How much pirated Amiga software did you have?

[stefcep2]

I bought my first A500 from a girl who had WALL CABINETS 4 metres by 2.5 metres high with drawers full of pirated software.  She threw in a box full of pirated software-mostly games for free.  When I saw she had every piece of commercial software ever made for next to nothing I was hooked and ended up buying a 100 or so games from her.  But what I found was that games didn't really interest me for long. I think many people pirated games simply beacsue they could, and probably never played most of them much, having it for the sake of having it.

My Amiga habit really kicked in when I got Real 3D version 1.4 off Amiga Format.  I then realised that productivity software was what I wanted, and to make the most of it, I needed manuals (and the tutorials in  CU Amiga, Amiga Format and ACAR).  So I bought legitimate copies of Wordworth (3,5,6 and Office), DPaint 4 and 5, Brilliance 2, Scala 3,  Cinema 4D v 4.  And HEAPS of software on the magazine covers, some of which I upgraded, for the manuals eg Vista Pro, Image FX.  

One app I never purchased was Lightwave, but I did use a pirated copy, but for its plaudits, I preferred Cinema 4D: Workbench look and feel, easier to learn, quality rendering engine, faster interface and faster rendering.  So even if I could afford the $1299 asking price, I wouldn't have bought lightwave.

[Crom00]

Back in the day I had lots of originally owned software. Amiga software was cheap and of high quality. These days I have a mega collection of no longer available software that I ahve looked for but alas no support so I purchased some from a collector. Whenever somethign cool and commercial comes up I'll get it... Mostly CD32 games and floppy stuff, and of course Amiga Forever etc.

Funny though in the C-64 days we would have the Commodore 64 Swap Shop after school. We would all bring in equipment and blatantly copy software. We didn't realize how crazy that was. Even the school was cool with it. Imagine that today with the PC and MAC? The FBI would sieze your property, you'd have your picture in the papaer. You'd be slashdotted. Blacklisted.

[Gulliver]

Mostly depends on price. I like winzip, use it a lot and reinstall it every time it expires, but the $50 price tag is too high. $25 would be fairer. You could see it as $25 loss, but considering I'm not going to pay $50 anyway, it's a lost sale.

I feel mostly the same regarding software. The most I am ever willing to spend on a specific software product is $25 dollars. Unless this software is going to cure cancer and HIV alltogether, I am not willing to spend a dime more. It is unreasonable from a home user perspective to pay more than that. It is absolutely different from a corporate perspective.

[mingle]

Hmm...

I'd say 90% of the software I had was pirated.

I'm my time on the Amiga I bought about 4 original games and 1 piece of productivity software (the ADPro scanner-driver package).

Since 1992 I've never purchased any software at all... I've been lucky enough to have corporate editions of all the key packages I need (WinXP, Win7, Office, etc) and also use 70% of freeware stuff.

Mike.

[weirdami]

Fanscale is a time traveling piracy cop! He'll go back to the past and arrest you all using the information you provide here in the future! BEWARE!!!!

[persia]

The best things in life are free...

The user's group I belonged to had disk copying parties...

[klx300r]

well as a young 64 owner, I can say I only bought 3 games and had hundreds..man 300 baud went a long way back then..I can still hear my brother yelling to close the damn phone:roflmao:by the time I got an Amiga I was in my late teens and had a part time job while going to school so I bought most of the programs I had for the manuals and support

[stefcep2]

Its obvious that software piracy on the Amiga was HUGE, probably as high as 90% of all software being used was not purchased.  

I've always maintained that for all of Commodores mismanagement, software piracy played the decisive move in killing the Amiga eventually.  Which programmer in his right mind would spend countless hours of his professional time and then not get paid, and then make MORE software?  No software=dead platform eventually

[Marcb]

Although I chose 1-5, I had many more in the "eLiT3" area of my BBS.
( if anyone tells you their BBS didn't have an exclusive area don't believe them!, Every Sysop I knew had one)
 
The copies I did have were the ones I rarely played, not sure if I didn't play them because they were crap or because they were copies...
 
For me, I always ended up buying the commercial version of whatever it was I used (SAS/C, FinalWriter,DPaint, Photon Paint etc. ) I didn't like not having manuals & boxes for my software but I tend to be a little anal about these things.
 
Reflecting on it, I am sorry that I did have any cracked software on my BBS, perhaps vendors and publishers would have supported the Amiga longer if copied software hadn't been so readily available.

[ElPolloDiabl]

Its obvious that software piracy on the Amiga was HUGE, probably as high as 90% of all software being used was not purchased.  

I've always maintained that for all of Commodores mismanagement, software piracy played the decisive move in killing the Amiga eventually.  Which programmer in his right mind would spend countless hours of his professional time and then not get paid, and then make MORE software?  No software=dead platform eventually

I don't agree. Back then the software companies did everything to make their software look better than the competition. Amiga fell behind in price/performance. They also tolerated piracy because it was free advertising.

[runequester]

and yet, some of the best amiga games came out in the 92-94 era, where commodore was going tits up.

[Amiga_Nut]

Its obvious that software piracy on the Amiga was HUGE, probably as high as 90% of all software being used was not purchased.  

I've always maintained that for all of Commodores mismanagement, software piracy played the decisive move in killing the Amiga eventually.  Which programmer in his right mind would spend countless hours of his professional time and then not get paid, and then make MORE software?  No software=dead platform eventually

I don't agree. Back then the software companies did everything to make their software look better than the competition. Amiga fell behind in price/performance. They also tolerated piracy because it was free advertising.

Yes in a way piracy and the ease of locating any game from your local friendly market stall holder for next to nothing did certainly help the sales of A500s grow sure.

I don't buy that it killed the Amiga market though, because from the way the software companies were talking around the launch of the A1200 you would think there was no PC piracy at all and Amiga users were much more prolific in the art of parrot balancing on the shoulder. Well sorry to burst that bubble but even my university lecturer was cracking original PC games, he did Lemmings for one, and then trained it and copied me the disk! It was all just an excuse to save a tiny amount of money and any effort to port a game to Amiga after PC. Within the first week of owning my PC I had everything I wanted, hell I spent more on blank HD disk bulk purchases for PC games than on the Amiga....and some were actually competently coded like Super SF2 for PC with VGA and 16bit audio.

The PC games market growing beyond the pathetic boring gaudy coloured experience that it was in the 80s is entirely Commodore's fault. People were crying out for the type of games that needed more colours/better sound/faster CPU. People weren't stupid, they played various coin-ops and wanted the same quality at home. But Commodore sat on it's ass and let their golden egg laying goose that was the Amiga chipset go rotten through lack of development. Truth is AGA was two years too late and at least a 16mhz A500 should have been the norm for 1990 onwards.

So software companies only have themselves to blame after making PC games ALL hard disk installable and on standard format floppy disks AND for making such pathetic versions of technically sophisticated coin ops like Powerdrift and Turbo Outrun. Even Team 17 finally gave up on Commodore and put some resource into World Rally Fever, an excellent Powerdrift clone that ran as good as a Sega arcade even with the cheapest 486SX and ISA graphics card.

And Commodore also only have themselves to blame. 14 mhz and zero 3D/texture mapping hardware assistance in 1994 for 400 smackers? We all knew it was coming, bad conversions and mediocre hardware upgrade = gravy train derailed! 8bit sound and low density disk drives were just the cherry ontop of the $hit sundae let's face it. Hell even a lack of 512k of fast ram on A1200 meant 3D games were running 50% the potential speed of the already compromised CPU speed decision they made. It's laughable really....except I wasn't laughing being an devoted Amiga fan who desperately didn't want to have to find an alternative to an overpriced A4000/040.

But I still buy a game if it is worth it, simple as that. Unfortunately the last PC game I felt like owning was from 2005....Sony has consistently built PC killing consoles 3x in a row now. Killzone 2 just isn't possible even now on a £250 PC. Crazy world!

[stefcep2]

Yes in a way piracy and the ease of locating any game from your local friendly market stall holder for next to nothing did certainly help the sales of A500s grow sure.

I don't buy that it killed the Amiga market though, because from the way the software companies were talking around the launch of the A1200 you would think there was no PC piracy at all and Amiga users were much more prolific in the art of parrot balancing on the shoulder. Well sorry to burst that bubble but even my university lecturer was cracking original PC games, he did Lemmings for one, and then trained it and copied me the disk! It was all just an excuse to save a tiny amount of money and any effort to port a game to Amiga after PC. Within the first week of owning my PC I had everything I wanted, hell I spent more on blank HD disk bulk purchases for PC games than on the Amiga....and some were actually competently coded like Super SF2 for PC with VGA and 16bit audio.

The PC games market growing beyond the pathetic boring gaudy coloured experience that it was in the 80s is entirely Commodore's fault. People were crying out for the type of games that needed more colours/better sound/faster CPU. People weren't stupid, they played various coin-ops and wanted the same quality at home. But Commodore sat on it's ass and let their golden egg laying goose that was the Amiga chipset go rotten through lack of development. Truth is AGA was two years too late and at least a 16mhz A500 should have been the norm for 1990 onwards.

So software companies only have themselves to blame after making PC games ALL hard disk installable and on standard format floppy disks AND for making such pathetic versions of technically sophisticated coin ops like Powerdrift and Turbo Outrun. Even Team 17 finally gave up on Commodore and put some resource into World Rally Fever, an excellent Powerdrift clone that ran as good as a Sega arcade even with the cheapest 486SX and ISA graphics card.

And Commodore also only have themselves to blame. 14 mhz and zero 3D/texture mapping hardware assistance in 1994 for 400 smackers? We all knew it was coming, bad conversions and mediocre hardware upgrade = gravy train derailed! 8bit sound and low density disk drives were just the cherry ontop of the $hit sundae let's face it. Hell even a lack of 512k of fast ram on A1200 meant 3D games were running 50% the potential speed of the already compromised CPU speed decision they made. It's laughable really....except I wasn't laughing being an devoted Amiga fan who desperately didn't want to have to find an alternative to an overpriced A4000/040.

But I still buy a game if it is worth it, simple as that. Unfortunately the last PC game I felt like owning was from 2005....Sony has consistently built PC killing consoles 3x in a row now. Killzone 2 just isn't possible even now on a £250 PC. Crazy world!

All good opinions, especially about the hardware not keeping up, but fact is software drives hardware.  

A 50 mhz '030 will play Doom on an AGA machine just fine.  But where was id's port of Doom for Amiga to push people to buy that '030?  And the more people that bought one to play that 3D game, the cheaper it would be to upgrade the hardware further: next step an 060, and 3d cards for Zorro machines, and so on.  

Instead pirated software consumers stuck with their stock 1 meg A500's beacsue they were too tight to upgrade, I mean hell their games were for free, they weren't gonna pay to  upgrade, until developer after developer left.

At its height the Amiga was the most pirated platform there was.  Make no mistake. I went to the Amiga user groups (AFTER C= went broke in 94) where we would get 250 plus people, all happily copying anything and everything, but no-one would say so in the open.  You think losing 90% of their sales due to piracy would have no impact on a software developer's decision to look elsewhere?  As software sales dwindle, less software is made, and software is a platform's lifeblood.

[mathman]

I bought quite of bit of software and hardware.  Lots of magazines, disk magazines, etc. but I also downloaded tons of stuff from bbs' and trading.

[orange]

'pirated' Amiga software, what is that?
no seriously, where I live you could *never* buy NEW Amiga 'originals', i believe.
we had sanctions and stuff. some guy did try opening a shop and selling C64 original games but that probably didnt go well.

i think it started with  microsoft  selling here original windows95 or something.

the only originals i have are workbench disks and used games from ami(e)bay. but one is still wraped up

[jj]

Probably at one point about 400 - 600 floppies