Amiga A500 - Best way to use today????

[pollaxe]

Wing Commander took me away from it in the end..

I have a couple of frothing Mac fanboy friends and having been a frothing Amiga fanboy in my day it does mean I can pat them on the shoulder/head in a patronising and condescending manner and explain that I do understand...

[malfunction]

I was a sickening Amiga fanboy in the early 90s. It's embarrassing to think about really; I used to have arguments with PC owners over the advantage of them. Put it this way, if I'd had access to web messageboards back then, I'd have been called all sorts of names under the sun for being an argumentative sod

You and everyone else that owned an Amiga. If I could have afforded it I would have ended up with some heavily accelerated tower Amiga monstrosity; the other saving grace of PCs was their relatively low cost even back then.

But yeah, for me, it was when Doom came along that changed everything. The Amiga, as much as everyone tried, just couldn't compete.

Gloom (edit: after looking at you tube I mean Gloom Deluxe) was quite playable on my 030 (68030EC @ 30MHz if memory serves)... Alien Breed 3D and a lot of the other attempted Doom / Quake clones were like watching slide shows through a kaleidoscope though. If whomever had control over the Amiga at various points in the 90s had managed to add some kind of 3d capabilities into the chipset I think it might have survived a lot longer

[Stoo]

I've still got my two up in the loft

A500+ and a pimped out A1200 with 030+FPU and a whole 16mb RAM

I might get the A1200 down at some point

Occasionally I've been know to have a bit of a look on ebay for a mint A3000 (not acorn!), but I've not found one yet..

[Flibb]

I've still got my two up in the loft

A500+ and a pimped out A1200 with 030+FPU and a whole 16mb RAM

I might get the A1200 down at some point

Occasionally I've been know to have a bit of a look on ebay for a mint A3000 (not acorn!), but I've not found one yet..

Eddie Lomax (posted above) has a desktop A4000, rather a nice bit of kit. My A1200 is sitting unloved under the TV haven't used it in ages, would be nice to be able to use it for web browsing at some point. Must talk to Eddie and see if he can sort it out for me, might even grab an expansion board. Luckily my TV is still a CRT.

[Mike Fishcake]

I have a couple of frothing Mac fanboy friends and having been a frothing Amiga fanboy in my day it does mean I can pat them on the shoulder/head in a patronising and condescending manner and explain that I do understand...

Aaaahhhhh I knew rabid computer system fanboyism sounded familiar

Gloom (edit: after looking at you tube I mean Gloom Deluxe) was quite playable on my 030 (68030EC @ 30MHz if memory serves)...

Nah. They get 10/10 for effort, but accellerator cards weren't common enough to make it a viable product. Plus the game wasn't brilliant.

If whomever had control over the Amiga at various points in the 90s had managed to add some kind of 3d capabilities into the chipset I think it might have survived a lot longer

Yeah... eventually it was a lack of business acumen that led to it's downfall. If the Amiga fanboys had a Steve Jobs-like media-savvy figurehead to worship, maybe it would have lasted a bit longer. Well, that and maybe if anyone I knew actually bought any Amiga software...

[malfunction]

Nah. They get 10/10 for effort, but accellerator cards weren't common enough to make it a viable product. Plus the game wasn't brilliant.

I honestly enjoyed the game - it was less impressive and more mindless than doom (if that's possible) - but I enjoyed it in a dumb shoot em up kind of way. Not the best game on the amiga for sure but enjoyable.

Well, that and maybe if anyone I knew actually bought any Amiga software...

Yes - piracy was rife... I still remember X Copy and various people having multiple filing cabinets full of floppy discs. In some aspects piracy was a good thing for the amiga in that most people swapping discs also swapped demos and all the rest of it. I can't imagine many people actually going out of their way to sit and watch a demo these days as many of us used to in the amiga days - but back then I guess we were more easily impressed and it was easier for the demo makers to do things with the hardware that were far more impressive looking than most games - in fact quite often things done on the amiga were more impressive than anything else on any other platform at the time. When Shadow of The Beast came out it was better looking than a lot of the arcade games of the time (shame the gameplay was as shallow as a puddle for the most part - though it was still a vaguely enjoyable game by the time you got to the later levels).

[Gerrard]

Well, it didn't help that Workbench had a helpful "backup" command that made copying disks easy. On the other hand, you still had various code wheels, code tables and even using the manual itself ("What word is on page 5, paragraph 2, word 5?") to try and counter it. IIRC, Worms used shiny black writing on black paper to stop it being photocopied.

[malfunction]

Oh and in terms of good amiga games:

Turrican 1 and 2 (not so much 3)
Brian The Lion (AGA)
X-Out / Z-Out
Disposable Hero
Pinball Dreams / Fantasies / Illusions (at least some of which are available in AGA version)
Speedball 2
Chaos Engine
Exile (I think there was an AGA version... This is obviously actually a classic BBC game)
Gods
Overkill (AGA)
Roadkill (AGA)
Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker
BC Kid 1 and 2 (PC Kid / Bonk's Adventure from the PC Engine / Turbo Grafx)
Supercars II (only really fun in 2 player mode though)
Super Stardust (AGA)

http://www.lemonamiga.com/ is a good site to have a flick through some old games

There are quite a few games you can *legally* download too:

http://www.factor5.de/downloads.shtml has Katakis, R-Type, BC Kid and Turrican 1, 2 and 3 for download
http://www.dream17.co.uk/downloads.php?cat=1 and http://www.dream17.co.uk/downloads.php?cat=2 for Team 17 game disk images and CD32 ISOs

[Syd]

I honestly enjoyed the game - it was less impressive and more mindless than doom (if that's possible) - but I enjoyed it in a dumb shoot em up kind of way. Not the best game on the amiga for sure but enjoyable.



Yes - piracy was rife... I still remember X Copy and various people having multiple filing cabinets full of floppy discs. In some aspects piracy was a good thing for the amiga in that most people swapping discs also swapped demos and all the rest of it. I can't imagine many people actually going out of their way to sit and watch a demo these days as many of us used to in the amiga days - but back then I guess we were more easily impressed and it was easier for the demo makers to do things with the hardware that were far more impressive looking than most games - in fact quite often things done on the amiga were more impressive than anything else on any other platform at the time. When Shadow of The Beast came out it was better looking than a lot of the arcade games of the time (shame the gameplay was as shallow as a puddle for the most part - though it was still a vaguely enjoyable game by the time you got to the later levels).

XCOPY - that brings back memoires!

I remember standing with a mate in the local computer shop (he worked there at the time) Copying Sword of Sodan - all 3 discs with Xcopy hoping the boss wouldn't come and see us!!! each block that ticked by seemed to take forever!!!!!!!!!!!

[badass]

Amiga willy waving bit:
My A1200 had a 68060 and 32MB RAM when I sold it around 1998/1999. I can't remember the HDD size but it was more than 1 GB.
I got a tower case for it and an adapter to connect PC keyboards but it couldn't handle more than 2 keys at once so made playing games with the keyboard impossible.
That was one of teh reasons I sold it and went to PC. The other was how much cheaper PC's were for mych more powerful machines, even though they were using that spawn of satan and a demonstration of a dire operating system, Windows 98 back then.

[simonw]

I think almost everyone that had an Amiga held off going to a PC for that very reason. The OS sucked. Obviously it's not an apples to apples comparison but IIRC my Amiga 1200 with an early IDE HDD (I think it was around 60MB!) booted to workbench in less than 10 seconds - and even when you were thrashing the CPU with something like powerpack it still remained responsive. That and even the best PC games at the time were crap in at least one respect compared to the Amiga. 3D games 'saved' the PC in that respect - they're a lot more forgiving of variable frame rates than 2D games are.

This is so very true. I held on to my Amiga even through my Uni days for typing up reports. Once Commodore declared bankruptcy, that was the end of that, I had no choice but to move to a PC.

Regarding the piracy issue, I actually bought my games, mainly because the people I knew either had Atari STs or PCs. But I did buy them via mail order, getting a discount and paying around £18 per game instead of the usual £25-30. I also had one of those external SCSI CD-ROM drives which was plugged in using the PCMCIA slot, mainly for viewing all the public domain demos which were doing the rounds.

[malfunction]

Amiga willy waving bit:
My A1200 had a 68060 and 32MB RAM when I sold it around 1998/1999. I can't remember the HDD size but it was more than 1 GB.
I got a tower case for it and an adapter to connect PC keyboards but it couldn't handle more than 2 keys at once so made playing games with the keyboard impossible.
That was one of teh reasons I sold it and went to PC. The other was how much cheaper PC's were for mych more powerful machines, even though they were using that spawn of satan and a demonstration of a dire operating system, Windows 98 back then.

If I remember correctly I got 'my' 68030EC / 30Mhz board around the time Frontier was released - we (my brother and I for it was a shared computer) took the accelerator card in and out a couple of times to compare the speed with (quite nice) and without (quite slow). Never saw an 060 in action - best I saw was an 040 and that flew.

Wing Commander took me away from it in the end..

Philistine! I have fond memories of playing the non AGA version and the CD32 version (yes, I had a CD32 too - that lasted quite a while though I usually played vital light more than anything else on that)

[Mike Fishcake]

Yeah, I had a 68030 card in my original A1200 too, with a MASSIVE 500MB hard drive Problem was, it was a 3.5" drive, and combined with the accellerator card, I couldn't use it for more than a few hours before I got worried about it getting too hot

Can't remember exactly how much RAM I had, but I think it was around 6MB.

[[GSV]Trig]

I had a 500mb drive too, never managed to fill it up
I had an internal 2.5" drive and an external CD drive, using one of those things that plugged into the internal ports and then gave u some normal 44 pin as well so you could run a cable out of the unit and into external box...
I had the 2mb in the 1200, a 16mb in the accelerator card and then a really old 4mb PCMCIA card...

[DavieJG]

RE: the guy who got alien breed special edition. DONT PLAY IT!

haha, i played it when i was 6 yrs old and i havent slept in 17yrs!

Loving the nostalgia in this thread tho!

[Bane]

I tried an A1200 to relive Amiga gaming memories, but had the advanatge of a Philips CM11342 CRT monitor from the same era.

Eventually I gave up and tried WinUAE with a USB Speedlink Competition Pro joystick. It worked better for my gaming needs, and supports game recording.

When I return to WinUAE I want to look at Amiga HD emulation instead of floppy disk option, to speed up game loading.