I thought to get us all in the Christmas mood we could share what our favourite memories are of the Amiga at Christmas!

To kick it off...

I remember playing Diggers on my CD32 as a kid while waiting for my grandparents to arrive to stay at ours for the Christmas period! It's quite a slow game and not one of my favourites but it is a happy memory because it was the start of Christmas.

I also liked 2013 as I got Allister Brimble's - The Amiga Works CD release and it was only the 2nd time that my wife and I have hosted Christmas and I remember playing the CD while preparing the mulled wine! It was also the year Putty Squad was finally released, happy times!

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"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@Thread

3rd time hosting this year for a small Covid family bubble with extra disinfectant, separate towels and possibly face masks!

This year to save me from tears...
... I'll crank up the COMA remix from the Amiga Power: Tha Album with Attitude

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"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

Best Christmas Amiga Memories?

Have to admit that so far it will be this year - working as a small wheel in a dedicated group to bring out AmigaOS4.1FE Update 2.

https://www.hyperion-entertainment.com/

Best regards,

Niels

@nbache

Great! I'm sure there is a great sense of achievement in completing such a project! That being said an OS can never really be 'complete' can it?

Have half an Eggnog on us!

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"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

No, but some of us might have felt these past years that it was starting to get a bit too far from complete .

The saga continues ...

Best regards,

Niels

well it would have to be Christmas of 1994, when I got my first Amiga!!!! a second hand A1200!!!

it was the Computer combat pack, with Zool 2, Brine the lion, Total Carnage, Personal Paint and Wordsworth, it was amazing to have so much power!!! with it being second hand it also had a few extra games Jaguar XJ 220, Cannon Fodder, Elite and Lemming. I also got a bit of money to buy a game of my choice and I got Theme Park that had just come out, its odd I some time struggle to remember what the hell I did last week, but that first week or two of owing the Amiga will always to be very special memory!!!

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AmigaNG, YouTube, LeaveReality Studio

@BigD

December 25th, 1989...

I was 14 years old. We (the family) had a Spectrum since they were released in '82, which I played games on and dabbled in programming, writing crap games in Basic.

My brother's friend bought an Atari ST in '87 or so and I'd been round his house to look at some of these amazing 16 bit games. I remember well being amazed by Carrier Command, IK+, Populus and other games, and then going home to my poor inadequate Speccy. We had Archmedies at school so I knew a bit about GUIs, floppy disks etc and I knew even then that the ST OS was poor.

Eventually we had enough money scraped together from the sale of the Spectrum +2, Christmas money and other places to buy an Amiga 500.

It was bought from an independent computer shop. I remember being amazed by the monitors in the shop and annoyed that we'd have to put up with an old TV. The 500 was, of course, sold in the famous "Batman Pack"...

I knew nothing of the Amiga specifically except what I'd seen from a few TV clips. It looked, at least the games, like the ST to my untrained eyes.

Christmas day came. I was amazed by Batman. We had had the game on the Spectrum but this was something else. Though the graphics were incredible in comparison, what really stuck out was the music! Sampled words in the music was not something I'd heard before except in pop music.

The other thing that sticks in my mind, from Xmas day specifically, is F18 Interceptor. Even my dad, who never really paid any attention to the Spectrum, was impressed when someone managed to fly under the golden gate bridge, and cheered us on. I remember just staring mouth open, the first time, as the camera zooms down on the plane at the start of the game.

Slayer (not sure if this was a standard Batman Pack part; I know we got some extras thrown in) was hard and I didn't like it, but the music was extraordinary. I laid on my bed with the Amiga 500 manual and let it play over and over. For hours.

It took a while, maybe a week, to fall totally in love with the OS. The speech synthesis blew my mind. I'd played with speech programs on the BBC at school but this was something else. The other thing that's interesting is how "normal" multitasking felt. It just did it effortlessly. A couple of years later I encountered Win3.1 for the first time (at school) and I couldn't believe how awful it was. Yeah it looked pretty with lots of colours in its icons, and a funky 3D appearance on buttons, but otherwise it was terrible.

AmigaBasic was perhaps the one thing I wasn't even slightly impressed by, in terms of what came with the 500.

It goes without saying I've never turned on a new computer and had anything like those feelings since. Happy times.

Lawrence

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Blog

@Aslak3

Thanks, that was almost poetic in your description. I am jealous that you experienced Batman the Movie with a new Amiga 500 and that lovely box art that the computer came in. I do feel lucky that my family invested in a 1040STFM in 1988 and I got Batman for Christmas 1990 with the Hollywood Collection on the ST but at that point the ST was beginning to be sidelined as Team17 came to the fore in 1991 etc. If AGA had come in 1991 I think we could have pushed for an Amiga at that point rather than in 1995 when the party was technically over (though it didn’t feel that way and my CD32 was a much loved Christmas present). Alien Breed Null Modem parties and playing Britpop as the backing music for CD32 Worms (yes, you can swap CDs while playing) etc all continued the fun for many years especially at Christmas!

Thinking about it, working on my first proper Deluxe Paint animation over Christmas 1998 was pretty special and meant that the Amiga was promoted as a viable serious computer as late as 1999 as my animation and Scala400 project that tied it all together with sound effects eventually came 4th in House Art (senior category) and helped us to come 1st overall in that competition. Even better is that my sister is considered the artist in our family but the Amiga has always inspired me to push myself creatively if only as a hobby.

Only Amiga!

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"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

Christmas 1993. Our first A500 and Rick Dangerous. I even have a photo of two kids (me and my brother) playing for a first time with an Amiga computer.

@BigD

Christmas 2008 is my time of coming back to Amiga.

For some reason, I started googling "what's left out of Amiga" in 2008, just before Christmas (ca. Dec 23rd).

I was astonishing so many things were happening: Amiga Forever, AmiKit, Sam440-ex, Efika, AROS, MorphOS, OS4 and more. I spent all Christmas on collecting modern Amiga links.

This is the time I got beck to the Amiga, after all these years.

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Amiga 1200 + WARP 1260 + AmigaOS 3.2

@Thread

A new Christmas Amiga memory has been made!! Playing Santa Run with my 4 year old! It's well worth a donation as it's a great game especially considering the fast development!

https://mcgeezer.itch.io/santa-run-2020

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios