Using a dedicated FPGA has numerous benefits over real hardware – a relatively tiny form factor, USB input compatibility and scaled VGA output meaning I can use my existing peripherals, swappable SD card based hard disks, “cores” that can emulate not only both older OCS/ECS and newer AGA Amigas, but also innumerable other platforms including the Amiga’s Commodore forebearers as well as its most compared rival, the Atari ST. I’d heard a bit about them in the past, but I don’t think I ever realized how awesome they were until I saw them being used there. In fact, I attended a talk by Joe Decuir, one of the original Amiga hardware engineers, and he even shouted out the MIST Amiga core during his presentation. I haven’t ever messed with any of the newer FPGA based computers, though I attended a retro computer festival in my city last year and the MIST FPGAs as well as the newer MISTer FPGAs were fixtures in just about every booth at the convention, emulating various obscure machines to what seemed like a high degree of speed and accuracy. All in all, I decided to take getting a real Amiga off of the table. There seemed to me to be a disconcerting number of challenges involved in collecting real vintage Amiga hardware, including the limitations of the stock hardware from the era, like having to rely on floppy disks, the seemingly bottomless money-pits that are collecting and aftermarket modification, the availability of this stuff here in the US where Amigas are far less common, worrying about exploding capacitors, smoking power supplies, and other issues related to the relatively ancient age of the hardware, the physical space being at odds with my recent efforts to downsize into my modest apartment, NTSC vs PAL issues, and a host of other video output concerns – I certainly didn’t want to have to track down a compatible CRT monitor, and much, much more. The more I looked, the more options it seemed I had to choose from.įirst and most obvious, acquiring an actual Amiga. Of course, there were also numerous other emulation options as well.
#Bbs door games like intercourse on planets series
Thanks to my interest in retro computing I already had some familiarity with the awesome things people had been doing in the Amiga scene for the last decade or more – insane modifications like the Vampire series of FPGA based accelerators, for instance. This got me thinking more and more about finally getting an Amiga of my own to play with, which led to multiple deep dives into Amiga forums and groups. I watched the comments on the post for a week hoping the original poster would announce that it was still available but alas, no such luck. Unfortunately, someone else had been quicker on the draw and already called dibs on the purchase. The price seemed pretty reasonable, all things considered, and an upgraded A1200 is pretty much the ultimate Amiga in my mind, so I was very tempted. It looked to be in great condition and included most of the standard upgrades, such as a CompactFlash card-based hard drive, a Gotek floppy drive emulator, and an Indivision scan doubler. One of the members was parting with his upgraded Amiga 1200. Introductions out of the way, this whole adventure started in earnest when I saw a post of a local retro computer Facebook group.