IMHO, the beginning of the end was when Wordperfect corp decided to leave the platform after disappointing sales of WP 5.0 around 1989. So much for the software side. On the hardware side, the cancellation of the A3000+ around 1992, to be replaced by a cheap cutdown labelled A4000 (no AAA chipset, no SCSI and no 16bit sound with DSP as the sad highlights) was the ultimate death sentence for the Amiga video market interested. Addons with such features became available in the next 2-3 years, but only when the patient was already terminally ill and abandoned by those who could keep its market potential alive.

And since C= did more marketing and development for the Amiga as a simple gaming machine with some extra productivity bundled, and not a true Mac/PC alternative with same optional gaming possibilities, as they did when the A1000 was launched, they soon were outpaced by the console world, and not taken serious by the Mac/Windows tandem. It is remarkable it struggled still a few years on to survive with outdated hardware, until C= died, and was taken over several times by companies unable to revive its development, with absurd delays and broken promises.

At least this was the last time a machine made me so thrilled for what it could do, compared with anything else out there. Today seeing Vista or a PS3, it is always like "seen that, been there", back in those days, it was just a different dimension, something very new, which only makes this story more sad as we all know how it ended.
Today, my standard A500 I got in 1988, but also my A4000 from 1995 with addons like 24bit gfx, 16bit sfx, SCSI-2 drives, 68060 CPU and HD floppy drives is taking dust in the cupboard, I just can't sell them, they will remain part of the origins of my IT enthusiasm, something I will definitely not be tended to do with my XBox360, Wii, Windows laptop or Windows workstation.

Jesus ,that were the days ,iv`e missed the days so much that i buyed an amiga recently :)))) ,an A1200 with 68040/33mhz card and whooping 32mb of fast ram :D, and i can now truly say that Amiga Rules! :)) ,Slamtilt <- the best pinball game EVAR ;) .Its pretty funny but i have my new amiga for 4 weeks now and i didnt played any pc game for that period of time :P, but i have finished few amiga games :)) once again ,Civilization AGA ,The settlers, Pinball Illusions,Slamtilt ,ahhh ;] ,funny thing i`m playin Doom II on my amiga ,never played it on pc though ;].
Greets to ALL amiga fanatics out there

hello there

Joan of arc - a true amiga classic. Im still trying to get hold of that game now....hard work, who could forget playing such games as "defender of the crown", or "wings". Cinemaware were one of the best companies to ever produce games on the Amiga. How ironic that they went bust. do you remember the name of the company that made Joan of arc??? i cant quite remember!!!

I remember getting the 'Bat Pack' in 1989 at the Commodore Entertainment Show in London, an Amiga 500 and I purchased the upgrade to 1MB at the time, I think I even got an extra floppy drive too (woohoo df1:). I bought an A1200 at the start of 1994 too and traded the A500 in. I too remember feeling 'wow' at the 120MB of hard disk space.. seemed amazing for the time.

I ended up having an external 'tower' for it with an 850MB SCSI HD and a 63030/882 @25mhz with 18MB of RAM.

I've since emigrated to the USA so my old Amiga 1200 is still with my parents and I still wish I could play games like It Came From the Desert, Paradroid 90, Xenon2, Speedball2, Future Wars :) .. Anyone know if WinUAE runs those?

How much money did it all cost? .. that's just too scary..

Those were the days. I remember how I felf when I upgraded my A500 to a whopping 1Megabyte :) so I could run "it came from the desert".

Man, where has all that imagination gone...

A1200 was great too, but I guess all that fragmentation of the market finished our beloved Amiga...

I was at that very show and bought my 1200 there... :)

Anyone else here ever set up Fighter Duel (from Jaeger) to play head-to-head with the modified parallel cable?

Man, we would play that game for HOURS.

Also got Stunt Driver going head-to-head also...another game to completely destroy a relationship :)

Amiga 500 + monitor + extra floppy drive = 1,100 USD
"Processor Accelerator" 68010 @ 14Mhz = 250 USD
TrumpCard drive/memory bay = 150 USD
8MB FastRAM exp card (W/8MB) = 500 USD
48MB Seagate SCSI HD = 600 USD
ASA 68030 33MHz processor card = 1,000 USD
ASA 2MB Static Cache ram exp = 300 USD
ASA 68882 33MHz math coprocessor = 200 USD
Amiga 2000HD = 1,300 USD
Video Toaster = FREE yes FREE from a friend :)

Total = 5,400 USD

Good lord man, now I know why I never added it all up before...LOL

And that 68882 math co-pro was actually a 25Mhz chip running at 33, so I've been overclocking for a long long time!

I wish I had my old amiga again

Anyone remember

SWIV ?
& code : NCC1701

i want SWIV for the PC..

-GKnight

Ahh, I remember the amiga.. still got My 2000HD 030.. took me *yrs* to save up for that thing...cost an arm an a leg trying to get it here in Australia, then sold alot of my games and saved up *every* bit of pocket money i could to fork out for a PicassoII , sweet.... then finally bought a IDE interface for it, so I chucked in a 24x cd drive and an extra 500Meg HD, how good was that... geez... my Amiga flew above all my friends Pee Cee's...

I can never forgive C= and they're hopeless marketing strategies, but thankfully, AmigaDE is going to resurrect all the Amigans sent underground by wealy M$, I can't wait for it!
(checkout at: www.amiga.com)

AmigaDE is brilliant and it's going to rock - gives me goosebumps that only thinking of an A4000 060 used to give me... sweetness...

Cheers All,
Br@inde@d

----------------------------------------

Long Live The Amiga!!

Originally Posted by RAZO
If anyone cares I do have all software for the A1000 that is needed to get it going along with misc software...let me know at tgenetzky@hotmail.com.

Originally Posted by ladouch
Thanks for the article. I was one of the very first Amiga users in my country, Czechia so to speak.
At those times in mid 80-ties the Amiga was even embargoed so I had difficult times to have
it and equally difficult times to have it transferred across the iron curtain ... I am very sorry because
of the fact that the technical development of Amiga was discontinued. About one year ago there
were rumors about new Amiga. Until now nothing and I doubt that the software only based new
Amiga SDK will do the job. I feel that it was really good hardware combined with excellent software
that made the Amiga really best.

Originally Posted by squeezer
Ah..I still own an Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200

Games like Speedball, Barbarian and Stunt car Racer were just so good.

Oh and can\'t forget Battle Isle.

And to be able to format 2 floppies at the same time, whilst doing something else. IMB PCs are just so lame, by Amigas standards. You really have no choice now as there is very little Amiga support, but I am keeping my Amigas for my children and childrens children to show them how good they were

Well, I was (and still am, 'till DE comes out) a PC user (BOEEHH, nooo noo let me explain, I am NOT A PC CHOOSER) And I an A500 at work. Xenon 2, Lotus 3 etcetera. WOW aaaargh did I ever hated more CGA It were the days that computers were really new, had really new features, especially Amiga and I was very young, and did not have the money (blame an eight to twelve years old boy for that)

But now, with the upcoming AmigaDE, which I can run on any (custom) computer, including gameconsoles, I will yes I will CHOOSE this time Amiga, because I am now twenty, and I have the money.

AmigaDE cannot compete against M$Windows? Well, if a stupid little companie like Microsoft could beat the big IBM, why not (especially with what AmiDE offers: fully cross-platform compatibility, write once run everywhere, a developers' dream + a brand new home-made computer called AmigaONE with a brand new Matrox G800 chipset, dolby digital support, and I do not know what more)?
Im really bored with o'days PC's, maybe always have been.
It's that there are so much games and programs on it.

The Amiga's been 'about to make a comeback!!!' for the last 5 years... let it rest in peace FFS :)

Originally Posted by gimpy joe
I wanna play \"Killing GameShow\" again. :)

Anyone remember the Budbrain demo?

Now that was cool! Remember the old guy trying to take a dump and took off... he he... and the chap breaking into someone's house just to get a go in the Amiga... now that really sums it all up .. oh I miss it... :*-(

great days, and thanks to everyone who has posted for reminding me of them.

I might just take my friend up on his offer of taking his old A500 & A1200 off him... :-)

I feel a game of Kick Off 2 & Speedball 2 coming on!

Oh, and if anyone ever had the Chain Reaction Utilities disks... that was me!

... it was quite cool to be a pirate back then, yeah!

Anton

sidewinder made some badass music on the amiga back in the day..... ah, i recall the glory days of EFNet#amiga well... (and the subsequent moves onto other networks)
it's just a damn shame that they (commodore/amiga/etc) didn't keep up with the changing times..

skyguy

Originally Posted by sidewinder
HI
I remember and love
my Amiga.. i always do
Being
a graphic artist and musician for 15 years on the Amiga
taught me alot.. and lessons sadly never taken seriously
in the PC world.. perhaps the era of a whole computer
mulitasking in a fluid enviroment with awesome audio video and internet access and under 2 MEGs is long gone..
perhaps it isn\'t
sidewinder

Originally Posted by cluge
yup...

poor old amiga, i suppose i might as well share my side of the story...

I was among the first 10 people or so, literally, to get an amiga when they appeared in austria back in ohhh lemme see... 85? or 86? its been so long i really cant remember...in any event, i DO remember playing *defender of the crown* & *joan of arc* and boyeee those games where so far ahead of their times, it makes all these geforce ultra\'s, quad chip voodoos so pale in comparison, et ceteris paribus...

i remember my mom getting all freaked out cause my buddies would be over ALL the time drooling over the machine and stuff... i remember the pull down window thing, where you could pull the entire window down to reveal another one, etc... or the direct text to speech thing... what was the command... say (?) .... and you hit enter and the thing would talk!!!

w00-h00 i suppose the closest thing to coolness factor would be an apple runnign osX i suppose...which brings me to the point...

:)

Originally Posted by Torque2K
Thanks, guys, for reminding me to go pick up my old A1000 system from my parents! (along with my original wood-grained Atari VCS [2600]!!!)

I found that one floppy wasn\'t enough. Two was good, but when Leander came out, I bought that THIRD floppy drive, and all was bliss!

Remember Blood Money? And Archipelagos! Someone\'s got a new 2000 version of that for the PC, it looks cool!

My only problem, though, is getting my system to boot. A1000 used floppies for the Kickstart AND Workbench, and the last time I dinked with it, bad floppies, and no backups (v1.3)... sniff, maybe someone\'ll help me out here? :O)

Enjoy forever!

Originally Posted by HiSpirit
Ahhh... the Amiga... I use WinUAE all the time to remember.... a few things no one mentioned that I thought should be with the Amiga.... first one is a game... my favorite of all time was Synidicate. Still play it to this day on WinUAE. Runs good on my Cel-2 566 o/ced to 850.... second one was the dreadful crash of the amiga... a \'Guru\'... Even thought you had to reboot the Amiga to recover, it didn\'t happen as much like it does with Windows! Let\'s see... I know there is more... but can\'t think of anything else right now... :)

I like the article and all the comments.
I loved Speedball 2 and Dungeon Master.
Thanx.

/STE

I was thinking about the Amiga days, how much fun they were. I got into the Amiga scene at the end of 1989, when we (my dad and I) went to the Commodore show somewhere in London, I'm thinking it was a hotel in Hammersmith. Bought an A500 with the 1MB upgrade. Dual disk-drives were the THING to have too, as it made using Amigas that had no hard drive that much easier. Plus with an upgrade to 2.5MB, my A500 rocked.

At the start of 1994, I got an A1200 with a ... wait for it.. 120MB HD! .. WOW :) .. Hard drives.. my first ever machine with a hard drive, and even though now you can't hardly FIND a drive that small, it all brings back memories of it.

It's amazing I think when people talk of emulators and 'skins' for GNOME/KDE or whatever that despite how much I loved the Amiga, I don't think I could happily use an emulator as it just wouldn't FEEL like an Amiga.. There was something wonderful and yet intangible about using an Amiga in its heyday. I don't know what it is... does anyone else know what I mean? Something like that is almost never recaptured .. even with the later Amigas .. it all doesn't FEEL the same. Maybe it's now Jay Miner has departed this world.. I don't know.

Ah.. a morning of sadness-tinted nostalgia..

:), yeah guys. My dad started up a small shop in Australian about 20 years ago, selling the likes of the Atari, VIC 20, C64, NEC APC IV's etc etc. Its hard to explain I guess why you don't get that long lost buzz that well all us't to, but I think is comes down to the fact that, computers have become boring in certain respects. And operating systems that run on them, aside from Unix flavours, are made for idiots. I mean when something new comes out for the PC like the new Geforce GTS cards, yeah ok, they can pump out few more billion pixels per second, but thats about it. Things like that just don't seem to get my blood going like when games like Shadow of the Beast 1 & 2 came out. The Intro for 2 was something that took me several weeks to get over. Out of this World was another one. I have to admit I was an ST owner aswell as a closit Amiga fan, me and a mate went on for years and years at which one was better. I do miss things like that. I was so desparate to get SOTB2 and addicted to the Intro that I copied the Amiga version and tried to find some sort of emulator to get it running on the ST(I think I was drunk at the time), yeah I know I could have gone and got emself and A500, but that would'nt have looked to good to my faithful ST cheer squad at High School who gave my Amiga buddie a verbal blast every time he came to school :) I really do hope that someday I can relive all of this, somehow, someplace................wishfull thinking says I. *Sniff* All I can say now, is, I was glad I was around when all this happened, its something that future gererations will never experience, 'the birth of computers'

I remember dreaming about the A4000 back in college. It was so far out of my price range. Sucks that by the time I could afford a $5000 computer, the Amiga is long gone. I entered college with a 500 and replaced it with a 2000HD. Summer cash spent on an 030 upgrade, scsi/ram card, pair of used 200MB HDs, and a 2MB 24bit graphics card so I could drive an $800 NEC MultisyncXV. The bulk of my internet days were spent downloading Aminet progs/demos and Mudding. Still in the closet, and I'm sure it would work if I plugged it in.

Took the plunge in 96 and built a Win95 box. I don't think it's ever been quite as exciting as the Amiga, but at least some old favorites are still around. Psygnosis is still making respectible games. Populous 3. =)

It's amazing how far graphics have come since the famous HAM mode. Carmack talks of 64bit graphics. Oh, and for linux fans, I've seen an Amiga "skin."

Nastalgia. I must be getting old now. Dammit! =)

Originally Posted by papasmurf.org
Wow...

Emotion overwhelms me when I read about those heady days.

Somehow, one day, I feel Amiga will prevail in some way.

papasmurf.org

:o)
Great article. I don't think the Amiga community will return in *that* way, with kids and adults all trying to get their hands on them, but it will return. I'd imagine it's going to be more of a lunix style alternate computing affair, there's just too much competition for it to become mainstream again.

My two favourite games - The Settlers and Frontier. Ahhhh :o)

Casparian Aremi
http://www.quest-tome.co.uk

Computing was so much more exciting back then, especially gaming, PSX
2? No thanks. Give me an A1200 and a copy of The Settlers any day!