Yep, I was lucky. We were a middle-class family and my mom and dad did support my extreme passion in computers. I went through a huge amount of systems.
I would buy one, love it, read about another and finally put the first in the newspaper for sale ( https://bytecellar.com/2019/05/08/computer-classifieds-datin... ) and move to the next, with funds added in by my parents to cover the different. I was very lucky in that! (The link shared shows actual scans of the newspaper ads I ran, selling some of the systems back in the '80s.)
Yep, one of the first games that really needed a chunky pixel video memory layout (which the Amiga lacked). Amiga's planar arrangement was perfect for platformers, which was the target of the Amiga gfx hardware design.
Most of my friends were gaming on consoles at the time. I very much preferred the Amiga (I also had Atari STs during this time) to consoles perhaps mainly due to the ability to use RGB monitors with a proper RGB signal. It was at best composite back then on the consoles of the era - in the states anyway (we didn't have SCART as an option). I know I'm odd here, but that was a major factor -- but also the fact that I used the Amiga for much more than gaming. I BBSed heavily, generated hundreds of images with paint programs, programmed on it, and then there was enjoying scenedemos as a huge part of my use.
Most people in the user group I was in back then (ALFA - Amigoid Life Form Association) were NASA engineers who used them as cheap and capable alternatives to the UNIX workstations they worked with at NASA (which was local, Hampton, VA). Many of these guys were older and didn't game at all.
I remember those extremely early days, which were filled with slow releases, I must say - but it was a singular experience, playing with that hardware. I left and came back with an Amiga 2000 in 1988 and that was a great time - a peak time to be an Amigoid.
1992 does seem late for a first Amiga - and a 500; I had an A1200 in '92.
I still have two Amigas that I use often (1000, 2000 '020) and a PowerPC "Amiga," that I rarely power on.
I gave Linux on the desktop a good shake once, back in 1994. I installed Debian from a dev branch that came on 15 floppies. I was running it on an AMD 5x86 160 with 24MB RAM and had a lovely 17-inch (unusual for the time) trinitron display from Nokia. I used it for about 4 months, then went back to Windows 95.
An interesting hitch was that I needed to purchase a commercial X-Window system to get color from my Tseng ET-4000/W32p graphics board. XFree86 would not hit the modes I wanted. It cost $99. Here is the manual:
This is a great look at the creation of the Tinitron aperture grille CRT. My preference for aperture grille over shadow mask technology cannot be overstated. Once I got my first aperture grill display (a Nokia 447Xi with a Trinitron tube) in the early '90s, I never went back.
I still have my 19-inch Sony G420 that I use almost daily.
A good handful of variants were tested as well, as explained in the article. It doesn't seem it could be items on the list. (Fake chips were discussed and identified as well.)
Pretty slick. I've been listening to lots of "new" tracker tunes on the 486 + GUS over the past few months, and it's been lovely. A sample: https://oldbytes.space/@blakespot/111990410300125218 (so to speak...)
I will say that the Atari ST version of Rogue was one of my favorite games for the ST back when I had it in 1986, published by Epyx as mentioned in the article. Nice tile graphics on that one.
This in turn also helps encourage consumers to buy AMD hardware, whether it is just an AMD GPU or an AMD CPU and GPU combination.
Is a flawed notion, as AMD FSR can run on most any modern GPU and a
is not tied to those of AMD, which is a particular benefit of the technology, as compared to Nvidia's DLSS, which is tied to Nvidia's RTX hardware.
Interestingly, I've never owned a 386. I was not much of a DOS/Win PC person until 1994, when I got a 486 to run NEXTSTEP. I've had an i8088, NEC V20, i80286, i80486, AMD 5x86, P4, and then on with the Mac starting in 2006 with (well, just before) Intel Core microarch. In those early days I was more Amiga, ST, etc. ( https://bytecellar.com/the-list/ )
I felt more spiritually connected to the MC68K line back when, for lack of a better term.
Amusingly the i386 system I spent the most time with was in college in 1993/4 on a Sun 386 tower running SunOS or Solaris in the APCS lab.
I wonder if a Mac Plus could do this equally well. I am guessing it can. Would be fun to print from the Mac Studio through the Plus to the Imagewriter II.
I had an Apple IIgs and a PowerMac G5 across the room from each other (still have the GS, but in the G5's spot sits a Mac Studio, now). To get files from the net onto the IIgs, I attached a Keyspan USB to serial adapter to the Mac, with the Mac-style miniDIN RS-422 connectors, and connected the GS to the Mac's serial port via RJ-11 using phoneNet adapters on each end. Worked great for filesharing to the GS. (I've got an ethernet card in the IIgs now, so I just FTP to the Mac (or wherever) to get files I want.)
I have a Mac Plus I've expanded to 4MB and expanded with a 512MB SCSI HD and an Asante SCSI-to-Ethernet adapter by which it's wired to my LAN. I use an FTP programs to browse my Mac Studio via a little FTP server I've got running on it, if I want to install something new on the Mac Plus. Works pretty well.
Here's the list: https://bytecellar.com/the-list
I would buy one, love it, read about another and finally put the first in the newspaper for sale ( https://bytecellar.com/2019/05/08/computer-classifieds-datin... ) and move to the next, with funds added in by my parents to cover the different. I was very lucky in that! (The link shared shows actual scans of the newspaper ads I ran, selling some of the systems back in the '80s.)