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Any Amiga enthusiasts here?

o1s1n

When I was younger a couple of friends had Amigas. I never did unfortunately, but I have pretty happy memories of them.

Anyway, it's something I'd love to get into but it seems like a very expensive hobby.

I've done a bit of research and it looks like the best system to go for is a A1200 HD. I'd like to run games from the hard drive, but from what I've read to do that you need 4mb of ram rather than the stock 1200 2mb.

Anyone have any tips/knowledge they'd like to pass on? Should I just stay away? (I've heard the 1200 can have cap issues)

I dunno, maybe it's just a phase, but I have that ebay feaver where you keep browsing them and almost hit 'buy it now' on multiple occasions :pac:

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Benny_Cake

I'd have to go along with what has been said about Amiga Forever. There is very little I've been unable to get running on it - it now includes Amikit which means you have access to a reasonably modern version of the AmigaOS. Combine with WHDLoad and you've got a very powerful solution for running Amiga games, or even serious applications in the event that you need to. Quite a number of Amiga enthusiasts use this for running games such as Alien Breed 3DII which crawl on most classic Amiga hardware. I had an A500 back in the day, never an A1200 though!

yrwhu8jxtni06a

Benny_Cake wrote: »

Alien Breed 3DII which crawl on most classic Amiga hardware.

Depends on what your running and what expanded on...

ryano77

oneillMan999 wrote: »

Shadow of the beast 2 on the A600...greatest game ever!! they dont make em like that anymore

God yeah i remember that. was bloody hard too. i could never get anywhere on it without a cheat code.
kick off 2 was the one game that took over my life though.

Benny_Cake

Isaac Unkempt Ferryboat wrote: »

Depends on what your running and what expanded on...

Fair point - what I meant was your standard, out of the box A1200. Again I have little experience with the A1200 so I'm relying on what I've heard on Amiga forums.Many users now use emulation to suplement their aging hardware.

yrwhu8jxtni06a

Benny_Cake wrote: »

Fair point - what I meant was your standard, out of the box A1200. Again I have little experience with the A1200 so I'm relying on what I've heard on Amiga forums.Many users now use emulation to suplement their aging hardware.

Yes thats true,price can be a factor,so i cant blame them for emulation,some cards for amiga can cost as much as a cheap laptop,i rather just buy one of them third party boards so i dont have to worry about timing issues on native amiga hardware..

ps-are you the benny cake that had a number one song in uk called vienna lol!

Skerries

i still have a 500 with 1mb memory and 2 external floppy drives
also a 1200 in a wardrobe somewhere, i must fire them up one of these days to check them out
the games i used to love playing were all the adventure games like Monkey Island and Indian Jones which i used to rent from Computer City in town
some of my all time favourite games were Dune, Dune 2, Another World, Shadowlands, Ultima VII and Laser Squad

yrwhu8jxtni06a

Hate floppy disks-read errors,fungi grows on some,glad we gone past them days..

Benny_Cake

Isaac Unkempt Ferryboat wrote: »

Yes thats true,price can be a factor,so i cant blame them for emulation,some cards for amiga can cost as much as a cheap laptop,i rather just buy one of them third party boards so i dont have to worry about timing issues on native amiga hardware..

ps-are you the benny cake that had a number one song in uk called vienna lol!

Why yes, I am, can't remember what I called myself at the time though

Another alternative is the Minimig - basically an Amiga 500/600/2000 on a board. Looks like a lot of fun, you could store a huge amount of games on an SD card! Plus you can connect a Zipstick or classic joystick!

yrwhu8jxtni06a

Benny_Cake wrote: »

Another alternative is the Minimig - basically an Amiga 500/600/2000 on a board. Looks like a lot of fun, you could store a huge amount of games on an SD card! Plus you can connect a Zipstick or classic joystick!

know it well,not that attractive,you can emulate amiga on your lappy/pc and get the same result,which basically thats what that is,you cant even play A1200 games on it,only has 2mb ram aswell*you pay extra for 4mb mod*,waste of money for that price i think..

yrwhu8jxtni06a

Well i must leave this place again*probably a delight to most*,my good work is done and lectures given.and boring info given, bye bye

o1s1n

You can't leave, I forbid it :P

Andrew76 was nice enough to give me a lend of his A600. I haven't even seen an Amiga in the flesh in about 15 years. So much fun. Going through all the disks, it really is amazing the amount of games that were ported to the MD.

SirLemonhead

I got an A500 and 1200 for free from boards a few years back, Still have them both

The 1200 came with some sort of ram expansion but i've no idea what it is. I remember using workbench on a tv being awful and headache inducing (due to the fact it's trying to read tiny text on a flickering telly!) so i'm tempted to get one of those VGA output boards and giving it a go again. The games are fun though, I've got a bigger hard drive in there and a couple loaded on.

People all around me when I was younger always had Amigas and I always thought they were pretty cool, so glad to own two now

Retr0gamer

o1s1n wrote: »

it really is amazing the amount of games that were ported to the MD.

Not really considering how similar the architecture was. The only thing holding back more ports was that fact that since you could use multiple disks the games on a lot of games on amiga wouldn't fit on MD carts.

Sarky

God, I used to be such an Amiga fanboy. First computer I ever had was an A500 my father got "for the family". Class of the '90's pack. I distinctly remember being disappointed he didn't get the Batman pack.

Old blog gushing over my pimped out A1200

Tips or advice? Dive straight in and experiment, the learning curve isn't very steep. You'll be altering the startup sequence and mounting virtual devices in no time.

o1s1n

SirLemonhead wrote: »

I got an A500 and 1200 for free from boards a few years back, Still have them both

You jammy git! I really have to stop buying stuff and adopt a 'free stuff only' rule. Would save a fortune.

SirLemonhead wrote: »

I remember using workbench on a tv being awful and headache inducing (due to the fact it's trying to read tiny text on a flickering telly!) so i'm tempted to get one of those VGA output boards and giving it a go again.

Yeah games look fine but workbench is a bit of a head melter on a tv. I was thinking about getting a multisync CRT pc monitor for mine. From what I've read there are a good few models that will sync down for games and then back up again for the OS.

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Not really considering how similar the architecture was. The only thing holding back more ports was that fact that since you could use multiple disks the games on a lot of games on amiga wouldn't fit on MD carts.

I've been using a MD pad and it pretty much feels like I'm just playing a really fancy Sega console.

Retr0gamer

I think the amiga was way ahead of the MD. It had way better sound but tbh the FM synthesis of the MD was never great and I think it had better colour. Some of the fancy rotation effects that the MD was tricked into using work on the Amiga as well, look at Son of Chuck Rock.

o1s1n

Ah yeah, that's what I meant by 'fancy' Sega console. Theyre like Megadrive games just with lots more gloss.

Was playing Desert Strike last night and it's odd seeing all the extra little effects.

Its pretty much the Megadrive game but with nicely animated explosions, voice samples, more sound effects and some sprites have a lot more to them.

The framerate seemed a little off though. I'm not sure if that was down to Amiga flicker or what...possibly me sitting too close to the television looking at all that extra detail

o1s1n

I was going to create a new Amiga thread but decided to have a bit of a search and what do you know, I actually already made one 15 years ago 😁

Anyone pottering around with Amiga bits and pieces these days? I fired up my A1200 yesterday for the first time in quite a while and ended up spending two hours playing Dune 2.

Which then lead me on to discover a Patreon where someone is remaking an AGA remaster of the game:

https://www.patreon.com/duneiithebuildingofaremaster

PS2Collector

I fixed up my fathers old amiga and have been playing cannon fodder most weekends, ordered number 2 so cant wait for it to arrive.

o1s1n

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123190745#Comment_123190745

Cool stuff! Is it an A600 or an A1200?

I was playing a bit of Cannon Fodder 2 last night as well, one of those series that really stood the test of time.

The Last Bandit

"my fathers old amiga"

Anyone else feeling very old :) Enjoy the Amiga adventure !!!

PS2Collector

Just a bog standard a600

PS2Collector

Am looking for more games but some of the prices are mad.

o1s1n

Have you ever seen the Gotek foppy drive emulators you can install?

They're not that expensive at all.

https://amigastore.eu/en/676-internal-usb-floppy-emulator-gotek-for-amiga-500-600-and-1200.html

There's also a more expensive external one if you still want to be able to use physical floppies

https://www.ami64.com/product-page/mini-external-amiga-gotek-drive-with-rotary

KeRbDoG

Another external drive option - cheaper and Irish store/seller

When building the Amiga 500+, I ended up sinking a few hours into Syncidate :) when playing with a PiStorm accelerator, its amazing to see the speed increase you can have in games like Syncidate by just adding RAM

o1s1n

Very cool! I hadn't heard of those PiStorms at all. See there's one for the A1200 too.

https://amigastore.eu/937-pistorm32-lite-amiga-1200.html#/

So does the Pi basically emulate a fancy accellerator and all the rest? I have 8MB of FastRAM in mine so can use WHDLoad, but it would be amazing to have the equivilent of a fancy accellerator to smooth out frame rates.

KeRbDoG

It emulates a faster CPU and Fast and/or Slow RAM (for the A500/600 at least) - it has limitations for sure. The A1200 one is a bit spendy though.

More info on the Amiga.org site → https://wiki.amiga.org/index.php?title=Pistorm32-Lite

Inviere

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/123191148#Comment_123191148

I went back and forth with the idea, but the general concensus seems to be if you're only ever playing classic Amiga games, then an 030 based accelerator with some ram is perfect.

For more modern tech demos, modern desktop applications and such, then the pistorm starts to make more sense.

I think I'll go the TF12030 route for mine when the time comes

Carne

I use the cm4 variant of the PiStorm32 lite on my A1200 and it brings it to a whole new level. RTG screenmodes via Hdmi output with RTG and native screenmode auto-switching via an external hdmi switch mod for now, still waiting for the Framethrower addon.

There's thousands of games and demos available on WHDload and an 030 Amiga is perfectly fine however it can be slow where as the PiStorm runs everything without slowdown especially if using the WHDload wrapper.

TechnoFreek

Always time for the Amiga though. Put serious hours into my Amiga 600 back in the day. Had the wild weird and wicked bundle