Hello from England!

[hayashi]

So... after a pretty disastrous start in the wonderful world of Amiga (not only was my first Amiga half-dead, but I managed to kill the other half, two floppy drives, and my reputation on some Amiga IRC channel somewhere ("You killed Gary! You're the grim reaper of A500+s! Go play CoD4 or something"), I've finally managed to get a nicely working Amiga 500+.

So... yeah. I'm Matt, or hayashi (one of several thousand nicknames I tend to go by, I think I was NiMa91 in the aforementioned IRC suicide), and my love of old computer software and hardware has caused me to become an Amiga fan. I'm 17, and presently I've got an Amiga 500+ with no accelerators or modifications (though I'm currently hoping to get a hard drive)

Picture (could do with a clean D:)

I'm also into music, especially synthpop and hoping that I can at some point put my Amiga to use making some. I suck at tracking at the moment, though.

Oh... and while I'm here... a question. Does anyone know any way I could transfer DPaint files to a PC? I love DPaint, and I'd like to be able to use the stuff I make in it outside the Amiga, but apparently you have to jump through hoops to do it :/ (Oh... and printers. Is there any way to use relatively modern parallel-port printers with the old girl?)

[hooligan]

Hi and welcome.

Click  here to learn about datatransfer.

As for music, Amiga software just isn't cutting it anymore. I would recommend Renoise as you said you have origins in tracking. You will feel right at home.

ps. as you like synthpop(me too), heres a track of mine in that category, made on Renoise.

[trekiej]

Welcome.

[weirdami]

I don't think printing was very reliable even in the pre-bankruptcy days, but apparently people have been doing it. All I can say is that I think that static electricity from that stuffed animal bear is what did Gary in.  :-P

[A1260]

when i read.... "Amiga fan. I'm 17,"...  i did check the date on the post... its still 2009 and not 1990. hehehe....

all you need for that a500 to do some seriouse tracking is a hd and more ram if possible. other than that you need a parallel cable and amigaforever+amiga explorer, this you can buy or download from shady places for free.

read about amiga explorer...
http://www.amigaforever.com/ae/

[jj]

I am always amazed that NERO on the PC has support for Amiga .iff files.

[darksun9210]

Hi there Hayashi, Welcome :-)

glad you got an A500+, as with tracking, the more chipram the better :-D and practice makes perfect.

if you want to "kick it up a notch", download octamed soundstudio, and find a midi interface and cheap keyboard or midi controller. good for laying down baselines or riffs in real time, and then tweaking the timing in the tracker so it sounds right ;-)

a hard disk and spot of extra memory works wonders and will make working with your machine much nicer. keep an eye out on ebay or amibay for a GVP HD8 for A500. there are a myriad of others, but these seem to be popular in the 2nd hand market and can take 30pin simms for up to 8Mb ram, and don't seem to have a problem with most any hard disks, or scsi-ide and ide-compact flash adapters.

as for transfering iff files, they should fit on a 720kb formatted PC floppy disk easily, so that is seemingly the simplist way. i think OS2.x came with a PC floppy dosdriver? could be wrong. i know OS3.x did....

anyway, good luck, and have fun :-)

[KatManDEW]

Hello to you in England!

You should be able to use CrossDOS to read and write PC disk in your Amiga. Instead of DF0 you use PC0.

I just purchased some stuff on EBay from England. Some old SIncliar computer stuff.