a 120Mb SCSI drive + 4Mb RAM were ordered as I'd filled the 52Mb drive.

These upgrades were followed by a VXL-30 accelerator (cheapest at the time, but had issues and no 32-bit RAM was available, so had to wait to unleash the power of the 030). I finally received the 2Mb 32-bit RAM module weeks later and it transformed the A500 - Loved the machine even more at this point - even more so when my multi-sync 14in monitor arrived a couple of pay packets later.

As I was into graphics, the announcement of the AA chipset was my dream come true - I had been looking for 24bit graphics for the A500 but this was expensive - the A1200 was £299 when it appeared so I grabbed one - the HAM8 mode was superb and was fine for my amateurish raytracing efforts, but the machine was so slow compared to my A500, no accelerators or RAM were available immediately so it went into the wardrobe for a few months.

As soon as an 030 accelerator appeared I ordered one to match the A500 for speed - a new era of high quality graphics was upon me!

I used the machine till 1993, when one weekend a friend brought his PC along, and produced a copy of DOOM....2 days later a bank loan was arranged and £1430 sucked from my account for a 486-dx33 and the disappointment that was Windows 3.11 - The A1200 was sold shortly after for a ridiculous £99 and that was that.

I bought an A500+ in 2001 for nostalgia purposes (£30 bargain), and stored it away on a shelf for the future, with the odd boot here and there to make sure it was still working.

Then in 2021 - I dug it out, removed the clock battery that still hadn't leaked and decided to go for some upgrades. I bought a 1Mb chipram board, a PiStorm, and RGB2HDMI and a Gotek over a few weeks. Really brought back the feelings from the 80's/90's - just missing the CRT monitor and a real 030/040.

This then led me to regret selling the A1200, so I now have one of those - bought an Apollo 1220 28Mhz board with FPU and RAM, CF drive and CF PCMCIA adapter to transfer files from the PC. Nostalgia overload and quite a sad bank balance.

I'm hoping to learn some assembler coding finally - never did much coding on the Amiga back in the day for some reason.

What a great few weeks it's been, re-living my youth!


Sorry for the long post....I stripped out as much waffle as I could too

Cheers
Darren

Welcome home, mate..

[stevelord]

Hi,

I thought I'd drop some hints for you in case you're interested. A lot's changed since 93.

Originally Posted by MGAmiga90

My raytracing and sound sampling hobbies were so much better now.

Since you've been gone, the Amiga Raytracing Society has a complete Lightwave course for you to dip in and out of. Now you can ray trace like the pros!

Wasp has a full Protracker course on YouTube.

Originally Posted by MGAmiga90

I'm hoping to learn some assembler coding finally - never did much coding on the Amiga back in the day for some reason.

Photon of Scoopex has a full assembler Amiga hardware programming tutorial series too, covering every single aspect needed to make a functioning oldschool demo while Wei-ju Yu has an Amiga C programming tutorial.

There's never been a better time to be an Amiga owner. Welcome back!

[khph_re]

Originally Posted by MGAmiga90

Hi,

Just thought I'd post about my recent Amiga nostalgia trip....and where it started.

Darren

A great story dude, and well worth a read. I think many on here have similar tales to tell.

Welcome back, and I hope you get much joy out of the Hobby.

[jurassicman]

Thanks for sharing your story. I'm sure you'll enjoy your stay here.

[fxgogo]

Great story and welcome. Some of us have similar stories to you and some of us have never stopped using their Amigas. One thing is common, our experience of the best computer in the world...

[MGAmiga90]

Thanks all - always loved the Amiga, still think the A500 is the best looking machine ever.

While WinUAE is an amazing bit of software, you just can't beat the feeling of the real thing!

Hopefully I'll get into some assembler coding if my brain allows me. Did a bit of 6502 on the C64 last year and some Z80 for my spectrum (always been my goal to write a spectrum sprite routine for some reason..)

Now, the wife has gone out, so time to fire up Pinball Fantasies on the 1200 (as it doesn't work properly on the PiStorm...)!


Cheers
Darren

[MGAmiga90]

Originally Posted by stevelord

Hi,

I thought I'd drop some hints for you in case you're interested. A lot's changed since 93.



Since you've been gone, the Amiga Raytracing Society has a complete Lightwave course for you to dip in and out of. Now you can ray trace like the pros!

Wasp has a full Protracker course on YouTube.



Photon of Scoopex has a full assembler Amiga hardware programming tutorial series too, covering every single aspect needed to make a functioning oldschool demo while Wei-ju Yu has an Amiga C programming tutorial.

There's never been a better time to be an Amiga owner. Welcome back!

Thanks, I've had a look at the Scoopex vids in the past - I will hopefully get to go through them all now.

The raytracing course looks interesting will have a look at that - I've only used Lightwave on the PC (and now play with Blender 3D), I was an Imagine user on the Amiga (I even bought Imagine for £200 - on faulty disks, only for it to be given away on a magazine a few weeks later!)

My musical abilities are a bit non-existent - no idea why I bought about 5 keyboards over the years, I can barely play a note - but used to like sampling the sounds - My tracker of choice was Med/OctaMed back in the day to mess around with samples and mods.