Nothing special... I wanted one as a kid, but could never get one. When I finally moved from Atari to PC 286-16-VGA in 1991 the wish was forgotten... sort of. Until some 2005 when I got A500 and later replaced it with A1200 with Blizzard IV 1230, CF 4GB and 64MB as floppies aren't my thing 😉 Now it gets only a few hours of use per year 🙁 Too much stuff around the flat 😊

I got a bunch of Amigas over the years, and got involved in the demoscene and coding.
Eventually led to me studying CS and becoming a software engineer/architect/project manager.
There's nothing quite like an Amiga.

nowdays I have an A1200 and an A600 , both pimped... in the past I owned very expensive amiga hardware, I literally had 4-5K worth of euros hardware in my cupboard... I eventually went back to the roots and only bother with classic 68k stuff and whdload 😀 , my top cpu nowdays is the 68030 🤣

Got a couple a A600s. My brother had an A500 for the longest time setup as his family machine. Can't say I have a great attachment to the Amigas though. By the time I'd gotten into computers PCs had upped their game.

So where is Amigaz, by the way? He is a "very Amiga" guy. Maybe he could share his experiences here.

I am connected to him on social network, but he's rarely active these days.

I had A500 back in the early '90s and A600 early '00s wich I bought from fleamarket really cheap. Nowdays I have one A500 in attic but it's non-functional, fd and psu missing. Test Drive II - The Duel, Faery Tale, Populous, Dungeon Master...oh those golden days 😀

Amigaz shifted his interests elsewhere, maybe he'll return after some years 😀

buried and broken. 🙁

memory lane... http://www.chiptune.com/

So many happy hours playing Fighter Duel Pro on the A1000. Two FDD and a whopping 2MB RAM expansion sidecart. Still have & use the CH Flightstick and Toshiba-made 1080 monitor.

I was late to the Amiga jumping from the C64 to a 286 in the late 80's not snagging an Amiga until 2000's. Currently I have a shelf of boxed Amiga games along with A500, A1000, A1200, 2x A2000, A3000 and A4000 machines.

Amiga has it's 30th birthday this year.
There seem to be some events for that.
http://amiga30.com/
http://amiga30.eu/

I have a relatively un-pimped A1200. Just a 4MB trapdoor RAM card, bigger HDD, and PCMCIA WiFi.

Plenty for WHDLoad, which is basically 100% of what I use it for.

I'd love to own an Amiga, but I've never met anyone around here who has owned one. I have played a few Amiga games through emulation though.

I currently own an A500, A2000, & an A4000. The 500 is set with kickstart 1.2, the 2000 has dual-kickstart 1.3 & 2.04, with the A4000 having kickstart 3.1. Other than the 2.05 (which was A600 specific from what I understand,) those are the latest versions that cover all compatibility issues. Though, I understand that nothing is lost (compatibility wise,) between 2.04 & 3.1. I've been halfway looking at A1000's, that use kickstart floppies (has a boot strap RAM chip instead of a kickstart ROM.) I've also considered getting an A3000 and putting the 2.04 in that instead of dual-booting the A2000. With my current financial situation, that's probably a year or so away though.

My system progression included Amigas starting in the late 80's. I went from a TI-99/4a to Commodore 64, Apple II, Commodore 128, Amiga 500, Amiga 2000, then PC 486DX2/66. In all honesty, The only reason I got the PC was because games had stopped being ported to the Amiga in the US around that time. The specific game I was looking at was X-Wing (IIRC.) I still can't get over the fact that my A2000 (with it's 12Mhz CPU, 8MB RAM, Flicker Fixer, & Picasso card,) outperformed my PC for 10-20 years after getting my first PC.

I wish I had the chance to own one but I've never seen one for sale in Northern Illinois. 😒

King_Corduroy wrote:

I wish I had the chance to own one but I've never seen one for sale in Northern Illinois. 😒

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

I'd love to own an Amiga, but I've never met anyone around here who has owned one. I have played a few Amiga games through emulation though.

I guess it's very much a European machine, even more so than the Commodore 64.
Which is strange, since Commodore itself was a US-based company.
Although I spoke to a number of Australians who use Amigas as well. Perhaps it's because they are also a PAL-country, and most Amiga software was PAL-oriented anyway.

I got an Amiga 500 about 6 years ago for the first time. I can't for the life of me remember how I got it, I probably bought it from a guy I knew locally. Anyway, thankfully I had an awesome Commodore 1084 monitor, which I later modded to include SCART input.
I will always have fond memories of the A500, I didn't have a lot of games for it, so I had to find a way to copy adf files on floppies. However, as most of you know, the Amiga uses a different floppy drive, which results in floppies being formatted at 880KB, if I'm not mistaken. So I found out that I could transfer adf files through the serial ports and copy them on the fly, which as you can imagine was quite slow, it took about 8 minutes per floppy and sometimes floppies went bad so you had to try all over again. This would have been okay if Amiga games were at most a two floppy disks affair, however they usually were around 4 or even higher.

So, that was a lot of fun, but I wanted to get an A1200 and add an HDD to it. I got one in the end, but I never managed to get it working properly. I had bought a RAM trapdoor expansion for WHDLoad, SD2IDE adapter and I thought I was ready to go, but initially I thought the power supply was failing. I tried one of the bulkier ones later on and I would still get system hangs for no apparent reason. Something was very wrong indeed and I never figured out what was going, the machine worked wonders without the expansions. So, frustration and increasing study obligations, led me to sell them. Including the 1084 monitor which I still think I should have never parted with, I loved that thing.

I found another A500 about a year ago and I have a PSU, but not much else. I'd need a mouse (or preferably PS/2 adaptor) and SCART cables to use it. I also have no Amiga floppy games any more, although I might dig out the old serial cable for some slow as hell transfers 🤣 .

^ most likely the A1200 troubles are because of failing caps, a very very common issue. You add expansions and you stress the machine more and it craps out. Or the expansions are busted.

Scali wrote:

I guess it's very much a European machine, even more so than the Commodore 64.

I'm on the wet coast of Canada. It was definitely a distant third-place after PC and Mac; I can't remember who the dealers were. But they were around. Picked up two or three A500 at the thrifts in the 90s The various Ami/Commodore displays remained fairly easy to find until that generation of kit dried up entirely.

The C64 otoh was very common. Easily the most popular of its generation. What was different was it remained popular in Europe I think. You guys had more of a scene dedicated to pushing the last ounce of those machines, as I recall.