Commodore Amiga A500+
For its time, the Amiga was a truely awesome computer. After having a
go on a freind's A500, I simply had to have one. I saved pretty
much every penny I had for ages, but then had the wonderful surprise
that my parents had bought me one as a Christmas gift.
By then the A500+ was out, which featured an updated Kickstart ROM and Workbench,
but unfortunately didn't run all the old games. However, after reading
about the machine and its new Workbench in Amiga Format, I
figured I'd be spending more time on serious computing than games
anyhow. Coincidentally, I never came across any games that didn't work
on the A500+.
- 1Mb RAM (plus another 1Mb on upgrade board)
- Kickstart ROM v2.04
- 880Kb 3.5" floppy drive
Most of the programming I did on this machine was with yet another
BASIC variant named AMOS. This was a great package that allowed
you to do all that cool Amiga-type stuff using a relatively easy high
level language. I started programming a huge number of games, none of
which were ever finished.
I also did my A-Level Computing project on the Amiga, which was an
application for designing Entity-Relationship diagrams. Being spoilt
at school with 25Mhz 486 PCs got me into the Windows 3.1 look and
feel, so I ended up programming basically an entire mock-Windows,
drag-and-drop GUI in AMOS. As far as I remember the
cool-looking Amiga GUI (the Intuition widgets) was either
incredibly difficult or just plain impossible to use from within
AMOS.
Not to be discouraged by my previous attempts at assembly language
programming on the CPC-464, I gave this
another bash. Amiga Format gave away an assembler with one of
its issues, in which was the first part of a coding guide from none
other that programmers of Bullfrog Productions, of
Populous and Magic Carpet fame. I managed to scrape
together a couple of simple games, and accumulated more Guru
Meditations than anyone I knew.
The Cartoon Classics package I have includes a decent game of
The Simpsons, the rather dire Captain Planet (based on
the environmentally friendly cartoon of the same name) and the most
excellent Lemmings. I also bought the wonderous Populous
II and the first two Monkey Island games. Like everyone
else at the time, most of the other games I had were cracked copies
(tut-tut)...
I spent no end of time making graphics and animations in Deluxe
Paint III, including a parody of the then popular TV show
Gladiators, which you will be able to download from
here when I get it copied over.
Later on, Amiga Format magazine started putting full (but
usually slightly dated) versions of popular packages on their cover
disks every month, so I soon had a huge collection of Amiga apps
ranging from random scenery generators to word processors.
These guys are still developing the Amiga OS, and have put together
specifications for a new Amiga machine.
Great multi-platform Amiga emulator.
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