Amiga suggestions

Hi, folks. Some things I should mention:

Don't forget there aren't just games but DEMOS and Paint & Music programs that distinguished the Amiga in its time. Way back when I wanted an Amiga (and got it) for 2 reasons only: 1) Deluxe Paint and 2) Lemmings.

And yeah, there are plenty of great original games, but most ports are just awful. There just wasn't much care or discipline put into lots of games, which we expected, thanks to Japanese games at the time.

VGA will be pretty tough for you. There are very few games that will run with VGA or the AGA chipset's promoted screenmodes. IIRC, there are some Amiga 3000 models with a flicker-fixer (VGA?) switch in the back, aren't there?

One consideration you seriously need to think about is getting games onto floppy disks. PCs can't read or write Amiga format disks (without a lot of help). You can't just copy a game/demo/file from the internet onto a PC floppy and run it on the Amiga. So for this, I'd recommend an Amiga with at least a hard drive. You could copy a DMS archive or a highly compressed (ZIP) ADF file onto a 720k MS-DOS formatted floppy on your PC, and read it using CrossDOS on the Amiga, copy the image to your hard drive (or if you have enough, RAM), and unZip/unDMS the file to write to a bootable Amiga disk. Without that, you'd have to rely on your network of friends to supply Amiga games on disk. :-/

 

yeah the whole mod music scene started first really hardcore on Amiga and Atari ST if i remember correct (and the cool demos although the C64 demos were the first if i remember correct)

and i remember a game that was really a Zelda 3 rip off but damn that was some very pretty graphics and the gameplay was just like Zelda in many ways.

and what about the game with a duck that were a samurai ? a cool platform game and Superfrog ?

The Amiga computer deserves a place among the other machines of its day.

 

Not sure if it's been mentioned but you should also note that getting certain early A500 titles to run on later Amiga revisions like the A1200 and A600 can be a pain. You really need a KickRom floppy disc to boot the early A500 workbench.(1.2 I think) That should ensure compatibility. I'm not even sure if an officially released version of this utility was available, I think by the time the A1200 had established its self, piracy had all but overcome the Amiga scene unfortunately.

 

They had an Amiga, just one, at a place where I went for a summer class like in 1990. The place was run by an american lady that imported educational material from Germany and the States.
I sort of recall the Amiga version of Arkanoid was awesome, but I was like 9 or something. I really liked the fact (don't remember how I knew) that this was a commodore machine, being that my first own console was a C64. I do recall finding the Amiga seriously superior to the NES - but that's the only time I ever saw one in "person".
I think the lady had a fuckload of other games, but the kids weren't allowed to play.

 

A1200 + CD Rom + Accelerator = most software, minimal fucking around.

WHDLOAD the games on the HDD http://www.whdload.de/

And there is no better Shadow of the Beast than on the Amiga, or any better looking or sounding 16bit game. Considering style and genere obviously, you couldnt compare SOTB to say NeoGeo AOF3.

 

until snes games started incorporating enourmous chips, the amiga was FAR better, and at the time was a real pc (that was far more effective than intel pcs) not only a game machine.

 

I'm sure it was a real PC back then, being that I had a 286 until like 1999, and the school I went to in 1990 didn't even have computers. The school I went to when I was in like third grade, in the late 80s, had 3 commodore machines and a bunch of Apple II's.

In late 1990 I had just gotten a NES and I recall the Amiga being superior. The SNes was simply one weird fantasy from american magazines that fifth graders ogled, back then.

 

Amiga 3000 is the only Amiga with 100% compatible VGA built in. A1200 and A4000 can display VGA scanrates, but as there is no hardware scandoubler any game which forces a 15KHz display mode will NOT work without a hardware scandoubler. A3000 can also be a bit wonky with compatibility on older games (especially games that have hardcoded delay routines intended for the 68000, or with games that rely on an earlier revision of Kickstart, although you can softkick an A3000 to 1.3).

If you want VGA that works with self-booting games, you have two choices - either get an A3000, or use a hardware flicker-fixer with any other Amiga. Either one will likely set you back a bit of money. A3000's do tend to come with at least 4MB RAM (and possibly up to 16MB), and most come with some sort of hard drive (mine came with 100MB, any drive up to 4GB should work flawlessly, out-of-the-box anything bigger would require OS3.5 or newer).

 

hmmm of what i have read on the little danish amiga forum some of them, have put 128 MB of ram in some of their amigas but it has something to do with an addon card.

 

Was the Amiga compatible with standard IDE hard disks, and could the floppy drives be replaced with normal 3.5" bay PC ones?

Strangely enough, despite the Amiga being the more popular computer, I had a lot more experience with the Atari ST and Acorn Archimedes (anyone who went to school in the UK in the early 90's will DEFINATELY have used one of those!). I remember the my friends' ST being a dodgy piece of crap that rarely loaded games properly (they had to send it back once) and pretty much only had inferior ports of games from the Amiga and other systems. I remember Out Run took several eions to load. The Archemedies was a pretty cool machine - it seemed far superior to the PCs of the early-mid 90's, especially the higher models like the 5000 and 7000 with CD-ROM drives et al. But the choice of games on the system was really limited - I remember my friend had to wait like 2-3 YEARS for big games like Wolfenstein 3D and Dune 2 to get ported to the Acorn...

 

Yes, there are addon Zorro-III cards for the A3000 and A4000 that can accept up to 128MB RAM (using standard 72-pin SIMMs, IIRC). A3000s and A4000s are limited to 16MB on the motherboard, without one of these boards. Other Amigas that used the Zorro-II bus were limited to 8MB, I believe (although there were some CPU accelerators that supported more RAM on the accelerator itself, these were mostly like the GVP accels that only worked with GVP proprietary 32-bit SIMMs). A3000s (and the A2000 variants such at A2500 that came with a hard drive) came with SCSI controllers onboard, A600/A1200/A4000 came with IDE onboard. I do believe there are also IDE controllers for all the Amiga models, which of course is extra money but it does mean you can use an IDE drive on the Amiga.

PC drives must be modified to make them work with an Amiga. I forget the specifics, but you can't just swap them out and have them work.

 

It was pretty funny how UK schools were convinced to buy the Archemedies, not only that, parents too. The computers for schools etc, the kids having to have the same computers hah.

Was a cool machine granted, our school had 3 pcs, the rest Acorn Archemedies of various types to replace the BBC Micro. I guess they were easier to use, more suited for kids.

Fervour was a wicked game, shame there werent more like it, bet it could do some good stuff given proper development.

 

An Amiga 600 HD with at least 1mb. of memory expansion is a nice looking gaming machine.
I'd a Kickrom switcher installed for compatibility issues (Kick 1.2) - but there's no HDD support under Kick 1.2.
Second problem is that the Amiga 600 really misses the numeric type block. Ever tried playing F16 Falcon and Eye of the Beholder without that? It plain sucks !

 

Damn right! Man, I so regret selling my pretty complete A1200 set (A1200, mouse, joysticks, RGB monitor, loads of floppies/booklets, a few boxed games) for 30e
:smt022 :smt022 :smt022 :smt022

 

There's no AutoConfig support, you mean (bug in the Kickstart). There should be no problem with mounting a hard drive after the system is booted (IIRC, early hard drive controllers required booting from floppy).

Pedantic, I know. But that's me =P