User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sat Feb 06, 2016 2:40 pm

Amiga Love is a hobby (passion, obsession, illness) founded by Eric K. Hill (a.k.a. intric8) a designer in Seattle, Washington, USA.

I've only recently been bitten by the Amiga bug. I grew up on the C64 in the 80s. I always wanted an Amiga yet could never afford one.

Time passed, then Nintendo ate my attention along with IBM Frankenstein machines that always left me angry, even though they mostly worked. But the games I wanted to play always seemed to be slightly out of reach technologically. The "minimum requirements" always were a bit more than I had.

In any case, I went from Atari > Vectrex > Coleco > C64 (for a long time) > Apple ][+, which was a mighty step backward > Nintendo NES > SNES/Genesis > IBM monsters alongside the N64, Playstation 1, Dreamcast, ... OS 9 Macs, Wii, (every generation of Nintendo handhelds, including the 3DS today), MacBook Pros...

And then, a couple of years ago, I rebuilt the entire C64 collection I used to have to near-museum quality (minus the piles of pirated software, although I still have quite a lot) and maxed it out to where I wanted it to be. I started playing through all the games I loved, and some I never got the chance to really enjoy. I still have a quite a few I have yet to crack open as the library is vast.

But then, my obsession with games and hardware moved to the Amiga - the machine I remember standing in front of when I was a pimply faced teenager - a total charlatan and poser in this place where things were sold with cold hard cash, literally mouth hanging open at some random computer store with not a single dollar in my pocket. I watched this 3D maquette juggle, then an incredible 3D sphere bounce, and felt like I'd suddenly pulled back a layer of reality and could see into the future. I never forgot that day.

So, Ebay happened.

And, being a tech nerd, after doing my research I landed on the A1200. I purchased a never used brand new A1200 NTSC model ... well, sort of NTSC. It was from Canada and had North American power plugs, but was made in France and boots to PAL by default, which I have to switch most times when I boot. The never-used magnetic hard-drive was a clickety-click brick, so I quickly upgraded it to a 4GB Compact Flash drive.

Got an ACA 1221 expansion board, which rocks, and upgraded it to the max. I plan to put a wifi card in it in the few next weeks... because. I also got a late 90s Panasonic WinXP Toughbook laptop (made of solid metal, weighs a ton). Why? Because it has a floppy drive on it, and I can use the drive or the serial port in the back to, of course, move files to the Amiga. Which I've done.

In any case, I think half the fun for me at this stage is just goofing around with the thing to see how it ticks. I have a lot to learn, but am starting to figure things out. I'm a little biased - the "best games ever" for the Amiga seem to pale next to the SNES, especially the ones where you use a joystick and mouse at the same time (*cough Heimdall 2 *cough) but the dungeon crawlers are simply magnificent, if not perversely difficult. I can't imagine playing some of these games back when I was 13. I might have gone insane. Then again, some of the C64 games were impossible, too. But my weekly pirate stash back then gave me enough distractions if I got too frustrated.

I've created this forum to create an archive of issues I've resolved along the way, where finding documentation was nearly impossible or scattered across the Web in tiny fragments. My hope is this forum develops into a community over time, but only time will tell.

If you need to contact me about this forum, for now PM me here on this forum (preferred) or ping me on Twitter here or here .

Welcome to Amiga Love, and see you around!





Return to “Member Intros”