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Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: Pentad on July 03, 2017, 01:27:35 AM
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I was talking with some colleagues over lunch about computers in the 80s and the Amiga, Atari ST, and Macintosh came up. The question was asked what was the moment that sold you on whatever platform you ended up buying.
For example, a few people older than I said seeing the GUI on the Mac was revolutionary since they had started on Mainframes and text.
One person said MacPaint and Page Maker sold him on the Macintosh. Another said one of the MIDI programs on the Atari ST (he was a music major in college) sold it for him. He really compared the music software he had on the ST with an architect moving from manually drawing to AutoCad.
I thought really hard about my 'Amiga Moment' and I guess the first time I saw the Boing Ball demo and they *pulled* down the screen so you could do other things. I remember thinking how powerful that was. Having used Macs in school (I was 15 in '85) we got the whole GUI deal but multiple screens, well that was revolutionary.
So, I ask you, what was your Amiga moment? What made you say 'I have to have that'?
-P
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I had a friend that had a C64. It died and he got an A500, thought it was very nice with good games around 1991. He got a 386 and was moving so I bought it with all software. Within a year I found an A2000 with a GVP 030/40 and picked it up Added a Tek 2060 that died some years ago. Found a guy here or on AW that was selling a loaded A4000T for $1000 and picked that up. Good stuff that I won't part with!
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Seeing the Dpaint waterfall image in color cycling at the software rental shop. Kept playing with the amiga when I visited there and finally got the Amiga 1000.
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Seeing my best friend's stepdad editing a presentation in Deluxe Video, then playing Firepower an hour later (which blew one of his speakers).
Sure as Hell blew my Coco 2 away...
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The COMPUTE! Magazine article introducing the Amiga 1000 piqued my interest, and subsequent articles held it. My BBS buddy running his BBS on a 500 in 1990 got me even more, but I was still C64/128. But seeing Shadow of the Beast in 1991 sold me. My first 500 system bought in 1992 did not come with the game, but I realized I had this amazingly capable computer on my desk. Never once since as I moved from project to project, hobby to hobby, interest to interest, never did I consider for a second my Amiga couldn't do what I needed.
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Seeing early ads for it in Compute! and a hands-on demo with one at a store - Deluxe Paint, showing off some color-cycling stuff. Just floored me.
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Mine was picking up a copy of my first ever Zzap 64/Amiga magazine as I had been given a Commodore 64 for my 11th birthday. I flicked through the magazine and saw reviews for Shadow of the Beast and Turrican....... My jaw dropped at the graphics.......
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For me I had a mate who had an Amiga 500 in 1988 or thereabouts I think.
Seeing F18 Interceptor in action (I loved flight sims) just blew me away. Hitting the afternoons and feeling the thump from the stereo sound ...it was like wow!
I had to wait until early 1990 before receiving my Amiga 500. Glad to see the pack in game was F18 Interceptor!
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Seeing sword of sodan and sidewinder on a black and white tv between 2 big speakers blasting in my face on a a500 sold me in 1989 :) Picked up a a500 a month later!
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2 Amiga moments for me :)
First was playing Lotus, Buggy Boy and Xenon 2 on my cousin's Amiga 500 back in the heydays and being totally blown away by it (while we had a 386 with VGA at home)
All games were in 'vga' (as I considered it) with awesome sound while I most often had CGA or EGA games with pc beeper, and if I were in luck, VGA support.
Later on, in 1999 I had a powerful Pentium 2 with 3dfx pc, a friend of mine offered to buy me his Amiga 500 for a small price, and I could use a spare computer for entertainment when my big pc was doing heavy work (windows 98 wasn't that much multitasking). So I replaced my old 286 monochrome as 'co-pc' with the Amiga.
First I thought it was broken, as I dutifully inserted the workbench disk and then inserted the game disk, and almost all games were displayed as 'NDOS'. But then one lucky day I forgot to eject the disk, and the next time I powered up the Amiga, I was being welcomed by the awesome intro of Pinball Fantasies :D :D :D
That was the second time I was blown away by the Amiga, years after it's heydays :D
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Just before I graduated high school I started seeing the ads in the computer magazines then when the small commodore 64 shop near me closed down we would go to the owners trailer to by/sell what stock he had left he had an Amiga 500. I graduated and moved to Ohio and right next to the big MicroCenter store was a little place called Computer Success where you could see the 500/2000/3000. The price of the 500 dropped to $499 and you could walk over to microcenter and buy a PC for 3x the price that much or a mac for 10x the price that and neither could do what the 500 could. I bought my 500 and started messing with emulators as well. Soon after it has replaced my c64 when I bought the A64 hardware adapter. Then a PC emulator let me do all my school work and if the mac ever did anything useful I could emulate that too. For that $500 investment I basically had 4 machines (c64, Amiga, PC and Mac) which would have cost much more to buy each separately.
Could never afford a 2000/3000/4000 so I ended up taking my 500 mainboard and a 286 and building a case around them so I had similar to a 2000 with bridgeboard. My first job out of college was at a pc shop so I ended up moving to the dark side up until Windows Xp was such a flop that I moved to Linux.
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I think it was Byte magazine that ran a preview of the Amiga before it was ready for production which I had read. Later a local Commodore computer group had a show with an Amiga 1000 demonstration. Watching the demonstration made me want one, especially after reading about it. There was an Apple shop that was going to carry it and I got my name on a list for when they would get them in. I started saving and visiting the shop every week asking if it was in yet. Finally it arrived and I bought it November 20, 1985....I still have the receipt though not the A1000 :(
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Seeing a demo of the game Walker in a computer shop sold me on the A1200. I'd had a Atari 1040ST until that point and yeah it had 1Mb of Ram but it was increasing obvious by 1992/93 that is had had its day! The most obvious evidence of this was the awful lack of channels and tinny music on Lemmings 2 on the ST and the fact there was no intro cartoon :-( Seriously, having the music actually cut out so that you could have a sound sample of a Lemming saying "yippee" was unbearable! It makes me shudder to this day. To think that most people fondly remember the Atari ST for music and MIDI and yet it had a pitiful sound chip makes be yearn for a time line where the ST and Amiga were a point project under Jay Miner / Jack Tramiel at Atari. Atari might hav been able to beat Apple in that time line with the name and video game pedigree in the USA with a proper games capable computer like the Amiga being marketed as a multimedia / gaming platform to smash the NES. The cost reduced A500 would have been a priority under Jack and may mave come out in 1986! That could have worked out ok?
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@EugeneNine
until Windows Xp was such a flop
Windows XP was the first 'good' Windows OS (if you discount the Windows NT line). I don't really follow you. Do you mean Vista was a flop?
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@EugeneNine
Windows XP was the first 'good' Windows OS (if you discount the Windows NT line). I don't really follow you. Do you mean Vista was a flop?
Windows 2000 was the best. It was the first with the NT4 kernel with the 9x interface. XP moved some portions of the outer OS into the kernel and forced the IE integration as well as a bunch of other crap that wasn't needed
2000 was way more stable, faster, more secure.
Most people forget 2000 because XP came out so fast due to the IE court case.
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My first machine was (and still is) a cpc 6128, quite blind buy back then as I knew nothing about computers.
Amiga was on magazines but didn't impressed me at all.
I went to a friends house who had an A500 and I saw and hear operation thunderbolt...
After changing my diapers I ran workbench and did some pointer changes.
Then DPaint nailed the coffin, I turned at him and said:
This computers was made for me.
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Windows 2000 was the best. It was the first with the NT4 kernel with the 9x interface. XP moved some portions of the outer OS into the kernel and forced the IE integration as well as a bunch of other crap that wasn't needed
2000 was way more stable, faster, more secure.
Most people forget 2000 because XP came out so fast due to the IE court case.
Windows NT4 had a 9x interface. Pre-4 NT windows versions had a Win3.1 interface.
Windows XP was practically based on Windows 2000, but the main 'difference' was that they ported the whole up-to-date directX library to it. Perhaps also some other backwards compatible features came with it and some server-specific functions were left out in the home version, but I don't know the details of that.
Perhaps those backward compatibility features rendered it somewhat unreliable but the main reason I think is badly written (often pre-installed) virusscanners/firewalls that clogged the system most often over time.
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Hard to remember what exactly was the moment. I remember seeing screenshots in C64 mags of games and they would have "Amiga screenshot" and it looked so good.
I had seen the game "Hostages" at a local shop that dealt mostly with Commodore hardware. It was the coolest game I'd ever seen. The graphics, speed etc. I had to get myself an Amiga 500.
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Windows NT4 had a 9x interface. Pre-4 NT windows versions had a Win3.1 interface.
Windows XP was practically based on Windows 2000, but the main 'difference' was that they ported the whole up-to-date directX library to it. Perhaps also some other backwards compatible features came with it and some server-specific functions were left out in the home version, but I don't know the details of that.
Perhaps those backward compatibility features rendered it somewhat unreliable but the main reason I think is badly written (often pre-installed) virusscanners/firewalls that clogged the system most often over time.
The biggest XP issue was IE. With 2000 I could install or uninstall IE, XP it was forced in to win the court case and therefore no matter how hard you worked at securing XP IE was a big hole straight to the OS Kernel that was easily exploited. XP got better after a few years and three service packs but I still can't get an XP box (or win7) to go 9 months of daily use without needing a reboot (even if you exclude patching).
The second issue was lack of control of virtual memory. I wasted one of my technet cases asking Microsoft why it was still swapping at 50% when I had set the reg key to swap at 99%, they told me they dropped support of that. So when my W2k workstation could easily run 3-4 virtual guests XP fell over at 1-2.
The inability to repeatedly use USB or resume were two other big issues I had. This was from a clean install without third party virus stuff either, those didn't start to get bad until later when they all tried to fix IE.
I saw many more XP BSOD's than I ever saw Amiga GURU's. Win2k I ran the beta for 9 months without a reboot, suspending and resuming my laptop at home, the office and client sites.
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mid 80's and there was a Commodore dealer/ repair center called Comspec just a 10 minute bicycle ride from my parents house. We used to marvel at all the new C64 games every weekend and one normal weekend there was an Amiga 1000 on display with the infamous Boing Ball demo running and when the guy at the store pulled down the screen and some other cool demos were running our teenage minds were just blown up..priceless:)
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Uh, why are we discussing Windows XP?
As to Amiga moments, the King Tut Sarcophagus HAM picture, anyone else with that one?
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The biggest thing I remember was ability to multitask. I was in college at the time and nothing else could. The Amiga I could have my word processor open, a drawing program to put diagrams in it and play music while I worked as well as download something from a BBS all at the same time. Nothing else at the time could do it.
Though one could also say multitasking causes our overly short attention spans now a days and blame the Amiga for that :)
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I was an Atari 8-bit user back in the mid-80's and was feeling the pressure from the Atari scene back then to upgrade to the Atari ST, however I just wasn't really wowed by any of the ST demos, apps, or games that I'd seen at the time.
One day I remember walking into an Electronics Boutique store in my local shopping mall and seeing what to me was the "Holy Grail" of gaming acheivements back then - a port of Dragon's Lair that captured the visual style of the arcade game (unlike the Coleco Adam and C=64 versions that took many liberties due to hardware constraints).
Utlitmately I opted to stick with my Atari 800XL for BBSing and gravitated towards the NES for gaming, but I would sell both systems in a few years to support my newly found interest in guitars. After I got out of high school in the early 90's I met musican and Amiga enthusiast through a local BBS and he introduced me to OctaMED 4. I bought a used A500 and 1084 for about $150, discovered that 512K of RAM wasn't enough for MED, and bought a trapdoor memory/clock expansion. Unfortunately the first card I bought only had a working clock, so I exchanged it for a card out of one of their floor model A500s (ironically the clock didn't work on this card).
I spent most of the 90's composing on OctaMED, gradually upgrading to a sidecar hard drive, then to an A3000, then to an A4000 with a notoriously bad Buster chip, and finally to an A1200 tower setup before a brief fling with an Amithlon setup. Although my fondest Amiga music memory was of the CDTV that I placed in a rack and used to gig with. We'd fit and entire scripted setlist (the startup-sequence loaded an IFF image of our band logo and our setlist, awaited a button press from the remote, loaded each song - decompressed with powerpacker lib - and played via the MEDplayer) on a single 880KB floppy. It impressed a lot of people in the late 90s. Those were great times. :-)
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...I turned at him and said: This computer was made for me
You know, I think that is the best description of the Amiga I've ever heard.
It really did feel like it was made for me...for how I think. Probably for all of us. Though I enjoy Windows, Linux, and MacOS, I probably had the most fun with the Amiga.
I remember seeing the Miami Vice demo on the Amiga 1000 (playing the theme) and just being blown away with how good it sounded. Watching Flight Simulator for DOS in a window on the Amiga with Sidecar. King Tut in Dpaint probably sold a bunch of Amigas as well...
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I had two friends, just starting high school in swizerland, who had an amiga 2000. One showed me firepower, batman, dark castle and marble madness. I was thrilled with firepower. The other one showed me deluxe paint, digi paint 3 and defender of the crown, outrun. Man i was in my parents ears until i got my own with printer and monitor for 4k at the time.
Got so many buddies through the amiga, had some great times with that machine. Still have it and working with 2091 2630 hd and cdrom, through 3 psus and battery replaced of course. Later i acquired a couple of 4000s and 4000ts which i sold to make it through University better. Good times!
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Watching the Wild Copper demo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZRK3bOPVbk) shortly after getting my A500, must have been 1988, or 1989.
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You know, I think that is the best description of the Amiga I've ever heard.
It really did feel like it was made for me...for how I think. Probably for all of us. Though I enjoy Windows, Linux, and MacOS, I probably had the most fun with the Amiga.
I remember seeing the Miami Vice demo on the Amiga 1000 (playing the theme) and just being blown away with how good it sounded. Watching Flight Simulator for DOS in a window on the Amiga with Sidecar. King Tut in Dpaint probably sold a bunch of Amigas as well...
Well except for this we have something else in common, same avatar on youtube :-D
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I was on my way to college and walking through Smiths in Walsall taking a shortcut from the bus station and there sitting in a glass case in the middle if the shop was a ZX81. It really was a Waynes World kind of moment ' Oh yes it will be mine '.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7jJnwEeiU0
I kinda had the same feeling about the VIC 20 in the window of Dixons in Birmingham as I travelled to work. In those days I think most that sat by me on the bus must have thought I was bonkers as I read pages and pages of machine code.
And the Amiga... I was transfixed by this full screen animation of a female eye just blinking at me in Lansdown Computers window in Bournemouth.
I guess when you're addicted you gotta have your fix. Still the same today. Probably too late to get help.... I have a GVP Turbo on the go in the next room on a 500 and I'm raring to go. As you do.
PS Here is my ZX81 with expansion and keyboard that I got from a Sinclair Exhibition in Edinburgh... That was a long journey from the Midlands I can tell you. But worth it.
http://www.scuzzscink.com/amiga/car_0108/car1207190.jpg
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My mother was a teacher, and her school sent her to a presentation of the Apple Lisa - this occurred before the release of the Mac, of course - and the people there told her about a wonderful new machine called Lorraine that would be so much better than the Lisa.
As soon as I heard about it, I started waiting breathlessly for it's release.
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My story is similar to that of tasmania guy. During my high school years the C64 was very popular, it was the thing to have. For most it was a gaming computer, but this one friend and I used our machines for more than just games. He even went as far as writing a couple of simple games for it. I still remember our long assembly debugging sessions.
We were aware of the Amiga from reading computer magazines. It had high appeal, both from specs and from the view of an existing Commodore user. No one in our small town had the money or the inclination to get the A1000. Many years later, my friend was the first to move to the Amiga (A500). I went over to his place to check it out. After seeing Test Drive and F/A-18 Interceptor I was convinced and determined to follow the same upgrade path. Being a broke student, it took me about a year before I could get my very own A500.
That was the first Amiga moment. And I've had other Amiga moments after that. Sometimes from witnessing the power of a new peripheral and matching software, and other times when seeing new Amiga models, e.g. A3000, A1200, CD32. I remember when I saw the Microcosm intro on a CD32 at our local Amiga re-seller. This in an era of Super Nintendo and Sega Mega Drive (Genesis). And whilst not an Amiga per se, when I first saw the Casablanca video editor being demoed, I really wanted one.
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Another cool thing I liked was accelerators. When adding a board actually *made a difference*. Nowadays, an SSD drive will make a difference, but with Windows, an I7 doesnt really feel snappy over an I5.
Going from 68k to 68020 made a difference with everything.
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Mine has to be getting my A1200 with the classic 8833 Mk2 Philips monitor. Great times and lots of overnighters.
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Why were Amiga productivity programs so intuitive and great? Everything from Deluxe Paint to Bars & Pipes was great. PC & Mac programs are 'just tools' even Photoshop (which is growing on me ;-)).
I recently used DrawStudio 2 again after more than a decade and I could pick it up again straight away! That's amazing! Great software. The number of people that used to say to me "But it can't run PC programs so why bother?" back in the 90s were fools, damn fools.
(http://www.tombsofkobol.com/films/apes/poa-1030.jpg)
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Why were Amiga productivity programs so intuitive and great? Everything from Deluxe Paint to Bars & Pipes was great.
Of all the programs the Amiga had the only one I really miss on modern computers is Deluxe Paint. It was so amazingly intuitive that you could just sit down with it and go to work. I've used Photoshop for years but there are still features in Dpaint that I miss.
It was also a lot of fun to play with too. Color cycling, brushes, perspective drawing...just fun to use.
I keep hoping for a Kickstarter where somebody is recreating Deluxe Paint for modern computers.
-P
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I was with my grandmother in an area of a nearby city that i had never been in and spotted a nearby computer store. I told my grandmother I'd by in there instead of waiting for her.
I was a long time C64 owner and programmer at the time when i spotted a machine near the C64 stuff playing a slideshow of gorgeous pictures. I picked up an information pamphlet and didn't believe the features! 4096 colours, no way! 4 channels of stereo sound! What the hell is multitasking?
After a few minutes a store employee came over and i asked him about multitasking. He started up an editor, an app that played a tune, then some of the things that came with WB1.3, you know the ones that draw rectangles and circles, then he told me to type in the editor. I was speechless. Didn't take me long to save up some money and get my first of several Amiga models.
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For me, I was lucky enough to live in Silicon Valley here in California at the time the A1000 was just about to get released and saw a demo of it. I was blown away and way too young to afford one. I think I was in like 5th grade at the time. So I saved every penny from my news paper delivery routes, did yard work around the neighborhood, washed cars and did other things to save up all the way to a year after it came out and got my A1000 as a demo unit at the local Amiga dealership. It was an awesome thing to have and loved it from the first day all the way to now.
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Test driving a loaded A4000T in the 90s at the Gateway Amiga Show in St. Louis. Love at first click. The Amiga was snappy, responsive and seemed a multi-tasking wonder.
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Of all the programs the Amiga had the only one I really miss on modern computers is Deluxe Paint. It was so amazingly intuitive that you could just sit down with it and go to work. I've used Photoshop for years but there are still features in Dpaint that I miss.
It was also a lot of fun to play with too. Color cycling, brushes, perspective drawing...just fun to use.
I keep hoping for a Kickstarter where somebody is recreating Deluxe Paint for modern computers.
-P
There is Promotion from cosmigo that it is almost DPaint.
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So here is my Amiga moment...
1987. I was 15 years old and a diehard Atari ST user and member of S*P*A*C*E -- the Seattle/Puget Sound Atari Computer Enthusiasts. Remind you, I was a diehard Atari 8-bit user prior.
May 15, 1987. Atari and several of it's ACE groups put on an Atari Fair in Seattle, WA at the Seattle Center Flag Pavilion. I was there, manning the S*P*A*C*E booth like a good little Ataribot. The show was in full swing, hundreds of Atari users (and many Atari employees too) roaming around. In from the back door walks in an Amiga buddy of mine who constantly gave me a hard time about being an Atari ST user. Somehow, he had arranged a small table on the outskirts of the show floor. On that table, he began setting up an Amiga in the midst of an Atari show! I walked over in disbelief half to see it for myself and half to tell him to get lost. Then I saw it -- it was an Amiga 1000 with 1300 genlock connected to a video camera and a TV he had setup. He was doing real-time titling and animations on top of live video. I could not believe my eyes -- I had to have one...and the rest is history. I sold my Atari 1040ST and SC1224 monitor, and bought an Amiga 1000 with 1080 monitor. The first thing I did when I hooked it up was play was Defender of the Crown hooked up to my stereo. I was in teenage nerd heaven!