What Made YOU Buy An Amiga?

[MAD]

Hoya!

Well, my very first computer was a mighty CPC 464!
I am always pissed off because there is almost never a CPC in the
"Fave 8Bit" polls. It WAS a cool machine!
Then almost 2 years later I sold it to get an Atari 520 ST...
It wasn't that good, indeed and the bugger had a SINGLE-sided floppy
drive! Beat dis!
Then, after seeing some A500's at a friend's (and after seeing all
the cracked games, let's be honest), I bought my A500!!!
YAY!
Then, in 1992 I sold it to buy an A500+, which I still have.
It was not too good a machine IMHO.
Then, in 1994, I bought a second-hand A1200 (a Commo one! ), that I
am being typing on!
Two years ago, I bought a Blizzard 030, that I quickly sold to get a
second-hand 060+SCSI+CDROM+16megs -the bloke was seling it with 32megs
but screwed me up... >:-E
And I still have my old 1083S from 1992!

Voilà!

Be funky

M A D

PS: as soon as I am able to get enough dough, that is in some
centuries, I'll buy an AMIGA ONE!!!

[PseudoDOS]

here's my story

in the beginning of 1989 i wanted to have a computer on my own to play that games i used to visit my friend W.P. for. he has had a c64 and i liked playing boulder dash with him very mush. in a local common wares (not warez) dispatcher catalogue there were among some trashy looking pc desktop boxes three smart models looking modern (right on the page next to the games and joysticks). the atari seemed poor an i've never heard or seen anything good about it. the amiga 500 was something totaly unknown to me (i have heard someone in my classroom shouting it to be modern and great and easy to print with it when its a need, but i was focussed on the c64 as my friend has had one), the amiga just quite seemed very brilliant and powerful. the amiga also showed the most sound channels and the best graphics features. as the amiga wasn't so cheap and the c64 i used to know well, i wrote on a little piece of paper the words c64 and its prize and also the same for some equipment. after that i deposited the little paper with my prize calculations in my upper desk drawer and looked forward to secretly accumulate money for it.

some weeks later my mother must have been finding that paper in my desk drawer because my father told me she had talked about me wanting a computer. and if i want a computer he recommends me to consider choosing something more serious than a c64. something like an ibm pc. they would spend me one. (as i knew my parents like buying me everything at this time it was a ludicrous fault not to ask them just straight on for an amiga, directly out of the heart and definitely about an amiga and only an amiga)

as i just have been anxious about my parents talking into my own decisions, fortunately some weeks later i did find a big bunch of money right on the street. now, this was really amazing!

"well! i am rich! really everywhere rich! ... this will be an Amiga and even much more!!!"

and it became one.

as he, my friend saw it, he neraly immediately bought one, too. (he never was affraid of such an act of decision as i used to be, allthough i have had far more money now. see, money is no gurantee for wealth)

now together we started to play all that amiga games that we were able to catch and copy here and there. the single game that must be exceptionally mentioned are emerald mine and zak mckracken. giana sisters i played also often, since zak mckracken my favorite genre was adventures, especially the ones from lucasfilm. this is still my favorite genre. beneath a steel sky was and is also great.

now i wish you enjoy some of the events of the next years

1990-1991 i have bought the hisoft basic compiler for me and my friend to let us both become professional coders

1991 the group of PseudoDOS has been formed of 3 middle and 2 side members and my friend an i started to learn 68000 assembler by a course in the amiga mag, hacking games and looking a other sources and some books

1992 our first and last one-file megademo

1993 i started to code a ripper system, aka Universal Ripper 1.x and 2.x

1994-1999 PseudoDOS and me seemed to be lost in the gap

2000-2001 amiga filterium

2002 eXternal Format Rippers master library

2003 upcomming version 2.0

[jon-paul]

For me it was quiet by accident

I wanted a monitor for my Atari (130 XE )

Spotted one of cix for 10£, and old Commodore 1084

When I Picked it up i was handed a 1 meg 500 and software as well.

That was about 2 years ago, and My Amiga collection has bloomed.

[bigpops]

I can't remeber why i wanted an Amiga. I just remember wanting one sooo bad. ST's had cruddy sound, and no hardware scrolling, so that was out.

I got it my first one in 1989, and i still have my it (an KS1.3 A500). In 1991 i got an A1200 with 210MB 3.5" harddisk, and i later bought a 68030 40Mhz accelerator / 4MB ram for it. I used this computer for everything, including internet access in 1996, until i got my first PC in 1997. I still have the 1200 too.

[Doc]

I got A500 in October 1993. Wowwww !!!

Pure magic. Even by today standards. Music rocks, unbelievable.

[Domine]

I purchased an Amiga when they first came out and still have working 1000 and 2000HDs, I just don't do much with them anymore since my keyboard and joysticks got glitchy (I also still have a working C64 ).

As to why I purchased them, two reasons - first being how much I enjoyed my C64 and Amiga having the Commodore name was an instant attention grabber for me - second being the more sophisticated sound and graphics engines that PCs had at the time.

It took PCs about 5-6 years to do what an Amiga could do, and by that time Amiga was even more improved and ahead of the PCs. I was very disappointed at the lack of support the US division gave the Amiga and I feel with better management it could still be a leading platform here (even with lack of support it did exceedingly well).

[Apollo]

It happened more by accident than it was planned. Back in Summer '87 my grandpa promised me a computer for my 13th birthday. As we were in the computer shop ("Vobis" for the german readers...) already looking at the C64 my grandpa asked the dealer if there wasnt a better computer than this. As the A500 just were introduced to the german market, the dealer said : "sure, here we have the Amiga A500 our top computer...". You cant believe how I was shaking. I have read before many articles about this "Super-Computer" and all its features. Well, you all know, it was the Dream-Machine for most people then. It happened that day that my grandpa was buying an A500 plus the 1081 Monitor. You can believe I hardly had a luckier day in my life...

Im nowadays working in the IT businness, sure to know that this is just the result of this birthday present.

Apollo

[shortie]

I bought my first Amiga 500 in 1988. There were a few discussions about the price and the alternate Atari - but after I saw the Amiga in action, my mind just cried "THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT I WANT"
And so : I got my first one.

The first night I didn´t sleep a single minute. I straight started to learn Basic. But even the next day I saw, that Basic is nice, easy to learn and you get quick results, but it´s too slow. So I decided to learn CODING and began with pure MC68000 Assembler - it rulz !!!

And now - 15 Years later I look back with a tear in my eye and wish those days may come back

[Anouk]

In 1988 When I saw the game "Hybris" in a friend´s house.

A500 + 512k RAM
I dont remember the price for the Amiga but I remember well the price for the 512k extra fake ram mem. ABOUT 200 € in those days.

[shortie]

The Price was about 1400,- DM including the TV-Modulator.
The 512 KB ( !!! ) extra memory came on top. But at this time it was worth it

[Hardrider]

... 1986, First (or second) Amiga A1000 that hit Switzerland (The second was owned by a friend).

Kewl toy at the beginning but really boring the next month as playing with Marble Madness, StarFox and Deluxe Paint and Amiga Basic ... these were the only title available (with 1-2 other craps)

Wanted to exchange my Amiga with the Atari ST of Metalwar and for some obvious reason I changed my mind a few hours before the swap. Lucky I were in that time !!!!!!

Then I started coding in ASM, and believe me, IT WAS TRICKY !!! No books, only Amiga Reference !

The main challenge was to have a clean exit of the demo !!! Eh, not easy to exit a demo without a Guru in that time !!!!

Second challenge: Adding music in your productions, other that Digi songs !! Remeber that only Sonix were available (and Deluxe Music Construction Set!)

Then,... vectors, code optimisation Bobs, more bobs, longest scroll,......

good old time !

[Firthy2002]

Well my mum bought me and my brother an Amiga 500+ as a joint Xmas present back in 1990. I hadn't encountered an Amiga beforehand so didn't know what to expect from it. I was hooked pretty much immediately and the following Xmas it was upgraded with a Philips CM8833 MkII monitor (which came with a free copy of Lotus 2 and actually outlasted the 500+), GVP 80MB HD with 4MB (IIRC) of Fast RAM, a 1MB Chip RAM expansion, Citizen Swift 9C printer and an external floppy drive.

We got all the great titles (including a substantial amount of Microprose's back catalogue!) and we had great times with that system.

Anyway, fast forward to 1996. Myself and my step dad whilst on holiday had a discussion about the Amiga. We had seen a lot of the fancy AGA stuff and we were downhearted that we only had a 500+ (which was beginning to show it's age). So it was agreed that we should get an A1200.

So we got an (Escom) A1200 with a 170MB HD and preloaded with a bundle of software including Personal Paint and Wordworth. We noticed that most of our current software ran without problems on our shiny new A1200 but some disk based games didn't run at all, which we found out was to do with the FDDs in the Escom/AT A1200s not being the same as the ones in the original Commodore 1200s (and the real kicker was that I found out about the fix after we got rid of it ). Still I was blown away by how much better Workbench 3.1 was over 2.0 (I have yet to use a better OS than WB3.1), and how fast the 68020 was.

About a year later we invested in a Magnum 68030 accelerator with 8MB of Fast RAM and another monitor so both Amigas had monitors.

Everything was going great until the A500+, which was now about 8 years old, developed a hardware fault wherein one of the audio outputs died so you couldn't hear all 4 sound channels. We didn't think it was worth getting it repaired so we didn't. Then it started having graphics glitches which slowly got worse as time went on. After a while we decided to throw it out as it wasn't being used, but first I salvaged the floppy drive from it in an attempt to get it to work with the A1200. Unfortunately that plan didn't work (the A500+ floppy unit was too big to fit in the A1200 case), so I eBayed the drive along with the other peripherals and the A500+ was disposed of.

Then to make matters worse our stepdad took the Amiga so we were Amigaless for a while but then he lost interest in it and bought a PC so we ended up getting it back (although I'm sure he still has a lot of games).

But when we got a PC there was no room to have both machines set up at the same time and the A1200 subsequently ended up on eBay.

I do miss my Amigas and still have a lot of the games and stuff. I do intend to buy a new one in the near future and in the mean time get WinUAE set up properly so I can retrogame.

[KeMoT]

My mom bought me my first Amiga ( A500 ), it was replacement for my old C-64
What made me choose Amiga dunno, maybe just far way better games than on C-64.