h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

- All Amigas from the first A1000 right through to the A1200 had the names of B52's singles burned onto the motherboards.

- The A1000 didn't have a kickstart ROM chip (like a BIOS chip on a PC) due to time constraints. Instead, it had to be loaded in from floppy disk before it would accept the Workbench disk or games.

- Microsoft (boo hiss! ) bundled a BASIC interpreter with Workbench back in the days when they were just establishing themselves as "a bunch of money grabbing jerks who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes".

- The Amiga HAM Mode, was not actually supposed to exist in the final product, but the developers gave it a reprieve when they found out that half of the graphics chip would have to be removed.

I had always been impressed by the Amigas ability to scroll things like text around the screen very smoothly and quickly. The default microsoft text-scrolling screensaver was very jerky even on machines hundreds of times more powerful than an A1200.
The way the amiga handled slices meant that you could have two `screens` on the monitor displayed at different resolutions, that was always fun to show off to PC owners too (well, at the time :> )
When I finally put my Amiga on the top shelf and started using a PC I was (and am still) very fustrated with MS's simpleton operation system.

We still use our Amiga for sequencing music.

Last time I was in a Virgin Megastore, they were still using an Amiga for handling their video screen displays.

Bless it's little cotton socks.

Completely forgot I was subscribed to this entry

Even nowadays with cutting edge graphics cards you're hard pushed to run two screens in one at different resolutions at a decent frame rate.

My Amiga, even though it's no longer my main computer still gets a good airing every now and again, mostly for simple graphics stuff (don't have Photoshop or Paintshop Pro so I make do with Personal Paint which is just as good and easier to use IMO )

Also do a bit of dabbling with OctaMED Soundstudio, or I did until I found that there was a windoze version.

Hi Croz :>
I used Soundstudio quite a lot, it was always quite fun getting 16 or so sound channels out of a machine that only had 4 channels.
It reminds me of the multi-channel music that the 48K Spectrum could produce :> Sort of all fuzzy.
Both the Spectrum and Amiga were machines that were impressive because you could 'push them to the limit' - lots of megademos etc. Nowadays on PC's you just slap in a bigger graphics card. I still remember the 'wow' factor of Alien Breed 3D, even though I had been playing Doom on the PC.

Call me old skool (or something), but I never progressed as far as OctaMED SoundStudio. I can't remember what version of MED I did use, but I remember that eight channels seemed like an extravagance at the time. Especially as I'd only just upgraded from a Dragon 32

BTW the 48k Speccy had a simple beeper; it was the 128s that had the (three channel, IIRC) AY chip that could do cool things like white noise and envelope modification. And remaining on the subject of old-skoolitude, I definitely stuck with the first Alien Breed game for ages (and used to play it at around midnight, then be unable to sleep for the rest of the night). Frontier:Elite II is the first 3D game I remember.

It's the 'simple beeper' that I'm referring to :> It was capable of creating multi-channel sounding music by using interrupts and things - had a distinctly grungy sound. The 128K chip had a very clean sound in comparision (being _actually_ multi channel) - pings and noise.
Favourite 48K game music: Dark Fusion
Favourite 128K game music: Silkworm, Hostages, lots of others
Favourite Amiga game music: Super Stardust (the Team 17 game)

Frontier was the first game I got for the Amiga and I thought 'WOW!' to the title sequence :>

I never got Super Stardust. I had an A600 back then, played Stardust and thought "this is cool". But I didn't get a 1200 until after the demise of Commodore, and picked up what games I could from car boots etc. Oh well, at least there's the new AmigaOne to look forward to (except that by the time you can buy a complete system, it'll be obsolete ).

The Amiga OS was fantastic. I hope the continuation is successful. However: "When you reach the last page of the book, it's time to close the covers"
I also like the Amiga music from Liberation (a sort of futuristic Dungeon Master game) a lot.