I got my Amiga when I was in College..
It was a largely Mac school, but I had about $850 to spend..
So, no Mac in the price range..
The school bookstore actually had some kind of sweet deal with NEC (I think) and had a decent (at the time) NEC laptop for $1000, so I was going to see what organs I could sell to swing that.....
And then they had an Amiga 500 with a 1084s monitor (and I think it came with the extra 512K.. I don't remember buying that separate) for $850..
I was a C64 guy, so I wanted one, but I needed something for school....
I was lamenting to the kid standing next to me looking at the Amiga at the time.
He asked if I knew about A-Max..
I did, of course.. Sweet.. A few hundred $$, then find a Mac ROM for more money and buy a copy of Mac OS and get yourself a Mac Floppy drive and you have a Mac AND an Amiga for less than the cost of the Mac... But way out of my budget..
And he said, "I meant the cracked version.." Cracked? Hardware cracked? What..
He explained that you really didn't need the hardware.. He had an Amiga with said cracked version, and AMax formatted floppy disks with SYSTEM and programs (including MacPascal needed at the time) he'd let me copy. And I didn't even need a Mac floppy, as once you're online, you just file transfer everything...
I quickly flagged down the sales person and took the A500 on the spot!!!
(Which was kind of silly, because I didn't know this other kid and had no idea how good or bad the cracked A-Max was...)
Well, it was good enough.. ;-) In fact, the first computer virus I ever got was a Mac virus on my emulated Mac.. ;-) It was that good..
Best thing about owning an Amiga at the time?
I could afford to buy it and do what I needed (although there was some piracy in there, I admit that, but I couldn't have afforded the PC or Mac, even if I pirated software for them..)
So, I would like to formally apologize to Readysoft, but I really couldn't afford it at the time, so it wasn't a lost sale..
Turns out, even the $850 was more than I could afford and I had to buy ramen noodles and white bread for months to survive...
But it was worth it...
I did eventually buy an A-Max and a Mac floppy, but it was years (and years, well out of college) later and second hand so they still didn't get any money from it..
I did buy Dragon's Lair (ReadySoft) tho a year or so later (still in college), so I hope that helped a bit..
(Shut up, I like Dragon's Lair.. Yeah, I'm that guy..) ;-)
desiv
