Hi, I'm Stephen. I was an Amiga 1000 owner back in 1985-ish, eventual upgrade to an Amiga 2000. But both systems are lost to time -- I may have all my floppies in a box in the basement though.
So I've recently dived in to retro-computing.. I had a Z80 system I built in 1979, cards in a box in the garage I think, and about a year ago I started designing a modern version of it. Eventually building a single board z80 computer and getting Altair basic up on it.
But enough about that. What happened is digging in to that made one thing lead to another, so I'm in the process of trying to acquire either vintage computers, or emulators, of all the pre-Windows systems I ever owned.
A big one for me is the Amiga computer, which I always considered a ground breaking computer when it was released. Broadcast quality video, lots of color depth, great resolution, and it ran a multi-tasking bitmapped displayed window system. I worked a career at Xerox Research and was using Altos and Dandilions at the time, it was great to go home to a similar computer
So of course I've been looking on Ebay for systems, and working Amiga's seem rare and expensive, so a few days ago I came upon FS-UAE, which lead me to Amiga Forever. I didn't have to give it any thought to buy their emulator and licensed software.
Once that was up I realized I wanted to do some of the things I did back then, one of which was run Deluxe Paint. I don't have my copy, unless it's in a box in the basement, so I went and purchased a vintage version of it, complete with original packaging and instructions. That lead to looking in to how to read and amiga floppy and I found that there are several projects out there where people have made arduino based boards that adapt vintage floppy drives to modern PCs. It's within my capability to build one of those boards, but instead I found someone selling a complete unit of a floppy drive with the interface board in the case, and a USB C connection to the PC.
So I'm all set to dig back in to Amiga land, especially if I can find my old floppies. Some of the stuff that I used to use it for probably can't be done anymore, because I did a lot of video with it. I had a live frame grabber for it, and actually wrote code to run on the Amiga to cartooniize captured video. I also remember that i wrote driver software for it to add a type of pipe to the cli, so I could pipe output from one process to another.
