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amigaspud

Posted Sun Feb 21, 2021 3:04 pm

Hello everyone!
This is my first post here, despite signing up some time ago.
I am based in the UK - you may recognise me as spudmiga or spudisgood on some other Amiga forums/IRC.

I also run the NWAG user group in the UK - made famous recently by a mention in Amiga Addict magazine :D
I began using Amigas through a friend in the mid 90s and got my own A600 in September 1999 from another friend - which was a trade for a 2Mb playstation memory card and £6 (about $10 USD at the time) and this came with a load of boxed games including Cannon Fodder, Indiana Jones, Legend, Beneath A Steel Sky and some others. This was of course - a very good deal!
Amigas were of course completely out of fashion at this time all but the hardcore users had moved over to PC or one of the 32-bit consoles, so prices were low. I can remember seeing many A500s, A600s in our local selling pages for around £30 - £50 normally with a load of games.

Anyway, the following year I traded the 600 with another friend for an A500 (I wanted the larger case and numeric keypad) then Christmas 2000 I received a brand new shiny fresh white A1200 Magic Pack - from an advert in Amiga Active magazine. I also managed to get a letter published in Amiga Active magazine naively asking them to do a floppy disk edition so I could use the coverdisk on my new machine! They politely declined. I loved my A1200 but as I was very young did not look after it perhaps as well as I should. I put it in a tower case in 2002 which was a hideous sight to be hold - some old beige PC looking thing - though I did manage to get an 030 from the company who did the conversion for me (Classic Amiga based in Manchester) - I still ahve the receipt for a Blizzard 030 with 2x 8Mb SIMMS for £30!! Yep, Amiga stuff was cheap back then all right!

Christmas 2002 came and I spent a load of money I had saved for an AmigaOne G3-SE. Man, what a pile of rubbish that was... as stable as a three legged donkey, no software I could use with it. An £800 white elephant. Late 2002/early 2003 I also wrote a few articles for Total Amiga magazine. I eventually sold my Amiga One before OS4 had even arrived and moved away from the Amiga for a while to the modern, user-friendly but not so customisable world of Apple Mac. Anyway enough of that.
I got back into the Amiga again seriously several years later. I now own an A500 Plus, an A600 mint in its original box and my daily workhorse A1200 (in its original desktop case I may add!) upgraded to OS 3.1.4, 64Mb RAM, ACA 1221 accelerator clocked at 28MHz, an external IDE CD-ROM drive, PCMCIA Flash card adaptor, external floppy & 4Gb internal CF card running through my Amiga 1438S monitor. I have a nice Workbench at 750x550 with 128 colours though sadly the monitor has no horizontal size facility so I have the 2 black bars either side of the screen. I can get a full screen image but this has to be through one of the ugly modes or alternatively I would kill my eyes using one of the flickery interlace modes.

My plans going forward with Amiga is to eventually retire my long and trusty A1200 which has served me well since 2015 and get one of the affordable new machines. I have been holding out for an A1222 . Yeah, I know.. we might never see it.

I was disappointed the Natami never took off, that thing sounded like a true successor to the spirit of the Amiga.
Anyway I have rambled enough, lovely to be here - and I enjoy the videos on YouTube.

All the best,
Spud 8-)

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sun Feb 21, 2021 6:25 pm

Welcome, Spud, and thanks for that lovely walk down History Lane! Very, very cool indeed.

Your 1200 sounds amazing - I'd love to see some pics of it if its currently set up. When you say "affordable new machines" do you mean a MiSTer kind of rig, or something else?

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obitus1990
USA

Posted Sun Feb 21, 2021 7:21 pm

Hang on to that 1200! Welcome to the board.

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fxgogo
Twickenham , U.K.

Posted Sat Feb 27, 2021 9:52 am

I am impressed you even came to the Amiga in the first place. By the mid 90’s, it was essentially dead. Boy did you get some bargains. Just remember, if you get rid of that 1200, it will cost you a whole lot more to get it back later.





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