In the "old" days, roughly 1995 or so, I originally owned an Amiga A600 which came as standard with 1MB (yes, really) memory. Certainly an improvement over the A500, the main cosmetic difference was a much smaller package which did not include a numeric keypad and the old power pack was done away with, replaced with an internal one within the keyboard. The A500 and A600 can be seen below with credit to both Alexander Jones and Bill Bertram for the pictures.
A500
A600
Believe it or not, the actual base Amiga package did not include a monitor but was connectable to your television via the standard aerial interface. What might be considerably surprising these days is the actual cost, although in the mid-nineties you were receiving quite a lot of kit for your money. I will always remember how much the system cost me at 15 years old, £300 from my catalogue with £75 interest after taking out finance for 100 weeks!
So, what did you actually get for your money? Firstly, for me it was a gaming machine but there was so much more that it was capable of in a similar way to your desktop or laptop is today. Take a look:-
* I used to complete school projects in an era when most people could only access computers at school, primitive ones at that, many schools were still running BBC computers!
* A profitable in school football game in a similar vein to "Play-by-Mail". You might need to look that one up. Play-by-Mail
* Audio sampling and music creation using a Beeline Stereo Sampler. This was in the early "trance/rave" days where you could connect the Amiga to your Hi-fi and playback/record samples for manipulation with specialist software such as Octamed. Several hit UK singles were produced using this method.
* Game programming, initially via a free piece of software called the "Shoot-em-Up Construction Kit". It was very primitive by gaming standards, even in those days but you could learn some serious programming basics then play your game or save it to disk and pass to friends!
Well, after a small introduction to the system it's time to tell you what this blog is for. Although I could waffle on for hours, possibly days about the system itself and what it could do, thats not what I want to concentrate on. Although I could do many things on the Amiga, gaming was always the first love due to the huge variety of titles available. In fact, there are many titles released for the Amiga that are now renowned for starting genres, some of which exist today as best selling titles that you may well play regularly. Over time, I want to show you some of these games, quite possibly from the point of view of a gamer 15-20 years ago but also to show you how you can play these titles even today. In the era of High Definition graphics and crisp gameplay, some older titles still retain huge playability.
Look out for my first review coming soon, problem is there are so many great games to choose from, I am not sure where to start!
As a student at uni in 1990 a mate had one of these, and I lusted after it but never owned one myself. I bought subLogic Flight Simulator (eventually to become the Microsoft franchise) and played it on his Amiga when he wasn't playing Populous himself! Looking forward to reading your blog!
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