![]() ![]() 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. 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. 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. 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. As I moved from Workbench 1.3 to 2.04, then 3.1, I found us to be a perfect fit. What kept me hooked was that I made this machine mine. During this time I purchased Miami TCP/IP stack and began using YAM for school email. 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. Pretty much from there I was hooked and fell down the rabbit hole. I figured, well, I have a bunch of utilities here, which included JR-Comm to dial into BBSes as I did with my 128D. 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 even worked in a PC store from late '96 through summer '98. 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 remained primarily Amiga until around 2001 with the first beta of Windows XP and the advent of affordable home wireless networking. I bought that Amiga 500 in 1993, and used Amiga exclusively until 2000 when I bought my first Windows machine for work. Soon afterward I got my hands on a Rev 6a motherboard, then an A500+HD with 40MB hard drive and 8MB of RAM. 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. While it came with Baalistix and The Killing Game Show, it did not come with SotB. I paid him $500 for it (roughly $900 today,) including a bunch of disks, a 4MB Baseboard, an external floppy drive, and a monitor. A molecular engineering student was heading out to another school and put his Amiga 500 up for sale in the Thrifty Nickel. I could finally afford to buy an Amiga and I sought out to buy one just for this game. 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. 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. I got to see the latter two through our local Commodore user's group. 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. 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. 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. Some years later I moved up to an a1200 with 030 accelerator and 4 mb ram expansion. I loved fiddling with Dpaint and creating basic titles fr my VHS home movies etc. 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 asked Mark (my friends friend) what the hell was I looking at and I was hooked from that moment on. 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. ![]()
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