In order to celebrate my own personal 20 year anniversary with my love for all things Amiga, I decided to order and build out a BRAND NEW Amiga 1200 system...
First off, I must that post 1995 the Amiga had really become somewhat of a rather large paper weight with all sorts of paper weight accessories including hundreds of 3.5" Amiga disks full of games, apps and utilities. I also had a hefty stash of Amiga books including 8 Abacus titles as well as several official Commodore reference manuals. Around 1998 I inherited my ex-best friend's Amiga 500 system which was nearly identical to my own minus the stereo speakers in his 1084 monitor and yellowed case. For some reason my own 500 did not have any yellowing of the plastic (knock on plastic). So I then inherited even more 3.5" disks. And somehow I managed to never jettison all this fabulous retro hardware out the airlock whenever I made a serious life change.
So that brings us up to 2009 where I find myself longing for the passion that the Amiga once gave to me and reconnecting to this old hardware and the Amiga community.
One of the first things I discovered while spending countless evenings surfing the tons of great information about the Amiga, was that there is still a (hopefully) thriving Amiga marketplace. I started looking around and found that the term "Amiga" on ebay brings up tons of people selling games, books and real Amiga hardware. Everything from the original 1000s, 500s, 2000s which I was quite familiar with. Then we have the missing link era of Amiga (for me) which includes the newer AGA chipset. These machines include the 4000 and 1200. I then found out there there is a British retailed called Amigakit.com which sells tons of Amiga hardware and software. They even have BRAND NEW unsold stock of Amiga 1200s! I had made up my mind! No longer would I settle for other people's used, modified and yellowed equipment. Just as in 1989 when I bought my brand new Amiga 500, I would be purchasing one of these NEW machines!
Now the great thing about Amigakit.com is that they will actually install and test any additional expansion parts you wish before they ship it off to you. This is great because they sell everything from flicker fixers to memory expansion.
So here is the system that I ordered:
** NEW (old stock) Amiga 1200 - this comes with a Motorola 68020 chip at 20mhz and 2mb of CHIP RAM.
** MTec "E-matrix" 1230 - A M68030 chip running at 40mhz with 32mb of FAST RAM!
** PCMCIA ethernet RJ45 adapter for the 1200's PCMCIA slot
** USB port
** Indivision AGA flickerfixer - Let's you plug your Amiga into any modern CRT/LCD panel
** Internal IDE 4GB CF hard drive - let's you boot your Amiga into solid state storage!
** OS 3.9 CD - This is the last version of the Amiga OS before it got splintered into various other projects. This is the last version that runs on 68k CPUs.
** A newer Amiga mouse - An improved version of the original 2 button
So I submitted my order and patiently waiting for them to build and bench test the system. I must say that I am overjoyed with the idea that I will be getting a brand new amiga with brand new accessories and expansion parts! This Amiga is brand new architecture (to me) because it has a different chipset called AGA and a newer OS. My Amiga 500 came with OS 1.3 and had the OCS chipset. So there are many many facets of this system that are new and magical to me! I am literally like a kid in a candy store! I have not looked forward to a new computer system in a very very long time. The last magic moment I had with computing was when I made the transition from Windows to Mac OS X. I am anxiously waiting for my brand new Amiga and I will document it every step of the way!
Until then... cheers!
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
My Dream Amiga System
Saturday, October 10, 2009
People still create on the Amiga
I have spent many of my nights catching up on the Amiga's history post 1993 when I seemingly lost interest in my beloved A500. I'm continually shocked to see how many brilliants minds are still developing hardware and software for this system of the past. And oh how I love the Amiga community. I sincerely expected to find a bunch of empty forums but yet again I'm amazed at the communities that are still supporting one another. I am actually feeling more connected to the Amiga community than I did back when the system was new in 1989. The level of comradery is amazingly high. And yes, I see that people get disenchanted and eventually leave and perhaps threatening to sell all their old equipment and move on leaving the past behind. But then I see new faces pop up and express their desire to renew their interest in an old friend.
So here is a little animation created by on an Amiga 4000 by Eric Schwartz. The music is from the game Portal and was cleverly adapted to fit the Amiga's story.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Amiga upgrade - Part 1
UPGRADES!
The midnight oil was really burning last night. I got a few packages in the mail that included:
2MB Agnus board - 2MB Agnus (8372A) + 2MB all in one!
PLCC Extractor Tool
I put together a little slide show of the installation here. Read More...
Monday, October 5, 2009
My computer history 1970s-1980
So I started to think about all the various computer systems I've owned and run across over the years and I wondered if I could actually remember them all. Here goes...
1978 : While visiting my Uncle's house in CT, I got to play with one of these:
The coleco Telstar Alpha. As I remember it, it was a 2 player only game system so I had to bug my Uncle(s) to play with me. It was a precursor to the Atari 2600's Combat game. The best part of this system was the tank stick controls which really felt like it would be how a tank should be driven (from an 8 year old's perspective).
1979 : My friend David (who was spoiled rotten), got the first Atari 2600 on the block. 
I distinctly remember the all night "Adventure" session that myself and my two best friends set upon. Having a strict father, I was forced to go home early and when I came back bright and early the next day, my friend Mark was still playing. It was the first official all-nighter video game session that I can remember. My friend Mark eventually got his own 2600 (from series re-branded as Telegames). And my Mother bought one for me in 1980. I had many cartridges but my favorites were Asteroids, Pitfall and Yars Revenge. My friend Mark got frustrated very easily and actually destroyed his Family's "large screen" Curtis Mathes TV by violently pushing it into the wall. My own father, who was an electronics engineer actually covered for him by telling his parents that the Atari destroyed the TV. True story! Mark left a wake of Atari joystick destruction.
To be continued!
Friday, October 2, 2009
The Apple Amiga of my Eye!
It was 20 years ago today
The excitement of that fateful day will always be with me. This is a computer that I had dreamed of owning since I first saw it at an independent computer store while shopping for my Apple IIc computer back in 1986. As much as I loved that Apple computer, it had an architecture dating back to the mid-70s. The Amiga 1000 was the machine I first fell in love with. I remember it was running a demo of Deluxe Paint at the time and the images that were being displayed on its color monitor were striking (for the day):
Although quite ironic, I ended up selling my Apple //c three years later in order to come up with enough dough to buy my Amiga 500.
The Amiga was quite an amazing machine. Designed originally by Jay Miner and bunch of ex-Atari engineers. These engineers, who were quite unsatisfied with how Warner communications had been running the show at Atari, decided to venture off on their own and form Amiga Technologies, Inc. They made a joystick and some other small hardware but the big picture project was a new computer system. Much like many of the computer systems in the days of 8 bit systems, it was usually just a handful of people working ridiculous hours with a dedication and passion that allowed them to design such wonderful creations. The Amiga computer had features which were truly put all the market leaders computers to shame (C64, Apple II, TRS80, et al). The most amazing part of the amiga was it's sound and graphics which unlike the Apple II was controlled by a custom chip set which offloaded the work from the CPU. This, combined with a "start of the art" 16bit CPU (The Motorola 68000) and a multitasking operating system is what the Amiga legend is made from.
Amiga, Inc and it's technology was eventually purchased by Commodore (minus their founder Jack Tramiel who had purchased Atari). The Amiga technology found it's way in their first machine called the Amiga 1000 and then eventually a lower cost machine known as the Amiga 500. The Amiga 500 was the machine that I purchased in the summer of 1989.
This computer has and will probably always be the most soulful, creative and enjoyable computer I've ever had the pleasure of owning. I've owned a lot of beige boxes and unmemorable laptops and even some of the new Apple Macs but none live up to the Amiga Legend.
And so begins my adventure back into Amiga-Land!
Read More...
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Duct Tape Programmer?
I wouldn't normally think that duct tape and software engineering go very well together, but according to this article by the great Joel Spolsky, it may not be a bad thing.
I have been using more OO concepts in my programs lately but still I can help but feel like I'm always running behind schedule and can't always research the best way to code & design my projects. I end up with a lot of small LOB (Line Of Business) applications. Most of the time I have less than a few days to write these little programs and they just need to get produced and left alone.
So I seriously have to ask myself, am I too a duct tape programmer? And if so, is that really a bad thing? After all, real programmers ship!
Retro Computing!
So I've been hit by the retro computing bug. Maybe it's all the books I've been reading lately such as iWoz and the book about Commodore. Whatever the impetus, I've been inspired to pull out my old Amiga systems and get the back in working order.
Read More...