piracy

Note that this poll relates to your Amiga disk collections PRE 1995, as I understand most now have what is officially described as "pirated" disks (e.g. ADF's).

Please choose the catergory that describes your PRE 1995 disk collection the most.

My entire collection was pirated disks!

[keropi]

I voted having my 386 pc in mind (I didn't have an amiga back then...) All except 4-5 games were cracked copies... Greece was a tough place to buy originals back then.... not to mention the ultra-high prices...

[Mœbius]

I'd say that up to 3/4 of my collection was pirated - but I did buy a lot of originals too...
Usually the games I wanted, could'nt be got through my connects, so I had to buy 'em. Mind the real good titels I was happy buying anyways... how could I of possibly survived without the Chaos Engine charachter cards to stick on my wall.

[dwood]

50+ are very good about 40 are worth having and 10 or so are duds.the pirated games i just didnt like.

I'm wondering who else voted like me. Come on. I only had pirated games because it was the only way you could have games here.

[redblade]

90%+ of my stuff was pirated. Living in my area origional games were hard to get, cost to much and the selection was shit. Most of the origionals were those real cheap games, ie Warzone, Madshow.

Hell even at the schools 90%+ of the software was all pirated. Then when I wanted to buy new stuff i had to pay like $2.50USD for a disk from a pirate up in Auckland for stuff as there was no traders in Gisborne/New Zealand. And I had no real swapping contacts :/

I must add, the games that came with the amiga were also pirated disks

[Unknown_K]

My vote is based on my PC since I didnt have an Amiga back then, same goes for my C64 collection of games before that

Thanks all for posting, the reason I wanted the poll is because I found a old FAST advert in Amiga Format....now I wonder if they still offer that £1000......

Seriously I cannot believe that nobody has voted "I had no pirate games". C'mon, we weren't all with dodgy haircuts back then buying crap from some guy in a market where we....

[Methanoid]

Even FAST understood at that time that decent games sold. Amazing that Dungeon Master sold so many.. sure many pirate copies but most half-decent pirates boot the class games. Shite like Dalek Attack was never gonna sell originals!

[Big-Byte]

I bought 10 blank disks and filled them with all the compacks I could a week before I bought the machine!

I did buy Menace and Virus though afterwards.

I ticked "a dozen or so originals" but in fairness, i had a hell of a lot more originals than that, it's just i tended to have a lot of pirated sofware too. hell, in 1995 i had over 1200 disks, i guess these where about 150 coverdisks, 10 to 15 original amiga titles, with 7 cd32 originals too, the original games that came with my amiga 500 batman pack, the amiga 600, amiga 500+, amiga 2000, amiga 600hd (same as a600).
obviously today it;s a little different, i only have 500 floppies now, as those 1200 got lost in a house move, luckily ive replaced almost everything i lost thanks to back2roots and the like, and i now have 8.5gb games/apps/demos on two dvd's and 2400+ games on 5 cd's.... oh yeah and 3.7gb on my pc... i just don't want to risk any amiga software ending in oblivion, so i've earmarked a 40gb drive to download aminet too, it's just finding the time to do it. i must admit though, i tended to get pir8 software often before it was released, if it was good (walker, pinball fantasies, alien breed 3d & 3d-II, alien breed tower assault, xenon 2 megablast, the killing game show, blood money) i bought it, if it sucked, i hadn't wasted £25.

piracy didn't kill the amiga. commodore did. Long live amiga!

Please don't use direct signature in your post, configure your UserCP instead. Thanks.

[Mœbius]

I would try and buy a game, if I really liked it. Also back then it was something real special to me to have the game boxed with manual etc..
Then one thing I kinda had to pirate was programs such as D-paint or Imagine, which would have been just too expensive.

[darkwave]

At first I had quite a few pirated disks, but I also owned about just as many real copies.

It was around 1993-4 when I started using my Amiga for more serious stuff and I got quite a big anti-piracy head on that I deleted all of my pirate games and tried to buy as many that I actually liked as possible. I remember I kept the Chaos Engine as even though I had the originals, disk 2 had stopped working.
Thing was, there were only a few out of my 200 disks that I actually ever played or regarded as any good.

Since then I sold off all of my originals but boy, what I'd do to get them back.

[Bloodwych]

I bought quite a few games, but they were so expensive for a kid back then - £24.99 in stores and a little under £20 mail order.

Must have forked out for about 15 originals, including Bloodwych/Extended levels.

This may sound hard to believe...but I never had a single pirate copy of a game.

There was plenty of opportunity...but, for some reason, I never participated.

All my games, and applications, were originals...

Different kettle-of-fish now though...

[JudasEZT]

the only original games I ever own were given to me by a mate who had a computer shop, when the original games of his shop got too old he asked to me if I wanted them,..

first was JoanOfArc and ShadowOfTheBeast, both in a lame package from Spanish distributors of the time, pure rubbish.. It havent worth to buy it originals.

next time were RainbowIslands and TheKillingCloud.

and last time were Pinkie, two copies of PinballFantasies and SperisOfLegacy.

[andreas]

Hah.
AwoL says he had over 1200 disks. But in 1995!
When *I* was starting highly active on the Amiga, we had 1988!

So when I heard redblade talk, I believed he must have he had read my thoughts somehow. .
Same here: shitty selection, the stuff they originally had for sale was extremely expensive, and hardly anybody in my vicinity was there with an Amiga.
After a LOT of travelling around in a radius of 30 miles, I managed to get AT LEAST 150 disks by extensive swapping. That was in about 1991.
But in 1988/89, I never had more than 40 (!) disks, with 90% of them being pirated.
Sure thing: if I had wanted to, I could've had 3 times as much as that.
But I only kept what I actually played, since I have never been a "collector for collecting's sake".
Talk about MP3 collectors with a personal musical taste like Korn, System of a Down or Nightwish, but sharing Bon Jovi or Europe shit on P2P! They'd never listen to the latter ones because they couldn't bear it [compare to shmup fanatics having to play a RPG!], but they just collect, collect, collect in order to watch the amount of files increase ...
Well, I bet that those '600 disks' many of the people claimed to have contained 90% shit, and 10% games they actually played. So take this 'I had ... disks!' thing with a grain of salt.

[Mangar]

I was an active member of the pirate scene so obviously most of my disks were pirated. I bought mostly Rpg's like bards tale since I wanted the maps and manuals.