Defining moment you HAD to have an Amiga?

[marcfrick2112]

Well , was there a 'time' you saw (or heard) something on the Amiga that made you want one immediately!?

 

For me, it was the 'vaporware' Video Toaster... Before that, hell, even PT Modules blew me away! I remember seeing VideoScape 3d, then Lightwave, (YEARS later) I'm like OMFG!

 

Your Amiga 'definining' moment, if you will ....

[OldSchoolRetroGamer]

Living here in Canada I was not even aware the AMIGA existed, then by chance going to a friend of a friends home, I seen his AMIGA 1000 running some platform game with parallax scrolling and stereo sound booming out of the 1084s monitor and MY MIND WAS BLOWN. I asked Mark (my friends friend) what the hell was I looking at and I was hooked from that moment on. Sadly, it would not be until much later that I could afford or find ANYTHING related and that turned out to be a nice a500 with some accessories. I loved fiddling with Dpaint and creating basic titles fr my VHS home movies etc. Some years later I moved up to an a1200 with 030 accelerator and 4  mb ram expansion. The years have not been kind and I have no original AMIGA hardware today and getting any shipped here to Canada tends to be prohibitively expensive for me, my greatest regret is having to very reluctantly have sell off my AMIGA hardware. THANK GOODNESS for emulation, that same emulation I scoffed at back in the day is now my only way to even attempt to relive those great AMIGA years. 

[Arnuphis]

Went over to my friends house who just got an Amiga 500. Saw Populous running. Went home and looked at my C64. Felt sad. Talked Mum into ordering Amiga 500 from her catalogue the next day with a promise to help with payments.

[+OLD CS1]

I had seen them before at the BX where my mom worked, a customer on my paper route had an Amiga 2000, and one of the BBSes on base ran on an Amiga 500.  I got to see the latter two through our local Commodore user's group.  By this time I had worked with my grandfather's Atari 520ST and one of my yard service customers had an Apple IIgs, but neither of these really grabbed me.  It was not until a couple of years later that I knew I had to have an Amiga, when I saw a friend playing Shadow of the Beast on his Amiga 500.

 

I could finally afford to buy an Amiga and I sought out to buy one just for this game.  A molecular engineering student was heading out to another school and put his Amiga 500 up for sale in the Thrifty Nickel.  I paid him $500 for it (roughly $900 today,) including a bunch of disks, a 4MB Baseboard, an external floppy drive, and a monitor.  While it came with Baalistix and The Killing Game Show, it did not come with SotB. 

 

It was a Rev 5 motherboard with the stock 68000, so it was not long before I was bitten by the bug and bought an M-Tec 68020 accelerator.  Soon afterward I got my hands on a Rev 6a motherboard, then an A500+HD with 40MB hard drive and 8MB of RAM.  More and more upgrades came over time.

 

I bought that Amiga 500 in 1993, and used Amiga exclusively until 2000 when I bought my first Windows machine for work.  I remained primarily Amiga until around 2001 with the first beta of Windows XP and the advent of affordable home wireless networking. 

 

I get asked why I chose to stay with Amiga, especially after the bankruptcy and while all my friends were on Windows 3.1, Windows 95, then Windows 98.  I even worked in a PC store from late '96 through summer '98.  The disappointment of not obtaining the game I so desperately desired was not going to stop my curiosity about this wondrous new machine, purchased with my very hard-earned money.  I figured, well, I have a bunch of utilities here, which included JR-Comm to dial into BBSes as I did with my 128D.  Pretty much from there I was hooked and fell down the rabbit hole.  The Amiga was my first personal Internet experience, with Termite TCP, an early version of A-Web, AmFTP, AmIRC (this got a LOT of use,) as well as the GEnie graphical front-end.  During this time I purchased Miami TCP/IP stack and began using YAM for school email.

 

What kept me hooked was that I made this machine mine.  As I moved from Workbench 1.3 to 2.04, then 3.1, I found us to be a perfect fit.  I had taken to the Workbench interface and the CLI/Shell immediately, where before I was frustrated with the Mac and tolerated Atari's TOS.  The sound was absolutely amazing and I took quickly to playing MODs and MEDs, and sound samples, then to editing samples, making MEDs, and even taking CD rips in WAVs and converting them to compressed IFFs to play at home before MP3s became all the rage.

 

Graphics were just as awesome, even though the interlaced screen was not easy on the eyes until they adjusted, and eventually watching demos and viewing downloaded images gave way to working with different graphics programs to create my own.  In some cases I had to cheat and use my friend's PC to scan my hand-drawn images, but then I would take them over to my Amiga to do real work.  When I started programming classes in college I was able to use first the Amiga Transformer then PCTask to run Turbo Pascal, then RM*COBOL, and within the first two weeks of the quarter I found a native COBOL compiler and switched to using that.  I did some C and C++ on the Amiga, as well, but unfortunately my labs required me to work on PCs at the school, meaning I did almost all of that away from my Amy.

 

Nonetheless, where I had used geoWrite and geoPaint for my classes, I had switched to Word Perfect 4 and whatever graphic program floated by boat at the time, as needed.  I even had some spreadsheet program, the name of which escapes me.  As I moved into the tech industry working at an Internet service provider, I used my Amiga for work, including napsaterm for telnet, AmFTP and native ncftp, iBrowse, and more.  Even as we shifted from telnet to ssh I was again able to find the program I needed (long live AmiNet!)

 

The common thread through all of this time is, no matter what I was doing I could bring my Amiga with me.  I wanted to play games, there were great games out there, even if not Doom as my friends were playing.  When music and graphics hooked into my creativity, the Amiga could do that, too.  Papers and spreadsheets for school?  Programming languages?  Need to send and receive faxes?  Yup, my Amiga had those programs, too.  Whether recreation or serious work, my Amiga was not only capable, but easily maintained its place at the center of it all.

 

The Amiga was and still is a machine and an environment with which I feel an undeniable bond.  To the point that when it would crash I would feel some sense shame and responsibility for pushing it to that point, promising to try not to do it again.  Even working to keep the Amiga stable without protected memory did not place harsh limits or restrictions upon me, it just made me more careful about which buggy programs I used and when.  That and closing unneeded windows to help spare my precious 2MB of Chip RAM (until the God-send of IconBeFast helped that out immensely.)

 

I learned so much using my Amigas, and still do.  I also gained more of an understanding of people and how they interface with, indeed integrate into, technology.  Some people are fiercely protective and defensive of their Amiga, whether it be die-hard "classic" users, those who refused to upgrade past 3.1, those who went PPC in its various incarnations, or even those from back-in-the-day who banned me from #Amiga for asking about UAE.  This extends to those Mac and Apple cultists, and the Atari ST evangelists (the worst of the bunch!)

 

While some people wax nostalgically about how we could be more personally connected to our warm machines in the time before the cold world of Windows, these PC users exhibit similar characteristics when facing upgrades.  Think about people who held onto some version of Windows for as long as possible against all adversity: the Windows 98SE users who eschewed Me and XP for as long as possible; the XP users who refused to move to 7 (Vista?  We never speak of that.)  Now, those who will hold on to Windows 7 and stay away from 10.  (Yeah, I am in his group, even buying extended support for my laptop and workstation.)

 

When you get something that works with you in whatever ways you need, whatever ways make you feel comfortable; as though you and the computer are a team, extensions of each other, rather than you forcing it or it forcing you to work a certain way.  Well, that comfort is something worth fighting over.  We invest ourselves into our space and our environments, and that includes whatever technology we choose.

 

I will always feel that Amiga is a part of me and I am a part of Amiga.

 

tl;dr I just wanted to play Shadow of the Beast.

[shoestring]

Saw one for the first time in a shop window late in the evening on the main street in my city. It was an Amiga 1000 with the monitor facing the shop window and there was a fixed digitized image of a red Ferrari on the screen.  I'll never forget it, I stared at that image for about 5 minutes in amazement before being pulled away by my parents. I couldn't believe what I was seeing because at the time, PCs were still using EGA graphics and my c64 had similar limitations. From that point on I had to have one but the A1000 was too expensive, we eventually got an A500 with 1.3 in 89 or 90 and the first game we bought was Shadow Of The Beast II, it was $79 which was really expensive in 1990. My brother loved playing Sensible Soccer and Kickoff where as I loved playing Hybris and Silkworm. I had a friend over all the time and we'd watch the latest demos and read all the scene disk mags, he loved downloading protracker mods and would have them playing in the background whilst looking at stuff on the internet.

 

I don't have an Amiga anymore, they are just too expensive to maintain and keep up to date. But I'm still doing a lot of assembler programming in vasm and mess around in UAE. Currently playing around with gfx in mame, dumping them and implementing tilemaps via the copper/blitter.

 

Amiga was a great system, unfortunately it wasn't very well balanced. AGA wasn't much of an enhancement in 92, it was fairly pointless without an upgrade of the blitter or at least a tilemode in hardware.

[Keatah]

I never chased after the Amiga for animation or sound. But, instead, for the still-image graphics and games. I was wowed and blown away at the resolution and amount of colors. Compared to the Apple //e I was using in 1984/1985 it was lightyears ahead. I was sorely disappointed with the games. But not so with the graphics.

 

Having downloaded real space pictures directly from JPL I got hooked on space art and really looked forward to getting the Amiga and all the possibilities. I envisioned drawing all sorts of space stuff and started my space art collection.

 

At the time I hadn't even considered the IBM PC or the MAC other than a cursory glance. Prices for those machines was way out of my league. And neither had graphics like the Amiga anyways. The Amiga looked affordable at about 1200-1300'ish or so. I was oblivious to other industry forces and just wanted to use tools like PhotonPaint & DeluxePaint and Digi-View.

 

I loved reading the first few issues of AmigaWorld.

https://archive.org/details/amiga-world-premiere-1985/mode/2up

https://archive.org/details/amiga-world-1985-11/mode/2up

The mag and some Apple II BBS text files are how I learned about the Amiga initially. And soon enough in 1984/1985 I got an A1000. It didn't last long and I gave up on it because I wanted money to get some R/C car stuff. So I sold it back to the computer store for $10 less than what I paid for it. As soon as the more affordable A500 came out I got one.

 

Simple ads and images like these were inspiring to me. And so the defining moment was seeing these things and reading the first issues of AmigaWorld. An affordable artist's station was possible!

 

And so I got to drawing scenes from Larry Niven's Ringworld. Futuristic cars, space scenery, and more. I was on my way! Afterwords (afterimage? Ba'dum-Tssssss) in the early-mid 90's it seemed the PC was cropping up everywhere. On my way home from work I would pass by at least 5-8 stores that were overflowing with "PC compatible" hardware and so I had little choice but to get into the PC sphere - if I wanted to start advancing and upgrading. Unfortunately the Amiga was nowhere to be seen except for 2 out-of-the-way stores.

 

I remember hemming and hawwing over what graphics card to get for it. I remember spending either $159 or $199 on a 1MB SVGA card that had a palette of 16.7 million colors at 640x480.5422datasheet.pdf I was jumping like I had a spring in my ass, somersaulting out the front door even. And there was tons of software available for it too! Including DeluxePaint. I soon found out about Aldus PhotoStyler, and thanks to race-to-the-bottom marketing methods I got a free copy with my soundcard. Of all things to include it with..! Next came PaintShopPro-32 or simply PSP. And Photoshop. Got PSP on my 486 and still use it productively to this very day. All the fussing over what card to get was for naught.

 

Eventually I used the Amiga less and less and sold all the stuff to some guy overseas around 2010 or so.

 

Today I only moderately miss my original hardware. Through emulation I can revisit all the software I had back in the day. And more! And without the hassle of maintenance or space consumption.

 

[Mulletino]

Seeing an A1000 running Defender of the Crown in a store i frequented blew me away but i could never afford one.

Then the A500 came out and in particular the Batman Pack, that was it, I had to get one so bought one on the store credit scheme (terrible interest rates) but i never regretted it.

Then when Dungeon Master came out I just had to have that, so had to purchase the RAM expansion to do so.

 

A marvelous machine that i loved using for games, work (I printed my Apprenticeship CAD project on mine with my CBM printer) and music (using samplers and trackers).

[Feralstorm]

I HAD to have an Amiga after seeing the article covering the A1000's debut in COMPUTE! magazine. My parents were less enthusiastic, having just gotten a C64 a year or two earlier. I finally wore 'em down by 1989, and my family got an Amiga 500.

[BydoEmpire]

I honestly don't remember.  Probably reading about it and seeing screenshots in Compute! or Compute!s Gazette - Defender of the Crown, the Boing demo, or that Baboon artwork...  I remember a year or two before I got a A500, I bought and Amiga magazine in some mall.  I sort of "hid" it from my parents, at the time i thought they'd be ticked that I wanted another computer!  A local mom-and-pop computer shop also had an A1000 on display, I'm sure I played with that at some point.  When I was 16 and got my first job I saved money all summer to buy the A500.  It was glorious!

Edited May 7, 2020 by BydoEmpire

[rmzalbar]

I had heard of Amiga but had never seen one. I had heard rumors of arcade-quality Dragon's Lair and other magic happening on it as an early teen, but also saw mid four-digit dollar amounts in magazine ads, so it was definitely not worth hoping for.

 

But then I turned 15 and could have an after school job. That summer a friend's older brother finished his Air Force service and came home with an A2000. He gave us access to Shadow of the Beast, Armour-Geddon, Blood Money, Lemmings, F-18 Interceptor, Dungeon Master, Dragon's Lair, MED, DeluxePaint, DigiPaint, Imagine 3D, and SIRTIS.GIF (lol.)

 

It's hard to say if any one of those things pushed me over the edge, because they all hit me at once and they all knocked my socks off, but probably Dungeon Master, F-18, and Imagine most of all. I bought an Amiga 500 several months later (as soon as I made enough money at my part-time drugstore job.)

 

Over time I expanded it with an AdSpeed and an AdRAM. Wanted to do 3d rendering, definitely couldn't afford the mainstream accelerators and hard disk expansions, so I got by with a doublespeed 68000 and a big ramdisk with two floppy drives.

Edited May 9, 2020 by rmzalbar

[Keatah]

DigitPaint! That's the other graphic program I forgot to mention in my rant. But PhotonPaint is where I did my best work at the time - like my current AA avatar. I only did a minor touch-up and color saturation change decades later with PC-based Photshop.

 

 

[+jedimatt42]

I was a TI 99 kid. But every year for several defining years, all of the local home computer users groups in Kitsap county would gather at the Silverdale Mall. Each would setup and show off the coolest stuff they had .. My father and I manned the 4A booth.

 

I would drool over all the different systems, but seeing the creativity apps on the Amiga, like Imagine, the mod trackers, deluxe paint... My objective analysis as a 13-16 year old, was that the Amiga was the best home computer available.

 

However, in '89 my father asserted that the upgrade from the TI-99/4A would be a PC. a 386SX, at 16Mhz, but with VGA already. Mouse was an add on. Multi-tasking required extra software, and most things broke... All pre windows 3.

I built a parallel port DAC so I could use some software that played Amiga MODs on DOS. 

 

I didn't aquire an Amiga until '91, a 1000 with genlock for $75. A steal from a co-worker at the college computer lab. He didn't want for money. 

 

I was hooked... The 1985 computer was clearly better than the 1989 PC. 

 

I think working with the Amiga prepared me for a life with Linux. The then alternative OS lifestyle.

 

 

[Daedalus2097]

I was an Atari 800XL kid, with nothing more than a tape drive and a 14" TV. Computers were very expensive back then, and I still used that into the '90s. School had PCs to use as well, and I knew people who had Atari STs, but the reputation the Amiga had was why I wanted one. I could never have afforded one back then though, so I kept plugging away on my XL until that died. I needed a new computer at home, and the 3 candidates were an ST, an Amiga or a PC - all second-hand of course. The PC we're talking here was probably something 286-based or a low 386 - anything else was just too expensive. But comparing the 3, the Amiga came out top, so that's what I went for.

 

Greatly expanded and used regularly, that Amiga is still here with me today.

[Loafer]

Back in 1989, I'm a Canadian in Florida on vacation with wife and friend. I had an Atari st at the time but had committed to upgrading to the Amiga at some point in the future because of the incredible Earl weaver Baseball. Anyway, point is i was leaning towards the Amiga, but I hadn't tipped over.

 

That is, until I popped into a computer store in Orlando. My buddy and I asked the owner if we can check out some Atari St game, he says "sure, crack the box open, I'll just rewrap it afterwards". "Cool", so we managed to open up the Psygnosis game "Obliterator", were playing that for a minute when all of a sudden behind us we heard jet engines blaring. We turned and saw he had an Amiga 500 plugged into a big amp with two tower speakers playing F/18 interceptor. My buddy and i looked at each other, looked at the Amiga/Interceptor, looked at the Atari /st, then looked at each other again and I said "f ... that"

 

And that folks, was the beginning of a beautiful friendship between this crazy Canuck and the best freaking computer that's ever been made.

[zzip]

It's something I always wanted after seeing all the images and hype about the new 16-bits in magazines.    But I was still a teen,  It was too much to ask my parents for.   It took a lot of paper route money to save up for an ST which is what I went with instead.  This was before the cheaper Amiga 500 released.

[English Invader]

I went for the 520STe Turbo Pack because it was £100 cheaper than the Amiga and came with a lot more software (in technical business terms, this is what Alan Sugar called a "mug's eyeful") but one of the things I found the ST to be great at was getting things done a lot more quickly and easily than the Amiga.  With the Amiga, you'd spend hours messing around with complicated third party applications; with the ST, it was just there.

 

There was always a part of me that was curious about the Amiga and it wasn't until 2009 that I finally got one.  I remember being intrigued by an A600 I saw in a Tandy store in the early 90s and that was the Amiga that called out to me.

[zzip]

8 hours ago, English Invader said:

I went for the 520STe Turbo Pack because it was £100 cheaper than the Amiga and came with a lot more software (in technical business terms, this is what Alan Sugar called a "mug's eyeful") but one of the things I found the ST to be great at was getting things done a lot more quickly and easily than the Amiga.  With the Amiga, you'd spend hours messing around with complicated third party applications; with the ST, it was just there.

 

There was always a part of me that was curious about the Amiga and it wasn't until 2009 that I finally got one.  I remember being intrigued by an A600 I saw in a Tandy store in the early 90s and that was the Amiga that called out to me.

Yeah this is a difference between the Amiga and ST that isn't obvious until you spent some time with both.

 

Before that you hear that AmigaOS is more advanced because it has multitasking, etc.

 

But what isn't obvious is the OS is floppy based, it takes time to boot, the OS frequently needs to access data from floppy, so you almost need two floppies or a hard drive to be productive.   Also multitasking needs memory to work well, and lower-end Amiga's were short on this

 

GEM- as minimalist as at was especially in earlier iterations,  booted quickly from ROM.  It was very snappy compared to Amiga's OS.  Also the desk accessory system gave you multitasking to a point-   you could load in some powerful productivity accessories and access them while using any other GEM application and both apps would continue to run at the same time-  again you needed RAM to really take advantage of this.

 

Don't mean to put down the Amiga OS either, I just think it was a little too advanced for the hardware it ran on.  With hard-disk, more RAM and maybe more CPU speed it should work just fine.

[thetick1]

It was 1987.  I saved lots of lawn mowing money to buy my next game.  I had the Commodore 64.  I remember it clearly as it was a 45 minute drive with my mom to the computer store that had the biggest C64 collection around.   The owner was a huge C64 fan so he had various open top titles to show/play in the store.  I entered the store and I see Defender of Crown on the Amiga and was just amazed.  (Sachs was an amazing artist!).

 

Mom said that's a beautiful game and it's educational you should get that one.  I lit up with joy and it hit me in seconds I had the C64.  The guy at the store knew me as over the years I bought C64 games there.  He saw my disappointment and said he would throw in the game for free if I got the Amiga.  My ignorant mom stepped in and said that sounds great as I could have an early Christmas present saying something about c64 was couple hundred dollars so is this Amiga a few hundred more ?  I did not even want to see my mom's face when store owner stated the price.

 

Well to cut to the chase the owner at store showed me DoTC on C64 and I was impressed graphically but the game play was lame.  All I could think about was how much cooler the Amiga graphics looked.  Anyway the shop guy knew me and my style.  He wiped out his latest new favorite Airborne Ranger for C64 booted it on the C64 and wow I was sold.   Airborne Ranger for C64 is still one of my favorite games to this day.

 

I did get an Amiga years later when Amiga 500s were cheap.  My pirated copy of DoTC I got from a friend just never seemed as great as that first Amiga I saw at the store

Edited June 1, 2020 by thetick1

[pixelmischief]

I fell in love with the Atari 800XL and 1050 disk drive in 1984.  It was all my school had in 1984 and all my parents could later afford for me in 1988.  Still, that system was so good, and my awareness of the 16-bit Atari and Commodore systems so non-existent, that the 8-bit lasted me well into 1992.  I knew Atari had a 16-bit machine, but was still unaware that the Amiga even existed!  As my career started gaining momentum and I had some income to blow on an upgrade, I went for a 486 with a CDROM drive.

 

Then, in 1995, a friend of my uncle told him he had an Amiga to give away and did he know anyone who was interested in it.  My uncle told him that I would probably enjoy playing with it and the guy gave it to me.  It was an Amiga 1000 with a memory side-car.  It came to me with a 1084 and a box of floppies.  When I looked at the specs, I was...underwhelmed.  I mean, it certainly crushed an 8-bit, but was nothing compared to a PC.  Right?

 

Ready to be unimpressed, I popped Dragon's Lair in the drive.  Holy.  S%&t.  The color and sound were explosive.  The animation was fast and fluid.  I couldn't believe what I was looking at.  No PC could do this!  Needless to say, I have been a fan and patron ever since.

[wierd_w]

I remember, sometime around 2002-ish...  I encountered an amiga 500 in a setting other than a garage-sale blanket type environment.

 

Prior, I had only seen A500s in such settings or in flea markets, as parceled out, nicotine stained bits of old obsoleted kit.  This was a working unit, sitting there, just practically asking to be played with.  So I did.

 

While I found the color scheme of the workbench to be... Brutally unpleasant...  I did give it the benefit of the doubt, as I do accurately remember how brutally terrible windows 3.1 looked, as its contemporary rival-- and gave it a pass on that.  I was quite impressed with how well it handled video, and high levels of on-screen color, and the resolutions it could throw down.  I found myself wondering why it had lost out, and entertained ideas of trying to appropriate one. (However, at the time, outside of those "you might get cockroaches as an added bonus with your purchase transaction!" type sale settings, nobody wanted to part with their "known working, and in good condition A500 setup" at a reasonable price.)

 

I never did appropriate one.  I instead indulged with UAE instead.

 

My curiosity about why the Amiga failed was sated some years later when I learned it was because of Commodore USA's absurd marketing decisions concerning the product line, (In stark comparison to the EU company's decisions, which propelled the product like lighting in a jar in the euro market) and that was the end of it.

 

 

[felix747]

1986, my boss at the time had an Amiga 1000 at work and the busy pointer caught me off guard?  Who the heck uses "Zz" as a busy pointer?!?!  Then I saw Marble Madness and I knew at that point I would have an Amiga.  Did not get one until the A500 came out in 87.  Amazing times, I used A-Talk III, Cygnus Ed with Lattice 4.x.  Did not get a word-processor until ProWrite.  Upgraded to an A2000 with Supra-Wordsync and additional 2MB RAM board.  GREAT times.

 

[desiv]

I do wonder how many Amigas were sold because of Shadow of the Beast, even tho I know people like to slam that game.

I knew I wanted an Amiga before it was released based on the buzz, but of course I couldn't afford one.

By the time the A500 came along, prices were getting more affordable.  And yes, I saw an Amiga running Shadow of the Beast (and Blood Money) in a computer store and that renewed my desire to get one.  Although I still couldn't afford one right then.

Had to sell my computer and finance the rest a bit...  But I finally was able to get an A500 with a 1084s monitor (and a Panasonic dot matrix printer).

I didn't think Workbench took that long to boot up, and the resident command made it easy to work with a single floppy system until I got my 2nd floppy much later.

I was fine with the 512k that came with it, until I decided I needed Dragon's Lair, which required 1M.

 

 

 

[jltursan]

Simple as this, when I see and hear this I knew Amiga was for me:

 

 

[carlsson]

In my case, it slowly grew on me. I think the first time I saw it was a classmate who had upgraded directly from a TI-99/4A to an Amiga 500, probably in 1989. I read about it in computer magazines but given I still had a C64 with tape recorder back then, it was not in my price range. A few years later and I went to high school, there was a computer club where we played Amiga (and C64) games at every break. Although I had got a 1541-II, I knew the next natural upgrade step would be an Amiga. No other systems were even considered - nobody used an Atari ST, PC clones were both super expensive and boring hardware, I would consider it a joke to even suggest a Macintosh (plus that I didn't have those $3000+ or whatever those cost). Finally at Easter break in 1992, I bought my Amiga 500+ even.

 

So no single defining moment, a progressive decision this was the future.

[youxia]

On 6/19/2020 at 2:55 PM, pixelmischief said:

Ready to be unimpressed, I popped Dragon's Lair in the drive.  Holy.  S%&t.  The color and sound were explosive.  The animation was fast and fluid.  I couldn't believe what I was looking at.  No PC could do this!  Needless to say, I have been a fan and patron ever since.

S'funny, back in 1995 my feelings were completely the other way around. I was looking at Doom et al and sulking that my poor A500 will never be able to do this I'd swap it for an 486 in a heartbeat.

 

For me the defining moment was seeing Defender Of The Crown and Lost Patrol (the short digi "movies") at our local pirate gatherings computer fairs, circa 1990. Coming from the 8-bit it was THE next generation, something on a truly another level.

 

Never the less it was completely out of reach for me at the time financially, I was still stuck with ZX Spectrum (buying which took years of saving). I tried to compromise somehow and made another beg/earn/borrow campaign which yielded me C64+tape deck. It was a bit underwhelming setup though, I was disappointed with the gfx and playing big games from tape was a chore, so after one more year of b/e/b I miraculously got an A500.

 

Three weeks later my internal floppy gave up the ghost. I had no waranty and any bargaining power left. But that's another story....