The vintage Amiga 500 in my collection has been with me, constantly dusted off and booted up over the course of the last one year and four months since its purchase.
When the journey began, the Amiga 500 was used to catalogue all my old floppy disks and their file contents – kept since 1997 – into a massive Amiga 500 disk directory database. You just could not pull off pivot tables with the hardware available in the 1990’s.
Over time, as the timeline projects were compiled in 2021, I turned to the Amiga 500 for gaming. Naturally, once I acquired an LG VHS/DVD combo player, I turned to sharing.
Recorded Amiga 500 games were shared on YouTube. I posted links on Facebook to my Amiga Retro World YouTube channel and to Amiga 500 articles published on the Diary of a Mad Chaos website. Internet users can then go to a YouTube video or website to view that work.
I think it’s really fun to have the internet and connectivity when I play the Amiga 500 these days. People from within the retro gaming community can leave comments on YouTube. That’s great interactivity. Also on Facebook the community can chat to each other. It reminds me of a bulletin board system (BBS) from back in those days.
Now YouTube has become the BBS of videos, Steam has become the BBS of gaming, and Facebook has become the chat room of the early internet. The online experience has come a long way since the 2,400 baud modem days of the 1990’s
The Interconnectivity Of The Modern Internet
The modern Amiga community is easily accessible worldwide compared to the way local bulletin board systems ran back in the 1990’s. I saw one guy with an Amiga 1200 had made a four-hour tutorial video of The Settlers game. He live streamed on Twitch, showing people how to play The Settlers on an Amiga machine, meanwhile drinking beers, sculling them down.
I thought, “This is great!”
With the internet, I can watch someone else play an Amiga game live. I can learn something from the Amiga community without getting out of my house and walking down the road to find a game buddy to play against, like we did in the 1990’s.
Game buddies in the 1990’s gave me information about viruses, games, software. We swapped and copied new games. The Amiga community in the mid 1990’s when armed with a 2,400 baud modem online connection was a vanilla computing experience compared to what is available today.
The History Of Amiga Game Developers
Today I can use the interactivity on the internet to purchase floppy disks, floppy disk cases, Amiga 500s, software, games. You can get everything globally on the internet these days. It’s so much more fun to use the interconnectivity of the internet to not just play games at home on my Amiga 500, but to share the gameplay, get feedback from the Amiga community, and then go off and learn more about the creators of games.
For example, I stumbled upon an Amiga game called Flight of the Amazon Queen in a Facebook group post. That led me to Google search the game title, which led me to an article from the game developer John Passfield that told his story as a developer. He even kept a diary in 1995 and 1996. He quoted from parts of his diary through the article.
I thought, “That’s amazing. This guy could have been me!”
I read how John Passfield made $30,000 in royalties on his game. To a kid in 1995, $30,000 dollars would have been a lot of money. He went on to publish more Amiga games with other developers. Those are amazing stories.
The PC Scene On The Rise In 1994
The only other way that you can get that information back in the 1990’s was to buy an Amiga magazine from the newsagent to read a selection of stories about the Amiga scene. However, information back in the 1990’s was a symbiotic relationship between developers and big publishers.
The 1990’s online experience did not have the interconnectivity that we enjoy now with the internet, live streaming, and social media. The internet has become individualized. So it’s a great time to live.
The PC/Amiga Internet/BBS scenes began to compete with each other in 1994. Lamer News (your bi-weekly dose of scene gossip) Issue 7 published on March 27, 1994 in the UK conducted an interview about the growing PC scene. The sentiments were that the PC scene was bollocks.
As a fifteen year old kid in 1994, I wish that there was interconnectivity back in the heyday. I definitely would have been able to get more out of my Amiga 500 experience than I did. Back in the 1990’s, it was a very vanilla computing experience, which was more than made up for with visits from friends to play doubles for hours, and often into the next day.
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.
