TroyWilkins
New member
Hi friends,
What to write here? My name is Troy, as I write this I'm 38, and I've been playing with computers since long before I started school - back then we had a Commodore Vic 20 and Atari 400. I have always lived in Australia, mainly in the southern state of Victoria, although for the last 3 years I have been living on the beautiful southern island of Tasmania - more specifically, up on the North-West coast.
After learning BASIC on both the Atari 400 and Vic 20, as well as playing some games on them that I now regard as classics - Choplifter, River Raid, Star Raiders, Oils Well, to name just a few, my brother and I got our first IBM Compatible PC - An Amstrad PC2286 with a 12MHz 286, 1Mb RAM, VGA graphics and screen, a 40Mb HDD, MS-DOS 4.01 and Windows/286 (Windows 2.1). Needless to say, this seemed like a huge leap forwards. We put a Sound Blaster 2.0 in and had a great time learning. I continued to attempt to learn programming, tinkering with Turbo Pascal and learning a little more of how the system worked internally.
It was after this that I purchased my first computer of my very own, not shared with anyone else. A wonderful Amiga 1200 with it's 40Mb 2.5" IDE hard drive and 1084S monitor had pride of place on my desk, and I spent many an hour having creative fun with Deluxe Paint IV, Imagine 2, OctaMED 4, AMOS Pro, and of course, also playing games such as civilisation, syndicate and many others that I cannot recall at this moment. As I considered the Amiga 1200 to be better in every way compared to the 286, my brother became the owner of the 286, and we had some rather heated discussions regarding which machine was really better, based on the software available. Civilisation ran on both machines, but ran far slower on my beloved Amiga, while for many other tasks, the 286 was clearly the slower machine.
As time went on and Commodore went bust, I added more Amigas to my collection - a CD32 with a few good games also doubled as a cheap and very slow way to access CDs on my A1200, I acquired an A600, an A500, an A2000, and what was my pride-and-joy for a long time, an Amiga 4000/040.
But as many of us know, software started to dry up for the Amiga platform, and I eventually switched to a 486 PC, followed by a Pentium 233 w/MMX, an Athlon XP 1800, XP 3200, Athlon 64 X2 4800+, Athlon 64 X2 7850BE, Phenom II X4 955 BE... I slowly gave away and sold my Amigas, something I really regret doing now. So, here I am, looking for an Amiga so I can show the kids how creative computers used to be, what it used to be like when computers were FUN, and how things they take for granted now, such as multi-tasking, have their origins in a machine that was so ahead of it's time, the manufacturer had no idea how to sell it to the people. I'd also love to get my hands on an Atari 8-bit, probably not a 400 (that keyboard... *shudders*), but that doesn't interest me as much as getting another Amiga. Emulation is ok, but it's just not the same...
What to write here? My name is Troy, as I write this I'm 38, and I've been playing with computers since long before I started school - back then we had a Commodore Vic 20 and Atari 400. I have always lived in Australia, mainly in the southern state of Victoria, although for the last 3 years I have been living on the beautiful southern island of Tasmania - more specifically, up on the North-West coast.
After learning BASIC on both the Atari 400 and Vic 20, as well as playing some games on them that I now regard as classics - Choplifter, River Raid, Star Raiders, Oils Well, to name just a few, my brother and I got our first IBM Compatible PC - An Amstrad PC2286 with a 12MHz 286, 1Mb RAM, VGA graphics and screen, a 40Mb HDD, MS-DOS 4.01 and Windows/286 (Windows 2.1). Needless to say, this seemed like a huge leap forwards. We put a Sound Blaster 2.0 in and had a great time learning. I continued to attempt to learn programming, tinkering with Turbo Pascal and learning a little more of how the system worked internally.
It was after this that I purchased my first computer of my very own, not shared with anyone else. A wonderful Amiga 1200 with it's 40Mb 2.5" IDE hard drive and 1084S monitor had pride of place on my desk, and I spent many an hour having creative fun with Deluxe Paint IV, Imagine 2, OctaMED 4, AMOS Pro, and of course, also playing games such as civilisation, syndicate and many others that I cannot recall at this moment. As I considered the Amiga 1200 to be better in every way compared to the 286, my brother became the owner of the 286, and we had some rather heated discussions regarding which machine was really better, based on the software available. Civilisation ran on both machines, but ran far slower on my beloved Amiga, while for many other tasks, the 286 was clearly the slower machine.
As time went on and Commodore went bust, I added more Amigas to my collection - a CD32 with a few good games also doubled as a cheap and very slow way to access CDs on my A1200, I acquired an A600, an A500, an A2000, and what was my pride-and-joy for a long time, an Amiga 4000/040.
But as many of us know, software started to dry up for the Amiga platform, and I eventually switched to a 486 PC, followed by a Pentium 233 w/MMX, an Athlon XP 1800, XP 3200, Athlon 64 X2 4800+, Athlon 64 X2 7850BE, Phenom II X4 955 BE... I slowly gave away and sold my Amigas, something I really regret doing now. So, here I am, looking for an Amiga so I can show the kids how creative computers used to be, what it used to be like when computers were FUN, and how things they take for granted now, such as multi-tasking, have their origins in a machine that was so ahead of it's time, the manufacturer had no idea how to sell it to the people. I'd also love to get my hands on an Atari 8-bit, probably not a 400 (that keyboard... *shudders*), but that doesn't interest me as much as getting another Amiga. Emulation is ok, but it's just not the same...
