Fixing Up An Amiga!
Bandit LOAF at the Wing Commander CIC has just the right amount of free time on his hands. All last week, he was tweeting and posting to Facebook about his frustrations regarding actually being able to purchase a used Amiga; he kept getting outbit on eBay. But he finally managed to land one for himself, and has proceeded to work on getting it up and running:
AMIGA! Is there no word more thrilling to the human soul?
If you’re reading this and thinking: what the heck is an Amiga? then you’re probably… an American! Amigas were available here but they were never more than an also-ran, a distant third or fourth or seventh in the titanic struggle between Macintosh and PC.
If you’re reading this and thinking “Amigas, eh? Jolly good.” then you are British and know what’s going on. The Amiga was HUGE in Europe and England especially, where they were the last desperate strike against having to use the same kind of computer as normal people (you know, along with the BBC Micro and the Sinclair and the Acorn and half a dozen other weird space computers.)
(Finally, if your reaction was: “eh mate, thems a fuzzy wagger” then you are an Australian and should seek help.)
The one exception is in professional video work, where American Amigas found a real niche. Thanks to an invention called the “Video Toaster” (yes, we’re all thinking of the After Dark flying toasters right now, just let it happen) the humble Amiga became an unexpected powerhouse in the field of video editing and 3D effects work. In fact, the still-popular LightWave 3D package got its start as software bundled with the Toasters. The quality of a given 1990s TV show can be determined entirely based on whether or not an Amiga was involved in the effects work and editing. SeaQuest? Amiga! Sliders? Amiga! The X-Files? Amiga! Babylon 5? Amiga… okay, so it’s not a hard, fast rule.
His ultimate goal is, of course, to get a port of Wing Commander for AmigaOS up and running (and there is quite a story regarding the existence of the port, so do click on through to hear — well, read — LOAF expound upon it!).
And while you’re there…there were, of course, also a few Ultima games ported to the Amiga as well. Do encourage him to give some of these a try, eh?
Do encourage him to give some of these a try, eh?
Banditloaf, if you’re reading this, what’s your position on Canadians?
Hah hah, I knew that joke would come back to haunt me… all the more now that it turns out I need to send the motherboard to an Amiga surgeon in (of all places) New Zealand.
Actually, the US market for the Amiga was more business oriented (video production (Video Toaster/Flyer), special effects (Babylon 5/various movies) than the huge game market of Europe.
Doesn’t help that Commodore management let various deals fall through (Sun, Scala, HP, etc.) and killed models that were basically ready for market (A3000+) and introduced crap like the A600 model. The CD32 was brought to market near the end and did outsell SegaCD and PC CD systems/games, but was far to late to save Commodore.
Everything past 1994 is a real downer if you’re an Amiga fan. For a bit the new Amiga Technologies did look promising and fell through. Eventually Gateway bought the remains and made some big promises, all of which fell through.
Amiga still lingers somehow, but there are more new releases for C64 than Amiga yearly.
Some reading, only goes to 2003, but some good details
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/ahistory.html
I got a brand new (well, not used) Amiga 1200 for christmas. My old copy of Wing Commander works perfectly.
I wonder if the possibility of running AmigaOS in a VM exists…