RIP. Amiga 500 was one of the best things that happened to me as a child, OctaMED taught me sequencing way earlier than I otherwise would have been able to. And the games were so amazing - Powermonger, SWIV, Batman, Battle Squadron, Lotus 1, 2 and 3, Lemmings etc. and so on. A golden age!
MED/OctaMED/SoundTracker/NoiseTracker/ProTracker were fantastic.
This still sounds great:
View: https://youtu.be/EcTPUoFUN3I?si=qEI2o77qtMvR9Lv8
And remember this is a soundchip from 1985. The creators of the Amiga were wizards.
The first games I ever played were Lemmings, Arkanoid and Dungeon Master on an Amiga 500.
Only had the cracked version of Lemmings back then (my dad brought it home one day) and the cracktro melody is still firmly burned into my mind;
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEnHEvYpZDA
Only had the cracked version of Lemmings back then (my dad brought it home one day) and the cracktro melody is still firmly burned into my mind;
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEnHEvYpZDA
I absolutely loved the main theme to SWIV and Killing Game Show. One of my mates had a device that would allow you to rip the tracks from games, so you get access to the samples and tracking. Spent so much time messing about.
Same.
I wrote a programme called Jack, which was a graphics/sound/music ripper. The Amiga didn't clear its memory when you reset, so you could go through it and find what games and demos had left behind.
Mom and dad are champs.
I can't even imagine my parents being like "you should have seen the joy on his face - we need to make getting him a game system a priority".
And that's why I never made Worms, mom. Thanks - it's your fault I have to talk to angry customers on the phone.
Another of my best memories is Deluxe Paint, that was a joy to use. Here are the very first things I drew for Worms in 1993, when I started a complete rewrite of the game in order to enter it in Amiga Format's Blitz Basic competition. That was when I decided on worms as the protagonists.
I owe the Amiga so much.
I owe the Amiga so much.
It sure does! I started by loading songs off demo disks into it and dropping out channels and changing things here and there, extending bits etc. and would then record them all to C90s, making up ridiculously long names for the remixes. Then eventually I would make my own things from scratch, and never really stopped. Good times!
OctaMED, Deluxe Paint and Shoot 'em Up Creation Kit made creating (relatively) 'real' looking and sounding stuff so easy. Amiga was such a joy.
(Also, I didn't realise you were actually the creator of Worms, incredible! I spent a very happy summer when I was a kid working through a 300 game Worms league with a few friends, with elaborate league tables drawn up on A3 sheets of paper stuck to my friend's garage wall. So thanks for that!)
I never had a C64 unfortunately but my parents bought an A1000 which i later upgraded to a whopping 1Mb of Ram with a huge 512 kb Microbotics Ram expansion. Iirc i then moved onto the A1200 which i upgraded with a tower, extra ram, an 68030 and 68060. I did buy a few second hand A500's later. I still have all my Amigas but none is up and running. I started out playing games but ended up staying for the demoscene which i discovered through cracktros. I dabbled with music programs, samplers, painting, animation and programming. While part of it is certainly nostalgia, it remains the best computer experience i ever had and i loved the creativity that surrounded this machine.
I've been rereading my Amiga magazines (CU Amiga and Amiga Format) and it surprised me how short lived the Amiga was. Already around late 1991-1992, games were developed on pc and then downscaled to the Amiga. PC already had harddrives and 256 color graphics while Amiga was lagging behind. Looking back at it now, it seems Commodore had no clue what to do with the Amiga after the A500 was released. A500+, A600, CDTV, CD32, ... all products that never made much sense and offered little improvement in specs. The A1200 came way too late and was already underpowered. It's a shame really given how ground breaking the original Amiga was.
I've been rereading my Amiga magazines (CU Amiga and Amiga Format) and it surprised me how short lived the Amiga was. Already around late 1991-1992, games were developed on pc and then downscaled to the Amiga. PC already had harddrives and 256 color graphics while Amiga was lagging behind. Looking back at it now, it seems Commodore had no clue what to do with the Amiga after the A500 was released. A500+, A600, CDTV, CD32, ... all products that never made much sense and offered little improvement in specs. The A1200 came way too late and was already underpowered. It's a shame really given how ground breaking the original Amiga was.
I was given my cousin's C64 like 20 years ago, along with crates of floppies. and I swear to God I don't think i've ever seen a legit Commodore game IRL. I have no idea how my cousin got his hands on them but booting up a game and seeing that crack screen feels almost official lol
I was deep in the Amiga scene when Commodore died. I owned an A3000 Tower with a 68060 and a Piccolo SD64 graphics card and something like 82MB of RAM. The thing was an absolute tank. It literally weighed 80lbs.
I actually went to Dave Hanie's birthday party in New Jersey shortly after Commodore died. A friend of his (Skal Loret...can't believe I remember his name) that I had met on the AmigaCafe IRC channel that I was an admin of invited me to the party and I drove to his house and then we drove down together in his supercharged Toyota MR2 that had a slipping supercharger belt. Kind of a leap (a dangerous one?) for a 20-something year old, but the thought of meeting Dave and the rest of his Commodore cohorts overrode any fear.
When we got there, I was starstruck. I wish I could remember all the people that were there. They were names you would have known. His computer room had a few PowerPC computers in it. I believe he also had a AAA prototype (?) and an AA+ Amiga 3000. I'm actually friends with Dave on Facebook now.
The insane thing is that the schematics for all of the Amiga chips are almost bog simple to understand compared to the CMOS chips we have these days, but what they enabled was really magical at the time.
I actually went to Dave Hanie's birthday party in New Jersey shortly after Commodore died. A friend of his (Skal Loret...can't believe I remember his name) that I had met on the AmigaCafe IRC channel that I was an admin of invited me to the party and I drove to his house and then we drove down together in his supercharged Toyota MR2 that had a slipping supercharger belt. Kind of a leap (a dangerous one?) for a 20-something year old, but the thought of meeting Dave and the rest of his Commodore cohorts overrode any fear.
When we got there, I was starstruck. I wish I could remember all the people that were there. They were names you would have known. His computer room had a few PowerPC computers in it. I believe he also had a AAA prototype (?) and an AA+ Amiga 3000. I'm actually friends with Dave on Facebook now.
The insane thing is that the schematics for all of the Amiga chips are almost bog simple to understand compared to the CMOS chips we have these days, but what they enabled was really magical at the time.
Great stories!
Thanks for sharing, I would have been star stuck as well.
An Amiga 3000 with AGA/AA+ would have been my dream computer at the time. I thought it was such a good looking, well designed machine. Sadly the 4000 was just stuffed in a PC case they had lying around and was missing features of the 3000. A sign of the struggles to come :(
Seeing the AAA prototype board in his Deathbed Vigil film just lying there on a table is burnt into my brain. Commodore dying was such a waste.
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I still consider the A3000 to be one of the best looking computers ever made. I wanted one so bad, but when a used A3000T became available, I jumped on it. I had a lot of hard drives and a CD drive and the A3000 never would have fit it all.
I do want to spend some time with the Amiga via emulation but I would need to spend a lot of time weeding through games to play that are at their best on the Amiga compared to PC or contemporary consoles.
Another of my best memories is Deluxe Paint, that was a joy to use. Here are the very first things I drew for Worms in 1993, when I started a complete rewrite of the game in order to enter it in Amiga Format's Blitz Basic competition. That was when I decided on worms as the protagonists.
I owe the Amiga so much.
Thanks for the stories. It reminds me that the entire Amiga scene was still very small and intimate. The actual hardware was designed by a tiny little group. Imagine even building a computer with an entirely new architecture from scratch today. Games were made by what would be indies today, either a single guy in his bedroom or like four friends. And even in my corner of the world, there would be gatherings where you could meet people who would one day make awesome games (and would currently be pirating stuff like crazy, probably).
Got one for like my 7th or 8th birthday. We were living on base at the time, so the guys were sharing all their programs and games. Loved using that thing. I learned to program it. I remember using Print Shop to make Happy Birthday signs for my moms birthday. Good times.
The Amiga was simply the best thing ever. I owe my hobby, my work and my whole career to that magic computer since it got me started with computer graphics as a kid. There was nothing even remotely like it at the time.
My pleasure. Because the Amiga was so creativity focussed I think it attracted a certain type of person, and creative people tend to be very passionate about what they love.
I think this is why the Amiga has endured, and why there's still a very active community 30 years after Commodore went bankrupt.