Your first A500

[KingTutt]

I saw my first Amiga in '87 - at a friends b'day (lucky bastard - talk about the best bday present ever). One of the original A500s, running Bobble Bubble, Future Tank and later on Marble Madness. I was only 11 at the time but knew from that day forwards what I wanted.

It would be another 3 years of begging and whining to my parents before my turn came to own greatness. Meanwhile I had countless sleepovers to the several friends that lived nearby that owned Amiga. And everytime I would leave with an unquenched thirst and a yearning to have just another hit of Amiga.

It was torture, 3 years! of seeing games like Dogs of War, New Zealand story, Supercars, Rainbow Islands, Robocop, Rickdangerous, Turrican, Midnight Resistance etc etc.

I enoyed my Amiga for many years after 1990, playing the likes of Wings, Defender of the crown, It came from the Desert, Shadow of the beast, Magic Pockets, Jumpin Jack'son, Simcity and many more. I always liked the true classics (Marble Madness was considered classic even in the amiga days).

One thing was certain back then, computers were fun. Little did I know that never again was I to be this happy about anything. Nowadays games like Unreal2 and the upcoming Doom3 hold the attention factor for maybe 30 minutes.

Hmm.... Well i was 5 when my brothers A500 first arrived in 1986. About the 3rd into the country, originally from America, it was routed through Germany to have fixes applied to run in this country (ENG) because it has a prototype chip mounted on the underside of the motherboard. Mouse and modulator were extras at the time so it arrived with WB1.2, Deluxe Paint Programs & Fued and Space Ranger games. The machine still works fine into it`s 17th year now.... Great memories  ;-)

[Jose]

89 here too :-D

[KapitanKlystron]

I bought my A500 in early 88. I was going to shore duty from a ship and had a bunch of money. Was going to buy a AT clone but then a friend showed me the Newtek demo.  I bought the A500 and 1084 monitor and 1010 ext. floppy and the A501 memory expansion. Also bought the lightning quik amiga 1200 baud modem. That was the only computer i had until 1991.  I still have that A500 and It worked the last time I hooked it up.

[lorddef]

The first A500 I saw was my brothers, I remember he had it for Christmas and his birthday in 1990 'cs it was about £500, we alwasys shared our stuff and I think I used it almost more than him so I got a good deal there.  It was a whacking great step up from the Speccy 48k we had before hand, I remember my bro telling me it was as powerfull as the computers NASA were using. :-D

Maybe I just really miss that time when computer games were so much fun, I mean I love modern games but theres never a modern game I can play all evening, like I remember on the A500.

I really miss being 8 years old...

[filson]

Playing "Mean Streets" with a mouse in the joy port.  :-D
My brother completed it that way   :-D  :-D  :-D

[golem]

Got my first A500 in 1990 - it was the Rainbow Islands/ F29 Retaliator pack - also came with Planet of the Robot Monsters. Stayed up all night some nights trying to write a Mandelbrot generator in AmigaBASIC - was a big improvement from moving from my then current computer which was just a Spectrum +. I remember having a floppy disk as opposed to tape was something that blew me completely away. Similar to when I later got a hard disk for my 1200. Bought loads of demos and Fish disks from CRazy Joes PD - remember Plasmutex - them were the days. Eventually graduated to coding some simple 68k programs with a68k.

[Jope]

Ah yes.. I got a C-64 in '85 and then after showing a lot of interest, the Amiga 500 Batman pack in the summer of 89 or so.

My unit was illegally imported from the UK in a suitcase as Amiga prices were a lot cheaper there then.. :-) Ahh, TNZS, Batman the movie .. The Very First, DPaint II ..

AmigaBasic..

Life was simple at first, then in '92 or so I got online with a borrowed 1k2 modem.. Later on I loaned an 9k6 speed monster and then 14k4 :-)

I upgraded the machine with 512k slow, extra DD, 2.04 roms and an AR3 cartridge.. I did all my stuff with a few highly customized wb2.04 workbench disks.. :-)

Learning asm, deciding it's too difficult and dropping it (stupid decision back then).. BBSes, and eventually the Internet..

I got a PC next to it in 1995, but the Amiga was always hooked up and I still kept doing stuff with it.. Then in 1998 I bought a second hand A4000.. After that I've owned almost all the retail Amiga models at some time or another, some have only had a short stay on my desk and some have been around longer.

The A500 is still with me, but the only things left of the original machine are the case, psu, manuals & disks and mouse.. The innards have been swapped at one point or another (it's now an A500+ ;-)

[Karlos]

lorddef wrote:
Maybe I just really miss that time when computer games were so much fun, I mean I love modern games but theres never a modern game I can play all evening, like I remember on the A500.

I really miss being 8 years old...

Amen to that!

[amigamad]

I bought my first machine when i was 16 and that was 12 years ago my sister has it now its in her loft .i have 2 amiga 500,s now one has roctec hardrive fitted with 2 meg of memory and 4 meg expansion. i love the 500

[vortexau]

in 1988 the company I worked for was shifting premises (their THIRD shift) over a weekend and I earned enough with the overtime to pay one-third the cost of a 1.2 A500 & 1084 monitor (( totalling about $1400AU ))

Took it home (where I was co-habiting with a Station Mistress at that time) and set it up beside my C128D on a desk I call "Big Blue". Still have that desk in my computer room today: behind me where my A1200HD sits INFRONT of that C128D!

Anyhow, the only software I bought firstoff was a Psygnosis game- Deep Space. I got into DPaintII and then searched out for the lowest costing source of Floppies; which was then $24-22 per pack-of-ten!

In 1991 I bought this A2000HD, and later on the A500 was sold to my brother-in-law when I bought my second Hand Scanner which, unlike the first, would install to Hard Drive!




                               

[Jiffy]

Ah! My first A500!

It must've been 1988. Since it came out, I was drewling all over every Amiga-magazine I saw. Finally, I had enough money to buy me a 500 with 1084. The shop even delivered it at home! The excitement of connecting all cables, the desillusion when finding out they delivered me the wrong monitorcable... AAAARGH! The excitement when the right cable was delivered two long, lóóng hours later...

The first few days, I didn't have any software besides WB1.2 and the Extras-disk. Hell! Did I care! 'Say' was great, the basicdemos awesome and when I finally was able to play my first games...

Upgrades were soon to come: internal RAM-expansion, extra floppydrive, 24pin printer, SCSI-harddisk, flickerfixer, external RAM-expansion, Power PC Board... Great stuff!

Nevertheless, I don't own a 500 anymore: I shifted to a 1200 and a 2000, which are more to my liking.

[Ferry]

I already posted this to the "Poll" thread:

I got it Christmas 1988. I was working as saleman in the computer section of an electronics store. I remember myself hypnotized when I saw the first A500 we received working. The first thing I saw was the now famous "Boing!" demo.

 I remember myself playing "Gee Bee Air Rally", "Test Drive", "Barbarian" or showing my customers DeluxePaint and its rainbow effects, next to an ugly 286 :-) . I sold many A500 before I could buy mine!

I sold my 6 month old Amstrad CPC 6128 to buy my first A500.

Ferrán.

[Linchpin]

wow i rememeber the old days of sitting up all night playing games like monkey island and putting towels over the miggy so the drive didnt wake the parents up!!! also remember playing with the startup files hee hee to make sotfware look like i wrote it, very naughty! Ahh the old a500 and 500+ , what memories!!! Kevin

[PMC]

I got my first A500 in February 1990, to replace my Speccy 128K.

The first thing I did was to play F18 Interceptor, before graduating to Batman the movie, Deluxe Paint and eventually using the 'say' tool in Workbench to swap insults with my mate Ben who kindly offered to help me with unpacking the machine!

However, within a few days the keyboad chip died on me and I had to get a replacement machine, which I still have to this very day.  

How can I forget the hours I spent playing Xenon II, Shadow of the Beast, Speedball and Falcon?  Oh, and being wowed by RSI's Megademo and spending hours doodling with DPaint 2........

[PMC]

.......And changing the colour of my workbench to turquoise/white/blue, adding a nice shadow to the mouse pointer, reading my first scrolltext......

No wonder I flunked so many exams that year  :-P  :-D