My first Amiga

Back in the Stone Age, when we used to go to the Atari club in our town, it never even occurred to me that there might be computers other than colourful ATARIs and monochrome PCs. I enjoyed ATARI and completely ignored everything else around it. What a shame. Even back then, a friend of mine had an AMIGA 500 on loan, which he used to make music, and he even had a MIDI keyboard for it. Maybe it was because of his black-and-white monitor or simply the alignment of the stars, but the AMIGA did not interest me at all at the time.

Times change and opinions change too, so I decided to get an AMIGA and play some nice games on it with the kids, as well as try some of today’s new hardware upgrades. For a long time I watched adverts on Polish websites, where some quite nice examples appear for reasonable money. I ruled out the A500 because it does not have a floppy drive (CORRECTION — IT DOES HAVE A FLOPPY DRIVE). At the same time, I did not want to invest too much in an A1200, which already costs quite a lot considering that I am not a die-hard Amiga fan.

One day I spotted a beautiful A600 in an eBay auction, in its original well-preserved box including accessories and floppy disks. I decided to take part in the auction and eventually managed to win the Amiga. There was one small complication: the seller’s profile said “does not ship abroad” and he required payment via PayPal, which I do not use. We exchanged a few emails, from which it was clear that the seller was a respectable English gentleman. If Google is not lying, he is a reasonably well-off, middle-aged music teacher 🙂 I paid by bank transfer.

I arranged transport with Dolphi Transport. Shipping cost approximately CZK 770. I booked the transport through a form where I specified the day and approximate time when the parcel could be collected. It was picked up about three days after I placed the transport order, and the seller informed me by email when it had been handed over. The parcel first travels physically to a depot in England and only then continues to us. I waited another week and received a message from Toptrans about the planned delivery.

Hooray… on 8 October the Amiga arrived. With the usual excitement, I started unpacking the meticulously packed parcel. The computer really was packed extremely carefully and nothing had suffered any damage in transit. The box gave off what I would call the typical smell of old paper and hardware. There is something special about that mixture 🙂 I solved the British mains plug by fitting a travel adapter, but there was no video cable in the package. The seller had warned me about that beforehand. That cable would have been useless to me anyway, because I only have LCD displays at home. I have already been investigating connection options and will probably have to buy some kind of “scandoubler” or the more expensive Framemeister. I do not know either device in any detail yet. Ideally I would like an LCD display that supports 15 kHz and also has speakers, because the fewer cables the better. At the moment I am completely lost in the subject and the Amiga is sadly waiting to be brought to life. In the meantime, enjoy the beautiful nostalgia in the attached photos too.