How did the Amiga fare in Australia?

[Kesa]

Well I have purchased here in Australia An Amiga 500, 1200, CD32..... I have used and seen in Australia as follows Amiga 1000, Amiga 500, Amiga 1200, Amiga 600, Amiga 2000, Amiga 1500, Amiga 3000, Amiga 4000D, Amiga 4000T (Genuine), Amiga CDTV, Amiga CD32, Amiga CD32 with both SX1 and Sx2 Expansion.

I have seen the following for sale in Australian stores for sale like Maxwells, Myer and small computer stores like MVB and Cplus. Amiga 1500 and Amiga 2000, Amiga 3000, Amiga 4000, Amiga 1200, Amiga 600 and the humble Amiga 500, The CD32 and CDTV.

I guess what I am trying to say and prove is that they existed here in Australia in a big way.

The Amiga flag is still flown here in Australia, I attend a monthly User group one of two groups in Victoria and there is a group in Sydney Australia also.

I was not aware of this and thankyou for clearing this up

But also realise i was only a tiny kid in the early 1990's so maybe that's why i didn't see many  :rolleyes:

There are user groups in australia? In sydney and victoria? Why, i had no idea   :hat:

What about newcastle?

[ElPolloDiabl]

I was not aware of this and thankyou for clearing this up

But also realise i was only a tiny kid in the early 1990's so maybe that's why i didn't see many  :rolleyes:

There are user groups in australia? In sydney and victoria? Why, i had no idea   :hat:

What about newcastle?

Are you kidding? You are only an hour away from Sydney, check out a SAUG meeting in Epping (on the north side of Sydney).

http://members.optusnet.com.au/saug/

Next meeting is on the 14th Nov.

[Kesa]

i particularly like the door under the staircase. It makes it look very secretive. Entrance to the batcave? Superheros secret layer? Mafia meet up place?

Nope it's just the amigans annual laminton drive! :roflmao:

[Retro_71]

WOW didn't know they were still around... got to go! (but i cant this meeting).
I wonder what i should tell the wife......... hmmmmmmm.
I have owned a A500 and A1200. I have lots of friends and family that did own some sort of Amiga so they were very popular up till C= went belly up and we all jumped ship to PC's. about around 2002 i started to miss them and stated my collection and i must say i am glad i did. (just as long as the wife doesn't EVER find out exactly how much i have spent.... )

[fishy_fiz]

Yep, at its peak the Amiga was very successful in Australia, with sales reaching 1 million units just as it started to decline. Unfortunately as mentioned already the a500 accounted for probably 95% of sales, and the Amiga was predominantely considered to basically be a console whos games you could copy easily. By the time AGA was released things were already done and dusted, and I remember seeing new a1200's and cd32's being cleared at big discounts more than a few times. There mustve been a small handful of australian amigans who stuck with it though, as while Ive not seen an Aussie amigan in real life for many years we do appears to turn up pretty regularly on the net.

[Fingers]

I've got a Mac Mini G4 1.5 but I have yet to install Morphos on it, which I will do in due course!

Question: Why in due course? Why not already?

Do it...do it now!

PZ.

[mingle]

Yeah, the A500 was very popular.

My mates brother had one of the first A1000s too... Cost a small fortune back then.

I upgraded to an A1200 in 1992 - cost me $1100 for Myer at Chadstone...

Not longer after, 486's with SVGA became cheap.

Still, I held out until 1998 before I moved to a wintel box...

Mike.

[Franko]

I'd noticed while gathering all those old Commodore TV ads for my site, that there were quite a few Australian ones. Seems since the days of the C64 Commodore really pushed sales down under.

(Reckon the 'Are you keeping up with the Commodore' Jingle would have begun to grind after a while though...) :lol:

[agami]

Yep, as a gaming platform it was very big. Many stores carried them. It was MYER where I saw the CDTV, and CD32 for the first time. Not at the same time obviously. Can't remember the store at which I first saw the A3000 but I do remember the amount of drool. The A500 was promoted heavily as a gaming computer. I remember even one of the Kmart TV promos covering all of their various departments included a quick shot of the A500 and some gameplay for 'Entertainment'. I think even the 5 A600's sold were all in Australia

The Amiga also did well as the system to apply to any use you can think of, as it was relatively inexpensive. Megatron in Victoria was the official distributor and repair centre and they had them working everywhere.

For the longest of time, through most of the 90's in fact, the screens on all of Melbourne's inner-city train stations displaying current and next train times was run by A500's. I've seen A500's used as automated watering systems in agriculture. People treated it as an embedded system.

Movielink, HQ in Toorak, the largest supplier of hotel in-room entertainment systems in Australia was using using 1200's for the interactive menu system. They had over 1000 in the field.

I remember when Petro came out he was very unhappy that the largest order of 1200's that year was Megatron outfitting Crown Casino's many electronic gaming systems, but no one will actually see the Amiga brand

So yeah, they did OK.

[EvilGuy]

I got my a4k030 (now upgraded to a CSPPC, sitting in the closet) from The Computer Man in Perth. He was a character..

[Cammy]

One of the most unforgettable sights ever was seeing the brand new Amiga CD32 displayed in its own section at Myer playing that demo disc.

The entire Keno (kind of like an in-club lottery system) network was run on Amigas, with Amigas displaying live results around the country on screens inside RSL clubs.

I think considering our small population, Amiga was very successful while it lasted. And as Fishy pointed out, I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that you could easily copy games that were around the same quality as those on the consoles at the time. Australia had quite a few cracker groups running, although I personally missed out on that era in Amiga computing since my first one was a CD32.

As for those Australian Amiga User Groups, I love how there is one in Sydney and two around Melbourne, and I'd like to visit them if I ever go on holiday in those cities, but I wish we had a user group around the Gold Coast or even Brisbane.

[CodePoet]

@Cammy

Hah my brother used to jig school to play "Walker" on the demo A1200's at Myer/Grace brothers!

[persia]

@Cammy

I was about to say you meant Grace Brothers, but then I realised you probably shopped in QLD....  I still remember watching all the Grace Brothers red transformed into Myer black.  It was a sad day....

[vk4akp]

Nice thread. Had to reply when I stumbled across it.

I so loved the Amiga and Commodore era.

I myself worked for a CBM outlet approaching almost 10 years from memory.
Unfortunately I left in the last year before CBM fell so I missed out on all the wonderful AGA machines.

Here are my machines in order of when I bought them.

Vic-20
(Left High School)
C64
(Started working for CBM)
(Ran my first BBS on c64 [ The Transcendental Connection. (Punternet BBS)]
8250LP Dual 1MB drives. (Never returned from service sadly when CBM went down)
A1000 (Ran many different BBS packages on this, I was FIDO 3:640/281).
A2000 (Briefly. traded this on an A3000 a few weeks later. Barely remember it.)
A3000 (Ran Paragon / Cnet BBS on this machine).
(Left CBM, went to College studding Ass.Dip.Info.Tech)
(Collected the following since)
A600HD
A500

I still don't own an AGA machine sadly nor have I ever played an AGA game.
Life can be so cruel!

Would like to add to my collection an A2000(B,Rev6.2) & A1200.

The Amiga had a killer following in Australia back in the day.
I spent all my CBM years on the sales floor and in that time I would sell about 99% Amiga's and the rest PC, Amstrad, Atari etc.

Amiga's were also very popular with the universities.

3/4 of the walls in the store were covered with Amiga software.

The Amiga BBS I ran run hot 24/7 I could only afford the one phone line back in the day.
Even after I turned it off the phone still rang hot with users still looking for the BBS.
This only stopped when I had to say goodbye to the land line phone 3+ years ago in favor of an Optus Cable connection and Billion 6404VGP VoIP router for my phone line.
I wish I could have hung on to the number some how. Maybe one day I can get it back but the cost of line rental just didn't make it affordable.

Probably the most sold Amiga would have been the A500.
Unfortunately though they were also probably the most dumped Amiga after the fad ended.
Mainly because not many were sold with hard drives.  
A2000's, A3000's often fell victim in storage from the dreaded clock battery leaking.

I had the honor of meeting Nick Wilson who wrote sysinfo a few times as Toowoomba is only a few hours from here (Ipswich).
Glen McDiarmid author of Resource (Machine code disassembler) was a good friend for many many years. In fact he only lived two blocks away from me for a very long time. I also went to college with him when I left CBM. I still have a copy of his software here now!. http://amiga-dev.wikidot.com/tool:resource

These days I am part of a group called "The Retro Computing Cult". http://shazam.zapto.org
We collect and display old retro machines.

Other then CBM machines listed above I now also have.
BBC Micro, Tandy 100, System 80, Apple IIe Platinum (Faulty sadly), TI-99/4A, DSE Cat, MicroBee, Vectrex.

We also run a Retro Computing chat line that can be accessed free world wide via VoIP and from most major cities in the world via PSTN gateways for the cost of a local call.

Click on Igal on our website to see some pictures of the machines we have recovered.

Great seeing all you Aussie Amiga nuts online!.

Remember..

Only Amiga Makes it Possible!!

.-.-.

[yakumo9275]

aussie cbm was big. lots of 500s and 2000's. I dont recall seeing mayn 4k or 1200's. We had a good well supported magazine Australian Commodore Amiga Review. Stores actually had amiga sections!

CBM Australia suffered the same deals as CBM usa, mainly fuck all or piss poor marketing, and being so far away, had little ability to get stock on shelves when it was needed (xmas time etc).

CBM Australia was really strong but got no support from USA HQ

[snoopy88]

A bit late to this thread but thought I'd share how I saw it,

A500 was huge here, the typical shopping centre computer stores had pretty big shelf of software. Having said that not as big a the 64 but still very well known. The images of games in magazine and on the back of bees were absolute wow. When the A500 was at its peak it was mostly 286 pcs with EGA graphics, the A500 was less than half the price.

I bought my A500 for $749 AUD around late 1990.

A600 was seen as complete mess, offering nothing much new 4-5 years after the A500. Actually at that time it was seen as a inferior to the A500. Should never have been released even though it is not a bad machine for upgrading today. It was in stores but I don't think it sold well.

When the A1200 came out (would have been around Dec 1992) I decided it time to upgrade. Rang the dealer and they quoted me $1499 AUD for a 1200HD/40 (no monitor). I was pretty surprised at the price as the machine in the UK was priced not far off where the A500 used to be. These are supposed to be budget machines which Commodore Australia now wanted big money for.

After thinking about it for a while I started look at PC's and eventually bought a 486sx-25/80mb/4mb/SVGA with monitor for $1950. I think those numbers would have told the story for a lot of people. By 1992 the machine commodore released was was probably perceived as comparable to a 386sx but in a small case, at a 486sx price. Someone was definitely pocketing $300-$400 extra on Australian machines compared to other markets.

So I never actually saw a 1200 in Australia (until I bought one in 2013). I don't think the mainstream stores had too many mainly due to pricing.