EggAndBean

There’s only a few things that stir up nostalgic feelings in me - Christmas Eve, the Blues Brothers movie, slapping defenceless gnomes, and the Amiga computer. Read on for a look at the Amiga computer (in particular, the A600).

I got my Amiga way back in 1992, naught but a mere slip of a lad - an extravagant Christmas present at £399 (approximately, ouuuu, €10,000 in today’s money). The pack was “The Wild, The Weird, The Wicked” pack shipped with the “A600″, containing the following software:

• Workbench 2.04
• Deluxe Paint III
• Pushover
• Silly Putty
• Grand Prix

Now, the A600 was a bit of an oddball - similarly specced to the “A500+” released years before, just in a slighter smaller and smarter case.

Roaring along at 7mhz with 1 meg of RAM, the Amiga could do things PC’s are still getting the hang of. Like what, you say? Well, while the IBM PC in the early 90’s blipped along with chunky graphics and beepy sound, the Amiga was a multimedia explosion - glorious technicolor graphics, powerful sound and a whole host of games and applications to suit your every desire. Amiga’s wound up being used in lots of video production houses in the 90’s, thanks to the NewTek Toaster (a video editing hardware/software combo). In fact, NASA only recently retired a bank of Amiga’s that they used for its unsurpassed multitasking ability.
So, the A600 in 1992 - I arrived back at the house with the machine, plugged it in, gibbered slightly, and fired it up….nothing appeared on the screen. Some more plugging in and our things, I scratched my head trying to figure it out. A tense 15 minutes later, I plugged the cable into the RF Output (not the composite, doh) and the TV screen burst into colour as the Push Over intro appeared. Success!

The next few days, months and indeed years - I finally got a PC in 1995 - were littered with Amiga niceness. I ended up with a massive collection of Amiga Format magazines (which I unfortunately gave away years later, much to my regret), and a whole heap of games and utilities.

Believe it or not, the game I remember most is a game called McDonald Land - a dodgy McDonalds tie in game that had great music and decent graphics. I still feel dirty though.

The Amiga’s demise was not down to the capabilities of the machine, it was the dire decisions made by its manufacturer Commodore in the early 90’s. Within the space of a few years, the Amiga was in rapid decline, and today it exists only as a name that was bought than anything else.

What are you favourite games? Your favourite Amiga memories? Let us know!