We prepared a small room with old computers as a part of a bigger event at work. After careful consideration, we selected Atari 800XL and Commodore Amiga 500 for the contest purposes. Atari was running Space Invaders and each visitor played with the highest difficulty (three lives, level 12). For Amiga, we chose Pinball Dreams and the goal was to get the highest score using just a single ball.
To make the room more appealing, we brought several old computer magazines and 80s props. Curious visitors could also experience ZX Spectrum+ with the Who Dares Wins game. The feedback on our room was very positive and people were talking a lot about their first computers there. However, the biggest surprise for me is that the joystick survived all the players. Some of them gave it a hard time.
I’m building a 1980s game room at work for an upcoming social event. There are multiple rooms planned and people can get a few points in each. At the end, the ones with the highest number of points will win. Among other props, I have three fully working old computers – Sinclair ZX Spectrum+, Atari 800XL and Commodore Amiga 500. All of them will be there switched on and doing something interesting, but only one will be used for the purposes of competition.
I’m looking for a Amiga game that meets the following requirements:
The game concept is simple and easy to understand
It is fun to play
The game features scoring
An average player will win/lose in 60 seconds (if the difficulty is selectable, I will choose the one to meet this requirement)
I haven’t decided yet what game should be used for this purpose. Space Invaders on Atari seems to be the best (when set to the highest difficulty level) but maybe there is something better for Amiga.
These were the computers we brought to Bytefest – a Czech vintage computer show. David and I decided not to bring more than two desktop systems. Amiga 2000 was an obvious choice – we fixed it not a long time ago and I played a lot with it recently. The other computer was SGI Indy with the original set of peripherals including the Indycam camera. There are not many vintage UNIX computers to see on vintage computer shows in this country. Thus, it is my duty to bring at least one every year.
The Aritma Minigraf plotter sitting on top of the Indy was connected using one of the Indy’s serial ports though a special ARM-based module that David built. The module contained the control software that allowed it to draw faster and with better precision than the plotter was originally designed for. From time to time, there were couple of people standing in front of the plotter, being hypnotized by the smooth movement of the pen. The Indy itself was communicating with the module as a serial terminal with the ability to send HPGL files that needed to be drawn.
I’d never played that much with Indy before (aside creating the OpenGL 1.0 version of our 3D graphics benchmark) and this was a nice experience. The graphics card in our Indy is able to display no more than 256 colors (or 16 colors for double-buffered 3D), but it’s pretty fast and allows you to have a different 256-color palette for an active window and the rest of the system. Therefore, the color flickering effects are minimized in comparison with PCs set to 256-color modes. I was surprised by the visual quality of the composite input from Nintendo 64 in 256 colors.
Commodore Amiga 2000 was configured to show the capability of this platform during the late 80s (thus, Workbench 1.3 and Kickstart 1.3 only). It didn’t have any accelerator board and the only expansions were a simple hard disk controller, 2-MB fast RAM card and A2088XT PC emulator (with an 8088 and 512kB of RAM). During the show, I also added an ISA card with a serial port (for Microsoft InterLink purposes) and a VGA adapter.
The other devices that we showed were: Apple PowerBook 100 (this year with a working hard drive and full of software), Digital DECpc 325SLC (because a 386 with color LCD is cool) and HP OmniBook 900 (just a service laptop to convert the Wi-Fi Internet into a cable form for the Indy).
I’m still preparing my computers for the upcoming Bytefest. Amiga 2000 with a A2088XT PC emulator card is the second computer I want to have there. Unlike others, I want to show the computer with Kickstart 1.3 / Workbench 1.3, original upgrades and late-80s programs.
I often see only heavily expanded Amiga systems with latest versions of Workbench, PowerPC accelerators and PCI cards. However, these machines don’t say much about this platform when it was really used by professionals.
Switching power supply is basically frequency boosted transformers at a price on electromagnetic noise and reliabliliy. The old one is likely still working while the other may fail before 10 years
You’re absolutely correct! I just wanted to show what power supplies looked like back then and what it is now. The difference in energy density is unbelievable!
Most modern consumer devices can tolerate such voltage ripples from switching power supplies. Also, the only groups that I can think of who wants pure, no-noise power source are scientists and audiophiles.
I can’t complain about reliability, as the old power supply is STILL working. Old tech is just built different!
