My Amiga and Atari ST Collection
Being a cold, wet, and dark weekend I decided it was high time that I dug out my remaining Commodore Amiga and Atari ST machines from the back of the garage.
It was very wet and cold, so when I brought them into the warm they immediately got covered with condensation. I will definitely have to let them acclimate before powering them on.
Yes, looking at them now, I probably do have too many. I blame the pandemic! Some people took up baking sour dough, I collected computers I didn't have back in the day or that I did have and I miss owning.
Back in the day we (and by 'we' I mean my big brother) bought the Atari ST because it was £100 cheaper than the Amiga, plus everyone we knew who had upgraded to a 16 bit machine did the same thing.
Well, apart from one wealthier family who had both.
I always wanted am Amiga, though, so that is probably why I’ve so many now.
That said, I’ve been very lucky at picking up “parts or repairs” computers on eBay. Some of them only needed a little TLC and my small but obviously enough electronics abilities to breathe life back into them.
All of them at minimum required a good and thorough cleaning.
It's understandable that the people who sold them after unearthing machines from Grandpa's shed don't necessarily have technical knowledge or motivation.
Mostly I had to use a cloth, screwdriver, and isopropyl alcohol.
But not all of them were a bargain - indeed, a couple I did over-pay for via Facebook marketplace.
Some I upgraded with modern convenience features, RAM, storage, and so on, plus one has an FPGA inside.
What a great collection, sadly I had to sell all mine off during lockdown to pay bills. I’m just using emulation now, it’s not as good as original hardware but I still get my fix. I still load up octamed to mess with Amiga music as if it wasn’t for the Amiga I’d have never got into music production. Back in the 90s my setup consisted of an Amiga 1200, with a 80mb (if I remember right) hd fitted, squirrel cdrom and my favourite add on a blizzard 030/50 accelerator with 16mb of ram lol. I loved my Amiga, those were the days when companies innovated, to better the competition, now it feels like everything is stagnant, other than a faster this and that now days, there’s nothing else.
I think I had a 040/33 board in my 1200, but it went years ago. Wish I'd kept it, but I wonder if I'd use it. I had a lot of fun with it before I gave in and got a PC as the Amiga brand died off. I've used Linux for a long time and that has a similar sort of community about it.
I’ve only ever used Linux on a raspberry pi, it’s pretty good on the latest pi, it really does remind me of the Amiga, I loved the demo scene on the ami but as far as I’m aware it’s not very active on the pi, for now anyways.
I remember the Amiga demos. I think that sort of thing still goes on, but I've not kept up with it. I am not a fan of Windows and Linux does all I need.
Yo, that is sick.
!discovery 31
Oh I'm jealous! Wish I still had my A500 and A1200, but they are long gone. Do they go for silly money these days? I know there are collectors for all sorts of old hardware.
Yeah unless you're willing to do some work and you're patient they go for a lot of money. Not long ago you could get them cheap at charity shops but the staff got wise I guess
I do actually have some old gadgets. I ought to do a post about them some time.
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