What was your most memorable experience with Amiga?

[moijk]

Most amazing:
- First booting of a game, which was James Pond

Second most amazing:
- The day I got the Philips 8833-II

[thgill]

Most amazing:

Here in the US the Amiga didn't have nearly the presence that it did in Europe so many kids like myself in the late 80's/Early 90's never even knew it existed. It was probably summer 91 or 92 and I was over at a friends house and he briefly showed me the Amiga 500 and some games running on it. Seemed kinda cool, but with the whole keyboard and mouse thing it just seemed un-necessarily large and bulky. I obviously had the game console mentality going on.

It wasn't till probably two years later that he decided to sell that same A500 to my brother for something like $50. At this point I was in college and took far more interest in computers than before. He powered the machine back up and popped in MED (not OcataMED, but the original MED) and I was completely FLOORED by tracker based music and watching the color channel bars bouncing up and down. Sampled speech, music...HOLY SHIT!!


So, whilst my brother and I didn't really get into the Amiga until after Commodore tanked, we enjoyed the hell out of it back in the mid 90's. Even going to several of the midwest Amiga Expo's in Columbus Ohio and my brother ran a BBS off an A2000 for sometime. I still actively enjoy the Amiga and have been thinking of picking up a basic A500 setup up for my brother since its been years since he last used one.

Got an C64 when i was 9 years old, then my first A500 when i was 14 (as i remember).

Milestones i remember:
C64:

- Playing all these nice games together with my family and friends. This was such a great time!!
- "Coding" "Adventures" in Basic

Amiga:

- Got a demo, where a mens voice was digitized. My mouth was wide open when i heard this "perfect" sounding voice coming out of my TV. As far as i remember, it had something to do with Star Wars (?)

- Got an Action Replay MKIII at christmas from my parents. My heart bumps with 180 beats per minute

- Connecting my 2400baud Modem to my A500 . Started with calling mailboxes which numbers i got from the local newspaper. Up-/Downloading with 2400baud ... what a pain! My phonebill was so unbelievable high, my parents freaked-out...so i had to distribute newspapers in my town to earn some money to be able to pay the phonebill

- Connecting my ZyXEL 16.800 Modem - HIGHspeed!!!! lol

- Running my own BBS on my A4000. This was a great time, i remember all those great chats in the night, trading stuff from and to USA, linking online-bbs-games with other bbs and so on...

- The night my BBS got hacked. I remember i waked up (must be at 03:00 in the morning). Because i was not really tired, i switched on my 1084S and saw ... a guru !!!! oh my god, my BBS was down. Restarted the Amiga and there was... NOTHING. The complete HD was formatted. someone hacked the adminaccount and formatted all harddisks.
I remember my mother stormed into my room when she heard my screams of rage at 03:10 in the morning...

Sorry for my bad english

[Photon]

A magic xmas break when I biked through snow every single day to my mate Paul, who had one of the first A500s round these here parts. Remember his mom used to serve pizza, another recent novelty. Paul had the connections... in an intense burst of time, all the excellent software that defines Amiga passed before our eyes (Seka, DPaint, Soundtracker, games, demos...) ending in a climax, that here was a machine where you could do much more different things, and you could do it yourself. In fact, there were a thing called demogroups consisting of school kids like us, who did all these amazing, different things themselves. It had a feeling of revolution and freedom to it.

[pickaweapon]

Playing Lotus Esprit II with siblings. Roaring NOOOOOO as someone passes you or forces you to crash or you kid sister laughing like a dirty witch as she overtakes you just before the finish line - ah happy days!

[Dastardly]

Originally Posted by ubermick

Getting my A500 Batman Pack. My class were supposed to be going on a school tour to London, and my mum and dad thought it was a waste of money to send me. Stayed home, got the hump, sulked in my room non stop, and swore I'd never forgive my dad. I'd been saving up all year for an Amiga after seeing my friend's one, and my dad decided to make it up to me by taking me into town, putting my savings (just over £100) as a down payment, and getting me my A500 on HP. Turned out that it changed my life, since I got addicted to DPaint, started doing logos for our wee scene group, and almost 23 years on, I do that for a living now, as a creative director.

So much of that echoes my experience. I got my Batman Pack at 15 (best pack ever) and then became addicted to DPaint 2 then 3 then 4 (see the Pixel Pushers H.Q social group for examples). 20+ years later, I'm now a Graphic Designer, still pushing those pixels around like it was yesterday. All thanks to the Amiga!

[dirkies]

from a post I did in 2002, still fresh in memory:

I was a good C64 artist/hacker/player/swapper for about 4 years 1984-1988 but the day late 1987 (in december, around christmas) some guys at my computer club (old C64 friends, then PC guys, quickly sold their AT PC for an A500!) walked in the club to swap some games, thus they brought along a 500 for copying. I was 15 years old at that moment.

The A500 was connected to a very big (37" or so) TV with decent stereo speakers, so it was very impressive compared with a normal 14" monitor.

First thing I witnessed... TECH TECH, a demo by SODAN (old C64 group). Still got that demo... INCREDIBLE! Vector graphics, stereo sound, sampled Depeche mode, vectors, scrolling and the blonde babe of Defender of the Crown but with naked t*ts! :-)
(still have it, but it only worked on kickstart 1.2)

Then I saw MARAUDER copier, a very colourful copier with nice animations. "White Lightning" was another copier I saw a lot, but boring blue/black

First games I played when I had my machine 6 months later with Philips CM8833mk2 and A501 and A1010 (funded by selling all my C64 hardware right after), hot summer of 88 (all 'donated' by the friends) :-)

JUGGLER DEMO (rendered 3D, whoa!) THE instant CLASSIC Amiga demo!
Firepower (absolutely awesome sounds, great fun,even through modem! replaced later samples with better hiQ ones, even more fun!!!)
The Jet (sublogic)
Dark Castle (cool one)
Defender of the crown
Faerytale adventure (very addictive)
Shanghai (houuuuuuuuuuurs with this one)
Test Drive 1
Sinbad & the throne of the falcon (never succeeded in completing this marvel of Cinemaware!)
Starglider 1
The Surgeon (text only, but with speech, hilarious shrink answering your questions!!)

more things a few weeks later (I was in the swapper world :-)
F/A 18 interceptor (with extra 512KB had TOPGUN sound intro)
Xenon 1
Gee bee Air rally
King of Chicago
Star Wars 1
Arkanoid (!!!)
Great Giana Sisters (with a magnificient Lightforce cracker group intro, superb stereo tune with smooth dwirling stars)
Barabarian 1 (Palace version, excellent chopping)
Styx
Sidewinder (!!)
Pink Panther
Karate Kid II

[N-Ed]

Remember I was like 14 at the time and near school were a Atari depot(or something along that line). Almost every day we would hit the dumpsters outside the depot for thrown away disks that we could format and use with our Amigas, that was our main source for disks. They would chase us away on at least a weekly basis, ahhh those were good times

[Specksynder]

Every day spent with my Amiga 500 was memorable. And the most sad thing is that all the money in the world couldn't bring back those days

[Methanoid]

1) Seeing an Amiga in the Cambridge Computer Store running the Blood Money intro. Sold my ST and bought an Amiga immediately

2) Selling my A500 a few days later to buy a B2000, ram and 40Mb HDD at five times the cost!

3) Having the "law" turn up and take away my Amigas after they shut down my BBS

[seuden]

Originally Posted by Zambot_3

Every day spent with my Amiga 500 was memorable. And the most sad thing is that all the money in the world couldn't bring back those days

See my sig.

[amiga_Forever]

getting past the "security" questions at the start in Leisure Suit Larry

I learn the hard way, but now its easier with cracks

(and of course Amiga 500 home from k-mart, opening it up and seeing all the goodies.), then my school mate sold me his ACtion Replay III, and the A570 CD Rom

Then, the fun finally started .....

[diablothe2nd]

oh wow you've just made me remember my experiences with the Larry "security" questions! haha. It'd take me about 10 attempts to get in at first (until i started writing the answers down) so i'd have to leave my miggy turned on overnight if i planned on playing the next day too to save me 90 mins of guessing the answers