Introduction

If you dont know what the Commodore Amiga was, it was the largest selling 16Bit computer of the 90's. It gave you better than console quality games as well as a full multitasking operating system and a full suite of business and professional software.

One of the most revered pieces of software was Lightwave which is a 3D rendering package and is still used by the film industry today.

There were also hundreds of accessories for the Amiga ranging from video capture cards to genlocks used for video titling. The expandability was endless.

There have been several variants of the Amiga starting at the A1000, then the A500, A2000, A3000, A600, A1200 and finally the A4000.

I've had three of the above. I started with the A500 which I got back in 1988. I still remember the games I got with it. ther was Buggy Boy, Thundercats, Barbarian, Wizball, Mercenary and Insanity Fight. I also got Carrier Command and Starglider 2 at the same time and paid £80 for a 512KB RAM expansion pack.

I then got an A3000 which I found in bits and rebuilt. The best thing about this was that it used a standard PC monitor instead of a TV and had the Motorola 68030 super fast processor (for the time).

Finally I got an A1200 which I installed an extra 4MB of RAM and an 80MB hard disk. I still have this machine and considering its over 10 years old, it works perfectly. In fact I stored it in a damp old garage for 2 years and when I finally retrieved it a few months ago, it booted up and it worked as if nothing had happened even recognising the Y2K.

As you can tell I enthuse over the Amiga range. In some ways they are still superior to the PC even though an A1200, for example, only ran at 14mhz. The speed was due to several custom graphics chips and superb programming. If you think that every Amiga program had to squeeze onto 880kb floppy disks, it bred superb programmers who are still leading the field today.

Unfortunately Commodore suffered badly in the 90's and after several death flings finally died in 1996. There is hope for all Amiga fans as Amiga Inc. is revitalising the Amiga in the form of a fully portable operating system and even a new computer.

WinUAE is a valiant attempt to emulate a very complex machine. Unfortunately because of the complexity of the Amiga, WinUAE it isn't very approachable for the beginner but I hope that you'll have a read and start enjoying the Amiga as much as I do.