New member from The Netherlands

[Planeshifter]

Greetings fellow computer lovers!

I'm Rainer, 47, from Haarlem, The Netherlands. Since I was 10, I've had an endless fascination with computers, starting with the Commodore 64, and then the Amiga 500.

Currently I own the following retro computers:
1) Amiga 500 x 3 (1 in a PC case with A590, 1 original, 1 spray painted dark blue with golden keys with ACA500Plus)
2) Amiga 1000 (unfortunately without 256 kB RAM expansion - I'm looking for one!)
3) Amiga 1200
4) Commodore CDTV
5) Commodore 128D
6) Atari Mega ST 2 with MegaFile
7) Atari Mega STe 1

I sold my original C64 back in 1990, but held on to all my floppies and even had all of them digitized by a friend from the HCC (Home Computer Club in The Netherlands). I still have my "original" Amiga 500 though, but back in the days I had already re-built it into a PC case - and I can't find the original case anymore. Everything still works, even the original SCSI drive! In the late '90s I had pulled all files from that disk using Linux, a great reason to familiarize myself with that OS.
The Ataris were not really my thing, they were given to me. I did use the Mega ST2 to compose on with Cubase though.

I used the C64 and Amiga for playing games, obviously, but I also learned to program on them. Together with a friend, I programmed a game on the C64, first in Basic, but that was way too slow, so we learned Assembler and programmed it entirely in that language, using the Monitor from the KCS Power Cartridge. The fantastic simplicity and straight-forwardness of Assembler was just great!
When moving to the Amiga, everything seemed so much more complex, and machine language was out of my league as a 17-year old, so I moved to Blitz Basic. We entered a programming competition to write a game in that language, with which we could win an Amiga 3000 or 4000 (don't remember which). We did everything ourselves, the programming, the graphics, the music, even the level editor. Unfortunately, the disk with the final game presumably got lost in the mail, because we never heard anything from the organizers. Nothing has been done with the game ever since - but I still have everything, including the source code. Maybe I'll release that Amiga game, called "NeverNoid II", an Arkanoid clone, to the world some day?

Another big thing I used the C64 and especially the Amiga for was making music. I loved the upcoming new genre called "house", and was particularly fond of acid house. Some of the music I made was even broadcast on a local pirate station in Amsterdam, "Radio 100", by Abraxas, from Fierce Ruling Diva, and by DJ Dano. I didn't further my career in music unfortunately, who knows where I would have been now...!

Back in the '90s I used my Amiga 500 with A590, a 1GB SCSI HD to make music, using the AMAS MIDI interface/sampler, OctaMED v2, a Roland JX-3P and a Kawai K4 synthesizer. You can listen to some of the songs I made back then here:
https://soundcloud.com/planeshifter/dawn-explodes
https://soundcloud.com/planeshifter/chaos-dawn-explodes-2

These days I'm enjoying the reliving of my "golden era" of computing, and I'm very happy to find that the community is still so much alive. I was surprised to find so many hardware upgrades for the Amiga available these days, only re-affirming the fact that the Amiga was indeed something very special.

I bought myself an ACA500Plus and a Gotek drive which I've put in an external drive case, furthermore I bought a SCART to HDMI converter which works great on a 1280x1024 TFT, also an TRD MIDI interface and a RoboShift mouse/joystick autoswitcher. Because I had a back-up of my old Amiga files, I can do everything I had back in the days, next to using WHDLoad to play games.

I am not quite sure which of my Amigas I want to use as my "main" computer.
- I'm very pleased with the ACA500Plus and it's flexibility for transferring stuff from PC to the Amiga, and after all, the 500 was always my Amiga.
- My Amiga 1000 does have the looks though, and the ACA500Plus also works on it, but as long as it lacks 512 kB of chip mem, it's hardly usable.
- Then there's the Amiga 1200, which I thought would be my go-to machine, but since owning the ACA500Plus, the attraction of the Amiga 1200 has lessened. It's nice to play The Chaos Engine AGA on it though
My CDTV unfortunately could use some TLC. It never worked as an Amiga while I had it in my posession, because it missed some custom chips.

I'm happy to be part of the Amiga community again, and am looking forward to sharing my enthusiasm with all of you!

 

[nrc]

Welcome! You're very lucky to have so many of your old disks and even your original A500 (even though you can't find the original case). Oh what I wouldn't give to see my OG A500 again... which is impossible, because it was thrown out somewhere in late 1995 when I jumped ship to the dark side. If only I could go back in time and kick myself.

 

[Planeshifter]

Hi nrc, thanks! A fellow Dutchie Well, you can't get back the past, that's for sure, but I can feel your pain. I hope you re-built something new in the meantime!
I find it so amazing that almost any software for the Amiga can be found and downloaded these days, even much newer versions. WHDLoad is also very convenient, although it does take away a bit of the charm of the manual work for a regular install

I also went over to the dark side around 1996. I had the strong conviction that the Amiga had been the better platform right from the start. But that is also "water under the bridge". I've watched many a documentary about the demise of Commodore and all the incredible missteps they made, but I don't want to stay in that, but celebrate that there is still so much good left for us these days.

 

[nrc]

Hi nrc, thanks! A fellow Dutchie Well, you can't get back the past, that's for sure, but I can feel your pain. I hope you re-built something new in the meantime!

Yeah, I think I over compensated for this in the past 15 years of collecting Amigas. I have amassed way too many A500s, but at least I will have enough for the rest of my life.

WHDLoad is excellent stuff! But I agree with you that it takes away some of the charm of the old way of doing things. I have found that although pimping an A500 (or any Amiga) is very fun to do, at some point, something gets lost. Sometimes I am simply in the mood for taking a 3.5 inch DD disk out of its box, putting it in the drive of a stock A500 with a 512K mem trapdoor expansion and wait for whatever it is to load. To me, it's all about the immersiveness that takes you back. So I just make sure I have both a souped up A500 with WHDLoad and a regular old stock A500 for the extra nostalgia fix. Best of both worlds

Although Amiga continued (or rather limped along) for many years, to me both Commodore and Amiga "officially" ended in 1994 when Commodore went belly up. After that, the name and the technology went through the hands of many incompetent companies and delusional persons, who to this very day around the beginning of the 3rd decade of the 21st century, are still bickering, fighting and sueing each other over the Amiga's intellectual property from the 1980s and producing very little of interest. I try to ignore most of that stuff and enjoy the glory days of the Amiga, which for me still live on. Enjoy your Amigas!