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A computer has been my primary creative outlet since I was twelve and my parents decided to get a Commodore 64 for christmas. It was a large expense for my parents then, so there was no storage device (no disk drive or datasette), just the computer and a monitor.
It wasn't long before the "family computer" was moved to my room and somehow became "my computer." Without a disk drive the only thing I could do with the C64 was play cartridge games like Omega Race or write my own programs in the built-in language, BASIC. It wasn't long before I was writing my own programs, and with nothing to store them on, that meant remembering and retyping everything I'd done before each time I shut the computer off. My Dad has often said he was impressed by my patience that first year; I would be programming during a rain storm, the power would go out, and I'd just start all over again from scratch.
We spent the next christmas at my grandparent's farm, and my aunt and uncle gave me a box of 5 1/4" floppies for christmas. I thanked them, and explained that even though my computer could not use them (because it had no floppy drive) I was sure I could use them at school. When we returned home from the farm after Christmas day, there was an unopened gift under our tree. My parents had bought a floppy drive for my computer.
A couple Christmases later my cousins got a computer -- a REAL computer, that made my C64 seem like a toy: an Amiga 500. It was so incredibly fast -- and the graphics! And it talked! And it came with a game that immediately made me want an Amiga 500 too: F-18 Interceptor by Electronic Arts. We played that game for more than 20 hours straight after I helped my cousins put their new computer together that christmas.
Eventually I saved enough to buy my own Amiga 500, and continued to use it when the strange twists of fate brought the IBM compatible PC into its dominance on the computer market. In 1992 I upgraded to an Amiga 1200, with an 80 MB hard drive which seemed incredibly huge considering how efficient most Amiga programs were compared to their PC equivalents even then.
I used that A1200 for many years, eventually feeding it power from a chopped up PC tower which doubled as a big enclosure for a whole bunch of SCSI peripherals. I upgraded the hard drive to a 1.08 GB Seagate Decathlon, added a 40 MHz GVP 68030 accelerator, and upgraded to a whopping (for the efficient Amiga OS) 10 MB of RAM. But eventually the time came when I needed to move on...
Unfortunately, the Amiga isn't quite as supported today as it used to be. It was an excellent computer to get work done on, so long as you can get around the lack of such "standards" as everyone expecting documents in MS Word format. When I was hired by Prelusion as the Lead Writer on the Gilbert Goodmate adventure game, I needed a PC to run the custom editing tools I would use. I decided it was finally time to join the endless masses and get a PC.
I spent a month or two researching my options, then custom ordered a system from a local dealer. The PII 350 system I put together took a pretty serious bite out of my savings, but after years of suffering from unsupported-computer-itis, I deserved a little ride on the cutting edge. The PII 350 wasn't the fastest cpu you could buy in October of '98, but compared to my 40 MHz Amiga it was definitely sporty.
Getting the PC was very exciting, because it meant not only moving up to much more powerful hardware -- it meant finally being able to try some of the incredible games that were only ever available on the PC. I was in heaven playing things like M1 Tank Platoon II, Battlezone and Longbow 2. And of course, I had to play a little Curse of Monkey Island before starting on the dialogue for the Gilbert Goodmate game.
Since then I've added a lot of toys to the Speed Kitten. The PII 350 has been replaced by a PIII 500, and I've become something of a cooling freak stuffing fans into my Enlight case wherever they will go. My ASUS S-400 CD-ROM drive started acting flakey just 6 days past the end of its warranty, so a new Toshiba 40x took its place. I added a speedy 20 GB Seagate Barracuda ATA to my dependable 7.6 GB Quantum Fireball EL, and have a SCSI Zip100 and Panasonic CD-R for backups. I'm still using my Diamond Viper550 and Voodoo2 combo, but I swapped out the Diamond MX-200 for an MX-300 which sounds even better through my 4 trusty Cambridge PCWorks speakers.
All in all, the move from the Amiga world to the PC world was far less painful than I expected. Sure, Windows98 still sucks in a lot of ways compared to the AmigaOS 3.1, but tweaking the registry is just as fun as tweaking the Amiga ever was -- and with all this excellent hardware and software there is definitely much to tweak. I've already started selling away pieces of my old A1200, and it won't be long before the whole kit is gone (the sooner the better as far as Michelle is concerned). It will be sad to see the old girl go, but with all these fun toys to play with, I can't say I'll miss her as much as I thought I would.
Last modified: November 15, 2003
All text, sounds, graphics and files at this site are ©1995-2002 Lorne Laliberte (lorne@cdnwriter.com)