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Offline ZorroTopic starter

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How is begun your adventure with Amiga?
« on: April 10, 2003, 11:51:40 AM »
I asked myself... how all begun for you ?

I had read of Amiga on the reviews of the gold age and had that cousin of a friend... :-)

He had the always mythical A1000... and we fall in love.

Then that friend bought an A500 when mother Commodore decided to let it out and I planted definitively a camping stretch to his house... ;-)

First thing that I have seen on his Amiga was Deluxe Paint... then it passed to the games: Marble Madness from Electronic Arts and Xenon from Bitmap Brothers... I did not resumed me for a looong time...

My world was not more the same one, at least until when I did succeed to take an Amiga 500.

Then it was the time of Kick Off... and the number of friends increased to excess...

I stop here otherwise I can bother you with all the history of my wonderful experience with Amiga...

 :-P
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   Zorro:roflmao:Zorro
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The Phoenix is rising...
 

Offline Spidey

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Re: How is begun your adventure with Amiga?
« Reply #1 on: April 10, 2003, 12:00:27 PM »
Hello Zorro,

(from Mexico? :-))

What's your story after your Amiga500?

For me:

Before my A500 I had a C64. With it I went monthly to my C64-club (everything in boxes and on the bike to the meeting, fun!!)
There I saw this A500 and not far afterwards I bought one for 2000 Dutch guilders, I think around 700 US dollars at that time.

Two games I was addicted to: Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder II.

After this I bought a A600 and A1200. Now I've got my A1200 and a Pegasos.

Spidey
 

Offline Lando

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Re: How is begun your adventure with Amiga?
« Reply #2 on: April 10, 2003, 12:23:29 PM »
Well, I had an Atari 800XL first and then I bought a Sega Master System, and then I got a SNES.  But SNES games were really expensive, so I could only afford a game every 3 months, and my friend had an Amiga 500 which he had hundreds of games for.

He told me all about the Amiga and how you could get games for free so I sold the SNES and I got an Amiga 600 with a Bart Simpson game.  Then he let me copy his games too so soon I had over 2000 disks of games.  I also started collecting demos and learning to code around this time, and wrote 4 or 5 intros.

I kept the A600 for two years, collecting more games, buying some originals too (about 10 a year), until the A1200 came out which I bought right away, selling the A600 to my brother's friend.  Then I started hacking away at Workbench copperlists to see how AGA worked and wrote some small AGA demos, which was amazing at the time.

Soon I upgraded the A1200 with Fast RAM, hard drive and an FPU, and kept using it up to the end of my second year at University. At University,  I had to code in Borland  Turbo Pascal for some of my assignments.  I had no PC so I bought "PCTask" and ran DOS 5.0 and Turbo Pascal on the Amiga, but it was so slow that eventually I had to give up and bought a "fast" 386 40Mhz PC with 1MB SVGA card and 120MB hard drive, SVGA monitor etc, which cost me less than it would have costed for a 030 board for the A1200.

Then I had 7 years of being a PC user, cursing Windows, until 2000 when a guy at work was talking about his Amigas (he had a couple of A4000's and an A1200) and it brought back memories so I bought an A600 with hard drive from the local paper.  I got a PCMCIA CDROM drive for it too, and then bought an A1200T from ebay with 030-50 and hard drive/cdrom drive etc.  

Then I upgraded to a Blizzard PPC board, then mediator and Voodoo3, TV card, etc, then finally I bought an A4000 and bought an Elbox Mirage case with Mediator 4000 and put all the PCI cards in it, and finally bought a CyberStormPPC.  I sold this A4000 system back in August/September last year, when AmigaOne/OS4 was "just about to be released", and I had joined the "I am Amiga" club, as I needed the money to buy the A1.  Of course, OS4 never materialized and I was very disillusioned by now so went back to using PCs.  

Then I got more and more interested in MorphOS, talking to people on IRC about it, realising how comitted the developers were, and how talented, and seeing the way Genesi supported the community in a way AInc never had.  So, now I'm a comitted MOS'er.  If OS4 ever comes out I would buy it, because Hyperion deserves the support, but I'm not wasting any more time.
 

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Re: How is begun your adventure with Amiga?
« Reply #3 on: April 10, 2003, 01:03:36 PM »
I started with a Commodore Plus/4 in 1987 and taught myself basic on it.  After what seemed like decades of begging my parents for an Amiga I got an A500 1.3 in 1989 and fell in love with the machine.  I soon bought another 512K Fast RAM (So I could play Weird Dreams).  Then I was introduced to the world of crack intros and wanted create these cool things myself.  I got a copy of DevPac (I never paid for much software, much to my shame), and spent 2 years learning to code 68k.  I joined a couple of crack/demo groups that had members in the northwest and eventually a couple of Polish groups too.  As with Lando, I had to use TP5.5 at college, so I used an Amiga Pascal compiler, and made my code check which OS it was running on (Multiplatform source wooo!), by this point I had bought an A1200 the day they came out, added a 340MB HD (Which I still have!), and 4MB Fast RAM, Commodore Multisync monitor that could take VGA and PAL signals.  Fond memories.

Then I bought a commodore 486 SX/25 and added a Gravis Ultrasound and took the RAM off my onboard Paradise VGA and shoved it in the GUS as I refused to use windows 3.1 so I didn't need the video memory. DOS only at this point, and joined the PC section of a famous Amiga group. I used to use Borland TASM, and it took a long time to stop hating the intel way of doing assembly.  Eventually I stopped using the Amiga altogether in about 1996 and sold it so I could go to a rave on new years eve (Life @ Bowlers, Trafford Park.  Money well spent!)

I used DOS only at home still coding ASM then I got a job coding on Oracle databases and had to get a P100 with 16MB RAM and install the dreaded windows nt 3.51 with the windows 95 GUI patch (remember that anyone?).

Then I discovered Linux, and it's been an on off love affair ever since.

I used UAE for years and years, and then Amithlon, to paraphrase Kylie Minogue "I can't Amiga out of my head".  I am due a rather large amount of money to come my way shortly and will buy a Pegasos and an A1, so look out for my reviews.

I'm looking forward to learning PPC assembly, I haven't done any ASM since 1998 so it will be fun.
 

Offline Dragster

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Re: How is begun your adventure with Amiga?
« Reply #4 on: April 10, 2003, 03:42:56 PM »
Hi Zorro, if (you're from Mexico)  then write (Hey compadre!!!) hehe.. I'm from Mexico :-)

Well, my still-on-going adventure with Amiga began with a Commodore64 my mom bought me when I was 13. I started programming in Basic and learned some C64 assembler but never went deep enough on it. I had the brown C64 and a datassete tape unit, it was fun. Then I was offered a C128 with a 1571 disk drive and tons of games and software so I sold the C64 and bought the 128, anyway most of the things I ran in the 128 were for C64 hehe. The 128 had some compatibility problems, the 1571 could not load games converted to "vorpal" and that annoyed me, so I sold it and bought a brand new C64-C with a white 1541 drive and all my compatibility problems were thing of the past. Then I met some friends at a computer store who also had C64, we became very good friends and shared programs, games, etc among us. One of them (Oscar) suddenly bought an Amiga 500, so he invited us one day to his house and we saw his A500 in action, I was amazed! The first game I saw on it was "Plutos", then "Xenon" and even the first game I played on my friend's A500 was "Test Drive".. gold old TD. My other C64 friends started to buy A500 too but I couldn't afford it immediately, so I had to wait about a yr. to sell my C64 and get my first A500. After that I got an A500 which could do PAL, then I sold the old A500 and my friend Oscar brought me an A1200 when he went to L.A. in the USA. That 1200 is now inside my Power Tower with a BlizzardPPC 603e+ (603/240, 060/50, 128 MB RAM, BVisionPPC, Plextor 40X SCSI cdrom, Yamaha8824S cdrw, ZIV busboard, HighwayUSB, Xsurf ethernet, Var I/O, scandex external scandoubler, external A4000 keyboard, PowerFlyer EIDE, 60 GB HD space (IDE), etc... it's a bit far from what it was when I bought it :-).

So, there's my story.. I haven't had any other computer than those listed above, no PC, no Mac, no anything else! :-)

Now I administer UNIX and Oracle databases to eat hehe

Best regards to all amigans outhere!!!

D
Amiga 1200T 603/240, 060/50, SCSI II, Plextor 40/12/40S SCSI CDRW, Plextor 40X SCSI CDROM, Fujitsu 36GB 10KRPM SCSI HD, Pioneer 305S SCSI DVD, BVisionPPC, 256 MB FASTRAM, PowerFlyer EIDE, Scandex external scandoubler, ZIV busboard, Algor USB, Wireless, repulse audio...Peg II Quadruple boot: OS4.1FE/MorphOS 3.9 regged, OpenSUSE11.1 & Debian Squeeze, Powerbook G4 1139 MorphOS3.9, A4000D CSPPC/PIV/DENEB OS3.9/4.1FE, A4000T CSPPC/CVPPC/SCSI, etc.. 2
 

Offline PulsatingQuasar

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Re: How is begun your adventure with Amiga?
« Reply #5 on: April 10, 2003, 03:50:47 PM »
That's simple: Walker on an Amiga 1200.

Then I knew I wanted to have one!

Before I had severall C-64. Well, still have actually.

At the moment I have 2 A1200 and 1 A600 with an AmigaOne on the way.
BlizzardPPC powered!!
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Offline jeffimix

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Re: How is begun your adventure with Amiga?
« Reply #6 on: April 10, 2003, 03:56:59 PM »
ME? Oh I stumbled across the A Inc. website somehow, then managed to make my way over here.  Then I decided to buy one of these machines, so I got an A2000HD yesterday. Its got workbench 1.3, which will be the first thing I upgrade. So I am working on it right now in fact.
\\"The only benchmarks that matter is my impression of the system while using the apps I use. Everything else is opinion.\\" - FooGoo
 

Offline alx

Re: How is begun your adventure with Amiga?
« Reply #7 on: April 10, 2003, 06:16:34 PM »
My brother got an A500 in 1990 or sometime and I was really impressed by the graphics.  Later, I really wanted to get one of the new AGA machines, but never had the money.  By the time I got my first computer (a 486 running Win95 - slow) I thought that the Amiga was dead.  I did have an Amiga Emulator on another PC, though.

Fairly recently I came across a few sites, and was amazed to see that not only was the platform still going, but there were new machines coming out.  I'm currently borrowing an A1200 (I've just found someone who can give me one for free - I'll probably upgrade and accelerate it) and I'm saving up for an A1.

Offline ShadesOfGrey

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Re: How is begun your adventure with Amiga?
« Reply #8 on: April 10, 2003, 08:24:00 PM »
I started out with an Apple IIgs back in '87 but had been using Apple II's (of various models) prior to that in school and with friends who had one.  I absolutely loved my IIgs (I still have it today).  Anyway, after Apple dumped the Apple II, I moved into the Wintel world in the early 90's (can't remember exactly).  But I had heard about this thing called Amiga that intrigued me.  

So after becoming rather disenchanted with my 486DX/33 running Windows 3.1 I started investigating the Amiga thing I had heard about.  I asked around a few BBS's and got little bits of information here and there, but nothing to make me run out an buy one.  About this time I upgraded to a 486DX2/66, which had made Windows bearable.  So I stopped pursuing the Amiga...

About a year or so later, my disenchantment with the 'PC' grew (again).  So one day, while perusing the magazine section of a book store, I came across a couple Amiga mags (AmigaWorld and Amazing Computing I think) and started reading up on what I had been missing.

It was then that I realized this Amiga computer was much more akin to my beloved IIgs (which I still used, more often) than my PC.  At the time I couldn't afford an Amiga, I had spent too much on my Wintel machine and I had my heart set on an A4000T.  I wanted to learn more, so I looked around for a local BBS'es or users groups.  

Luckily I found a couple BBS'es after a few misses (something like 70% of area Amiga BBS'es had gone down).  But I learned that the Amiga Community (in the form of the largest users group) in my area was slowly dying...  In a way, it foreshadows the state of the present 'global' community.  There was a big battle between two factions in the group, vying for control over it's name and control of the group sponsored BBS.  And no wonder, it was about '93 at the time.

So I was left with hanging out at tow or three of the BBS'es still worth visiting in the area.  And as luck would have it, a user at one of these BBS'es was looking to find a home for an A2000 he was retiring.  He'd let me have it for free, as long as I picked it up.  Which I did, and luckily for me, it came with quite a bit of stuff to get me started.  Unfortunately, I had the 2000 no more than nine months before Commodore 'officially' went bust.

Still I loved my A2000.  I bought all kinds of upgrades (incl, Tekmagic accelerator, Spectrum 28/24 graphics card, 2MB chip RAM, Catweasel ZII Mk2, an Emplant Deluxe, and more)  Although I didn't use it as much as my 'PC' (school/work reasons), it superseded the IIgs in my heart.  So much so that I bought another A2000 and later traded both in to get an A4000D which inherited much of the hardware I had for the A2000...

Sadly, my A4000 seems to be dead.  And I fear repairing it will not be worth the expense.  So I'll have to wait for AOS4 to be released.  At which point I plan to get an A1.  In the interim, I'll use UAE and keep my eye out for a 'cheap' Amiga.


I should mention I also had a VIC-20 some two or three years before the IIgs, but I used it more as a game console than anything else.  Mostly because while learning BASIC, I could never save and then retrieve anything from tape!  Otherwise I probably would have been hooked on Commodore and got a C-64 or C-128 and later an Amiga.
Unless otherwise explicitly stated, this message is not meant to affirm nor deny, defend nor offend any faction within the \\\'Amiga\\\' Community.
 

Offline takemehomegrandma

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Re: How is begun your adventure with Amiga?
« Reply #9 on: April 10, 2003, 09:35:36 PM »
My first contact with any kind of computers was with the Vic 20. I got one for christmas way back in  time. I moved on to the C64 where I really was hooked. "Everyone" had C64's back then and there were this great community feeling. During that time I started to read the (now since long dead) Swedish computer magazine Datormagazin (DMz :-)),  wich targeted commodore computer users with a rather laid back and hobby kind of approach. Creativity and fun was more important than anything else, as the opposite to many of todays "professional" magazines on full color glossy paper wich mostly contains boring reviews.

Anyway, it was in that magazine I first spotted the Amiga. A year or so later I made the first live encounter with an Amiga 500. It belonged to a friend of mine. If it hadn't been so darn expensive I would have bought one the same day. But I had to way for a much longer time before I got ahold of my first Amiga. I still have an A1200, but it's not really 100% functional so lives in a closet now :-(.

BTW, any Swedes remembering the DMz? I know you do!  :-) That was an institution back then, and now it's a legend!
MorphOS is Amiga done right! :)
 

Offline ensu

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Re: How is begun your adventure with Amiga?
« Reply #10 on: April 10, 2003, 11:13:26 PM »
Hi Zorro,

my first experience with programming was a pocket calculator TexasInstruments Ti 57 in 1977?
My next computer was C= 128D in 1983.
In 1986 I bought an Amiga 1000 and in 1989 I switched to an Amiga 2000. I use this A2000 already til today. The A1000 waits in its original package for its "rebirth" ;-)

ciao...
[color=000000]\\"[/color][color=10429c]The fut[/color][color=2ea8c4]ure is a w[/color][color=3baa3b]ide an[/color][color=e6d300]d und[/color][color=dc8c00]iscover[/color][color=e20a20]ed land.[/color][color=000000]\\"[/color]...
 

Offline carls

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Re: How is begun your adventure with Amiga?
« Reply #11 on: April 10, 2003, 11:19:50 PM »
A friend in school had two big brothers who owned a Spectrum 48k, which we used to play games on. Then they upgraded to an A500 and of course we played games on that one too. This was about 1987 or 1988 when I was 7 years old.

When I was 11, I had saved up enough money to buy my own all-new A500 Plus (complete with an original version of Deluxe Paint IV!). Around 1993 I got interested in Desktop Publishing and now my Amiga had 2 disk drives, 2MB chipmem and an inkjet printer.

Realizing the Plus' shortcomings, I bought a used A1200 with a 120MB HDD in 1994. I started expanding it more and more.

In 2001 (err, I think) I bought an all-new A1200T with some fancy expansion cards.
Amiga: Too weird to live, too rare to die.
 

Offline Tomas

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Re: How is begun your adventure with Amiga?
« Reply #12 on: April 10, 2003, 11:23:26 PM »
My cousin just got a brand new a500, my parents got impressed by what they saw and one month later they went out to buy one  :-)

Only computer i had before that was a c64..

Had a damn great time with that computer... I miss those times so much. Those where the times when it was a joy to turn on the computer, instant bootup.... RARELY any crashes... Todays pcs are a pain, i never turn of my pcs anymore, cause i feel sick every damn time i boot windoze...
 

Offline minator

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Re: How is begun your adventure with Amiga?
« Reply #13 on: April 10, 2003, 11:41:28 PM »
This is going to make me feel old...

My first encounter with a computer was in primary school.  I went to a club after school on I think Thursdays and the teacher who took it brought in her Apple 2.  This must have been around 1980.  Later on my Dad got a ZX81 which he later gave to me, couldn't do much with it as was 1K RAM! so we got huge the 16K RAM pack - complete with the infamous RAM Pack wobble (touched it and it crashed).

My Dad then got a Spectrum Plus (with the weird keyboard) and we upgraded this later with microdrives (no more loading from tape!) and a thermal printer (remember those?).

It was a round 87 when I'd seen a friends C128 and was going to buy it because of the music stuff he had with it.  He was asking a lot of money but then I seen a ad for an Atari ST which blew the C128 away and decided I would get it instead.
Then one day I was up in Belfast and happened to walk past a computer shop who were showing an Amiga with the NewTek demo.  This was showing pictures in 4096 colours and as soon as I lifited my jaw from the ground I decided the ST wasn't me after all, I wanted an Amiga!

Unfortunately they were too expensive but it turned out a company was selling French A1000s cheap so I got one of these - complete with stickers on the keyboard to make it QUERTY instead of AZERTY which is of course evil.

Of course when I got it it didn't have a TV modulator so I had to go a day without using it.  I went through all the first "demos", Boing, Juggler, The artificial heart etc.  I couldn't afford any software so but I managed to get a PD copy of Space Invaders which was my only application for quite a while.  Later I upgraded it with an A590HD / RAM combo (which went in backwards).

Later sold the A1000 and moved up to an A500+ and then an A1200 which got a 50MHz 030.  After this I wanderd off to PC land to enjoy the "joys" of Windows 95 and then (rather more sensibly) BeOS and even Linux.

I "came home" last year when I got an A1000 at a show  complete with Juggler etc.  when I was meeting the MOS guys for the first time :-)

I later discovered the A1000 is an NTSC model and as such possibly from the very first batch :-D

Right now I'm typing this on a Mac iBook complete with AZERTY keyboard...

--


BTW anyone know how to change an NTSC A1000 to PAL?
I'd like to find out to confirm it's age.
 

Offline that_punk_guy

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Re: How is begun your adventure with Amiga?
« Reply #14 on: April 11, 2003, 02:39:39 AM »
Hey everyone,

Well for me, I think something bizzare happened to me in the early 1990s, kind of a biological clock thing. The two coolest things of the early nineties were the Amiga and (the best band ever) Nirvana. They both made some kind of impression on me that I wouldn't fully realise until 1998, when I got 'Nevermind' second hand, and sold my bike for an old 1.3 A500.

As far as I knew at this point, no-one cared about the Amiga. Then I happened across a newsagents which stocked CU Amiga (remember when they used to do that? Now it's even hard to find Mac magazines), it was the issue with the first Doom port on the coverdisks.

I bought it despite the fact that my A500 couldn't possibly run Doom and I was amazed by what I saw - Amigas in towers, with nice big hard disk drives,  the big-box Amigas (I had no idea they existed!).

Well I bought an old temperamental GVP HD8+ from some lovable psycho down the road who happened to have one in the loft, but eventually my dad bought me my A1200  from an old friend in Scarborough (who interestingly enough also liked Nirvana... oooh it's spooookeeeeee *cough*), for which I bought a 750MB HDD, Power Typhoon (right after they changed the specs and made it crap  :-( ), nabbed a spare 8mb simm from work and.....

uh, that's it. My Amiga is sadly tucked away in the dresser drawer (try fitting a PC in there :-)) 'cause this PC takes up all the deskspace. It was a simple matter of economics - and so I have to put up with Wintel until I can afford to invest in something PPC based :-)

I'm actually pretty fond of my PC. I think it's the brilliantly designed case more than the OS somehow though, since I keep running back to UAE now and then with my tail between my legs. But how I hark after those days of Hi-Res Interlace  :-D