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The Official AMIGA "Rosetinted" Thread

hesido

Member
Nice drawing hesido! Deluxe Paint?
I made some terrible attempts at making art with Deluxe Paint but mostly logos and animations, still had tons of fun, making art with Photoshop on high res monitors is not nearly as fun, it's something special when you're putting every single pixel right where you want them without a bunch of plugin effects helping you out.

We used Brilliance, I think it was a better graphics tool than Deluxe Paint :)

I remember doing tons of logo-flying animations for the heck of it. The "3d effect" always wowed me.
 

SID 6581

Member
8CTFB5O.jpg



That was it!

The third microswitched joystick I loved!

Thank you, I'd forgotten about that gem.

Back on C64 my faves were:

Konix Speedking

wBAAg6i.jpg


Then in '88 the Navigator:

ytJKvYI.jpg


Navigator was great but the stick movement was a bit too much for the most difficult games.

Eventually I used some old Atari 2600 one button joysticks for the hardest games. I remember buying one new in UK Birmingham Toys'R'Us around 1989. They had quite a few in stock.

Prob nostalgia but those cheap leaf switches seemed pretty accurate (when they worked)
 

Mascot

Member
The Quickshot II was my C64 and Amiga joystick for many years. It's amazing that it didn't put me off video games for life - a dead fish nailed to a beer mat would have offered better control.

quickshot.jpg
 

hesido

Member
The Quickshot II was my C64 and Amiga joystick for many years. It's amazing that it didn't put me off video games for life - a dead fish nailed to a beer mat would have offered better control.

quickshot.jpg

Yes, this is what I used for so long. I remember having to get it fixed several times (brought it over to TV repairmen, it had springs connected to small metal "leafs", with a distinct click sound. It broke too easily!) Later moved to QuickShot Python 1 which had a soft mechanism.
 

Mascot

Member
Yes, this is what I used for so long. I remember having to get it fixed several times (brought it over to TV repairmen, it had springs connected to small metal "leafs", with a distinct click sound. It broke too easily!) Later moved to QuickShot Python 1 which had a soft mechanism.

I had to grip the stick near the base to get any sort of control, then adjust hand position to press one of the buttons. It was awful..!
Joystick design back then seemed to pre-date ergonomics.
 

Outrun

Member
I remember that the 1MB RAM upgrade opened a new world for me.

Top demos for me...

-That Star Trek one with the Enterprise leaving The space construction dock

Top games...

Lotus Turbo II
Jaguar XJ220
Ik+
Turrican 2
Shadow of the Beast
Xenon 2
Speedball 2
Sensi
Kick Off 2 (Dino Dini)
 
My personal favorite was the Quickshot Python 1, of which I still own 2 mint in boxes, almost unused.

And I can't believe how awful they are as far as controllers go. I mean, seriously, wtf..

Amiga was the best, always will be the best. I bought about 100 diskettes and a gotek recently, and I'm in the process of rebuilding a library of Amiga game floppies in my free time. Going back and replaying some of these things moists my eyes.
 
This was the best Amiga (and C64/VIC-20/Atari 600 etc.) joystick IMO, the Suzo Arcade:
1486.jpg


I went to the Amiga 30 years event in Amsterdam on June 27th and met RJ Mical, Carl Sassenrath and Dave Haynie there, they all signed my Amiga 500, which was awesome.

Then I showed RJ Mical, who also worked on designing the custom chipset of the Atari Lynx, my Lynx port of the Amiga Boing Ball Demo, which he originally developed.
He was surprisingly enthousiastic about it and signed my Lynx as well.

I never expected to ever meet original developers of the Amiga, it was an awesome day.
 

hesido

Member
This was the best Amiga (and C64/VIC-20/Atari 600 etc.) joystick IMO, the Suzo Arcade:
1486.jpg


I went to the Amiga 30 years event in Amsterdam on June 27th and met RJ Mical, Carl Sassenrath and Dave Haynie there, they all signed my Amiga 500, which was awesome.

Then I showed RJ Mical, who also worked on designing the custom chipset of the Atari Lynx, my Lynx port of the Amiga Boing Ball Demo, which he originally developed.
He was surprisingly enthousiastic about it and signed my Lynx as well.

I never expected to ever meet original developers of the Amiga, it was an awesome day.

What an honour!

I've found the stop motion animation we did! (titles made on a PC, everything else on an Amiga) I uploaded it to youtube now and used an online gif converter:
pdVtBDO.gif


Had to cut first few seconds and last few seconds because of converter limitations.

And here's the youtube version:
https://youtu.be/S7j8SJ6pJSs
 

Silent D

Neo Member
Oh, the horror

"Commodore" smartphone to be released (using generic low cost mediatek platform)
Wow, that's really.. something. I guess Commodore brand does still have interest in order to do something like this.

I feel this thread is seriously lacking TAC-2s. Here's two of them. As you can see, it is possible to break them. The middle one is made in China and seems way crappier than the original on the right. The one in the left is Prof Competition 9000. Not the Competition Pro, although quite similar. I'd say these are my go-to joysticks. I have a lot of old joystiks somewhere. A lot of crappy ones.


Also, I do remember that the Terminator was in fact quite good. A friend of mine bought that back in the day because of the looks (and because joysticks broke all the time), but he ended up using that a lot.

 
I was looking at a bunch of Amiga auctions, trying to complete the collection of games I used to have.

While I'm at it, I'd like to rescue some ancient picture files (and possibly Amiga Basic files, if at all possible). There's now a flash card adapter for Amiga 1200. My computer didn't come with any disks that I know of, so I don't have a recent Workbench. If I get a WB3.0 disk, the adapter and a flash card, do I need anything else to grab files off the Amiga? Can I just mount that as a "hard drive" and copy files off Amiga (500) floppies, and then get a reader for the same flash card for PC? Or are there additional steps?
 

Turrican3

Member
This was the best Amiga (and C64/VIC-20/Atari 600 etc.) joystick IMO, the Suzo Arcade:
1486.jpg
Absolutely.
Still own two of these little beasts: one of them was thrown out of the window (it's a long story lol), took an unwanted ~25m flight, hit the ground and just got its shell barely scratched. Talk about excellent build quality. ^__^
(needless to say, they're both still working flawlessly after 20+ years)

PS: glad you were able to attend Amiga30. I wish I could too, but I became aware of the show a mere two days before so getting a plane was extremely expensive. :-(

===============

Now, on a completely different note... I've just bought one of those infamous Gotek USB floppy emulators.

I was wondering: theoretically speaking, would it be possible to use a hardware copier (Cyclone or stuff like that) together with an external Gotek drive to backup original, protected floppies in ADF format?

I still own a bunch of original games, and I'd like to know if this might work for stuff that has no WHDload support (or even for use with unexpanded Amigas where it could turn out being unpractical or even plainly impossible to use it, i.e. due to lack of enough extra RAM)
 
Too bad you couldn't attend the Amiga30 event, it was really great, though looking at the videos I missed lots of things.

I still have a number of Suzo Arcade sticks, including my original one, one with a clicky firebutton, a C-64 colored one and the one with an extra button on top of the stick.
They are totally family and friends proof, but they do kill your hands after prolonged use :^)
 

Turrican3

Member
Too bad you couldn't attend the Amiga30 event, it was really great
Yep, looking at various videos shared via Youtube I'm sure it must have been an unforgettable experience.

You can clearly see people like RJ were (are?!) soooo crazy* and passionate about what they were doing...

* = in a good way! ^_^
 

dofry

That's "Dr." dofry to you.
I have an iMac. How would I go about playing Amiga games on it? Explain like you're speaking to a child.

No need to really write in detail as it is simple. The instructions::
http://fs-uae.net/getting-started

1. You need to dowload the emulator
2. You need to buy or transfer kickstarter roms
3. You need the games

It's all in there and this FS-UAE software was really simple to use.
 
Well.. This thread seems rather dead and I really think it shouldn't be. Alas, I'll try to revive it by pimping a recent piece of hardware I bought, the ACA500Plus by Individual Computers.

miniaturka_duza_58629a1b46c86.jpg


It's basically a modern A500 accelerator with a Motorola 68EC000 CPU at 14Mhz (which can comfortably be OC'ed to 42MHz), KickStart 3.1/1.3/1.2, 8MB Fast Ram, 8MB Flash ROM (which comes with all Workbench 3.1 floppies on it, and you can add custom kickstarts to softboot from), incorporates an Action Replay III, two Compact Flash ports which can hassle-free use Compact Flash cards greater than 4GB (thanks to injection of resident updated scsi.device) as boot or storage hard drives using any Amiga File System as well as FAT95 (yes you can boot FAT95). Oh, and it's compatible with ACA12xx accelerator boards so you can keep expanding that way.

So go ahead and buy it. I don't know any better way to celebrate the 30th birthday of the Amiga 500 (born January 1987). :)
 

eso76

Member
So..

There's still no such thing as an USB device capable of reading Amiga floppy disks, right ?
I know about that interface that allows you to connect your amiga external floppy disk drive to a serial PC port, but i was looking for something more practical : |
 

Mascot

Member
So..

There's still no such thing as an USB device capable of reading Amiga floppy disks, right ?
I know about that interface that allows you to connect your amiga external floppy disk drive to a serial PC port, but i was looking for something more practical : |

I'd love something like this too - I found my old game index disc recently where I listed every Amiga game I owned
(which was every Amiga game in existence, thanks X-Copy Pro)
along with short one-line reviews. I even did an animated title screen with music. Ah... memories.
 

ffvorax

Member
Played so many games on my Amiga 500...

Wings was so beautifull, also I backed the remake! (that comes with and Amiga emulated version of the original :D)

Lionheart, Sensible Soccer, Kick Off, Blues Brothers, Hostages, PBD, 9 Lives,Battle Chess... countless games! Actually there was a store that rented games so I had played a LOT! And my older brother proceeded to copy each of the rented copy... actually the store had an option to sell pirated copy of the games made by himself for few money... XD

Also had so many joystick broken... lol
 

sloppyjoe_gamer

Gold Member
Oh man, the memories.....LOVED my Amiga 500!! I thought Psygnosis's Blood Money had the most badass intro ever. I loved Sword of Sodan too lol...played that game to death, along with Space Ace and the Dragon's Lair games.

It also introduced me to Cinemaware's games. Had a blast with It Came from the Desert, and Wings.

lol me and my friends would fire up the program that would "say" what you typed and we would write out these long ass paragraphs of stupid things and then prank call people and when they'd answer the phone, we'd hit enter and let the program say what we typed.
 
So..

There's still no such thing as an USB device capable of reading Amiga floppy disks, right ?
I know about that interface that allows you to connect your amiga external floppy disk drive to a serial PC port, but i was looking for something more practical : |

Please explain why you need this? Because there are much better ways of doing this than physically reading the Amiga floppies.
 

Elandyll

Banned
Bought Viva Amiga this week end, and gotta admit I was a bit disappointed, even if it did scratch that nostalgia itch.

It is very short (1h04min), and relies extensively on lengthy "Amiga-style" bad 3D for transitions, ending up feeling a lot like filler.
The interviews are great, but somehow participants feel like either they were pressed by time and were rushing, or the questions weren't that great to begin with maybe.
Participants repeated themselves a lot, stayed very surface, and didn't deliver a lot of anecdotes (there are a few). Jay Miner being (mostly) absent was a miss, in spite of RJ Mical's entertaining delivery.

The structure itself left me pondering though: We go from the design and initial start which was mostly great (would have liked more about the atmosphere and anecdotes), to the shenanigans with Tramiel and Comodore's Acquisition, to the lavish launch in 1985... To suddenly jump to 1993 and the fall, after just a very short middle segment propping up Newtek (admitedly a big part of Amiga's history) and Deluxe Paint.
In spite of RJ clearly describing the Amiga as a game machine that could do a lot more, games are barely mentionned at all (prefering to position the Amiga as the "cool MacIntosh" for creatives before Macs were cool).

Things that imo should have been included, even at a higher cost (the video is "only" $9.99):
-Interviews with EA managers from the time. EA and the Amiga early years were very, very entwined (and showcasing not only Deluxe Paint, but also F/A 18, Westwood titles like Lands of Lore or Eye of the Beholder, and of course Bard's Tales).
-Interview from Kiki Stockhammer, whose image (she is back at Newtek) was so strongly associated with the Amiga at trade shows
- Interview with CG producers for Babylon5 (Lightwave, yes it's another Newtek product, but it was huge on Amiga).
- From Lightwave, go into the 3D scene which really started on Amiga (Autodesk/ 3D Studio on PC was born out of CAD). Imagine, Cinema4D, Aladdin, etc.
- The demo scene got practically no mention
- Cinemaware was not mentionned, in spite of its titles probably having sold a ton of Amigas (Defender of the Crown, Rocket Ranger, It Came from the Desert...)
- No mention of Rainbow Arts for German devs, which was huge then. On the music side, Chris Huelsbeck should have been interviewed to talk music (which was barely touched on to show the Amiga had great sound, but never went in depth on the actual chipset, or the graphic one for that matter).
Showing screaming DJs using the Amiga still was... interesting. But in no way representing the larger possibilities or history.
Same for AV... there was so much more...
Including the DPS PVR which was revolutionary for its time in features and price point.

In the end, I think the most frustrating aspect is that this documentary is trying to walk on two lines at the same time: the fans and their nostalgia, and also the general public (can't go in depth then) in case this is ever shown on The History Channel or something.

You can only repeat "the Amiga was revolutionary" so much, while showing Deb Harris' bad video scan being filled with a yellow fill bucket by Warhol, or the Video Toaster with Penn and Teller doing terrible 80s video effects... but all the while not explaining really why it was so great to the larger audience.
It probably makes little sense to them, and the fans, while appreciating to see that part of Amiga history, would also like a more in depth look.

Edit: weirdly missing, a retrospective of the Actual Amiga models reviewed, and explanation as per the existence of 2 separate lines of Amigas (the 500 line and the 2000 line, the 1000 having been the "prototype" of sorts). Otoh they extensively went on about the X1000/ X5000 (current machine for OS 4.1), which is I guess probably a condition given for some interviews...
 
Bought Viva Amiga this week end, and gotta admit I was a bit disappointed, even if it did scratch that nostalgia itch.

I've heard similar impressions about Viva Amiga but haven't watched it yet.

While reading up about that documentary, I also realized that From Bedrooms to Billions: The Amiga Years has been out for a while now and it seems people are recommending it as a decent Amiga documentary (I've watched the original and loved it). In any case, I've now got a couple of Amiga documentaries to watch which is a great thing in itself, the only problem is finding the time (FBTB:TAY is two and a half hours long I think).
 

mitchman

Gold Member
I still have my 2000/040 28Mhz and 4000/040 somewhere in storage. Doubt they'll work now, though :) I owe the Amiga my programming career, it thought me how to do programming (doing Thor, a offline mail/news/everything reader) and I've been doing web browsers the last 15 years. Had a fantastic time programming on the Amiga with its rich api, still unchallenged in many aspects in modern OSes to this day.
 
I still have my 2000/040 28Mhz and 4000/040 somewhere in storage. Doubt they'll work now, though :) I owe the Amiga my programming career, it thought me how to do programming (doing Thor, a offline mail/news/everything reader) and I've been doing web browsers the last 15 years. Had a fantastic time programming on the Amiga with its rich api, still unchallenged in many aspects in modern OSes to this day.

Wtf you wrote Thor???
 

Elandyll

Banned
I've heard similar impressions about Viva Amiga but haven't watched it yet.

While reading up about that documentary, I also realized that From Bedrooms to Billions: The Amiga Years has been out for a while now and it seems people are recommending it as a decent Amiga documentary (I've watched the original and loved it). In any case, I've now got a couple of Amiga documentaries to watch which is a great thing in itself, the only problem is finding the time (FBTB:TAY is two and a half hours long I think).
Thanks for the ref, looks like the special ed of FBTB:TAY is more what I'd be looking for.
 

mitchman

Gold Member
Wtf you wrote Thor???

Yeah but it was a small team of people, but I guess I did the majority of the stuff. It was my learn-to-do C project but kindof stopped around '99 when the Amiga was pretty much dead and income shrunk. Got a "real" job then :) It still landed me some nice jobs and we had lots of fun doing it.
 

eso76

Member
Please explain why you need this? Because there are much better ways of doing this than physically reading the Amiga floppies.

Would like to recover all the pixel art I did for dozens of (never released * :p) games, using Deluxe Paint.. and saved on a few dozens floppy disks laying around that haven't been used in decades.

That's assuming those are even readable, which is highly unlikely at this point I think.

* Unless some of them leaked and became available as prototype versions, I'll have to check.
 
Yeah but it was a small team of people, but I guess I did the majority of the stuff. It was my learn-to-do C project but kindof stopped around '99 when the Amiga was pretty much dead and income shrunk. Got a "real" job then :) It still landed me some nice jobs and we had lots of fun doing it.

Man. Respect. This is so strange its like the Amiga version of how it would feel to meet the coder of Blue Wave or something..

Have you ever made the code public? Would you consider? There is much renewed interest in the amiga now with cheap accelerators and fpga cpus available I wish more people would code for it. Im learnink m86k assembler on an a500..
 
Would like to recover all the pixel art I did for dozens of (never released * :p) games, using Deluxe Paint.. and saved on a few dozens floppy disks laying around that haven't been used in decades.

That's assuming those are even readable, which is highly unlikely at this point I think.

* Unless some of them leaked and became available as prototype versions, I'll have to check.

You can use a gotek or hxc usb floppy emulator with an amiga as a df1 external floppy drive and copy your files on df0 real floppies to adf images on usb/sdhc in df1 then open those images on pc with adf opus.

Do a google search for gotek correx and hxc floppy emulators.

I would be incredibly interested in seeing the art..
 

FlyinJ

Douchebag. Yes, me.
Bought Viva Amiga this week end, and gotta admit I was a bit disappointed, even if it did scratch that nostalgia itch.

It is very short (1h04min), and relies extensively on lengthy "Amiga-style" bad 3D for transitions, ending up feeling a lot like filler.
The interviews are great, but somehow participants feel like either they were pressed by time and were rushing, or the questions weren't that great to begin with maybe.
Participants repeated themselves a lot, stayed very surface, and didn't deliver a lot of anecdotes (there are a few). Jay Miner being (mostly) absent was a miss, in spite of RJ Mical's entertaining delivery.

The structure itself left me pondering though: We go from the design and initial start which was mostly great (would have liked more about the atmosphere and anecdotes), to the shenanigans with Tramiel and Comodore's Acquisition, to the lavish launch in 1985... To suddenly jump to 1993 and the fall, after just a very short middle segment propping up Newtek (admitedly a big part of Amiga's history) and Deluxe Paint.
In spite of RJ clearly describing the Amiga as a game machine that could do a lot more, games are barely mentionned at all (prefering to position the Amiga as the "cool MacIntosh" for creatives before Macs were cool).

Things that imo should have been included, even at a higher cost (the video is "only" $9.99):
-Interviews with EA managers from the time. EA and the Amiga early years were very, very entwined (and showcasing not only Deluxe Paint, but also F/A 18, Westwood titles like Lands of Lore or Eye of the Beholder, and of course Bard's Tales).
-Interview from Kiki Stockhammer, whose image (she is back at Newtek) was so strongly associated with the Amiga at trade shows
- Interview with CG producers for Babylon5 (Lightwave, yes it's another Newtek product, but it was huge on Amiga).
- From Lightwave, go into the 3D scene which really started on Amiga (Autodesk/ 3D Studio on PC was born out of CAD). Imagine, Cinema4D, Aladdin, etc.
- The demo scene got practically no mention
- Cinemaware was not mentionned, in spite of its titles probably having sold a ton of Amigas (Defender of the Crown, Rocket Ranger, It Came from the Desert...)
- No mention of Rainbow Arts for German devs, which was huge then. On the music side, Chris Huelsbeck should have been interviewed to talk music (which was barely touched on to show the Amiga had great sound, but never went in depth on the actual chipset, or the graphic one for that matter).
Showing screaming DJs using the Amiga still was... interesting. But in no way representing the larger possibilities or history.
Same for AV... there was so much more...
Including the DPS PVR which was revolutionary for its time in features and price point.

In the end, I think the most frustrating aspect is that this documentary is trying to walk on two lines at the same time: the fans and their nostalgia, and also the general public (can't go in depth then) in case this is ever shown on The History Channel or something.

You can only repeat "the Amiga was revolutionary" so much, while showing Deb Harris' bad video scan being filled with a yellow fill bucket by Warhol, or the Video Toaster with Penn and Teller doing terrible 80s video effects... but all the while not explaining really why it was so great to the larger audience.
It probably makes little sense to them, and the fans, while appreciating to see that part of Amiga history, would also like a more in depth look.

Edit: weirdly missing, a retrospective of the Actual Amiga models reviewed, and explanation as per the existence of 2 separate lines of Amigas (the 500 line and the 2000 line, the 1000 having been the "prototype" of sorts). Otoh they extensively went on about the X1000/ X5000 (current machine for OS 4.1), which is I guess probably a condition given for some interviews...

This documentary that came out a few months ago is way better:

http://www.frombedroomstobillions.com/amiga
 

eso76

Member
You can use a gotek or hxc usb floppy emulator with an amiga as a df1 external floppy drive and copy your files on df0 real floppies to adf images on usb/sdhc in df1 then open those images on pc with adf opus.

Do a google search for gotek correx and hxc floppy emulators.

I would be incredibly interested in seeing the art..

Sounds complicated but I'll read about the process more carefully later.
I spent years crafting those backdrops and sprites pixel by pixel and I was very proud of the results. Shame on me for not taking better care of my work.
 
Sounds complicated but I'll read about the process more carefully later.
I spent years crafting those backdrops and sprites pixel by pixel and I was very proud of the results. Shame on me for not taking better care of my work.

Mail the disks to me of you wish I can copy them to adf images or a hard drive and share them with you.
 
I might just do that if you don't mind, i'll send a PM

I don't mind, would be happy to help.

EDIT: I just tested my proposed method above and managed to rip my own disks to ADF and access the files on them on PC, feel free to send me a PM whenever you feel like it.
 

mitchman

Gold Member
Man. Respect. This is so strange its like the Amiga version of how it would feel to meet the coder of Blue Wave or something..

Have you ever made the code public? Would you consider? There is much renewed interest in the amiga now with cheap accelerators and fpga cpus available I wish more people would code for it. Im learnink m86k assembler on an a500..

No, we haven't really discussed it at all. But never say never.
 

Turrican3

Member
Otoh they extensively went on about the X1000/ X5000 (current machine for OS 4.1), which is I guess probably a condition given for some interviews...
Trevor Dickinson is credited as "executive producer" in the trailer, so that might be the explaination.
 

Gozan

Member
Yeah but it was a small team of people, but I guess I did the majority of the stuff. It was my learn-to-do C project but kindof stopped around '99 when the Amiga was pretty much dead and income shrunk. Got a "real" job then :) It still landed me some nice jobs and we had lots of fun doing it.

One of the most disappointing things about switching to PC was to discover there was no Thor for Windows.

You're Norwegian, right?
 
It's sad that an official Amiga thread started 10 years ago, only has 18 pages and it's first bump in 2 years. I never knew this thread existed.

I never owned an Amiga myself, but I had two cousins that had Amiga 500s and I envied the hell outta them. When we'd visit, I'd disappear to their computer rooms and my parents would have to come in and drag me out to the car at leaving time lol.

The memories:

- GODS
- Lemmings
- Chase HQ
- Batman
- Ghostbusters II
- Crazy Cars
- Rick Dangerous
- Cannon Fodder
- Another World
- Monkey Island
- The Chaos Engine
- Sensible Soccer
- Turrican
- International Karate
- Defender of the Crown
- Speedball 2
- Supercars
- Flashback
- SWIV
- Championship Manager

And on and on and on and on and on.
 
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