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Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: mcbone on August 19, 2014, 05:08:54 PM
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Are you new to the Amiga or old timer person to the Amiga.??????
Do you like all new amiga comeing out today.????
And the Amiga forever and amikiik and aros .?????????
I do like amiga forever and amikit and aros .?????????
But the old amiga are the best .??????
like amiga a 500 and cdtv amiga ....
P.S i am useing raspberry pi with help off Aros ....
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I was a child when Commodore went bankrupt and I didn't know about the Amiga till I got into UNIX in the 2000s. Despite that I've been lurking since MorphOS went 2.0 and OS4 was released for real. I'd consider myself older to the hobby, but I may be considered new.
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Old School for sure! I was there when the new A1000's hit the shelves, all I could do is look and dream at the time! I was BIG TIME into C64 - C128 stuff. I had a pretty nice collection including 1581 drives, 1750 expansion, etc.
I took the lot down to my buddy "Nic" Tech Star" in Kent, WA and he traded the lot in for an Amiga 1000 and the "rest is history" as they say. I still have the A1000 and most of the other Amiga's that I have collected since.
I also have a reg'd Mini 1.5 G4 with MorphOS, a nice Amikit setup, A4000T Toaster/Flyer, A3000T, A4000D, A3000D, plus several others.
Lastly is the Sam 400 Flex. I bought that from AmigaKit in 2008 and that has been a nice machine too.
-Jeff
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I'm an old timer. I remember seeing my first Amiga 1000 in the basement of this guy's house (he was setting up a computer store in town and was going to be carrying the Amiga but didn't have his real estate yet). The OS wasn't even fully baked (he was running a beta of 1.0 and Commodore was misspelled in the boot messages). Got my first A1000 shortly thereafter. Ah, the good old days...
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Are you new to the Amiga or old timer person to the Amiga.??????
Do you like all new amiga comeing out today.????
And the Amiga forever and amikiik and aros .?????????
I do like amiga forever and amikit and aros .?????????
But the old amiga are the best .??????
like amiga a 500 and cdtv amiga ....
P.S i am useing raspberry pi with help off Aros ....
"Old Timer" I started out on a Commodore Vic=20 and went to the C=64 and then read all about the Amiga 1000 in magazines for a good while until the A2000 came out. I got an A2000 my senior year in High School in 1989 with a 8088 Bridegboard for compiling Pascal for my CIS college classes.
After that I upgraded and tweaked my A2000 for years and ended up selling her to get one of the first few hundred A4000/030s to make it to US shores at the Amiga show in NYC. I carried that computer from the docks in NYC back to Grand Central Station with my new A386 bridgeboard in tow.
I really miss the innovation and unique home brew styling that Commodore brought to all its projects. That free-wheeling spirit where engineers seemed to be able to dream bigger rather than being a part of a big corporate cog. Not that Commodore didn't also have it's politics as I'm sure Dave Haynie can elaborate on.
I for one would welcome someone coming out with new hardware that was AGA compatible and simply gave me a reliable hardware platform to run my old software on. Though I do keep watching the new RISC bases motherboards hoping that one will be inexpensive enough for me to get into the latest AmigaOS on modern hardware. It's just a hobby to me and not a daily driver so it's hard for me to justify too much expenditure at this point.
Anyway, there's my book. 8^D
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Hi,i must be new then lol because up to about 6yrs ago i did not know what Amiga was but now i surf the net with my Amiga 1200 and my never say die Aniga 600 now she is a star born to surf and steady as a mountain goat and rattles away like marbles in an old jam jar which i can only think she must be talking to someone on the net and to whome i have no clue so for me it has to be the old stuff takes centre stage by a mile very best wishes from me sent from the Amiga 1200 and farewell from the Amiga 600,Brian
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My first Amiga 500 was from 15/12/90 after my CPC 6128.
I use only old school Amigas, one is only with a PPC board.
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Dear Friends:
All of my friends had an amiga 500 when they just came out, and I could not afford one.
Then when I went to my first year of college, I was able to buy a new amiga 1200.
I was very happy with it, and used it to play wizardry:bane of the cosmic forge.
A friend then, when he saw how much I liked amigas and how much I wanted to learn animation, gave me a free gift: a new amiga 4000/030 including original aladdin 4d.
I was superhappy, I spent a long time learning aladdin 4d and rendering animations.
I must'ed got the amiga 1200 and 4000 about the year 1993.
I always loved amigas and aladdin 4d.
Now I only have an amiga 2000 with low specs, but I am looking forward to get
a better amiga in the future.
I am using aladdin 4d on winuae/emulation.
I love amigas !!!
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Old timer.
My family's first computer was a C=64 in 1984 when I was thirteen. Sometime during the first year we got a 300bps modem and I discovered the local BBS scene and ended up spending so much time on the 64 it became mine (dad bought a C=128) and I started running an after-hours board.
I enjoyed BBS, programming in BASIC and gaming on the little Commie for a few more years, until Dad got an Amiga 500 shortly after they were released. He quickly outgrew it and got an A2000, giving me the A500 as an early graduation present. We joined the local Amiga UG which met at the only store in town that specialized in Amigas and after a few meetings the owner offered me a job.
I wasn't much of a salesperson but working at the store meant I could try out just about any hardware and software after school. My main interest was in animation and CGI, having obsessed over and studied the field for a few years from trade magazines and what information was available at the library. One day a local video producers came in looking for someone that could do some animation for a NOAA weather production and this began my professional career and change of role to video/graphics specialist for the store.
About a year after graduation, while taking R/TV classes at the local jr. college I left the store with my buddy to start Vision Graphics. We didn't have a whole lot of steady clients but we did have a couple TV stations and a legal engineer that did accident recreations and we helped get them up to speed with their own Amigas while also doing some on-air graphics packs.
Somewhere in here I discovered this new thing called The Internet, which, at the time, was mostly about e-mail and usenet groups and years before the Web. I became a regular on comp.sys.amiga.graphics and other related groups as well as the general graphics groups. One of the online friendships I made was a TA in the graphics lab at California Institute of the Arts and in the summer of 1991 he told me they had an opening and I should submit my stuff.
At the time there was about a 2 year waiting period for spots, the school being very small and exclusive (all schools and all disciplines totaled to only about 1000 students). I ended up getting the spot after sending in tapes of my experiments in recreating some of the T1000 effects I'd seen in Terminator 2. They were really anxious to have students that wanted to use all the Amigas and SGIs they had since a majority of the animation students weren't interested in CGI.
I wasn't there long though because studios came by fairly regularly on portfolio reviews and I got recruited out of school to work for Metrolight Studios, co-Oscar winner for Total Recall, by one of my CG animation idols. I got to learn from several of the greats that I used to read about since I was in junior high. And all the while I learned high end technique and software I was keeping up with what was happening with the Amiga.
When I moved out to go to CalArts UPS destroyed my A3000 that I had shipped from Texas to California. I ended up replacing the A3000 with another and then "upgraded" to an A4000 shortly after it was released. I should have just kept the A3000 but, oh well, and in the Summer of '93 I left Metrolight to join a brand new startup called Digital Domain.
Several Amigans would make up those early ranks and, come to find out, the genesis of Digital Domain owes much to the Amiga. While James Cameron and Scott Ross talked about starting their own effects company Stan Winston was already putting a team together based on a short piece of animation that one of his puppeteers had done at home on his Amiga in Lightwave. He called his buddy Cameron up to brag about his new division and Cameron and Scott convinced him to fold it into their plans and, voila, Digital Domain was born.
In 1993 digital disk recorders were very expensive. Abekas and Accoms cost about $60K or so for about a minute of ccir601 (720x480 8bit YUV) playback. This was an incredible bottleneck for the growing number of artists to manage and utilize for testing and recording.
Myself and three other Amigans, one of which was the company's head of video engineering, convinced the company to invest in six (I believe) A4000-based PAR (Personal Animation Recorder) workstations which would be placed on mobile carts around the facility. I ended up writing the SGI-side CSH-based "shooter" script which allowed artists to send sequences of .SGI/.RGB files to one of the Amigas. It communicated with an AREXX script on the Amiga that controlled the PAR software.
This setup constituted the single best playback and review solution in the industry, hands down, for a time, and one of the systems (then two) made their way to the motion-control stages where they replaced single-frame recording to 3/4" tape, revolutionizing the way miniature photography was reviewed and iterated. I don't use that term lightly either. These Amiga-based solutions were better, more convenient, and more accurate than anything in use at any other facility, giving our artists a major advantage by being able to review their work at proper speed (realtime 3:2 pulldown) and without having to wait in line, sometimes for hours, for access to a single, expensive device.
And then Commodore went out of business and all the Amiga 4000s finally died from their constant use and unfortunate reliability. BUT, there in the early days, when we were doing True Lies and Apollo 13 and Interview With the Vampire and Strange Days, the Amiga was an integral part of the company and used in highest of high end work being done in Hollywood. I was really proud to have been a part of making that happen. It was a real shame when Commodore went under before we could even really talk about what was going on.
A year or two later we absorbed the Lightwave group from Amblin, who had already switched to Windows NT, but were all folks who also got their start on the Amiga.
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When the A500 came out I had the Commodore 64, and could not afford the A500 at the time.
Some years after I got an A600 to start of with and found that a whole new computer to handle. With Workbench discs to ME at the time was unheard of.
The first ever Amiga magazine I bought was Amiga User (I think??) before I got the A600 I had to wait 2 weeks before I got the money to buy it with Interword on the front of the page, still got the magazine.
Then after a few more years I got the Amiga1200 with an Apollo Turbo accelerator just after that, then I had the Mediator and a Tower Case but alas hard times got me by the throat and I was forced to sell the Mediator, but still got he Power Tower.
I also use Amikit and to me that is the fastest type of Amiga I use. But having said that In my personal opinion you cant beat the REAL thing. Over the years I have had many many types of keyboards both Oric Atmos 48k, ZX Spectrum 48k+, ZX Spectrum+3, C16, C64, C128, PC and I have to say in all honesty that the A1200 keyboard is the best I have ever used. I wont use Aros yet until it has more bugs removed. I have never used Amiga Forever so I cant say.
So for now its my REAL Amiga 1200 I still to this day and Amikit now and then if I am on the PC. The Amiga is the only computer that I have real pleasure out of most used is Amos Pro, FinalWriter 97, Dpaint 4, PPaint 7.1b, TurboCalc 4.0, and HI-soft basic.
I do not think that the Amiga will ever die out the following is far to big to let that happen.
So for now its Amiga 1200 to a HDMI TV 19" RGB connector, next week I shall get a Amiga VGA adaptor from Amigakit.
I lost my Dpaint 5 discs a long time ago so have to use Dpaint 4 but still even that is great to use. I could go on and on about the Amiga as I am sure all of us could do.
But we all know that the Amiga is the best computer of all time. Never mind the all powerful
PC's that are in use today, the Amiga is the Amiga and can not be replaced.
Mike.
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Old Timer, for sure. I bought an A1000 when they were new.... still have it somewhere. ;-)
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Around 88/89
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Old timer. My parents bought our C64 in 1984, when I was 8. Back then I was the only kid on the block to own a computer, even the typing class I took in school still used typewriters. I learned everything from gaming to programing to graphics on the C64. Probably knew more back then than I do now. ;)
Of course when the Amiga came out I drooled over it every time we went to the Cameron Station base PX. Wasn't until about 1991 that I was able to afford my first A500 (paid for by mowing a lot of lawns!), and in 1995 or '96 I got an A1200. I was still ahead of the curve even then, designing web pages on my A1200 before most people had heard of the WWW, beyond AOL, that is. ;)
Suffered a setback in the early 2000's when all my hard drives crapped out at once, taking with them almost every piece of Amiga software I owned. I tried emulation briefly but couldn't stand it, so threw up my hands and got a PC, then another, and another, until finally landing a job that affords me to get back into my Amiga hobby. Boy did I miss it, not a day went by in those 10 years that I didn't fondly remember my Amiga's. It's good to be back, and loving the posts on this thread! :D
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@Sean Cunningham
Wow, what a story. I could read stories like that all day. It's amazing just how many people virtually owe their current living to the start and inspiration Amiga gave them.
As for the topic I suppose I am an old timer. Our family picked up a C64 back in 1984 when I was a kid. It was used mainly for games, but without a disk drive it wasn't easy to be productive with it.
In 1989 when I was a young teenager, my two brothers and I clubbed together and bought an A500. Well, what a machine that was. It was followed by a 512k RAM expansion and external floppy. A colour dot matrix followed soon after. This machine was used heavily for games, but was also used for productivity.
As I got older the uses it was put to changed. I used it to produce Lotus 123 compatible spreadsheets for Uni, using CrossDos (which was possible under KS1.3 though you seldom read about it).
Around about 1994 an acquaintance who was into art and design decided to sell his A1200 and move to a PowerMac (I think he regretted it at the time) so my brother and I took it off his hands. Now we had an Amiga with a hard drive and that just made it a whole different beast. A 68040 accelerator and loads of RAM was added to this machine. My brother was studying computer science and was able to do some code for Uni on this and compile it so that it ran faster on the A1200 than the machines at Uni. We also set up a serial network which allowed the A500 to access the storage on the hard disk. It was very slow, but useful sometimes.
Around about this time the internet was taking off and the Amiga was already being left behind. Commodore going bust didn't help matters. Anyway, the A1200 had a trick up it's sleeve. Shapeshifter allowed us to run Netscape on the A1200, and under an 040 it was reasonably useable.
I soldiered on with the Amiga until 2001, when I finally caved in and bought a PC. My employer had got rid of their doorstep salesmen and were selling off a load of laptops. I'd always been intrigued by the concept of a laptop (well we never really had one with Amiga) so bought one. It was quite a high spec IBM Thinkpad and had loads of extras thrown in, and nice leather pilot bag to carry it all.
Since then I've bought a desktop PC and another laptop, but using these gives me no real enjoyment.
I'd like to get back into Amigas, particularly OS4, but at the moment my lifestyle doesn't really allow for it. I work all over my country and live in pretty much temporary accommodation. A big box Amiga would just be something else to worry about when moving on to the next contract. Despite the expense of it, I actually have the money and the inclination for the likes of an X1000, just not the place to store and use it.
I'm really hoping in the next couple of years I'll be able to settle down a bit, and one of the top priorities will be to get an X1000/X2000 and enjoy computing again.
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Nice story Sean Cunningham - I liked the reading a lot. You are a lucky man beeing so deeply involved in some fascinating work, even more when it was done with the miggys ;-)
I got mine A500 somewhere back in 1989 when I was 12. Wanted a C64 like my friend because of the many games - lucky me my brother dicided to buy this used gift for me. Even more lucky me because I got also a Phillips CM8833 with an old Apple Sticker popped on top of it???
Firstly I was the only one in the neighborhood with an miggy but after some searching I found some people for "exchanging" ;-) games. The most lived "far" away - some 1 hour bike ride. Not much time passed and quite some of mine friends upgraded to an miggy :-))
Until 1994 my main use was gaming and typing/printing for school or fun with Textomat on an Star LC-10 color 9 needle printer - wow :-)) Before that I soon had to buy that 512 kb RAM expansion and then also a second DD (it was a hard decision to choose between that and a handy-scanner - but my decision was the right one). HD were so extremely expensive here :-( for the C= at least. I also painted a little bit in DPaint or Sonix.
With the demise of C= (the day is also my birthday - what a coincidence!) I finally got more and more interested in this wonderful machine and switched more and more from buying Amiga-Gaming Magazines also to the ones which dealed with the serious stuff. Luckily a friend quickly sold his more or less new A1200 (and I my A500 with beginning errors on vector graphics) with this beast my intense Amiga story really began when I discovered that I can watch that colourfull JPGs from PCs - it began to get really usefull. An new boost was finally a harddisk a year or two later and soon a CD-ROM and an 17" monitor. Then a Blizzard 1230IV. Then I towered it - crappy Micronic keyboard interface.
When I began to work I soon bought this long desired used A4000/030 with CV643D some TBC and other nice stuff. Then another A4000/040 and I sold the former one. The came a used but pricy CSPPC - I was in heaven :-))))))
After I got a cheap CDTV and A3000 and CD32 I started my collectors careeer :-( After buying more or less a full lot from another collector I now have a little too much to use - life evolved. But it don`t stopped me to buy on of the last µA1 and 2 years ago also a MOS-MAC-G4MDD.
I am not a big fan of the emulation but I am happy that there is at least this option. The Classics are the best but I like the possibilitys of the NGs which carry the system, I like most in the world, to modern possibilitys at faster speed.
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@mcbone
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX+3 which cost me £150.
(There was a £50 voucher off the standard price of £199.99 in "The Mirror" Newspaper I used).
Regards, Michael
aka rockape
The only stupid question is the question which is never asked.
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I got me first C-64 in late '83, first C-128 in late '85, and my first Amiga in late '86. I have been using Commodore computers ever since. Currently I depend on an A2000 revision 6.2 motherboard with a GVP '030 card. Far from the fastest Amiga I have owned, but it works quite well. I may setup another video Toaster, who knows. I still use the A2000 to work on graphics along with my Windows machine.
I play a few games on it - but my game machine is an Amiga A1000 with 4.5Mb of RAM, and a laser mouse. With Kickstart 1.1, 1.2, & 1.3 disks, I can play almost any Amiga game.
Does that answer your question?
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The Amiga was the first computer I ever owned back in '89. I had used the C64s and Vic-20s at school as well as the Apple IIs but I always had to sit back and watch because my parents weren't college educated and couldn't see the merit in a computer besides games.
I learned to program on the Amiga and have been doing software engineering professionally for the last 15-16 years. Amongst the long string of companies I've worked at, I've notably worked for Google, Netflix and I now work for Facebook.
I still have at least 4 Amiga's in my office (3 assembled and ready to run)
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Old timer.
My first computer was the Sinclair ZX80 back in 1980. I had to wait 4 months after it's initial release before mine arrived due to the great waiting list. Couldn't get a pre-built model so had to buy the kit instead
It was also my first real dealings with a soldering iron putting it together ... Happy days!
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@mcbone
new-ish, i suppose. although i knew of them back in the 80s and 90s, i never bothered with them. first time i used an amiga was in 2010 and i've been hooked ever since. :)
-- eliyahu
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Old timer for sure....
I started on a ti99/4a in 1980 i think which was shortlived.I wrote my first extended basic program with sprites on it however. It was a engine with moving internals.
Started with a c64 in late 82' when my friend came back from germany with one and a nice color monitor, i was hooked. I had to have one.
I had tons of fun on the c64 interfacing stuff to it like a home made burglar alarm for the house using the joyports and S.A.M for speech to yell out "Intruder Alert-section B" etc.
when i had installed it in my room,i forgot to mention it to my mom and she came in to have this siren go off and the computer yelling intruder!-scared her half to death.
Went to sears quite often to load malicious programs on the c64's and 128s there. We would turn up all the monitor volumes and load a police siren like program that would go off as soon as someone touched a key. we would wait by the door and watch it happen and laugh like fools!
Got modem and hit the bbs's.. learned to phreak(before ESS came) and called worldwide bbs's to get new warez. I also was on Qlink(quantum link) around 85 or so,and had a ball there.. many people never knew we had a national online service like Qlink just for c64/128 with irc like chat and such.
I had a c128dcr in here also,i think i got it around 1986. I expanded it later with CMD ramlink,CMD HD,and a CMD super cpu eventually. great machine.
The first time i saw the Amiga, it was in the local PX around 1986 and it was playing the newtek demo i think.. I must have watched it over and over for a hour with my jaw on the floor.
around them the local commodore club had some amiga guys showing up with A1000. One guy actually printed color brochures off his A1000 for the club, They seemed incredible for the time.
I got my first amiga, the A2000 in late 87. I soon expanded it with a Ivs Vector 030 card and scsi cdrom(wow they were expensive!!!). I thought i was in high heaven but the A3000 was soon out. I quickly realised the benifeit of a all true 32bit machine with zorro3 and sold the 2000 and got a 3000.
The 3000 was expanded with a A3640 and 16Mb ram and a external scsi cdrom i put in a old ibm floppy case given to me. The 3000 was a truely sweet machine and i did quite a bit with it. But i sold it also.
My good friend had a A4000 and warpengine 040/40 around 92-94 and i ended up buying it for a song. This was a real power house and i soon added a picasso IV and i was in 24bit bliss! best card i had ever bought. eventually it became a 060 machine and today is still running 24/7 with a csppc and mediator/radeon etc.
Tinkering with everything from dpaint to lightwave 5x to anything in between kept me so busy, it just seemed the world was infinite then. Great days.
I still have all my c64,128dcr's and amigas.The A4000 is in daily use.
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I am from the old times.
My first computers contact was with the Texas Instrument TI99. Later C=64 and Atari 8 bits (the real Amiga predecessor)
1985, appears the Amiga 1000, then i came from thats Amiga times to the date.
I meet Internet on Amiga, and Amiga was my main computer until 2010.
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Got my 1st Amiga (A500) in 2011 or 2012 as a gift from a good friend. He got it somewhere, didn't know what to do with it, so he gave it to me. It was all yellow and without any expansions/disks but I fell in love. Yeah, she won me over at first sight. I'm a new timer then I guess...
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Bought my first amiga, an A500, in 93.
I have been hooked ever since that time.
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Old Timer Here. I bought my first amiga 500 In '89. I had saved for quite a while to buy it. I was upgrading from an Atari ST. lol.
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Old Timer Here. I bought my first amiga 500 In '89. I had saved for quite a while to buy it. I was upgrading from an Atari ST. lol.
Me too. I bought a 2000 that year. Had been using my housemate's 500 a bit. Even though I had a C128D. When I moved out I sold the 128 and got my 2000.