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Doom was an important game, it defined the IBM-PC compatible as the new gaming computer. Amiga users became angry because they where used to the fact that Amiga generally had better games than the PC. In order to show the world that the Amiga could handle Doom they began working on lots of “Doom-clones” to prove stupid PC users that the Amiga was better than they thought it was.

Doom clones:

Alien Breed 3D 1995

Alien Breed 3D was the first successfully commercial “Doom-clone” on the Amiga. It was only compatible with the Amiga 1200 and the Amiga 4000 because it used some clever hardware tricks for the game engine only present in the AGA chips. Alien Breed 3D can run on a stock Amiga 1200 with 2 MB but shines on an Amiga upgraded with a 030 CPU. In the graphics department Alien Breed 3D has worse graphics than Doom and runs in a much smaller window. The actual game though is very good and fun to play.

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Perhaps you used to own an Amiga 500 when you where a kid and you are missing the days of floppy grinding noise while loading a game?

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AmiCon 92:

I got the opportunity to work at the Swedish Amiga show AmiCon92 in 1992. AmiCon92 was located in a suburb to Stockholm called Sollentuna.

We thought the show was going to start early in the morning but we failed to take notice that the show was about to start 4 hours later than what we thought. Thankfully, to save us from a lot of free time a person from the show organizers asked us if we wanted to help out and work there. We was let in early and got to see all the big names in the Swedish Amiga industry at the time.

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I found some rather nice AT towers during a summer a couple of years ago when I was taking a walk around our neighborhood. One tower was a huge old school big tower. It was tall, massive and robust with a cool sliding door on the front. The other tower was a super small mini baby AT tower. I was surprised to find a Pentium motherboard, a Pentium 133 MHz CPU and 32 MB memory (which back then were a lot). Back then it was popular to modify Amiga computers inside PC towers and big towers where almost exclusively used. But I always thought that using a tower as big as 60 cm tall for a rather small Amiga motherboard was unnecessary.

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Desktop icons have always been important for the Amiga since Workbench has always been GUI based since the beginning. IBM-PC users in the 80′ies worked in MS-DOS text-mode while Amiga users had a lightweight operating system and an efficient graphical user interface. In comparison with Windows and many other operating systems, Amiga icons can have two different images, one normal image and one clicked image, they can also have different shapes than typical icons ranging from very big to very small even in non-proportional size.

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The Commodore Amiga is used to be different from a PC and Mac since it could easily be connected to a TV. It used to be that it cost a lot to connect a PC or a Mac to a television, often it was more economic to find a solution with an Amiga than getting expensive equipment converting VGA to a signal compatible with a television.

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One might wonder if any mainstream Amiga owner needs a 16-bit soundcard in their Amiga. It is not like every game or application which uses sound takes advantage of the sound card, not at all. Most games, if not all important Amiga titles, uses the native 8-bit four channel sound. Some music/sound applications do support sound cards but most music made on the Amiga was made in a tracker program, a kind of music composing software in which music modules could be created and which did not usually support sound cards.

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There used to be a time when hard drives where a luxury not standard equipment not only in the Amiga world but also in the MS-DOS world. Standard equipment was one floppy drive, almost luxury but more obtainable from a financial point of view was a second floppy drive. One floppy drive held the operating system in one floppy disc, the other drive held the application you wanted to run from a second floppy disc.

Buying a hard drive for your Amiga used to be a huge investment. Not only did you buy the hard drive, you also needed to buy the controller for it since some Amiga models did not come with a HD controller built in. You could easily pay more for a hard drive controller and a hard drive than for the Amiga 500, if you wanted extra memory added in the controller price could easily hit the stratosphere.

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The “PowerPC future” was launched as a kind of next generation CPU standard for the Amiga after Commodore closed down in 1994. Previous processors in Amiga computers where all based on Motorola 68k processors, so it was natural at the time to go forward with the next generation chip from Motorola which was the PowerPC. Back in those days hardware used to be tightly connected to the software in most Amiga users minds so it would have been tough to sell a turbo board or new motherboard with an Intel CPU for an Amiga user.

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Great Valley Products was a well known company making hardware accessories for the Amiga computers. They are most famous for their line of hard drive controllers and memory expansion for Amiga 500/2000 and generally for making good products.

Another reason to remember GVP is their later accelerators which only accepted their “own” memory standard which makes those products slightly unattractive on today’s international second hand market if the product offered is not already generously populated with RAM since finding the rare GVP-Simms is difficult and costly.

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