How did the Amiga fare in Australia?

[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.

[slimf]

I remember going to Grace Brothers and Dick Smiths seeing A500s front and center of their computer departments. There was also a stack of smaller businesses producing hardware - for example, I purchased an Aussie designed and built eeprom programmer (which allowed duplication of Apple roms and Amiga roms). There was of course Opal Vision.

We also had stacks of small businesses selling hardware and software - both retail and mail order. We even had our own Amiga Mags and back in the day there were Amiga clubs almost everywhere.

[gertsy]

And Audio Engineer hardware and software, and the Phoenix A1000 MB replacement out of South Australia, and the ubiquitous Sysinfo out of Queensland, where would we be without that?
Amiga was quite popular in Australia in specialised computer shops and the Myer/Grace Bros chain and even had an Aussie magazine in "Australian Commodore and Amiga Review".
Sigh... long ago now.

[gertsy]

And Audio Engineer Hardware and Software, and the Phoenix A1000 MB replacement out of South Australia, and the ubiquitous Sysinfo out of Queensland where would we be without that.
Amiga was quite popular in Australia in specialised computer shops and the Myer/Grace Bros and even had an Aussie Magazine in "Australian Commodore and Amiga Review".
Sigh... long ago now.

[bwldrbst]

I remember seeing 500s in K Mart and drooling over 4000s in Myer a few years later.

I knew quite a few people that had Amigas but pretty much only 500s. Later I saw a couple of 1200s and 600s. I went to a meeting or two of a local Amiga user group a couple of years after C= went under but didn't feel like I fit in with the grumpy greybeards there! I don't think there's an active user group anywhere near me now.

My first Amiga was a 500 and I eventually bought a 1200, probably one of the last ones sold here in Perth! The 1200 was the first computer I bought with my own money and it's still going. Sadly, I sold the 030 accelerator I had in it for peanuts when I was broke in the late 90s. By then I had got my hands on a 4000 but didn't know about the dangers of the battery and it died a few years later.

Until I got interested in Amigas again a couple of years ago, I'd never even seen a 1000 or a 2000 but have since picked up two of each and a couple of them even work.

[Iggy]

I remember seeing 500s in K Mart and drooling over 4000s in Myer a few years later.

I knew quite a few people that had Amigas but pretty much only 500s. Later I saw a couple of 1200s and 600s. I went to a meeting or two of a local Amiga user group a couple of years after C= went under but didn't feel like I fit in with the grumpy greybeards there! I don't think there's an active user group anywhere near me now.

My first Amiga was a 500 and I eventually bought a 1200, probably one of the last ones sold here in Perth! The 1200 was the first computer I bought with my own money and it's still going. Sadly, I sold the 030 accelerator I had in it for peanuts when I was broke in the late 90s. By then I had got my hands on a 4000 but didn't know about the dangers of the battery and it died a few years later.

Until I got interested in Amigas again a couple of years ago, I'd never even seen a 1000 or a 2000 but have since picked up two of each and a couple of them even work.

K-Mart has a presence in AU , eh?
I'm fond of the A2000 myself.
Sturdy enough to be used as a weapon when you tire of using it as a computer. :laugh1:

[CodePoet]

K-Mart has a presence in AU , eh?
I'm fond of the A2000 myself.
Sturdy enough to be used as a weapon when you tire of using it as a computer. :laugh1:

@Iggy K-Mart is a fantastic chain here, some are even open 24 hours! They sell pretty much everything

I loved A2000s. My father bought me my first A2000 from a garage sale for $80 in 1996 (I was using an A500 prior to that).

I only ever really used Wordworth, DPaint and Protracker on it from disk... Until I accidentally reboot it twice on years' eve, and it suddenly auto-boot into Workbench 2.0 (which I'd never seen before) - I was absolutely gobsmacked. I didn't realise it contained a hard disk, or how much ram (6MB) it had in it. The hard disk required two reboots as it was slow to spin up

...Christ, I was forced to attend new years celebrations that night. I just wanted to go home and play with the workbench preferences on the A2000, I couldn't believe I could set background patterns in Workbench 2.0... In 16 colors no less!

Good times. I'm now 32, and I haven't had anything excite me to that extent since.

[paul1981]

I like that story! I feel as though I know how that would have felt too.

[whiteb]

Ahhh good old Australia.

When I arrived in Australia (Perth) with my A500 there were several outlets for Amiga.

I got my 1084S from Kmart.
Amilight Software in Como / South Perth, PD Software (But not so PD if you asked the right questions).
ComputerMan in Mount Lawley (ComputerYid, due to his Jewish faith).
Headlam Computers in Leederville.

Then things happen, get married, have kids, Move to Melbourne.  

Been to Maug a few times in Mooney Ponds (Melbourne Amiga User Group), THB (from EAB) goes to Maug.

[AndyFC]

Anyone else remember the two A500's they had on the TV set Neigbours?

Yes. There were one or two in Paul Robinson's office in the Lassiters Hotel - it got a 'Virus' and Josh the computer whizz-kid fixed it.

Josh also had one when he lived with the Robinsons.

The Kennedy family were better off - they had a PC but the only game they played was Magic Carpet.

[slimf]

Be ashamed, very ashamed!

[bwldrbst]

Headlam Computers in Leederville.

That's where I got my A1200. One of the 1000s I've got now had their phone number on a sticker on the keyboard.

[Azryl]

I worked for a company in Richmond, Melbourne, Victoria.

This company had over 400x A500's in motels running specialized software for VCR control and movie schedules.

Over 600x A1200 in major hotel chains like Crown Towers, Hilton and many others.

We used the A1200's for small animations of navigation pages for a master antennae subscription movie service.

Some of the A1200's were used for Scala multimedia displays running what ever the hotel wanted as a information and description pages for their customers and guests with sound and voice over.

I personally shoe horned into a one inch high, custom 19U rack mount, an A1200 motherboard, 8meg ram expansion, 3.5inch hard disk, 3.5inch internal Iomega IDE 100meg ZIP drive and a face mount reset switch. I wrote custom boot scripts and software to control the copy/paste of Scala updates into the internal drive via the 100meg Zip. Great fun to do!


Many hotels had 6x A1200's installed in a server rack with the VCR's, master modem, amplifiers and assorted other hardware for the movie delivery system.

I also had to do Scala programming, all the monthly updates for graphics and animations. Every month we had new movies to be shown so new pages had to be created.

The main graphics machine was an A4000Tower, nice machine Brilliance V2 was the most useful AGA paint package I used, lovely program.

Az

[Slattery]

I am in Melbourne, Australia and have a CD32 with SX1 expansion. I pulled it out of the cupboard and fired it up last week. It still works almost 30 years later 

Back in the day around 1987 we used to go to Dick Smith in Boronia Victoria after school each day to play Test Drive that they had setup on the demo Amiga 500 in the store. I saved up and purchased one!

[PlatformerZ]

Our folks bought an A1000 in Hobart Tasmania - probably Myer in '86 and it was the best. We didn't buy any more stuff retail in Hobart but mail-order from magazines out of the USA. Titles like Defender of the Crown and the Mirror Hack Pack and GOMF came from there. Hardware extras like Digiview + NTSC camera, Timesaver and Perfect Sound also came via mail order.

My friend was a member of OmegaV - a subgroup of ACU and handed me most of the other software I played with.

Jeff from Unitech Electronics in the Sydney area told me back in the day he was an agent for the CD32 and met with the late Kerry Packer who ordered 100's of CD32 motherboards to run in the slot machines in his Melbourne Casino.

[Slaanesh]

A bit late but just wanted to add that the TAB (Betting shops) in Victoria used Amiga 2000s for their gambling machines, which was a system called Tabaret.
I walked into a pub and saw the screens, and immediately knew it was an Amiga running it.
A few years later, I bought an Amiga 3000 with a network card which still had Tabaret software on the hard drive!