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Author Topic: Hello from South Africa  (Read 15581 times)

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Offline orcish75

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Re: Hello from South Africa
« on: February 13, 2013, 12:05:33 PM »
Ah!

I've only met two other people in SA that had Amigas, I bought everything that the one guy had so he's no longer into it and I got an A2000 off the other guy, but he's subsequently disappeared so don't know of anyone anymore.

There were a couple of small Amiga shops around in the late 80's/early 90's, I remember one in Pretoria run by a German lady and another in Joburg, but it only lasted a year or so before it shut down. At that stage though, I was a rabid ST fanboy, being 15 at the time, it was impossible to try convince me otherwise! I still secretly admired the Amiga, although I'd never admit it to anyone at the time.

Yup, PC clones definitely dominated the computer market at that stage, although the C64 and Spectrum range were popular amongst home users. I only got my Amigas around 1999 or so when I saw them advertised in a local classified for next to nothing.

I should've bought an Amiga rather than an ST, purely because there's so much more available for the Amiga in terms of hardware such as accelerators, SCSI controllers, memory controllers etc. I enjoy gaming on both platforms, but tinkering with hardware is what I really enjoy on older systems. The ST has hardly anything in terms of expansions, all my STE has is a 4MB memory upgrade and external floppy.

If there are any other Amiga users in SA, let us know!

Cheers!
 

Offline orcish75

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Re: Hello from South Africa
« Reply #1 on: February 13, 2013, 01:30:19 PM »
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I watched Amiga dealers come and go over the years, I outlived all of them.

Yup, sad that the Amiga never really took off here, glad your business kept going though! My A501 memory expansion still has a sticker on it, Omega Systems from Kempton Park.

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I have not met anyone until now who had an Atari computer.

I think the ST was even more rare in SA than the Amiga. There was a small community in Joburg of about 10 users that I was part of. I got my STE when my brother had a trip to Germany and brought it back for me.

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You mean you acquired your first Amiga in 1999 only?

Ha ha! Yup! I bought an A2000 with a GVP 030 33MHz combo card, 2 x  stock A500s, a stock A1200, 2 x GVP A500HD+8 (both were broken, but got one of them working), a 25MHz VXL*30 A500 accelerator with 2MB memory board (Had a broken CPU pin which I replaced and now works), and 3 x 512k memory expansions for the A500, all for R2000 (Approx US $225 for those unfamiliar with the SA Rand)

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I will see if I still have any Amiga contacts in South Africa. Give me a few days.

That'll be cool!

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The Junkmail used to be a good way to find other Amiga users.

That's exactly where I found the stash above that I bought! :roflmao: