Mentioning religion or atheism seems to change the boiling point of blood. People go from Zero to Totally Freaked Out in less time than it takes Takeru Kobayashi to eat 53.5 hot dogs.
When I was a kid, it was the same thing, except that religious debates didn’t mean “Christianity versus Atheism” or anything like that.
Oh, no.
No.
It was “Amiga versus Atari ST versus Apple IIGS versus IBM PC versus Macintosh versus…”
And those days scarred me. I spent my earliest years with a Timex Sinclair 1000 until my dad brought home one of the original IBM PC’s. I loved those machines, but was always the victim of those bloody bastards who put hi-res, deceptive screenshots on video game boxes.
I remember getting a copy of Cinemaware’s “The Three Stooges”. The shots on the back of the box were gorgeous. Even though it was probably written down somewhere that they were from an Atari ST (or something similar), I was young, stupid, and believed that the game was going to “look like that” on the IBM.
It did not, of course, “look like that” on the IBM. Rather, it looked like the Easter Bunny had thrown its own pastel poop on the screen and then smeared it around.
The IBM had a four color CGA card, and it could only display those colors at a resolution of 320x200. I didn’t fully comprehend at the time that this was a limitation of the hardware. I thought that the people who did the IBM versions of the games were just crappy coders.
I eventually came around to understand that it wasn’t that the people who did the IBM games were crappy coders – it was that the IBM was a business machine (and an “international” one at that), and that business people don’t like color, so graphics weren’t a priority.
If you wanted graphics, you went with another machine.
Maybe an Atari ST…
An Apple IIGS…
Or, if you were the luckiest little bastard on the planet…
…an Amiga.
I hated the “Amiga Kids”. They were the smug, rich ones who had Everything. Most of them didn’t even realize what that fabulous box was.
Poor kid (me): Do you have a computer?
Rich Kid: Yeah.
Poor Kid (me): What kind? Does it have colors? And sound?
Rich Kid: Yeah. It has all that [yawn].
Poor Kid (me): Wow! What’s it called?
Rich Kid: I don’t know. It’s, like, an “Abeeva” or something.
Poor Kid (me): Do you mean “Amiga”?
Rich Kid: No. That’s not it. It’s definitely, like, “Arteega” or whatever.
Poor Kid (me): Amiga?
Rich Kid: No. “Farfleega”.
Poor Kid (me): AMIGA?
Rich Kid: Yeah. That’s it. It’s OK, I guess [shrug].
Poor Kid (me): [I said nothing at this point. I was too busy trying to figure out how to shoot lasers out of my eyeballs.]
All that power and no brains. It was a sad state.
But that’s all behind me now. “Water under the bridge,” and all that. I really don’t care.
Really. I don’t. I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. It’s cool. Seriously. Leave me alone.
Although that attitude does make it difficult to explain my fascination with Amiga emulation, which I’m sure is not just my inner-child crying, but rather a healthy interest in historical computing that happens to be focused on the machine that ALL THE LITTLE RICH BASTARDS HAD BUT DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO USE AND I WISH I COULD GO BACK IN TIME AND STUFF RABID BATS INTO THEIR SHORTS AND… and…
[ahem]
Like I said, it’s cool - I’m fine.
To feed this “historical interest”, I started messing with Amiga emulators a few years ago. The host machine I was using wasn’t very powerful, though, and there were still many compatibility issues with a lot of the software I wanted to run. I was able to get a basic Amigasperience, but wasn’t able to do all that I wanted. Interested, kind of excited, but mostly disappointed, I walked away from Amiga emulation and chose instead to mend my childhood wounds with hookers and cheap street drugs.
That’s all changed.
I started reading a magazine called “Retro Gamer” a few months ago, and quickly realized that, along with Scientific American Mind, it was going to be the magazine that would have me lurking around local bookstores in anticipation of future issues (note that this behavior has since been curbed slightly by several restraining orders).
Just when I thought I was over Amiga emulation, a recent issue shipped with a “lite” version of Amiga Forever, which is a nice all-in-one Amiga emulation solution. It uses the easily acquired WinUAE emulator, but ships with some perks, documentation, and, most importantly, Amiga ROM’s (or “ROM” singular if you’re using the “lite” version). The big hurdle to getting an Amiga emulator up and running is the acquisition of an Amiga “Kickstart ROM” image, which is required to get the damn thing to boot. The problem is that it’s still under copyright, and it can be hard to find one of these suckers. Provided you own an original Amiga, there are ways to get the ROM from the machine to the emulator, but it all sounds like a pain in the ass, and, as my inner-child will tell you through tear-choked sobs, I don’t have an original Amiga. Amiga Forever, on the other hand, takes care of this problem for you, so you can just start emulating away.
For the past couple weeks, I’ve been messing around with Amiga Forever, and one of the coolest things about the software isn’t just that it emulates Amiga hardware, but that there’s effort being put into emulating the Amiga experience. The main contributing factor is the addition of a “floppy disk sound” that plays when you’re “loading” disk images. I wasn’t expecting to hear it, but when I did, I was blown away by the sheer geeky coolness of it all. As someone who could grunt both the floppy disk and hard disk boot sounds of an original IBM PC, as well as the sounds of a 2400 BAUD modem handshake, I love being able to hear the disks “loading”.
It’s such a small touch, but it makes all the difference.
Anyway, if you’re interested in Amiga emulation, then you ought to check out Amiga Forever. It’s cheap, it works, and you can be up and running with an emulated Amiga in minutes. Even cooler is that Cinemaware has released some of its classic games for free, including my favorite: It Came From the Desert. I spent many a long hour staring into the CRT, blasting away at radioactive ants in that immersive, 50’s throwback.
Also check out Retro Gamer Magazine. I’ve begun re-reading issues because I enjoy it that much, and it’s not like the reviews of games from the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s are going to get any more dated.
Very cool.