What brought you to amiga. What made you stay?

[runequester]

Was it the games? Graphics? Price? Something else?

What got you started on amigas?

Why are you still here today?

[Cammy]

I came for the games, but I stayed for the logical, elegant Operating System.

[Drummerboy]

For, becouse was the best Computer option, back in 1986.. And i dont was wrong.. In fact.. was growing.. and was best.. i stay becouse as far as computers are concerned i fill i home!..

[kolla]

I just needed a "typewriter" when I started at university, and the A1200 was the cheapest thing around, and with the bonus that I could plug it into my 14" TV with a scart cable. Then I more or less fell in love with the OS.

[Buzzfuzz]

Games, I never did much with OS'es or use it for internet and documents.
Simply because I switched to pc in 1995/1996 and from that on I accepted BSOD and nagging pc components.
I left the Amiga's for what they were just untill the end of 2009 when I dug them up from the garage.
Now I'm trying different OS'es and if I'm lucky, I'll also be going OS4 as soon as a Cyberstorm arrives.

[Chupathingy]

I was brought to the Amiga by the game Megaball. I saw my dad playing it when I was a kid and have been hooked ever since.

I'm staying because of the hardware. When I was younger, I used to play Mr. Fix it with my dad's computers, without knowing what I was doing. This has resulted in the loss of a Vic20, 128 and Amiga 1000. I'm trying now to find broken systems for cheap that I can repair, gathering information as I go along.

It's like a treasure hunt!

[fishy_fiz]

I had access to an a1000 when they where 1st released, so the graphics at the time where mind blowing. Managed to talk mum into buying me an amiga finally when the a500 was released and while games where a big part of my use I'd had an interest in both graphics and games programming prior to the amiga so things like deluxe paint, brilliance, amos/amos pro blitz basic, imagine3d and so on all ended up getting used just as heavily as games. After a while I started to get addicted to AmigaOS 3.x itself, heavily customising my desktop with new gfx and various enhancements from aminet. These days things havent changed a lot. My main interest is in doing creative things and I hope to finally one day finish an original game rather than just doing ports. I understand there's no real money to be made from it, but I've always been interested to see what sort of results could be achieved with a moderately upgraded aga machine, as apart from game styles unsuited to the amigas custom chipset (fps and other 3d games) I dont think anyone really tried (yeah, there where a few heavy aga games, but no games that are written to the amigas strengths that showcase an expaded aga system)..... anyway, I have delusions of one day trying a few genres that showcase aga, this is one of the reasons I stick around,... its like an untapped mystery of the amiga that hasnt really been explored in certain ways yet. (and yes I understand aga is "obsolete" and whatnot, but it's also fun for my interests).
Besides this retro side of the coin though I just think amiga os (and its variants) just have something that's hard to let go of once youre used to it. Despite some of the obvious advantages of win/mac/lin I find I miss the responsiveness of aros (my ng "amiga" system of choice), and knowing every inch my OS and being in control of it, plus a bunch of other things. Theyre only small things, but make it hard to leave (although I wouldnt anyway, I very much enjoy my amiga hobby)

[JimS]

Back in the days of the 8 bit machines (I used the Atari 800 line) when the time came to step up to the next level of CPU power, graphic and sound cabability, the Amiga was the obvious choice. Mac were B&W and over priced. PCs were under powered, over priced and had lousy graphics. The Atari ST should have been the path for this old Atari user & user group president.... but it just seemed 'dodgy' as they say over the pond.

As to why I'm still here.... well, it's like a novel... started out well, then dragged on and on.... but you still can't put it down. ;-) Gotta see how it ends... and peaking ahead to the last page isn't allowed.

[Franko]

I started of in 82 I think it was, with the at that time totally amazing Commodore VIC 20, real keyboard and massive 3Kb of memory... all my little ZX80 and Spectrum friends were green with envy. :lol:

Next Came the C64 with more memory than anyone could have dreamed of at that time. (still own one and hold it in high regard)

When the A1000 arrived I snapped up one of those, I mean 4096 colours :eek:. Wow!!! who had ever heard of such a thing.

Then it was onto the good Old A500, cost a fortune at that time to add a 120Kb HD and extra memory., but it was worth every penny

Finally it was onto the A1200, that to me is the best machine ever produced and is all I use to this very day (just a pity it all went balls up before the fabled Triple A chipset got going) . I daren't even think of the amount of cash I have spent over the years on my various A1200's, but I know it runs into several thousand quid. Again though, worth every hard earned penny spent on them.

My only wish left is for Jimmy Saville to read my 'Wish Jim was still here...' thread and come out of retirement (or dig him up !!!) and make my dream come true... :biglaugh:

Now if we all sent a letter to Jim, then maybe, just maybe the Amiga would be back on top of the world again, where it truly belongs.

Cheers :drink:

Franko

[AmigaNG]

My brother had a spectrum, he played all the games, but I loved programming on more, looking around and looking more into the market back then everyone was saying the Amiga was the best games programming system with AMOS and Blitz Basic etc, so I got an Amiga, but surprising it got me more into games, it was the first system I played games like Sim City, Lemmings, Elite, Dune 2 and later Gloom, Alien Breed 3d, and Theme Park, these kind of games you could not get on the console world, or they offered very poor versions and controls, so I loved playing these new type of games on my Amiga, what made me stay (specially with out a PC until 98), was it was just so much better and easy to do creative stuff on compared to my experience with PC, I was so surprise that get most games to start you needed to know loads of Dos commands etc. Even all the way up to 2003 Amiga was still my main machine. Just the competition finally cached up and the world was all using the PC. I kind of left the Amiga scene a little at that time for the last few years, what made me stay and keep me interested and wanting to get a OS4 machine is I do remember when computing was fun!

[johnklos]

The m68k processor and preemptive multitasking brought me to the Amiga. I started with the Z80 (Sinclair ZX80, Timex Sinclair 1000), then moved straight to the m68008 in the Sinclair QL. I used to do a lot of graphics programming as a kid (fractals, basic attempts at 3D modeling, mathematical modeling), and the QL let me run stuff in the background which took hours or days while still using the machine.

There was no possible way I could go from a bitmapped screen, preemptive multitasking, and an elegant processor with lots of 32 bit registers to the 8 / 16 bit mess that was x86, nor did I have the money to have multiple x86 PCs to "multitask" by running things on multiple machines.

By the early 1990s, I grew tired of writing all my own software, so I got an Amiga to replace my Sinclair QL. It helped that I could justify the purchase by using the Amiga to run Mac OS, too.

These days the Amiga is still the best way to run m68k, so I use several Amigas to test and compile on m68k for NetBSD.

[Nostalgiac]

while I was still on my C128 a friend got a green-screen dos 2.11 8MHz 8088 ... after recovering from my belly busting laugh I (with the help of a dear unclu) ended up smuggling an A2000  from germany into belgium ( 2/3 of the price over there).

I didn't "stay" as by the time the A4000 came out it was to expensive for what it offered, and the free Mac from work combined with my expanded A2000 lasted me till 1998 or so...

Tom UK

[tone007]

What brought you to Amiga?

Boredom.

What made you stay?

Inertia.

[Darrin]

I guess in was a natural progression from my VIC-20 and C-64.  I remember watching Tomorrow's World (A UK TV science program) demo the A1000 and the next day in school all the geeks were drooling over it and I decided then that I wanted one.  Unfortunately, as school kid I didn't have the money.

Spin ahead to 1986 and I joined the Army and was sent to boot camp in Reading.  After passing out I was given a (what seemed) huge chunk of money and I quickly bought a C-128 which I took with me to a training school.  I few months later I was sent to a unit in Colchester and I found I had even more money so I took the plunge and bought the best machine you could get:  An A2000, 1MB RAM, ECS, 1 FDD and Workbench 1.2 with a CBM 1081 monitor and a dot matrix printer to replace my MPS801.

It caused quite a stir when it was delivered to my barracks.  The security van that showed up at the gate wouldn't let anyone open the box to inspect the contents without my permission so I got an angry call from the RSM to "get my arse down to the guardroom and tell him what was in this big f***ing box!"

I remember the disappointment of not having anything to really demo the machine to the guys in the barracks that night.

The next day I ran down town and bought Marble Madness and Defender of the Crown.

That week I discovered that 1MB of RAM isn't a lot and "diskswappers wrist" bloody hurts so I ordered a GVP Zorro SCSI card with a 128MB hard drive and 2MB of RAM and another internal floppy drive.

As for what makes me stay, I just enjoy paying over-the-top prices for old hardware.  

[B00tDisk]

The logical progression from Vic-20 to C64 to C128 to A500.  Just seemed to be "right" to me.  The Amiga was doing so much more than PCs at the time were (again, so it seemed to me).  

I remember seeing PCs at Costco with their brand new "VGA" displays and thinking "Oh man, that looks so good!" and then wondering why my A500's display was in glaucoma-vision (it was a shitty color TV - didn't get a monitor for my Amiga for a few years )

Brand loyalty kept me with C= up to the fall; I'd have stuck with it even longer but for having a sit down talk with a guy who was doing work for MS, and another fellow working with NextStep.  Those first steps away from DOS on the PC were shaky, hesitant ones but I could see where the future was headed.

Now I just fondly remember the good times.