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Waka

Posted Mon Dec 20, 2021 4:16 am

Hi there,

another Amiga lover from good ol' Germany here. Born in '81 and raised in West Germany I fell in love with the Amiga... I think as soon as I laid eyes on it at a friend's house. He had an Amiga 500 (of course with the memory upgrade) and we spent countless days and nights in front of it. Played games like Midnight Resistance, Eishockey Manager, Bundesliga Manager Hattrick, James Pond, Stunt Car Racer, Jaguar XJ220, Street Rod, Rush Hour, and many, many more.

One fateful day my friend got himself a PC (heresy!), a Pentium 75. Since he had no need for the Amiga anymore he gave me his for free. Yep, until then I never had the money to have my own computer at home. And I didn't want to ask my parents for one either because it was waaay too expensive for us.

Soon after another friend got rid of his A500 as well. That friend even had an external disk drive. So now I had an Amiga 500 with an external floppy and countless copied games. Needless to say, my school rates dropped a bit during that time. :roll:

After that my memories get a bit fuzzy. I remember that once the internal floppy drive malfunctioned. I think the spring mechanism just broke, I couldn't get the disk out anymore. I think I tried putting the external drive inside the Amiga, but for some reason it didn't work (maybe I put the cable on the wrong way). I don't know if I then got a second Amiga from yet another friend, but I guess I must have, because I also remember the power supply giving up the ghost one day. Would have been quite silly to have the Amiga running without a working disk drive, right? This must have been some time around 1996/97. I remember still buying an Amiga magazine quite regularly, but it got cancelled because of lack of readers/buyers. Wikipedia says the last release was in December 97.

And this was the end of my Amiga days.
Or so we thought! (kudos to everyone who gets that reference)

Just a few years later, I now earn my own money and can buy whatever the hell I like. So I buy an Amiga 500 off eBay, and an external floppy drive, and another external floppy drive, and another external floppy drive. Somehow they keep failing on me, right now I have 3 external drives and two internal drives, but on one external drive the main board seems to be broken, the Amiga won't even boot up as long as it's connected, and one internal drive is so damn loud I fear it eats up my disks.
And I buy a Blizzard Turbo Card. And a hard drive. And a SCSI2SD adaptor. And a Lotharek SD Floppy emulator. And now my setup is quite nasty. If I had that kind of setup back in the 90's I would've been the undisputed king among my friends instead of just a lowly leech without and computer of his own.

Here's a pic of my setup from August 2020. It's not quite what it looks like today, but it's pretty close (I have since then installed the Lotharek floppy emulator)
Image

On the left screen we see Windows 7 running the Amiga Explorer. There's also a Win98 machine, because the great tool ADF Sender Terminal requires a 32-bit OS to be running (compability mode doesn't work).
Then we see two external 3.5" disk drives. The 5.25" drive belongs to the C64 that is not visible, but also at the same desk. Then we see the Amiga 500 with the hard disk drive. Currently open, because I just installed the SCSI2SD adaptor and have just formatted and partitioned the SD card (I now have several partitions, all a few GB in size. I will NEVER be able to fill up all that space even if I hardcopied all my games). And to top it all off, the good old Commodore 1084S (with missing front plate) to display all the great graphics.
The stereo on the right is indeed used to put out the sound signal. Because why not? :lol:

The specs right now:
Blizzard Turbo Memory Board, set to 14 Mhz, with 2MB RAM. Another 512KB of memory are in the trapdoor
Hard drive: 4GB in total
Kickstart: 3.1
HxC SD Floppy Emulator (Lotharek)

I also own an Amiga 600, currently with Kickstart 2.0 (I plan on upgrading to 3.1). I know it is what ultimately let Commodore fail as a company, but it's still a nice little computer to have.

Also, I now have many original Amiga games. Quite an expensive hobby, but it's so cool to finally have all those games in a big box, with a manual.

User avatar
3D-vice
Germany

Posted Mon Dec 20, 2021 7:46 am

Greetings to you too, fellow countryman!

Thanks for sharing your story and for showing your setup. And welcome to the Amiga-Hive. :boing:

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obitus1990
USA

Posted Mon Dec 20, 2021 8:46 am

Welcome! A great read for sure.

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Zippy Zapp
CA, USA

Posted Mon Dec 20, 2021 9:18 am

Nice story and a clean setup. Welcome to the forums.

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A1-X1000
Toronto, Canada

Posted Sat Apr 02, 2022 8:57 pm

welcome back to Amiga land Waka :boing: :commodore: <3






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