Why do we keep doing this again....??

[Unit21]

Hey y'all.

I haven't been logged on here for some time, but I drop by amiga.org every day to catch up or whatever...

I have recently gotten my hands on several Amigas and I am in the process of selling them to other faithful Amigans over here in Norway.
Most of these buyers have more or less retro-needs or the fullfilment of some childhood dream as the reason for buying these machines... And I have to admit that I myself got a few flashbacks from simpler days when I dusted the Amigas and fired them up to see if they were working.
Workbench 3.0. Scala with the dongle. Dpaint. OctaMED.
All good fun, and all 15 years old...

So my question to you guys and gals is this.

Why are we stuck on the Amiga still??

Are we just being stubborn, old-fashioned or simply crazy to still dabble with the Amiga??
Why do we keep coming back to this ageing system?

Tell me what you use your Miggys for.
And more importantly, try to explain WHY you use them...
(It's ok to get emotional...)  

;-)

[amiga_3k]

Now you've opened a can of arguments ;-)

Recently the Amiga silently sneeked back into our living' after being absent for too many years.

While using the old Apple (OS9) to browse the internet I see my wife playing online-games on her not so old Mac (OSX). Most of them are simple 2D games. I said: There's no use having a high-power consuming Mac for those games, the Amiga had exactly the same games with the difference of them being about 1 Meg in size, not 40. The difference being they need only 7 MHz to run, not 700. The difference being that they do NOT hick-up every now and then. Then she made a mistake... she dared me to show that those old machines could do the trick ;-).

Now, that was a dare I'd loved to take up. So... an A2000 at 68020/14 walked in... and I took back home my A4000T (that last one hasn't been connected yet as I've got no monitor capable of using the Amiga's output neither do I have a RGB->SCART cable.

Now she's seen the machine in action and asked the question I've been asking myself as well: Why oh why did the Amiga die.

[J-Golden]

Heh, we all know why the Amiga died, I'm going to touch that with a ten foot pole.

As to the original question, I still have an Amiga (A4000T) and use it to push the limits.  I guess you could call me a techno-thrill seaker.  I always start a priject with the same question.

"What can I do with this that I shouldn't be able to..."

The Amiga has been the only piece of hardware that never seems to run out of things I can do to it.

second place is my X-box...  but I do that more to piss off Bill Gates and his gustapo regime (spelling?).


J-Golden

[Ral-Clan]

Why do I keep using my Amiga:

1) Bars & Pipes: nothing on any other system matches it - and it's free.

2) I've spent a lot getting my Amiga going where it is.  I understand how to fix most hardware and software problems.  I can do it myself.  I've opened the hood many times and know what is going on under there.  If something goes wrong with my windows box it's much harder to fix.

3) ImageFX, PageStream, Bars & Pipes.  These are all tools that still do what I need, and compete with modern tools for what they can produce.  I am familiar with these software programs and can work with them well to turn out a good product.  Does a carpenter throw away a nice old chisel just because there are newer ones with plastic handles?  Once I get used to a tool (software or otherwise) and have become used to using it, why switch to something else that I will have to re-learn all over again?

[TheMagicM]

I like messing with it cause its fun... i usually buy them and hold on to them..then sell 'em on ebay for max money.  pays for my real hobby.  

[techie]

At the moment I use my A500 for basic retro gaming (Lemmings, Marble Madness, Zany Golf, that sort of thing) while I wait patiently for projects like Clone-A and OS4 to come into full commercial production :-).

As for my reason for sticking with Amiga, well, I can't really say for sure. There's just always been something about an Amiga that I can't seem to find in any other system :-)

(Edit: excluding MorphOS of course since I haven't actually tried it yet and as such can't really say how "Amiga" like it is)

[DaBest]

"Are we just being stubborn, old-fashioned or simply crazy to still dabble with the Amiga?? "

:crazy: I am :crazy:

Why do we keep coming back to this ageing system?

 :-D Because it still works great :-D

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee :lol:  :lol:

[_yak_]

I had a lot of fun with my Amiga back in the days. And I don't mean just games, it did a log of real work for me too. It's part of my life, my childhood. I can't just leave it behind and forget it. It's such a pleasure to come back to it once in a while, all those memories come back... ahh, great thing :-).

The short answer would be:
Because "AMIGA RULES!" :-D

[countzero]

cause the world sucks and we need to fallback to a safer mode from time to time. amiga gives us the feeling "oh I'm 15 again !" and we escape from reality for a brief moment. I guess that's the main drive.

[lavo]

Countless times I have sold my complete collection, thinking I'm never going back (and I sold sooo many good things, like a  Blizzard PPC card with a Grex, a couple of 4000s, a Picasso IV card.....  :madashell: ).  Then I read the forums again and wish I never sold them.

Now I'm back with a new project - shoehorning a 1200 into a 1000 case (I did it years ago with a 1200 into a 2000 case).  That's what I love about it.  Its like the hotrodding movement in computing :-)  And for fun, I'm going to do the project as a video podcast!

And this time, the case and 1081 display are getting a paint job!

[Dr_Righteous]

Honestly, as I sit here in the middle of towerizing my A4000D in a very nice Antec case with an overclocked A3640 and a Mediator 4000D... I often wonder the same thing. I think of the large amount of money, time, blood, sweat and tears I've crammed into this thing... And wonder why the hell I didn't just stick to emulation.

Then, I think back to the days gone by... Sitting at home with my 8088 playing on the bulletin boards... Downloading MODs to use on videos I'd make at the local access TV station (which used A2000s). I remember how much fun those days were and how much I got sucked in by the machines.

I just don't get that joy from my current PC. Hell, I get more fun tinkering with the 4 SGI Indy's I just aquired.

Someone please get me a bleepin time machine!

[Tomas]

Mostly just classic gaming through whdload these days..

[T3000]

I have a room full of amiga hardware and software. IF I can find the time, which seems to get less and less each month, to rebuild them to a functional state and maybe restore some of my lost art, I can say that I have no regrets going pc...  
AMD 64 Athlon x2 with 1 gig ram and Windows XP.
Say no more.

...the linked pictures below are from when the units were working a year ago.

The A3000D suffered some checksum errors and resutled in a HD failure. Lost years of photo scans, texture generations and 3D models.
The A3000T/VT one day just didn't power up. No matter what I reset or checked. This time in the middle of a paying project.

Just got fed up with it all...

 :-D

[amigadave]

@T3000,

Sorry about your lost data, really!  But you should have backed up everything on a regular basis.  That is just good computer sense no matter what platform you use.  I hope you can retrieve the work and data on those hard drives.

(Premature response to the last message in this thread without reading the rest, I'll go read the rest now)

[marcfrick2112]

Oh why? As others have mentioned, the software of our beloved miggys
still do what we need it to, there is considerable flexiblility
in all of it....do something in DPaint, load it in ImageFX,
maybe overlay something scanned from ScanQuix, (in my case)
do something in DCTVPaint, save as 24-bit, use in same project..
All these years, and I still don't think I have used my Amiga's
graphics software to the limits, and I haven't even touched
audio, or learned AREXX, or....
  I still remember the day I bought my first Amiga. I was 18,
 and I took my first tax refund check, and basically gave it
to the clerk at Software, etc. (Now GameStop) I was awed by what
was in that big white box....