The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA is holding a two day event celebrating the Amiga, and other events will be held around the world. The museum’s event will include exhibits of Amiga machines and other computers of the era from Commodore, Apple and Atari, speakers, rare artifacts and art, and a special showing of a new Amiga documentary.
Happy Birthday Amiga! I’d like to be able to make it to at least one of the many events happening to mark the 30th anniversary, but it’s just not happening. Instead, I’ll fire up a couple of the old girls and soak up some nostalgia.
Yes, it’s a good occassion to reactivate the old equipment and be impressed that it still works (if it still works – it usually does). I have an A500, two A600 and an A1200, mouse, joysticks, gamepad, and a big box of floppy disks (no HDD). You’d be surprised that those actually seem to be more reliable than “normal people” would imagine: They are still readable today. And if you compare an Amiga to what the common PC hat to offer at that time… 80×25 text mode, PC speaker, dedicated monitor; and the Amiga had “high resolution color graphics”, stereo sound, could be attached to a regular TV, run with 12V, and had a versatile GUI – and it booted quickly even without a hard disk.
In the context of storage (if you don’t have a hard disk for your system), this might be interesting:
https://cortexamigafloppydrive.wordpress.com/
And if you already have a floppy unit, why not just put a whole Amiga, erm… ARMiga into it?
http://www.armigaproject.com/
It’s not impossible to build computers the size of a disk drive – even including a disk drive. 🙂
The feeling of Amiga Workbench can easily be re-captured in everyday work by using AmiWM. Yes, it’s not the same, but…
http://toastytech.com/guis/indexamiga.html
So happy birthday, Amiga!
I feel so old right now… I still got a working A1200 with a 500MB HDD (silly small haha) with a 28MHz 68EC020 and a whooping 4MB of “fast” RAM
It does play games but I need a mouse for it, the old one is dead.
Any suggestions for a modern Amiga mouse?
Good old days…
Yeah, I remember paying £250 for a laptop hard drive for my A1200… It was 1.4GB! Huge at the time. Still have that machine now but it’s turned into a bit of a Frankenstein over the years… 68060 CPU, 192MB RAM, 120GB hard drive, PCI daughterboard with Voodoo3-3000, network card and so on. And it still works!
As for a mouse, this is what I use: http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?produc…
It’s a little expensive, but it’ll let you use any PS/2 mouse you have lying around, including wireless ones. It’s great to not have to use a ball mouse any more!
Thx for the link, I think I’ll get one as I have a nice weighted mouse unused in a drawer.
I still need to get around installing a CF HDD in it with WHDLoad, but I lack time
An ACA1233 would be nice too but it’s totaly overkill for my use haha
There is PS/2 adapters for the amiga so that you could use almost any mouse.
A 1200? You’re not that old! 😉
On eBay, it’s quite easy to find amiga mouses!
I started with a good old A500, so yes, I’m relatively old
So did I. I still have it and it still works, although I don’t think the external floppy drive works any more.
I recall having to shell out $150 for a 1MB expansion card, which also came with a real-time clock. That was around 1990 when RAM prices were super-high because of Japanese dumping or something like that. I remember the excitement we had when RAM finally dropped down under $100/MB.
For all its flaws the Amiga was amazing, and I’m glad I got to experience that part of computer history.
Japanese COLLUSION, not dumping. Every five or six years, the primary Japanese and Korean memory manufacturers collude to raise memory prices. They get sued, they lose, and memory prices drop through the floor… for about five or six years, then they do it all over again. They’ve done that at least three or four times in the last couple decades.
I bought an A500 to replace my Atari 400. I still have that A500 (also still have the Atari 400 for that matter). That Amiga is still my favorite system. I put the FATTER AGNUS in it so that I could do 1MB of chip ram, have one of those belly slot memory expansions that gives you the extra chip ram if you have the FATTER AGNUS along with 2.5MB of slow ram (also called bogo ram). I also have a 68030 accelerator with 4MB of fast ram, and a Slingshot Zorro II expander on the side expansion port with a couple Z2 cards. I eventually retired it for an A4000, but that A500 was the best system I ever got.
500MB? Ha! My Amiga 500 in the basement has a 52MB Quantum (IIRC). Funny thing is, I’ve been cleaning the basement this week and was planning on playing with it this weekend. I haven’t turned it on in at least 10 years.
I hear Amiga-SCART-Component (or HDMI) is the hot way to hook up to a modern TV or monitor, anyone try it? I still have a (somewhat flakey) 1084S, but I’d rather use something easier.
If you have a good SCART cable, it’s pretty much as good as you’re gonna get without additional circuitry, since it’s using the Amiga’s RGB output directly. More modern TVs might need a couple of resistors in the SCART cable to get the status voltages correct, but such cables are still on sale from Amiga dealers, and easy to make yourself if you’re handy with a soldering iron.
Composite video on Amigas is generally pretty poor quality-wise, but still usable in a pinch.
Edit: Just re-read your post, and I take it you don’t have SCART on your TV, in which case a SCART->HDMI or Component adaptor would be needed. Haven’t tried it since I’ve always had SCARTs on my TVs, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work well.
Edited 2015-07-24 08:25 UTC
I’d like to wish happy birthday to the Amiga but he’s such in a sorry state, it wouldn’t be appropriate.
All those things that went wrong, what a waste!
I wonder if Microsoft saved it instead of Apple, would it have thrived, or even survived? Probably not, the curse casted by its former owners is too strong.
Today I’m not celebrating a birthday, I’m mourning a beloved friend.
Quite a few years ago I finally managed to land an Amiga A4000D, and have since upgraded it to an 060@50mhz, with 128mb of fast ram on the accelerator, another 128mb on a ZorRAM card, and yet another 128mb via the Radeon I have in it.
USB, 10/100mb network, 160gb hard drive. Yup, it’s a beast.
Running Amikit for Real on it, pretty snappy with the memory and 060 in it.
To the author of this article, I’d like to clear up a major misunderstanding. This event was not organized by the Computer History Museum. It was a stand-alone event, envisioned and kickstarted by a single individual (tekmage). The operations of the event was an all-volunteer effort, funded by a kickstarter & ticket sales. The venue was far from free. CHM refused to endorse the event in any way, shape, or form.