[ Nerd update alert again ]
I've never owned a Commodore computer, although lately I've enjoyed emulating the good ole C64. I was always curious to see if the Amiga lived up to its extreme hype in the BBS days. These days, you might try to emulate one with WinUAE, or spend $450 or so for a brand new(!) Amiga 1200 with hard drive, ethernet, and AmigaOS 3.9. But what I was more interested in, were OCS games. I managed to score an Amiga 500 with 40-meg SCSI hard drive, 4 megs FastRAM, A501 expansion, external floppy drive, and hundreds of floppies, for a lot less than the A1200 would have been.
Above, begging for Workbench 1.3 disks again
I have to admit, some of the games are at least as good as SNES, and there are dozens and dozens of truly good games so far, whereas with the Apple IIGS, I only recall a small handful of standouts including Rastan and Task Force. And Amiga BASIC is a lot of fun. I have a few other goodies coming soon, like a 3.1 Kickstart ROM, which could enable me to use WHDLoad on that hard drive instead of flipping through those hundreds of floppies. Notice the 24" Dell LCD display, driven the same way as the Apple IIGS (that's the IIGS next to it in fact), from a 15khz SCART-to-SVGA scan doubler.
So far it's a lot of fun, and its hardware is especially suited to 2D platform games, which are my personal favorite.
There's been stuff going on outdoors in the Keys too, of course, and I'll get back to that soon, Seriously. After I just play through a few more of these...
UPDATE Friday, Oct 31 2008...
I accumulated about 400 floppy disks full of games, then upgraded the Kickstart ROM to 3.1 (yes, i had to bend one pin and solder two jumpers, motherboard is a 1988 Revision 5). Then, the Apple IIGS project loaned a spare 700MB SCSI-II disk to the Amiga, which was thrown into the GVP enclosure. Workbench 3.1, WHDLoad, and a few other goodies got installed, and I promptly began filling up that big (heh) disk with WHDLoad games so maybe those floppies can disappear soon. All in all, I'm amazed with the machine, amazed with the sub-$200 cost of the entire project (but it was only that cheap because I already had a scan doubler), and very happy for the knowledge and insight I've gained into the Classic Amiga world. It is so tempting to branch out into A4000, A1200, Minimig, SAM440ep or even Efika, but those kinds of ideas will be evaluated on their merits (and costs) and pursued at a later date. For now, it's enough to say we've conquered "classic" Amiga OS here. This project is going into maintenance mode, and I got the OCS video game machine that I always wanted.
-Chris