Hi, just registered

[SnkBitten]

Hi, just registered and checking out the site. I'm in South Carolina, US and have recently found myself back into Amigas. I started with a C-64 and started hearing about the Amiga. I jumped into Amiga from launch to bankruptcy purchasing an A1000 in November of 1985. I added an A2000 when the original Video Toaster came out, also adding an A2620 card and monstrous 5.25" full height 65 MB SCSI hard drive to my system with an Overdrive SCSI controller. I later had the opportunity to jump on an A4000D 040/25 so purchased that and sold the A1000. The A4000D had the Toaster4000 card as well. I added to it a WarpEngine 4040 card, an EGS Spectrum RTG card and a Emplant board. I also had a single frame VCR + controller that came with the A4000 deal. These were my systems for years until I started playing Descent on a friends PC. Was given some old PC parts and started assembling PCs. Sold the whole lot for pennies around 1996 needing cash quickly....only to land a higher paying job a few months later

Amiga's 30th anniversary news popped up in my day to day browsing a few years back which had me searching on 'Amiga'. I found numerous boards and people still actively using Amigas. I grabbed WinUAE and started playing with it and the Amiga addiction kicked right back in! In playing with WinUAE and reading forums I kept hearing about Amithlon, a supposedly incredibly fast Amiga "emulation" on x86 PC hardware. Tracked it down, got it installed and was blow away with how impressive it is. This lead me to start creating complete walk-thru documentation on setting up and configuring Amithlon as well as what hardware is supported. You can check out the guides on http://amithlon.snkbitten.com/

Having been bitten by the Amiga bug I picked up an A4000D off eBay in 2016 I then added a Toaster4000 and Video Flyer, the Flyer being something I dreamed of back in the day. An Indivision AGA was installed and then I added a Picasso II. About six months later I got extremely lucky an happened upon an A4000T so snapped it up. This became my project system, moving the Toaster/Flyer boards over to it, adding a WarpEngine4040, X-Surf 100 w/RapidRoadUSB, CyberVision 64/3D w/scandoubler and YCP-100 (for the Toaster). The A4000D received a Mediator Di in place of the Toaster/Flyer.

Huge Amiga fan.... Looking forward to participating in the forums.

[intric8]

Dude - snkBitten - thanks so much for joining AmigaLove! We're lucky and proud to have you on board.

Sold the whole lot for pennies around 1996 needing cash quickly

Ugh, that totally kills me - and I can completely relate. I grew up on the C64 and created a pretty sweet collection - as a broke kid - and in a fit of rage gave it all away to a friend in a swap for his Apple II+. Quite possibly one of the dumbest trades of all time. I couldn't believe what I'd done - and it only took me a few days to realize my mistake. Talk about taking a giant leap backwards!

Then, in the 90s I created yet another massive C64 horde. At the time I was living in Texas and there was this amazing "Commodore Barn" out in the boondocks. It was literally a red barn - like in a postcard - out in a farm field. It had this huge chickenlips C= logo painted on the roof. And when you walked inside, it was this incredible stash of mostly NOS shrink-wrapped software - 95% games, of course. This was well after the death of all things C=. It was heavenly. Then I had to move from Dallas to the Bay Area, and I didn't have room for my gigantic (and so awesome) collection. And I sold the whole thing.

Fast forward another 15 years and I started my 3rd collection. This is by far my best and largest. And I ain't gonna let it go this time (knock on wood) unless my eyes fail me or whatever.

I got into Amigas late - like, really late. I'd always wanted them BITD but could never afford them. Single-parent, deadbeat dad, etc.

Anyway, I currently have a very sweet Amiga 1000 (1, 2), Amiga 2000 that was donated to me as part of a lifetime collection (see it to believe it) and a complete backup for parts, Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200. All are NTSC and the 2000 and 1200 are souped up a bit. The 2000 has a GeForce 030 clocked at 40MHz and has somewhere around 15MB RAM. The 1200 is ridiculous with an ACA 1221 completely maxed out (although I run it at 21MHz IIRC, as I don't want it to get super hot and frankly that's fast enough for my needs). It has more RAM than it'll ever possibly use. Because.

The 2000 has become my daily driver for the past year as I've come to recognize I prefer OS 1.3. I've run 2.04 and 3.1, but always move back over to 1.3. It just works with what I want to do, and I love the look of it. Over the past two months, I've been using the 1000 more and more. I have a couple of very cool old-school hardware projects I'm working on that I hope to share soon. Very cool nerdy crap. That machine is, by far, the sexiest one I've got. I cleaned its keyboard after I acquired it - wow. Unreal. To be honest, the 2000 is the easiest for me to type on for "serious writing" like BBSing, but the 1000s is the most fun for some reason. It's really solid. And I just LOVE its keyboard garage.

And I've never gotten into the AGA stuff - with maybe two exceptions. But I find I am wanting to play games created for 1.3 more often than AGA. I guess I prefer the older stuff - the stuff I would have used in high school had I been able to use an Amiga.

Attached is what my setup looks like most of the time. The Amiga side gets swapped between the 2000 and 1000 these days. I just can't put my C64 away, as it's my baby. Plus, it is also hooked up via Wifi, so I've been using it lately to hit my favorite BBSes at night.

Snkbitten - I'm so glad you decided to join AmigaLove! See you around the site.

[Zippy Zapp]

Wow, those are both great stories. Glad you got back into Amiga.

Don't worry, we all make those kind of "mistakes". Only we don't realize until years later it was a mistake. I gave away most of my Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200 collection +C64 stuff years ago too. 12 years or so back I realized that I had made a big mistake but emulators appeased me for a little while.

I then got a call from my buddy that we used to run a BBS together and he told me he was emptying out his storage and if I wanted my stuff I needed to come get it lest it be dumped to ewaste. I had completely forgotten that a good portion of my collection back in those days went in his storage as we used it at his home office for the BBS. So suddenly I had once again, a C64c, my 1541c drive with Supercard+ installed, 1571, 1581 and my REU and power supply. Not to mention much of my software and games. About 5 Big boxes worth. But then came his Amiga 2000 that I helped him get, a 1702 monitor, a 1084 monitor and a ton load of my old Amiga games and disks that I forgot all about most still in the box since he never really played them. Some of them even still had the receipt from when I bought them new in the late 80's and early 90's.

To say the least I was happy since I inherited all his old Commodore, Amiga and Macintosh stuff too. I instantly had a 1983 original C64 that he had replaced with a C64c because it went dead. A few chip swaps later and a $3 6510 mpu and that C64 was saved. The Amiga had leaked it's battery but I repaired some of it and got it working again thanks to a new agnus chip. But it has since died and I need to figure out why.

So I think there are more people like us that went through similar things. But as intric8 said, I did that once, twice or maybe three time, but not again. Although I have been weeding down my Macintosh collection since I am having a problem maintaining and using 15 Macs, my Commodore stuff mostly won't be going away. I may ditch my extra A500 and my extra Plus/4 and a drive or two but that is it.

[LambdaCalculus]

Welcome, SnkBitten! Come on in, grab yourself a seat, and have a cup of coffee with us. It's freshly brewed.

I've wanted an Amiga as a kid for a *very* long time, but since we already had an IBM PC in the house, as well as an NES, my mom was one of those "you already have a computer and don't need another" types. So the best I could do was play with store demo units and read the Amiga publications I could find in my local bookstores in New Jersey (most of which were UK imported magazines via Barnes & Noble), and just pine for the day that I'd land an Amiga of my own.

Well, fast forward to now. I have two Amiga 500s; both rescues from neglected homes. I'm fixing both up so that they may be usable; so far I've gotten an Amiga SCART cable, a fresh RAM expansion (Individual Computer's A512 expansion), and Workbench disks. One is equipped with KS 2.04 and the other is equipped with KS 1.3, and I'm keeping both, most likely. But the one model I'd really love to have is an Amiga 1200. Hell, I'd love a big box Amiga as well; something nice and expandable would be fun to have around!

I'm also using MorphOS, a next generation Amiga-like OS, on both a Mac Mini G4 and an iBook G4, and AROS, an x86 implementation of the AmigaOS APIs, on a ThinkPad T42. My main machines, a custom Debian desktop and my Lenovo ThinkPad X220 (also running Debian!) have FS-UAE installed so that I can use AmigaOS 3.9 and AmiKit.

[SnkBitten]

Thanks guys. I was a much bigger game player on the C64 than the Amiga, I started getting more into utilities and productivity software. Video was the biggest draw for me which is why I started playing with the Video Toaster back in the beginning of it. I regretted the sale the day I did it....but figured (wrongly) that with Commodore bankrupt their value would only continue dropping.

I thought of buying another for years but never had the spare funds. After WinUAE and getting in to Amithlon I jumped at a chance to grab an Amiga that went unsold on eBay and was relisted a second time. Shortly after, I practically fell into an A4000T. I didn't really have the spare funds but there was no way I was going to let it pass me by.

Of course now I'm trying to talk a long time friend out of his A3000T that he has stored away.

[TenLeftFingers]

I was big into the C64 before I saw the Amiga too. And now that I'm a bit older, I actually don't know which I prefer the most - which is why I have both! Welcome