Poll: How did you get your first Amiga?

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  1. #1
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    How did you get your first Amiga?

    How did you come to own your very first Amiga?

    If you haven't played a classic game in years, it's never too late to start!


  2. #2
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    I remember this very good. I was in school, and when it was over, I got out and my parents waited for me. Didn't know why, as the school was not situated in our hometown, but 4 miles away, and I always took the bus to get there.

    They didn't say anything, and myself, I didn't also ask why. So I got into the car and we drove at the shop called Eurobureau, where they had computer stuff. Still not knowing why we got there, as I still had my C64, and I thought that perhaps my father was needing something.

    So we entered the shop, and my mom said to me, tell the vendor what it is that you wish the most. I thought, wtf, and told him of course, it's an amiga baby. Only at that point I realized my dream's coming true. I got the A500 with a 1084S monitor. I still remember the price, it was exactly 40.000LUF, which is now 1.000€. That was a lot of money at that time.

  3. #3
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    WOW! That must have been an amazing surprise. My parents didn't have the money in those days for such great surprises. And €1000 is for sure a lot of money. And even better getting a 1084S monitor with the A500. I had to do with a portable 14" colour TV for many years until I saved enough for a Philips monitor.

    My parents did however surprise me with my Amstrad CPC464. I had wanted a computer all that year but I knew my parents didn't have much money so I didn't hold much hope and just went round to friends houses after school to play on their BBCs and Spectrums. Then come Christmas morning the CPC was sitting there under the Christmas Tree. I found out more recently that they actually couldn't afford it and had to take out a 3 year repayment to buy it for me. I will never forget that.

    And that reminded me. When I had the Atari ST, I didn't even have a colour TV and had to use a crappy old 12" B/W TV, the type with the rotating tuning dial. That wasn't great at all and I used to grab the big downstairs TV to play games on whenever I could. Thinking back, I wonder why I never got a converter for the Amstrad monitor and just used that

    If you haven't played a classic game in years, it's never too late to start!


  4. #4
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    Mine was an A500+ bought as an Xmas pressie by my dad, before that I used his C64 with it's 1541 disk drive, he even got me to Action Replay his C64 collection from tape onto 5 1/4 disks for him, my first exploits in hacking....

    He was a bit p'eed off when I swapped the A500+ for an A600, but he saw the reason why when I put a 40 Mb (WOW) 2.5" laptop hard drive into it, ahh the days of disk swapping at the local cricket club on Monday evenings...the club members wondering how I booted WB so quickly, LOL

    I always wanted an A1200 but the price was silly at the time, £399 if I remember correctly.

    I have an A600 now (a new floppy drive for it arrived today from Amigakit) and possibly another on the way via the EAB, I am doing the A600+ project that Zetro of Oldskool and EAB has done, but I am using a hard drive for better software compatbility.

    I also have an A500, a 500+ and a couple of A1200s in various states of repair,some I traded old PC hardware for them and I got one A1200 from Ebay for £10, which had a 130Mb hard drive and a 4Mb expansion board in it, I wonder what that machine cost originally...??!

    I am going to get them all working in my spare time, one of the A1200s will also get the "A1200 Plus" DVD-ROM drive treatment so I can transfer adf files quicker.

    It's a hobby which will keep me busy for a while....
    Old Amigas never die, they just get modded....

  5. #5
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    The 4MB expansion board for an A1200 originally cost £179.99. I know this well because that is what I paid when the A1200 was new.

    I also think the A1200 dropped in price very quickly from £399 to £299 as that is what I paid for my first one not long after it came out. Definitely a great machine and my personal favourite Amiga as an all round machine with the best expansion short of going for a big box Amiga.

    You may cry yourself when i tell you of a project I have been planning for some time, and one that I've mentioned on the old classicamiga board some time ago. I want to take an A1200, gut it, replacing the internals with a PC!!! Wire the Amiga keyboard up via USB using a Keyrah interface, mount a laptop DVD-RW in the lefthand side (similar to how many have mounted one in A1200 projects) and then I will have a very portable PC which will be perfect for emulation.

    If you haven't played a classic game in years, it's never too late to start!


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    Average Merlin's Avatar
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    The A1200 case would lend itself to a motherboard with something like the old Western Digital layout that Compaq or Dell used on their office machines like the Dell Optiplex GX series (God I am sad to be able to recall all this crap) where all of the I/O ports are in a line, that way you wouldn't be hacking the case about too much.

    Another alternative is an ITX Shuttle mobo.

    I'm not a fascist when it comes to Amiga or PC modding, to each his own, if you are gutting the Miggy, I might be interested in the old innards...

    Merlin
    Old Amigas never die, they just get modded....

  7. #7
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    I also had to use my C64 with a b/w TV in the beginning, and I didn't have the floppy drive. I saved a lot of money to be able to afford one, and that was about 2 years later I had the computer. When I finally bought the 1541, I costed 375€, wow.

  8. #8
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    Like I said before...the computer was there before I was. lol.
    Check out my blog - submeg.com/

  9. #9
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    Quote Originally Posted by Merlin View Post
    The A1200 case would lend itself to a motherboard with something like the old Western Digital layout that Compaq or Dell used on their office machines like the Dell Optiplex GX series (God I am sad to be able to recall all this crap) where all of the I/O ports are in a line, that way you wouldn't be hacking the case about too much.

    Another alternative is an ITX Shuttle mobo.

    I'm not a fascist when it comes to Amiga or PC modding, to each his own, if you are gutting the Miggy, I might be interested in the old innards...

    Merlin
    Well, the plan is to use a mini or micro itx motherboard inside the A1200 case. This will reduce the noise to nearly zero as there are many with completely passive cooling. In addition, using an external power supply, will reduce heat even more inside the case and will mean there shouldn't need to be any fans at all. Although I will test this by soak testing the system and monitoring temperatures once its built.

    Alternatively I may opt for a faster Intel Core Duo based mini ITX based motherboard which would require some cooling but offers more processing performance.

    Although the new Pico-ITX design is interesting me at the moment with up to 1.5GHz passively cooled CPUs and a motherboard size measuring just 100 x 72 mm in size! Just imagine some of the cases you could fit that in! You could probably even build a PC based around a ZX Spectrum case with that one! And one really cool thing is that it only needs a 22W PSU and only consumes 1W of Power. That could actually be a really good thing to base a file server on. 1.5GHz would easily be fast enough with enough ram to run a file sharing, ftp and torrent downloading machine. And no noise as it's completely passively cooled.

    If you haven't played a classic game in years, it's never too late to start!


  10. #10
    Wiseguy Staff Moderator
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    I bought my first Amiga with my own money that I'd saved up, an A500. I'd only had C64s before that. Went through several C64s in those early years, at least one of them I bought myself too. I know my older brother bought one, and the first one we had was bought for us by my dad.

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