Adam’s Amiga page

As part of my internetwork ecology PhD project I’ve been writing some sections which I guess are personal historical narratives relating to how I’ve come to having these ideas in the first place. The idea to write these auto-ethnographic sorts of pieces came from reading those ‘internet memoir’ kinds of texts (such as the writing of Howard Rheingold, Julian Dibbell, John Seabrook, Dinty Moore and so on).

Integral to such a tale are my formative experiences with the Commodore Amiga computer.

I’ve also collected a lot of links to various places on the web that have historical information on the Amiga scene as it was, and also information on the contemporary scene where the Amiga is undergoing a revival of sorts. A big part of the present-day scene is the Amiga emulation community. I have posted some links to software that gives your computer the ability to run amiga disk images (ROMs), just for that nostalgic experience.

So if you are interested then scroll down and take a look at what I’ve collected.

I will annotate this with the links when I get a chance. Come back another time! :D
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Brief Personal Backstory

In 1991 my family purchased our first home PC (in the days when the term PC was not synonymous with IBM/Wintel machines). That computer was a Commodore Amiga 500 (revision number ). We hooked it up to the television and were amazed at what you could do with it.

Prior to getting a computer in our home I had used the Apple II computers in primary school, and I’d become interested in the NES console - so at first I was a bit non-plussed because it wasn’t a gaming console. But that disappointment didn’t last long because with the A500 you could play games that were way better than console games AND do all the other stuff that real computers could do.

The Amiga was a workhorse compare to many of the other PCs in the market at that time. It was ahead of it’s time, it was just unfortunate that some poor marketing decisions at Commodore ended things in the mid-90s.

During the years that it was active (1991 until about 1998) I used my A500 for mostly playing video games, let’s be frank about that one - but I also used it for creating graphics, 3D landscape stuff, basic animations, word processing, CAD drawing, music programming, audio sampling, and it was where I first dabbled with programming in a few different languages. You would be hard-pressed to find a PC computer from that era that could do all of that straight out of the box with no costly hardware upgrades.

I am proud to say that I used my Amiga computer for the whole of my High School life and also for the first two years of my university career, even though by that time I had been using ‘real computers’ at University that surpassed the power of my little old A500.

I would write my essays on my A500 at home, and using my CrossDOS software I could move the document as a plain ascii text file to a PC formatted floppy that I had created for just such a purpose, and I could load up the text file on the windows3.1 machines (yes, the university still had not moved to windows 95 in student labs and this was 1997!). I would then format the text in MS-Word and and print it out on the shiny laser printer in 14 point Times New Roman. Ah, the old computer lab in the EDA building.

I can’t remember exactly when it was that I stopped using the A500. It eventually went into the wardrobe for storage. In 2002 while searching on the web for some other childhood memories on I came across some Amiga software archives which is when I first discovered that there was an emulator for the old Commodore Amiga (as well as many other emulators).

In an effort to restore some of my old data from that time I found the WinUAE software which included the Amiga Explorer application, which allowed a user to network the amiga to another computer via a serial connection. I was curious about getting the amiga to network with my PC so I went out and bought a PC serial cable (otherwise known as a LapLink cable) which cost me quite a bit of money ($30 or so) for a pesky cable. The old amiga was a bit dirty but I hooked it up to a small spare television and loaded up my WorkToolz disk. The worktoolz was a “custom” workbench disk that I made which contained a whole bunch of software including Directory OPUS, Textengine, the Devpac Editor, a virus detector program, the lha file compressor, and some other odds and ends. There were a couple of versions of the WorkToolz that I created, with different front ends or menus and things that I experimented with. The one I used all the time was the one that booted straight into dOpus by default. Perhaps I might post an ADF of the worktools some time :)

Anyway, so I booted up the old amiga software and was able to “Talk” to the amiga from my PC via the serial link. The Amiga Explorer software allowed you to create an ADF file from the contents of the amiga’s 1.44” floppy drive – so I was able to restore a bunch of data from the old days.
I even found some old archives of files from the early 1990s, including a diary of sorts (even then I was blogging!). I had to laugh when I tried to open the lha files on my PC and they asked for a password! :D The irony being that I can’t remember the password, so my data security policy was indeed a sound one. Do I have to bruteforce my own archives? :)

Amiga Emulation

Amiga emulation software is available for all of the major computer platforms.

The two major programs are UAE and Fellow. I use UAE on both my gnu/linux desktop computer and also on my windows notebook computer. I imagine most people coming here might be interested in the Windows version: WinUAE. I recommend getting one of the older versions of UAE because it is not as technical - it’s customisable so you can try different amiga configurations, but sometimes all those options can be confusing.

I have used Fellow on my windows notebook a handful of times so I am not as familiar with it, but my impressions are that it does not have as detailed setup options which may appeal to new users.

Both pieces of software are free software available to download from the internet.

A company by the name of Cloanto distributes a software bundle called Amiga Forever which is commercially available in a variety of forms, the least of which is the emulation software above. The special versions of the software package come with additional legally licenced games and demo programs for you to use, as well as some good archival sort of material for those interested in the historical dimension, or for nostalgia purposes. I personally have the complete 2006 premium version which comes as two CDs and a DVD of video material. You get a downloadable version of the installer, and they will send you the package in the mail with the extra discs. Also included is a hybrid version of the Knoppix GNU/Linux LiveCD which has AmigaOS 3.0 running in the UAE emulator on top of Knoppix. It’s neat because it boots up straight from the CD and doesn’t touch your computer’s hard drive.

The only catch is that the software that existed on the amiga’s internal ROM hardware is still subject to copyright. In order to run the emulator software you need a ROM of some kind as well as the workbench GUI software. The moral assumption is that you are an Amiga enthusiast who will create a ROM file for your own purposes from the Amiga hardware that you own. Also, you can get ROMs with the Cloanto bundle which includes the license to use them.

Further to that point most amiga software is proprietary software that is still subject to copyright protection. As such it is illegal to possess a copy of any ADF images that you don’t own the originals of already.

Oh, a very quick disclaimer if you are new to this whole emulator scene: the way the Commodore Amiga computers worked (in particular the A500) is that you would boot up off a diskette (the little 3.5” disks formatted for amigaDOS at 880K) and everything ran from floppies. Harddisk drives were available but not as common when I got my A500. I certainly couldn’t afford one, although my cousins had a 8mb (that’s 8 mega bytes) drive for whatever reason.

Like most software out there, you would be surprised at what you can find on the internet if you look hard enough – both ROMs and quality ADF images.

I’ll come back soon with some more links and things…