It's a computer, not Spanish for girl-friend! (Amiga in General)

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	Amiga in General
Date:	13/03/01 (91 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great all round computer

Disadvantages: Expensive, Dodgy TV modulator

Well, I was a fairly late arrival on the old Miggy scene having watched on in jealousy from the outside. It’s hard to believe that the Amiga was launched around the same time as the Apple Macintosh (1985), in the form of the A1000. Whilst immediately showing what a good computer it was, it never really took off as it was too expensive for the home market, and the professional market was going the way of the PC and Mac.

In 1987, Atari released their ST computers in two forms: 512 and 1024. To counter this, Commodore released the Amiga 500 which was targeted towards the home market – it was all built into one case along with a bundled TV modulator in order to plug it into your telly. The first releases were poor as they were just sub standard ports from the ST which had been around slightly longer, and already had a big following due to its’ built in MIDI port, and excellent dedicated sound software.

Slowly though, the Amiga began to be the computer of choice in younger gamers – the range of games available was larger than those of the early consoles, and usually of better quality. Also, the Amiga was running a GUI called Workbench which was designed to “combat” Windows and MacOS by offering similar functionality. It was really good for it’s time, and came on (using WB3.0 as a reference) 6 disks which held lots of modular components, and you copied whatever you used or wanted onto 1 floppy disk, and used that as your OS.

Later, around 1992, Commodore released three new versions of the Amiga: 4000, 1200, 600. These had new graphics chips (AGA) in them which could display *gasp* 256 colours! This breathed life back into the Amiga community with new, more colourful games, and a larger built in amount of RAM.

This is where I joined the Amiga community – towards the end of 1992 when Commodore announced the Amiga 1200; I had been in my very first job for a few months and had some money burni
ng a hole in my pocket after buying all my Xmas pressies. Hurrying down to the nearest shop, I bought one of only 10,000 A1200s that were released in the UK. I remember leaving the shop, almost £400 lighter, but very, very happy indeed. Pity really, because every single one of them had a dodgy TV modulator, which was fixed for when the second wave of Amigas hit the streets in 1993, but having a SCART socket on my TV by-passed the modulator, and I got a crispy picture.

Those were the days – a 4MB RAM upgrade cost “only” £50, a 540Mb hard drive (external through the PCMCIA port) was about £250 and the games were just fantastic. I remember playing such gems as Championship Manager, Flashback, Frontier (Elite 2) and the absolutely wondrous and best-game-of-all-time Sensible World of Soccer.

Games were not that much different in terms of price – it was not unusual to pay between £25 and £30 for a game which came on maybe 4 disks tops (I remember Flashback on 4 disks, but can’t remember any game having more). I also the fantastic Wordworth word processing software, which came on about 4 disks, but as one of these was fonts, and one was the dictionary and thesaurus, it wasn’t that big a problem – in fact my current printer (Hewlett Packard 600 stems from about this times as well).

At the time I was leaving the Amiga scene, things such as CD ROM drives, the internet and FPS’s were all starting to hit the good old Amiga, but alas, I was not able to stick around to see it through. Now it is but a pale shadow of it’s former self – having had at least three owners (Commodore, Gateway and the German crowd whose name I can’t remember) and is basically no longer supported…

Definitely the highlight of my computer history so far!

Summary: