Commodore Amiga turns 40, headlines UK exhibition

The Commodore Amiga turned 40 this year, and the event has been marked by The National Museum Of Computing in the UK with a hands-on exhibition of models from the archives. Space Invader Twenty classic arcade games FROM THE ARCHIVES You can find a range of computers in the newly-extended PC Gallery at the museum's site in …

[may_i]

It's not the desoldering...

When you find a machine which has been stricken by leaking capacitors or batteries, it's not the desoldering which leads to a world of pain. It's having to repair all the tracks and plated through holes on the PCB which have been dissolved by the leaking electrolyte.

Thankfully, most old kit has a PCB with only two layers - tracks on the top and bottom of the board, making repair possible if you know that you're doing. More modern kit, with four or more layers is a much, much more difficult repair. In fact, once you have buried layers, a repair may not even be possible.

The comment about RIFAs might be somewhat obscure for non-electronics nerds. It refers to a type of capacitor which is normally placed over the mains inputs to a power supply for noise suppression. Unfortunately, the plastic case of these particular capacitors develops cracks over time. These cracks allow moisture to seep in to the capacitor and once it has been damaged this way, can turn into a very smelly fire as soon as you plug the equipment in.

[munnoch]

Re: It's not the desoldering...

I had to google RIFA. Radioindustrins Fabrik Aktiebolag a Swedish component manufacturer acquired by Ericsson.

[Lunatik]

Have a CD32...

...but it's mine, all MINE!

[graeme leggett]

Re: Have a CD32...

I've only got the CDROM add on unit - A570 - which made my A500+ closer to a CDTV unit.

[Dan 55]

Re: Have a CD32...

I literally have no idea what I did with mine. Probably sold it in the classified ads and now it's hanging on a wall behind some youtuber.

For some reason I thought a CD32 + SX1 expansion + keyboard + mouse was a buy than an A1200 because the A1200 didn't have a CD-ROM drive (Commodore went bust before the CD1200 got out of the prototype stage).

[AbelSoul]

Re: Have a CD32...

I had one but swapped it for a 10GB hard drive nearly 30 years ago. Whoops.

[David 132]

Re: Have a CD32...

You sure on that capacity?

My first HDD in ~1990 was a 20MB one (A590 sidecar); once I got my A1200 in ‘92 I had a 40MB then a 60MB internal unit.

I was at Uni in ‘94 when a friend-of-a-friend showed off his shiny new 1GB, 3.5” hard drive; we all boggled at how unimaginably vast and limitless its capacity was.

10GB “nearly 30 years ago” seems unlikely unless the word “nearly” is doing a lot of work in that sentence :)

[user555]

Re: Have a CD32...

nearly could easily be 1997 ... that's feasible, affordable capacities rapidly grew once MSDOG's 800MB limit was crossed.

[phuzz]

Re: Have a CD32...

I had a 1.5GB (one point five gigabyte) hardrive for my A1200 in about 1996-7. I bought it second hand off a kid at school for £15, so they must have been coming down in price by then.

[David 132]

Re: Have a CD32...

To be fair that would (assuming you meant internal) have been a 2.5” unit, and those always lagged their 3.5” brethren in capacity.

And reliability. I lost the first two units I installed in my A1200 to premature failure - there’s an old schoolfriend of mine who shall remain nameless whose mere presence killed my shiny new 60MB unit :)

[phuzz]

Re: Have a CD32...

Oh no, it was a full 3.5 incher, which you could just fit inside an A1200, as long as you removed half of the internal metal shielding, and didn't mind the case bulging a bit.

It might have also needed an external power supply, I can't remember now. I know I did need one when I also added a CD drive, with the ribbon cable sticking straight out the side of the Amiga.

It was pretty janky, but it worked!

[Boothy]

Re: Have a CD32...

Those were the days, my first HDD was a 80MB also on an A1200!

Of course for perspective, this was the age of the Floppy disk, with Amiga 3.5" disks (A1200) having 1.76MB per disk, so you could install the entire Amiga OS onto that 80MB disk, and still have space for around another 40 Floppies worth of data or installs.

I even partitioned mine, one with full Amiga OS with a few other extras, which I used for productivity (Deluxe Paint, Wordworth etc), plus another with a cut down OS, to keep memory usage to a minimum, which I used mainly for a few specific games.

[Kilsally]

Re: Have a CD32...

And so do I with a TF330 64gb ram and sd card

[ParlezVousFranglais]

Wow - another thing to make me feel old! Hundreds of hours playing Gunship, and many more than that playing Lords of Midnight & Doomdark's Revenge by the late, great, Mike Singleton (fantastic ports from Chris Wild still keeping them alive on mobile as well)

[tony72]

I'm honestly having trouble remembering all what I used to play on the Amiga. Dune 2, Civilization, A Train and Sim City 2000 for sure took care of many, many hours. Oh, and Syndicate. And I used to do a full length race in Microprose Grand Prix before every actual Grand Prix. Oh yeah, Sensible Soccer, Alien Breed, Speedball 2. Good times.

[Terje]

And the countless hours of pinball dream, pinball illusion and pinball fantasy. Ohh and Wings a disturbingly good game!

edit: forgot all the hours I spent with harpoon and red storm rising.

[rjsmall]

I was a big fan of the Cinemaware games - Defender of the Crown, Rocker Ranger, TV Sports Football along with other titles such as Lemmings, Operation Wolf and SimCity. Lots of lost hours playing these but none of them wasted.

[MasonFlash01]

Totally agree those games might have eaten up a lot of time, but they were absolutely worth it. Titles like Defender of the Crown and Lemmings had a kind of charm you just don’t see anymore. Honestly, those hours feel more like great memories than wasted time jenny mod uncensored.

[Homo.Sapien.Floridanus]

dont forget FA/18 Hornet with that little mission code wheel to prevent cracks. It was way more advanced that the other simulators which were still on wire frame graphics.. pfft babies in comparison.

I miss my old 1000 as well as my VIC20 and C64

Good days freee from the Internet, loved the less toxic BBS'

[AbelSoul]

All of those plus Cannon Fodder. "War ain't never been so much fun" At the time, the highest quality game music I'd ever heard.

[CountCadaver]

WORMS

Worms - oh no, uh oh

[Dan 55]

I was rather hoping El Reg might have mentioned the 3rd Spectrum Next Kickstarter with a Doomdark's Revenge port as one of the goals and ZX81, QL, Sam Coupé, C64, and CPC cores, but it went unreported.

[David 132]

I have my 2nd-issue Next and love it :)

[DrXym]

I didn't realise it got an Amiga port. My dad used to play Lords of Midnight & Doomdark's Revenge for hours on the Spectrum.

At the time I actually wrote a realtime blend of Doomdarks & Dungeon Master and sent it off to a few places, got an interview in EA but nothing came of it after that. I recently recovered the demo using a floppy reader and it wasn't that complete tbh but I'm impressed by how much functionality I did manage to code up.

[Kilsally]

The Games That Weren't website would likely be interested in that.

[DrXym]

Thanks I might consider it. I actually fired up the demo I did last night and I totally ripped of Lords of Midnight for sure.

[Colin Critch]

I have a dragon32 I have to get running

I have a dragon32 I have to get running, I'll be sure replace the capacitors first. I too loved LOM and played that on the spectrum mostly, though there was a android version that Mike published that i have somewhere. I did get two military victories with LOM, after that I then extracted the map at the end of the RAM, I also found I could poke values to get 255 magic swords and riders, fun times.

[wolfetone]

I am surprised that a place like that doesn't have a CD32, yet they have surplus of things like the PET which they sold the other week.

All of these "YouToobers" who paint themselves as historians or vanguards for the retro gaming scene - why are you hoarding a CD32 in your flat when it could be somewhere for others to enjoy?

[elsergiovolador]

and CDTV!

[KayJ]

It belongs in a museum!

[Maurice Mynah]

Retro-blighting

I found a very grubby beige keyboard once, and decided to spruce it up by cleaning with a mixture of ammonia and weak alcohol*. This worked a treat taking off all that finger grease and bringing up the keys a respectable off white. For a few days. A week later it had gone a decidedly MAGA shade of orange.

* Don't do this at home, kids. Not in an enclosed space anyway.

[mark l 2]

I still have my A1200 which was rehoused in a Eytech tower case. But it needs recapping and i don't have the soldering skills to do it myself, so its either pay to have it done by someone or in reality I probably should i just sell it on to someone else who wants to put the time and effort into it. As its been sat collecting dust for years now and my laptop is able to emulate an Amiga vastly more powerful than what my A1200 would be even if i spent 1000s getting every upgrade i possibly could.

And I am not someone who believe that you HAVE to run it on true hardware, I also have a PS2 but play those games through emulation on my laptop as this gives me higher resolutions, better frame rates and other QOL improvements such as save states, bug fixes and the ability to play games on the go.

[David 132]

> my laptop is able to emulate an Amiga vastly more powerful than what my A1200 would be

The author subsequently released a later version that took account of emulators, but for a long tine the Amiga benchmarking tool SysInfo would give a speed rating, when run under emulation on modern hardware, of “Call me NOW!!!”

It was unable to comprehend the existence of an Amiga orders of magnitude faster than an A4000/040 :)

[John Brown (no body)]

Gamers will take about lag. Pretty much zero lag playing an old computer or console on a CRT display. Plug it into an LCD panel and there are multiple ways of increasing the lag between a button press and a response, not least of which is the display itself. Then you might add in an upscaler of some sort and likely increase the lag even more. So yeah, emulation or FPGA type devices with modern outputs is probably the best way to go if you don't want to get into the potential world of hurt[*] of getting and keeping a suitable CRT display running :-)

* Both figuratively and literally - Fixing CRTs can be "fun" if you come from a digital world and there are up to 30,000 volts to "play" with around the HT transformer and picture tube, which can be life changing...or extinguishing.

[phuzz]

I can't speak for everyone else who's old enough to have used an Amiga back in the day, but my lengthening reaction times mean I am completely unable to spot that amount of lag any more.

[Dan 55]

Speaking for myself my reactions aren't what they once were so they need all the help they can get including removing lag I can't see, luckily being middle-aged I can waste money on stuff like real hardware or FPGA (not CRT, I can't get that past the WAF).

[John Brown (no body)]

Yeah, as Dan said, our older bodies are adding an inherent lag anyway. Add in the 50+ms of lag even using native HDMI, or the 100+ms using the analogue inputs[*] on a LCD/OLED display and suddenly your 60 year old reactions are behaving more like you are 80-90 years old :-)

Yes, modern TVs may still have analogue inputs, but they have to be digitised, frame by frame for display on that flashy new panel, even the digital inputs have to be processed and scaled to fit, so unless you buy an expensive "gamer" display, there will always be some lag beyond our control or advancing ages :-)

[WolfFan]

Thou shalt read ALL the Sabrina Online strips

https://www.sabrina-online.com/archive.html

The very first strip (September 1996!) featured Eric Schwartz's obsessions with Amigas and skunks. He is still obsessed with both. Dangerously obsessed.

[Dave559]

Re: Thou shalt read ALL the Sabrina Online strips

Wow, I'm impressed (and very surprised) that that's still on the go! I haven't read that since the late 90s!

(It feels "wrong" that it now seems to be in colour, though!)

[Mr Crisps]

40 years. Sheesh.

Sold oodles of A500s and Atari STs in my first proper part time job at a computer shop in Edinburgh. To memory upgrade the early Atari units you had to solder the RAM onto the board :) Happy times though, crazy amount of software on those platforms in their heyday.

[m4r35n357]

Re: 40 years. Sheesh.

& both utterly urinated over the PCs of the day

[munnoch]

Re: 40 years. Sheesh.

I quite possibly bought an ST from you.

[0laf]

Re: 40 years. Sheesh.

My parents possibly bought my Amiga from you too

[The Central Scrutinizer]

Great Memories

I had an A500 and then an A4000. Great machines.

I spent a lot of time with DPaint 3, Harpoon, lots of Fred Fish disks and then got into 3D with Aladdin 4D and Imagine and eventually LightWave.

Computing was actually fun back then.

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Great Memories

Finding random addresses in magazines, sending empty floppies, stamps and cash hoping to get something cool back.

[ChrisC]

Re: Great Memories

Finally started archiving all of my old discs, having recently reorganised the garden shed and found which of the myriad of almost identical looking storage crates actually contained them, and some of the names on said discs bring back some happy memories of doing exactly that. It appears I spent quite a considerable sum on PD discs from Start Computer Systems just down the road from where I used to live at the time, and amongst the mix of discs from other libraries were a few from 17-Bit Software in the days before they became better known under their later Team 17 moniker for stuff like Alien Breed, Project X etc...

Even some of the discs I used for my own stuff bring back happy memories too, either because they've got branded labels from the local computer store where I got them from, or because the box they're in is sufficiently unique to trigger memories of picking it up off the shelf back in the day.

That said, my earliest memory of taking a gamble with a random ad like that was back in my days as a Spectrum owner, when I saw a tiny ad for a tactical turn by turn wargame, which turned out to be Laser Squad... It's crazy to think now, given just how readily available it soon became once word started to spread as to just how epic a game it was, that it started off being sold in such a nondescript manner.

[Dan 55]

Re: Great Memories

T'would be a great service if you could upload those PD disks to archive.org, Aminet, or similar. I'm sure there are gems which are still unavailable online.

[David 132]

Re: Great Memories

Back in ‘94, as a young and painfully gauche university undergrad, I wrote a little utility program for the Amiga and submitted it to Aminet. In those days, as I recall, they sent out CDs to contributors, so somewhere I still have that disc.

Anyway, the tool had a minor bug in it that’s (pardon the pun) bugged me ever since. Over the years I’d fire up my old Amiga desktop in WinUAE and be confronted with my shameful error.

So the other day I set up the SAS/C toolchain, grabbed the app source, and fixed the bug - including updating the documentation in AmigaGuide and text format.

Uploaded the new version to Aminet with apologies for taking 31 years between versions, and got a really nice note back from them saying that normally they don’t accept new versions of software if the submitter has a different email address (my .ac.uk address is long since defunct), but that they’d make an exception as they were touched by my story :)

A pint for the Aminet team!

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Great Memories

Ah, Aminet. I even took out a subscription with a local UK distributor and collected all the CDs once they started on that format. I think I bought the first half dozen or so, then started getting them as they came out. The spines made up an image when all lined up in order, I think it was the Aminet logo.

[tin 2]

Re: Great Memories

Love this story!!

[ChrisC]

Re: Great Memories

I was a couple of years after you in starting to submit stuff, so maybe they'd stopped dishing out CDs by then... Incredible resource though, and one of the many things that made the Amiga community such a great thing to be part of back then.

[Wally Dug]

Re: Great Memories

Ah, yes, the memories! But... it was the Amiga, so you always got something cool back.

For me, it was Pinball Dreams, Pinball Fantasies, PageSetter, Professional Page, PageStream, KindWords, MED, OctaMED, Fred Fish disks, AmiNet CDs, demos, music, graphics, cartoons... heck, now that I think about it, it was everything.

And money, money, money!

A500, external disk drive, A501 additional RAM, OS upgrades (many OS and ROM upgrades!), handheld scanner, A1500, GVP SCSI hard drive and memory card, GVP accelerator card, graphics card, serial card, CD-ROM drive... endless money.

Amiga Format, Amiga Computing, CU Amiga, Amiga Shopper, Amiga Power and, on a personal level most importantly, JAM (Just Amiga Monthly) - huge thanks to Jeff Walker for launching my writing career.

But endless hours of fun and excitement!

Only Amiga Makes It Possible

P.S. I still use an Amiga regularly under emulation.

[MrBanana]

Re: Great Memories

So the early advent of Kickstarter then?

[ChrisC]

Re: Great Memories

Same here hardware wise, and that 4000 ended up having more (relatively speaking) money thrown at it than I've spent on any other system I've owned - by the time I was finished there wasn't a single expansion slot left unused, nor much space at all left within the rather cramped confines of the 4000D case, to the point where in order to get the CDROM to sit flush against the front panel, I had to remove the retaining screws from the rear drive bay assembly so it could slide as far back into the case as possible and provide *just* enough clearance to avoid the power connector on the CDROM from clashing with the connector on one of the drives in said bay.

Was still using that 4000 as a day to day machine up until around 20 years ago when we moved, and it never quite managed to get unpacked again from its storage crate, other than a couple of rare outings to fire it up and pull some files off the HDs for transferring into WInUAE. More recently though I got myself a USB Zip drive and a Greaseweazle-modified floppy drive, and have been slowly going through a couple of crates-worth of discs to archive as many of those as are a) not already available elsewhere (no point in archiving game/application discs, for example, but that still leaves a huge pile of discs containing stuff I'd created myself over the years) and b) still readable after having been stored in what can charitably be described as less than ideal conditions. Given the latter, I've actually been pleasantly surprised at just how few of the floppies have had any level of read errors, and how few of those errors actually led to any data being unrecoverable. And that's before I've even tried any of the cleaning methods to remove the surface contamination which is sometimes the cause of such read errors following such storage conditions...

[Chris Gray 1]

Amiga 4-Ever

I just checked and there are no Amigas in my closets here. I did pass some on to a friend who was going to put them in one of his storage lockers. Don't know what he has left - his life has become *very* busy.

A1000 - first off the official monitor wasn't available, so the store loaned me a green-screen one. Very slow BASIC Mandelbrot in shades of green. Long live the keyboard garage! The SOTS (Slap On The Side) hard drives never worked, so the store and I agreed to an upgrade:

A2000 - eventually got the 68020 board turning it into an A2500.

A3000 - workhorse - eventually bought a second as backup, but never needed it, but see below.

A4000T - bought this *after* I heard that they were going under - I was in the middle of a lot of programming and did not want to switch machines at that point.

At times in there I would be running Amiga Empire or AmigaMUD with two modems. Another period I ran the Amiga UUCP package and was a forwarder for news/email.

I got an ethernet card at one point - that would have been for an A3000 I think. Work let me put it on the network in their machine room, so it was running Empire or AmigaMUD (both??) right on the internet for a while.

It's been quite a while since I had UAE running - I don't think ever on this current Linux box. Probably good - saves lots of time! :-)

[neilo]

Re: Amiga 4-Ever

And us Draco fans? You ever going to port that language to (say) Linux or macOS? We've been waiting DECADES for you, buddy!!

[Chris Gray 1]

Re: Amiga 4-Ever

Been working on Draco's successor for quite some time. Getting there. I now have a compiler written in itself that generates X86-64 code on Linux. The language is huge, but quite Draco-like. I took some time a couple years back to try porting Amiga Empire to it. One or two routines in the world generator compiled without change. Stalled on trying to have a single server handle all the clients directly - will need to do something like "inetd" on my Linux box, or maybe use "vfork". A very out of date version of the language is here:

http://www.graysage.com/Zed/New/

Note the "http" - I haven't gone to the effort to support "https" yet.

[Jeroen Braamhaar]

Still got my A4000/030 ... and an A1200 and an A500. Not booted up in years, but not forgotten!

[John Brown (no body)]

My A1200 gets booted regularly. In spirit if not in acuality. During the pandemic lockdown, I dug it out of the loft, got everything prepared in advance, removed the 2.5" IDE HDD, plugged it into a USB caddy and imaged it for use with UAE. I wasn't going to risk plugging the real A1200 in, the PSUs are notorious for going bang and taking the Amiga with it, let alone that the A1200's were built in the middle of "The Great Capacitor Plague" (Ironic that I did this during the COVID plague!) and didn't want to risk even the HDD for more than absolutely necessary.

It took a little fineabling to the startup-sequence to stop it looking for hardware not present and then sorting video drivers for a better resolution, but was a fun experience and still gets fired up for some of my fave games.

[Boothy]

A500, A1200, A4000 & CD32

Had all four of the above at one point or another.

The A500 was a 2nd hand unit, bought in my late teens to replace/supplement an ageing ZX Spectrum 48k [*].

Later on got a A1200, new from a shop in Leeds (UK). I had some money by this point!

Got a CD32, such a shame it never took off.

Got a 2nd hand A4000/030, later on found someone else who'd upgraded from an 040, so bought the old 040 board from them for cheap(ish). That was interesting to upgrade, it was not a simple plug-and-play, needed a newer ROM (good idea to do this anyway), plus several jumpers had to be set correctly for the new CPU to work. But so much faster than the 030!

Also got a Village Tronic Picasso IV board for it.

A500 was sold a while after getting the A1200.

Still have the A1200 and A4000.

Don't recall what happened to the CD32 (it's not in the loft (no damp in my loft), I just checked!).

*: The Spectrum started as a regular 48k rubber keyboard, I modified it to create a universal joystick, that could be used to emulate any keys pressed (via jumpers). I wore the printing off the keys with use, no problem, I'd memorised the keys by that point (and I mean all of it, not just A-Z etc, but POINT, CAT, PEEK, POKE, IN, OUT etc). Then I wore the membrane out! By that point + (Plus) conversion kits were available, so it became a + and I got an micro-drive for it. Had one of those cards that can dump the memory to a micro-drive, so much nicer than tapes! This is currently also in storage. Bit of a hoarder!

[0laf]

Glory days

I had a 500 which was a dream machine for me after seeing my cousin's machine.

Some of my happiest gaming time ever. Speedball 2 as someone else brought up, Alien Breed, Stuntcar racer, Starglider 2 (came with a book), It came from the Desert.

I had the Batman pack.

Sorry to admit but most of my games were cracks and copies but I did have a fair few legit ones.

[David 132]

Re: Glory days

Batman pack here too, even before I’d seen the film.

I had genuine originals of Monkey Island 1 & 2, Civilization 2, Colonization, and maybe a few others. As for the rest of my games, ahem…

[Anonymous Coward]

"Why are you bothering with PCs?! The Amiga will kill the PC in the next few years, mark my words!" , said my brother-in-law back in the day!

Don't think I'd have managed a 35 year IT career if I'd listened to him. Sorry to say I was an Atari ST/PC fan back in the day.

[ecofeco]

Two things:

If Commodore had not shot themselves in both feet, the world would have been Amiga(ish)

The Amiga WAS a PC.

Long live the Video Toaster.

[tin 2]

Indeed. I think history has agreed Commodore was a horribly mismanaged company by then!

And, further, possibly if ESCOM had not also shot themselves in the foot.

I remember reading that selling an Amiga pulled in a hell of a lot more profit than their PCs but there was so much snobbishness (and ofc the Amiga was a several years old design by then) that PCs were sold, they didn't make enough money, and boom.

My local ESCOM had a couple of Amigas that were either off, or showing the insert disk screen. Whack a decent demo disk in it back then and everything else in the shop would have looked quite silly.

[Dave559]

In the early 90s it seemed to be the case that computers beginning with "A" were just so far ahead of those very rudimentary DOS boxes, that they would surely inevitably dominate the market: Apple, Amiga, Archimedes/ARM…

Well, I guess at least two of them went on to become much bigger things, albeit with a couple of quite severe hiccups along the way. It's just such a very real shame that the third wasn't so lucky.

[IGnatius T Foobar !]

I loved my Amiga 1000

Amiga 1000 was one of my favorites. I bought it when it became affordable and sold it before it became obsolete. Lots of good times in between. I just wish the operating system had been unix based.

[Dave559]

Re: I loved my Amiga 1000

Within the almost infinite and wonderful treasure trove of Amiga software that was Aminet, there actually was a port of csh, which I made great use of! (OK, with hindsight, csh, ugh, but still…)

And the Amiga's own shell was itself pretty good, and there was also ixemul.library which (as far as I know) provided enough of a compatibility layer to make porting a lot of unix tools much easier than it otherwise would have been.

(I remember installing an entire PostScript environment, for pretty much no reason other than I could, and being highly impressed: that tiger.ps sample image loading up on my screen, very impressive for the time!)

[This is all from the later AmigaOS 3.0 / AGA era, but by then the Amiga really was showing what a powerful system it was.]

[DarkwavePunk]

Atari ST

Come on, we need a good 80s-90s flame war.

[spireite]

Re: Atari ST

ST went down in flames then, as it will now....

[Antony Shepherd]

Re: Atari ST

I had an Atari ST. I even had the special black and white monitor for it that earned it the name "Jackintosh".

But looking back I've often thought that maybe I made the wrong decision there.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Atari ST

"But looking back I've often thought that maybe I made the wrong decision there."

There no "maybe" about it. Of COURSE you made the wrong decision! Shirly you must have had more than an inkling when you walked down the street and Amiga owners were sniggering and pointing at you. :-)

Coat. No, not the macintosh, the cool bomberman jacket.

[DarkwavePunk]

Re: Atari ST

To be fair, Cyber Studio on the ST was the dog's bollocks and spawned Autodesk. Still want to feel that magic of mowing lawns to afford some software.

[Dave559]

Re: Atari ST

The other niche that the Atari ST occupied was in music production, thanks to it having a built-in MIDI port. Many very well-known electronica artists used Atari STs back in the day, sometimes eking life out of them for rather more years than could ever have been foreseen!

There was a lot of excellent music software for the Amiga as well, but given all of its other market-leading "multimedia" capabilities, it is a bit of a shame that the designers unfortunately had a bit of a blind spot when it came to MIDI, which really would have been the icing on the cake!

[Ribfeast]

Had a room of A500s at school (Dad was the principal). I'd enjoy playing numerous games after school while he was marking homework. During holidays we'd take a few home and play games. Had some "LAN parties" at school with classmates one night, every unit had someone playing on it.

Have a huge selection of games on floppies still. Never owned an A500 myself.

In the early 2000's I was doing some onsite work for a school, and they had a storage room full of old hardware, including some A500s, they let me take two home, including external floppy drives and RAM upgrades. Happy days!

Fired up one of the units last year for some nostalgia still worked. For some reason, all the floppy drives stopped reading for some reason after a few hours and never came good, maybe the clock batteries leaked on something important. Might be time for a PiStorm...

[0laf]

FB has recently revealed to be quite a thriving antique Amiga scene. There are lots of people out there providing expertise in restoring and renewing old Amigas. If you still got the kit it might well be savable

[Ribfeast]

Yeah it might be worth a look sometime, I still have the units.

[Tim Chuma]

Still being used in TV until recently

I believe RMIT and channel 31 in Melbourne still used Amiga software for video stuff until quite recently.

[I am the Walrus]

I just pulled all my Amiga stuff out of storage earlier this year to check it over and it luckily all still works. I have 2 4000's (one 040 one 060) a 500 and a CD32 (Also 3x1080S's and a 1960). Would love to have a 3000/T. I remember we bought an 020 upgrade for our 600 back in the day that used the pressure from the keyboard/top of the case to keep it seat over the 000 chip and it would always pop off causing a failed boot. The amount of abuse that poor keyboard suffered with us pushing down on it to reseat the accelerator board constantly, my god. Such a shame we just lost Mark Sibly at the end of last year as well.

[Fursty Ferret]

Ahh, Deluxe Paint

I remember using that while wedged into a corner of the office at my dad's company while he was working. They had a colour dot-matrix printer. Thinking back on it the staff must have hated having me there because printing anything in colour took about 45 minutes and meant that no one could have a conversation due to the noise.

[Rob]

Ah, great memories. Makes me want to pull my A1200 out to see if it still works and fire up Stunt Car Racer, had a great soundtrack! Loved that game before I then got addicted to the Bitmap Brothers and the stuff they churned out. Not sure I have the will power to do another round of Cadaver though, felt like I was playing that for years.

[Alan Bourke]

Ah the good old Miggy ...

... it was no Acorn Archimedes, but still pretty good.

[Dan 55]

Re: Ah the good old Miggy ...

Has the Achimedes managed to change CPU architectures or run preemptive a multitasking OS yet?

End of playground argument, Amiga wins decisively.

[ThomH]

Re: Ah the good old Miggy ...

> Has the Achimedes managed to change CPU architectures

Yes — CPU architectures are different than they otherwise would have been because of the Archimedes.

[ChrisC]

Re: Ah the good old Miggy ...

I suspect you may just be joking a little here, however...

* Considering how good the native CPU architecture was, and how far it's progressed over the past 30-odd decades, I'm not so sure the Archie would have ever needed to consider adopting anything else. As good as the 680x0 family was, the lack of continued development from Motorola meant the Amiga had no real choice but to try the painful process of jumping ship in order to meet the demands for ever greater levels of raw performance once even the mighty ^[1] 68060 started to fall short.

* Arthur and RISC OS might not have been pre-emptive, but the Archie hardware could also run RISC iX, which ISTR was.

As much as I loved my Amigas, I'd never dream of declaring it a decisive winner over the Archie, and I consider myself fortunate to have had access to both systems back in the day. They were two very good systems each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and had the latter not suffered from the same two weaknesses of its predecessor - a) being significantly more expensive than the competition, and b) having less support from mainstream developers - then I suspect it'd have had at least as much success and longevity as the Amiga.

[1] and yes, it was mighty - seeing how much faster everything ran compared with the 030 it replaced, made it worth every penny I'd paid for it, and every drop of blood shed ^[2] during the installation process

[2] anyone who fitted a new CPU card to an A4000 will be painfully aware of how close their fingers needed to get to all the sharp points on the back of the Zorro backplane...

[Dan 55]

Re: Ah the good old Miggy ...

I'm joking, but RISC OS has to be re-written for 64-bit ARM and it's estimated that it'll take several years to do that.

[Havoc71]

A4000 recap

I have an old A4000 with the lower end processor that is probably in need of re-capping and probably a new power supply if this one can't be refurbished but I would love to be able to get that running again had hours of fun with Gunship and Gunship 2000 as well as most of the other Microprose titles. even managed to find some old memory modules to give it an upgrade from the 4mb I think mine arrived with to the 16mb maximum it would accomodate.

Hope the 100mb+ disk drive is still usable.

I'll get around to getting it running again one day when I have the time.

[Androgynous Cow Herd]

Video Toaster

that is all.

[I am the Walrus]

Re: Video Toaster

Only in NTSC regions (Yes there was a pal version later on but it was the NTSC board with a PAL IO, all the processing of the frames internally was done in NTSC).

I was happy when LightWave 3.5 came out and no longer needed that expensive dongle so I could move up from Imagine2.0.

VLabMotion was the go to for PAL work. I had the VLab back in the day and always wanted to get a Motion version at some point.

[FeRDNYC]

with models on show from an early Amiga 1000 through to the more-powerful 4000 (although the latter is not currently running).

If it's a really early model, then it's not an Amiga 1000 at all — the very first units released were just "The Commodore Amiga", because it was the only one.

Once plans were developed to expand the line by adding the A500 and A2000, the first model was rebranded as the A1000 and made part of a product family..