Amiga.org
Amiga.org specific forums => New User Introductions => Topic started by: frootloop on March 28, 2008, 08:26:01 AM
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Hi there,
I've been lurking here for a while now, just thought I'd drop in officially;)
Got a banged old A2000 that a buddy of mine found lying in a forgotten flooded store room, and have rediscovered how much fun the 'miggys were! Btw, is anoyone else here from South AFrica? As for as I can tell, I'm the last surviving Amiga User in the country...it was not all that populat here to start with, unfortuantely.
I must say, this is one of the best communities ever, It really makes me feel the old 'miggy spirit is still alive and well!
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Welcome =)
>I must say, this is one of the best communities ever, It
really makes me feel the old 'miggy spirit is still alive and well!
Thats probably why people are still here/keep returning.
Do you happen to know why it wasn't popular in south africa?
Was it a stock A2000?
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I find myself living in Belgium, the so called center of western Europe, but the number of Amiga users here is also very low, though higher than 1 :lol:
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frootloop wrote:
Btw, is anoyone else here from South AFrica? As for as I can tell, I'm the last surviving Amiga User in the country...it was not all that populat here to start with, unfortuantely.
Hello and Welcome !
I'm pretty sure we have some members from the SA. I remember at least one guy taking X-Rays of various Amiga hardware was probably from SA. (probably he'll introduce himself soon :))
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Hi there,
Thanks for the welcome :)
The Amiga was not very popular in SA for several reasons.
There was no Commodore subsidiary in the country. The C64 had previusly been distributed here by a company called Tedelex, but they didnt seem to support the Amiga much. SO there was no advertising or real awareness of the Amiga except among a small group of computer enthusiasts.
during the 80's and early 90's, South Africa was still under the Apartheid regime, and was under international sanctions. It was therefore not easy to get hi-tech stuff, and usually at a high price - a secondhand A500 with monitor would sell for around R4500 - this was quite a bit whne you consider at the time, R4500 a month would be considered an exceptionally good salary| Also, non white people would earn significantly less than that...and it was almost unheard of to see a computer at a non-white school at all.
On the otherhand, PC clones thrived. There was a huge influx of them from Taiwan, you couls get them as cheap as R1000 for a full system if you shopped around. They sucked, biut they were fairly common ;)
Whoa...sorry looks like I'm going off on a tangent there ;)
The A2000 ame with a GVP Series II HC+8 with 2Mb onboard, and the Agnus upgraded to an ECS 1MB model along with 2.04 roms.
It also came with a Magni 4005 Internal genlock - apparently one of the best PAL genlocks at the time. Apparently its been hacked to support YUV ... will have to find a manual and a pinout diagram so i can build the breakout cable for it.
All in all, its been a lot of fun getting it back up abd running...waiting for the 3.1 roms and os i ordered to arrive, and the super denise...now if i could just find a decent RTG card and accellerator, I'll be all set to use it as my primary box :)
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@countzero
LOL, xrays of Amigas? He does sound South African then;)
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Welcome here frootloop!!!
Nice to have an amigan in SA.
Cape Town is a nice City too!!!
Good Luck!
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Hello and welcome to a.org, you should be careful because you can get very addicted to this site :-)
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Welcome aboard :-)
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As for as I can tell, I'm the last surviving Amiga User in the country...
Welcome, and please stay that way! ;-)
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Phantom wrote:
As for as I can tell, I'm the last surviving Amiga User in the country...
Welcome, and please stay that way! ;-)
I get that feeling some times too, though there are a few amiga ebay merchants floating about. I frequently write to amiga.com to hassle them about our beloved machines. I know they probably auto delete it, but it makes me feel better. I wonder how much they would sell the specs to their hardware since they obviously dont need it. :)
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Hello South Africa.
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Hello South Africa.
"Hello Motherland, how are you doing?" One my favorite Dr. Alban's songs... 8-)
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Well my other half frequently plays games on my A2000 and she's originaly from Durban. :-D
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Lots of South Africans here in Oz, no Amiga users amongst them that I know of.
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Thanks for the warm welcome everyone! Its good to to see that the Amiga is alive and well, given the enthusiasm I see here!
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@frootloop
Welcome. I'm from Canada. Lived in Zambia for a few years between 1969 and 1972. I was a teenager then. One time, my brother and I visited South Africa on a short holiday. We were on our own. While in SA, we travelled by train. One time my brother boarded the wrong train car, which caused a bit of a fuss. It was a good holiday, we visited many interesting places in SA, but we were glad to get back home to Mom and Dad in Zambia.
I can imagine that both Zambia and South Africa are quite different now.
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redfox
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Hi mate iam from new zealand i was in south africa end of last year with my Fiance she is from mossel bay, we stayed in cape town and mossel bay and visted other parts very nice country i wanna go back :)
i asked if they heard of amigas seemed they didnt pcs all they knew. what part you from?
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Not surprising really - the Amiga was never really popular here :( Mossel Bay is quite nice in Summer .. but I usually go further up the coast to Knysna if I can .. its one of my gavourite spots in the country.
I'm from Cape Town, the best part of South Africa, lol. Spent some years in Johannesburg and other parts, but always come back:)
If you are ever in SA again, be happy to show you around ;)
I have an Ex-South African friend in New Zealand - she really loves it there, I hope to visit one day ;)
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Welcome
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I knew many people who had Amigas in South Africa. I even ran an Amiga club on the East Rand.
I sold Amigas and gave professional support and training for many years.
I started with the VIC-20 in 1983 and soon upgraded to the Commodore 64 and then the Commodore 128D. I still love the Commodore 128D, it was a super 64! In 1984 and 1985 there were two big Commodore clubs in Johannesburg, it was very festive. The good old days.
I still own a CBM PET.
Now I am living in Israel.
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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!
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I watched Amiga dealers come and go over the years, I outlived all of them.
I have not met anyone until now who had an Atari computer.
You mean you acquired your first Amiga in 1999 only?
I will see if I still have any Amiga contacts in South Africa. Give me a few days.
The Junkmail used to be a good way to find other Amiga users.
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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.
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.
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)
I will see if I still have any Amiga contacts in South Africa. Give me a few days.
That'll be cool!
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:
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Hi,
Still not sure how i ended up on this forum, but decided to register anyhow.
I'm from South Africa and got an Amiga 2000 in '88 I think. My Dad worked at Tedelex, which meant we got it at a big staff discount. It was still R 7000.00 back then which was a huge amount of money in those days.
I actually still have the Amiga, but it's in my garage and haven't been switched on for years now. I still remember, having both an old MFM harddrive (accessible through an old mfm controller) as well as a 50 MB scsi hdd that i added, as well as a 68030 expansion card. I also upped the default 25mhz crystal on the card to a 33mhz crystal (overclocking :) ).
I remember having a peculiar problem with my A2000 in that i had to have my dot matrix printer attached to the parallel port for it to boot up.
After seeing this forum I'm now very tempted to go get it and see if I can get it up and running again. Think it will need a bit of work though.
First time I told my friends about the Amiga they responded 'Amigo who?'. And after I showed them the games, I had to endlessly explain why it wouldn't work on their pc's and why their games looked so bad.
Anyhow, let me see if I can fire it up again.....
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I would recommend opening it up and checking for battery leakage before firing it up. Those things don't last forever.
Good luck!
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Welcome.
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Hello Amiga user from a so far so far land!
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I would recommend opening it up and checking for battery leakage before firing it up. Those things don't last forever.
Good luck!
Thanks for the tip. I'll do just that.
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Me too! :)
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yahooo! me too! :) also south african - from ptown pretoria :)