great thread, very interesting and brought back alot of memories.
from my point of view, being the kid with the pimples who hung out at the amiga store with a box of floppies copying shareware for hours - here is how I saw it back then.
the games were great. yes I pirated alot of them.. er I should say copied from friends. But I did buy some whenever I had the cash... which was alot. Looking in my F19 Stealth box, it was $65.
So, one time I walk into the amiga store with all my savings. I bought a printer, Kickstart 1.2, external floppy and a 1MB Supra Ram cartridge - all for my A500. Total was $860
A while later I was at a friends house, playing with his x86 - windows 3.0 was just released and it was pretty good. The games weren't very good. He didn't have audio beyond bleeps and bops. We had to unplug the mouse to connect the modem. But there were games, he had a printer and he had OK color.. he also had a hard drive.
So I saved a bit more and walked into the Amiga store looking to buy a hard drive. I believe it was a 40MB (same as my friends x86). They wanted $800 for the hard drive.
Well, that was it for me. I could buy a PC with a printer and hard drive for that price, and for a couple hundred more I could have a Adlib. So I decided to save and buy a loaded PC.
Little did I know it would take years to save that much money. When it happened, I got a 486 Dx2-66 Compaq with over 200MB of hard drive space, a CDrom and everything for $1200 + plus $1400 for a 17" monitor. $300 of that was knocked off by selling my A500 to my brother.
I got my A500 back but all the software is lost. I rescued it from the back porch where it had endured the weather for a few years.
It wouldn't boot up, just a red screen and the power light was pulsating. Cleaned the leaves out of it, and some other crud that looked like ear wax and spun the floppy a few times and now she is slowly starting to come back to life. Had a tear in my eye when I opened her up and saw the chip names on the motherboard that I had forgotten about.
Anyhoo, been searching ebay for workbench now for a few days, hopefully I can find it soon. And if Amiga is coming back, I am all for it. I am sick of windows and windows support. I want a real machine again and just use my PC for games :-D
how ironic.
