Amiga days(and nights)

Some of the younger gamers on the site probably hav`nt played on the Amiga 500/600/1200,most of you have probably heard of it.

It was my first computer that i purchased with my hard earned cash,i played games before this but in my teens i found Girls ,so did`nt get back into gaming until 1988.Now if you are asked what has been your favourite gaming machine to date,it`ll be a fair bet that the 360 seXBOX will be your favoured choice,it is mine but it never used to be.

Thats where the 500 came in.I remember first seeing it in Laskys electrics showing off a game demo called F/A-18 Interceptor.It looked amazing as you saw it fly under the golden gate bridge,straight away i wanted it.I baught it with my savings from work,i got it with 2 games Feud(sorcery type RPG) and Space ranger(Defender type clone).At the time these games looked amazing and they had half decent gameplay.

There where many classics that came out for this computer.Xenon,Xenon2-Megablast,sentinel,Turrican,Populous/2,Syndicate,Zool,i could mention literally 100s.

I can remember buying my first memory upgrade,it was a half meg cartridge which took the memory up to 1 meg,it cost me £149! and was about the size of a paperback.

As much as i loved this machine i do`nt think i ever finished a game and i must of had about 100 titles.

I remember trying to learn to program in BASIC and learnt simple program commands but got bored with that because there was no one to help me and it was boring learning out of a book.
You could also render 3D graphics and some where actually produced for TV.There where some great graphic demos on the public domain which can be searched on You tube like the Rocking chair and the Juggler,they look dated now but where jaw dropping then.

The sound was also very good,pop stars used it as a sequencer and a sampler,Top of the pops frequently had them on show,as Artists strutted their stuff or lack of it.There was a good use of sound samples put into games and bedroom programmers cut their teeth in programming, producing public domain demos using samples of house,acid and rave to fancy graphics.

This system had a fond bond with me and i have Had many gaming memories with it,i am contemplating buying one again for some nostalgic fun.Amiga is spanish for girlfriend and she was mine.

See the Amiga passed me by but I was a Sinclair Spectrum kid, ahh the first fanboy war between Spectrum, Amstrad and Amiga now they were the days!!

Yeah i remember.The Atari st was the Amigas main rival and put up a good run for it`s money but Amiga won that 16 bit war,never used a spectrum etc ,my dad could`nt afford to get me one.

If we're talking pre-console gaming from the long-long ago, it was the BBC Master for me.

I remember Repton 3 (very similar to Boulder Dash XL for those that want an XBOX 360 equivalent); JCB Digger and Chuckie Egg. They even had variant versions of repton 3 like "Repton in Time" and "The life of Repton". Something wierd about playing a baby Repton pushing over Humpty-Dumpty into an angry dog...

I also spent many a year learning BBC Basic - I can remember BBC Basic better than the Visual Basic I learnt at University. (Am I showing my age now).

Chuckie egg was class,a lot of good programmers and software houses came from that era of programming,Codemasters cut their teeth in gaming,bedroom programming cheap platform games then you had Peter molyneux,Geoff grammond and David braben to name a few. Ahhhhh the nostalgia of it all.

My first experience was playing "Head over heels" on the either the spectrum or amstrad (whichever it was on)...

I was like 6 and used to love playing chuckie egg, Lotus Esprit, Ikari Warriors, Army Moves, Green Beret etc... all classic games

Then I moved onto the Amiga with games like the indiana jones games which had like 685467 disks, Monkey Island, Fighter Bomber, Final fight, Midnight resistance to name but a few... Oh yes, Syndicate... and SWOS 96/97! I spent many an hour during my teenage years on that!

Then onto the Mega drive, with Sonic, Streets of Rage, EA Hockey, Road Rash etc, and then Snes, N64, gamecube, playstation, saturn, the list goes on...

Ahhh the old days where good! lol

I remember Repton sub_monkey!! We used to play that at school on the BBC's in the library!! Those were the days!!

The platform war we had at school was Amiga versus Megadrive and Snes!! The Amiga boys used to bleat on about the graphics and I used to defend the consoles by arguing that Amiga games looked good on stills but they couldn't handle the sprites like the consoles which had superior gameplay in my opinion.

Still, it was hard to argue with that beautiful Shadow Of The Beast Demo that was used to sell Amigas in computer shops! It looked amazing at the time!!

I have a complete collection of Amigas as part of my Retro set of machines

To me its still the greatest machine ever released

I remember seeing the A1000 (the first one made) in a magazine and seeing its graphics and deciding that was for me.

I had nearly every game ever released for it and nearly every magazine made about it, but sadly those collections are no longer. I still have the full TOSEC stuff and an active A1200 running.

I remember paying £599 back in the very early days for the slide in HDD unit and extra processor for the original A500 too. I had to pay it over 12 months as it was so expensive at the time. The HDD was 20 meg!!. Most iphone games are bigger now.


Highlights gamewise were far too many to mention, but The Sentinnel and the TV Sports Series and the Cinemaware stuff were utter class, along with nearly everything the Bitmap Bros did.

Mercenary and Starglider are two other titles that put even todays great games to shame.


My intention is at some point to have a small Retro Machine Museum, but until then my myriad of consoles stay safe and dry in storage.

But the miggy will always reign supreme.

For a look at Cinemaware click here

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WinUAE is also a must for miggy fans

We started off with the BBC at school but the first real taste I got for computer gaming was on the rubber key'd 48k Spectrum.
Commando, Way of the Exploding Fist, Rambo, Yie Ar Kung Fu, Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy and MoTD to name a few.
The big rivalry back then was between the Spectrum and the Commodore 64, the Spectrum's original rival was the Vic 20 but that didn't last the pace. The commodore had much better features, multi coloured sprites and vastly better music but I liked the Spectrum's games better. I remember when Amstrad bought out the Spectrum and brought out their own hideous looking version with built in tape deck. That's still a reason I dislike Alan Sugar to this day.
Then onto the Amiga/ST war. We actually had both but mainly used the Amiga. I think I was getting into going out on the razz around this time so didn't touch games for a while and just left my brother to do that.
Sega vs Nintendo was the next big rivalry and yet again my brother had to get both machines. I always preferred the Sega over the cutesy Mario flowered SNES. Apart from playing Street Fighter II and the button layout was much better for the SNES.

Trying to remember games that really stood out on the Amiga and can't really think of any, other than Sensi, which, with rose tinted glasses on, is still better than anything EA can vomit out once a year. Not to say there weren't any but more due to me not really playing games anymore when other pursuits had taken my interest. My halcyon gaming days were definitely back on the 48K rubber key'd beast.


One thing I noticed recently while on holiday. As with most holiday resorts, some more than others. There's always a little arcade with slot machines, those weird sliding coin machines where no money ever falls from and a smattering of arcade games.
I had a look at the games on display in the arcade and the graphics weren't even as good as what we now have in our living rooms.
When did console graphics supersede those of arcade machines?

heh

i was always a c64 guy over the speccy but i still loved them both

my zx-81 was the first machine i actually ever owned, but i did some programming on the Pet at school.

one of my fond memories of the c64 was when some bright spark invented the space invader game you could play whilst the real game was loading

those tape decks were the height of tech at some point, and when i look back i remember being puzzled when i got my first miggy at how it was possible to load so much in from floopy compared to the 5 mins it took on the tape deck


great days great days


i hate being as old as i am, but when it comes to things like bands and computing, i was very very lucky to be able to be where i was when i was

for me the pissy3 facebook boyband xfactor twitter shite of today seems a mile away from the punk/c64/walkie talkie/proper seaside arcade days of my youth and i am so grateful for that

A lot of rose tinted specs in here i see. I also had a Spectrum 48k and the thing i remember most about it was the loading screen. The most infuriating thing in the world was getting a LOAD ERROR after waiting half an hour for it to load. Ive stamped on a few game cassettes because of this.

Gamers today dont know how lucky they are. Imagine if you had to watch this every time you wanted to play a game?

LOL
Fiddling with the bass and treble on the cassette player in the vain hope your copied game would load this time. Oh what fun!

Ahh that brings back memories, I remember staring at the edge of the screen and just blissfully drifting away in a multi coloured haze, wouldn't happen nowadays can you imagine the line, "Beware Loading this game may cause an Epileptic fit". I also remember doing impersonations of the loading sounds in the playground!!

Colne Crusader wrote:I remember Repton sub_monkey!! We used to play that at school on the BBC's in the library!! Those were the days!!

I'm not sure how to respond to that. Joy that you remember the *rose-tinted-glasses* awesome game that was Repton, complete with it's password system... or feeling old... Hang on. All I played at School on the BBC was Grannies Garden (which I managed to get a copy of and therefore knew all the built in cheats....

Are you Ready? [Y/N]
types 'T'

Yeah... I feel old now...

That said we also had Repton Talks.... we could get the computer to talk (or insult people)

Aww man i usedd to love playing IK (international Karate), Hunter and It came from the desert! and of course FA/18.......oooh also just remembered some epic battles in paper planes!!! those were the days!!!!!

Sentinel and Elite where my favourites but i also liked The Bitmap Brothers stuff,like Xenon1/2 megablast (Bomb the base soundtrack,which they copied from the movie "Assault on precinct 13"),Magic pockets(Betty boo did that one"Doin the do")Chaos engine.Those were the days........Can anyone remember F-29 Retaliator it came out about the same time as Fighter bomber?

Tenlo wrote:Ahh that brings back memories, I remember staring at the edge of the screen and just blissfully drifting away in a multi coloured haze, wouldn't happen nowadays can you imagine the line, "Beware Loading this game may cause an Epileptic fit". I also remember doing impersonations of the loading sounds in the playground!!

I remember the Amiga diskdrive making a loud grating noise when it was loading games up.

New Zealand Story, Cannon Fodder, Sensible World of Soccer, Pinball Dreams, Turrican, Speedball 2, Another World, Flashback, Lotus Turbo Challenge, Moonstone, Chaos Engine, Chuck Rock, Zool, Superfrog, James Pond, Syndicate, Populous, Mega Lo Mania, Rick Dangerous, North & South, IK+, Alien Breed, Second Samurai, SWIV, Rodland, Rainbow Islands, Desert Strike

And these are just a few of my favorites! All played with my trusty Quickshot II Turbo

What a great machine, I keep meaning to get an emulator so I can play all the old classics again

I have a feeling you will be able to get the real hardware cheap if you shop around.I tried a few of those emulators but they never worked,may of improved by now though,i am going back about 12 years.

I've still got my old amiga 500 in my parents loft would just prefer something a bit more convenient and permanent than setting it all up again so a pc emulator would be perfect

Cool,let me know if you ever get an emulator working on a pc mate would you?