The time is 4pm, November 28, 2020. We are on a drive back home from a family day trip at Macarthur Square, where we took family photos with the huge Christmas tree as a backdrop, located in the outdoors promenade towards Macarthur Square train station.
When I returned home I chatted to the Amiga 500 seller from Penrith. Nine days back on November 19, 2020 while I browsed Facebook Marketplace, I found an Amiga 500 in Australia selling for $600 dollars. I felt an instant compulsion to invest in a piece of my childhood memories.
Last week, I was preparing to quit work, until I came across that Amiga 500 online.
I figured, “I need to work another week so that I can make six hundred dollars for the Amiga 500. Then I can quit.”
My mind was only motivated by how much money I need to make in order to afford the things that I want to spend the money on. Talks with the Amiga 500 seller have progressed on Facebook Marketplace since then.
Seeking Amiga 500 Proof Of Authenticity
Two days back on November 26, 2020 I asked the Amiga 500 seller if he could send me some proof that the Amiga 500 works. He recorded two videos. The first video snip was a screen of the Amiga Workbench v1.3 startup/boot screen requesting a floppy disk to be inserted.
The second proof of authenticity was a video snip of a game that he was playing for a few seconds. Still, I remained skeptical.
I imagined how easy it would be for the seller to find videos of Amiga 500 gameplay online. I do believe him, but there’s no credibility when someone sells items on Facebook Marketplace. If the seller sells me a dud Amiga 500 and then blocks me on Facebook, I have handed over $600 hard-earned dollars for nothing.
I know some people who have paid money only to be blocked by the seller and receive no goods. I don’t want that to happen to me. I don’t want to be conned. So I have to approach this seller like a businessman, as if I am going to on-sell his Amiga 500, therefore I need to ensure the computer works.
In order to hand over $600 dollars to a stranger I needed to meet at a place where we can turn the Amiga 500 on.
I need to test the Amiga 500, otherwise, if I hand money over based on trust, the seller could just disappear.
Arrange To Meet The Amiga 500 Seller
With this in mind today, the Amiga 500 seller and I organized to meet up in Luddenham in two days on Monday to finalize the sale. Monday will be the day that I get back a piece of my childhood history, at a time before Diary of a Mad Chaos.
The discussion nonetheless leaves some alarm bells ringing in my head. Despite how I mentioned I would like to plug the Amiga 500 into a wall socket when we meet, he brushed over that suggestion to arrange that we meet in Luddenham Caltex. That worries me because the petrol station will not have power sockets.
It sounds like the seller wants to make the transaction quick. He probably assumes that he will hand me a box.
I’m going to say, “Here is six hundred dollars.”
Within a minute he will drive off. The entire exchange will be rushed. I won’t be able to look inside the box until I return home, only to realize that the seller had put some bricks in the box, or the Amiga 500 is broken. This was the level of wariness in my mind.
Do Amiga 500 Floppy Disks Contain Timestamps?
On a positive note, if the Amiga 500 works, I am going to be ecstatic going through those hundreds of floppy disks that have collected dust under my bed for twenty five years. I will relish the opportunity to fish out all the information that I had on those floppy disks.
For one, I wonder if there are timestamps on my Amiga 500 save files saved onto those floppy disks. If the Amiga 500 did record timestamps, then it would enable me to more easily piece together a timeline of my gaming life in the years before the daily diary entries of the Diary of a Mad Chaos commenced on March 9, 1996.
It will be interesting to do a forensic analysis of my prehistory, and to unpack all of my unwritten life by looking into the contents of the personal files, save disks, games and software saved with an Amiga 500. It will be fun to lay down the tracks of a relived history.
Diary Of A Mad Chaos is a daily diary written from March 1996 until today, of which individual books and book series have been created, namely “The Lost Years” an exploration of young, entwined love, the “Wubao In China (猎艳奇缘)” book series which provides an extensive comparative analysis of the cultural differences between Eastern and Western societies, and the book titled “Foreigner (华人)” an exploration of race relations in Australia.
