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From something like 1990 on, I’ve been an avid Amiga user (or believer, fanatic, activist, etc.). For years, the Amiga and the people and activities (largely demoscene-related around it were consuming a major part of my free time. Those were some great times, until it all went south with Commodore screwing up et al, “we” were on the cutting edge of technology, doing things before and/or better than any other computer could do, and we were not afraid to show that off too . And even after these ‘high times’ I still enjoyed using Amiga’s, just because they did a lot of jobs so efficient and elegant.But after we moved house, and thus our collection of Amigas in 2000, I’ve never bothered to hook up my trusty ol’ A4000 again (remarkable, since I still used it regularly back then - guess I was just tired of it all somehow)… that is, until last week.

After listening to some old mods I suddenly caught the buzz again and just had to hook up my A4000 again, so I started digging in the attic…

Digging it up

Now, my attic is fairly large, and fairly full of obsolete computer hardware (It’s sometimes dubbed “The Freakshow” by one of my friends). Ofcourse, it’s (un)organized in the typical nerd’s way so finding all the required bits and pieces required some dexterity.

In any case, after 4 hours of dragging out junk I had a fairly complete system: my trusty ol’ A4000/040, a Cybervision 64/3D gfx card, an Ariadne network card and a Commodore 1942 monitor. I had quite a buzz when it sat on my desk again, while battered and covered with dust, she still looked good (even tough the A4000 case is probably one of the worst case designs in Commodore’s history), couldn’t wait to fire her up..

Firing it up

Hooked everything up, said my prayer for the hardware gods and pressed the powerbutton… lots of noise from the harddisk and fan, but… it worked! Booted right up like nothing had ever happened.

After clicking around for a few minutes I realized why I’ve always liked this system so much. While it’s now about 10 years old technology, it doesn’t feel that much slower than your average Windows or Linux desktop. Ofcourse, it’s dog slow when it comes to number crunching or large amounts of numbers, but the ‘clickaround-experience’ really isn’t bad.

Networking

Next up was getting it on the net, ofcourse. Reconfigured AmiTCP for the ariadne and the new home network, and within a few minutes it was up and pinging. Tried browsing a little with IBrowse, seems to suck just as much as browsing today.

Demos

Next up were some demos, as I hadn’t seen one in a long, long while. This proved to be a little more difficult than expected: all my demos were on a CDR I burned and the CDRom drive just wouldn’t read it. Another CDR failed to read aswell, so I figured the drive must have died. Luckily, I have about a bazillion drives in the attic so it was replaced in a snap. Now the CDR would load, but with frequent read errors. Normal CD’s would work fine, so I suspected the CDR to be faulty. Put it in my PC proved this point, couldn’t copy it due to some severe read errors. I think this is proof that CD’s do “rot” as I’ve always been very careful with this particular CD and it doesn’t show any scratches or the like. Anyway, retrieved from the CD whatever there still was to retrieve, rebooted “without startupsequence” instinctively, went to data:demos/ and started firing up stuff - only to be presented with a lot of different Guru s. Some memories came back, and I remembered that the A4000/040 wasn’t the most receptive of all platforms when it came to demos. Anyway, with various combinations of CPU settings and setpatch

I finally got a few to run.. and (luckily - I was expecting a lot) they still rock! Ofcourse 320×240 3D engines in 2×2 pixel hardly impress anyone by now, but on this hardware, and -more importantly- with such style it’s great stuff. Ofcourse, I’m very biased by nostalgic feelings (remembering how wowed I was when seeing them for the first time, while they were still cutting-edge), but still, I haven’t been impressed/entertained that much by any PC demo of the last few years - and there’s some good stuff out there!

Games

Nosed around on the harddrive and ran into a few games. I wasn’t really expecting much from it (by being spoiled with ultra-fast hi-res 3D graphics from my Playstation2 and PC for the past few years) I was quite amazed with the quality and playability of these old games.
I lost a good few hours playing old stuff like Speedball2, Stardust, Skidmarks and Dynablaster, these games still have something that a lot of modern games don’t have. Playing Slamtilt (probably the best pinball-simulator in the world) again reassured me that I had to make a permanent Amiga setup in my computer room again. The only (predictable) dissapointment were the 3D games, like old-time favourite Xtreme Racing, the resolution, but especially framerate was just too low for my spoiled taste.

And now what?

So she’s back, again. In fact, she’s back with reinforcements. Not long after I had revived the A4000 in my computer-room, I put back together an A1200 to play those nice 4-player games and old demos on the TV set. Oh, and I’m busy setting up an A3000 to serve as a serial network server for the A1200 and an A500, so…
Next up is updating the OS and getting the ‘latest stuff’, altough there probably isn’t that much to get unfortunately. On the other hand, the hardware upgrades I could never afford are available second-hand very cheap by now (except ofcourse 060 and PPC accelerators) so I probably increase my collection of obsolete hardware again in the coming months. In any case, a nice and quiet harddrive and PSU fan are on the list, since I didn’t quiet down everything in the computer-room for nothing!
And, with the A4000 back up, DPaint is available again, so I can no longer procrastinate creating images for my webpages. I still haven’t found a tool on any other platform that can do pixel gfx, or at least in a way that I understand it .

Summarizing

Things I like the most:

1. It’s all lean and mean, no bloated applications which require frameworks, xml, toolkits, etc. to do the simplest of things.
2. No annoying OS telling you what to (not) do
3. DPaint. Probably the only gfx program I can deal with.
4. Fast booting
5. The mods sound better
6. The demos look better
7. Slamtilt!
8. Nice looking hardware

Things I dislike the most:

1. No memory protection. This really sucks after using Unices for so long, any crappy application can crash your whole system in the blink of an eye.
2. 16 Mb of memory isn’t really cutting it on today’s WWW.
3. Aminet is down.
4. It has no future

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