Tag: Amiga

Cool tech news

Sometimes I’m a mega geeky fanboy. Two things have me pretty excited.

The Amiga is coming back. That’s so retro awesome. We’re not talking about emulators. But the real deal.

Android is now on the iPhone. Also cool.

Austentatious

I’ve never been a Jane Austen fan. I have no desire to relive the Elizabethian era or glamourise a time where a man in posession of a fortune may be in want of a wife. Unless of course the glorification of said time were a gorification – complete with brain eating zombies. Everybody loves a brain eating zombie romance. It’s what made Shaun of the Dead so appealing. From memory it was marketed as a Rom-Zom-Com – a Romantic Zombie Comedy. 

I was no doubt scarred as a child playing too much “Horror Zombies From the Crypt” (download from abandonia) on the Amiga. 

But what’s all this about zombies you ask? Particularly because I started off talking about Jane Austen. Oh yes. If you would prefer Pride and Prejudice retold with the awesome upgrade package – namely zombies wreaking havoc throughout the plot – now you can. Thanks to ThinkGeek.

Silkworm


I like it when a post I’m writing tangentially leads to a new post. In the caption of that font message I mentioned silkworms – I can’t mention silkworms without remembering the quite excellent Amiga game that went by that name. It featured a jeep and a helicopter in two player mode – and I wasted enjoyed countless hours hunched over my side of the keyboard while my friend/family member hunched over the other.

I’m going to have to track down a downloadable version when I get home.

From the Vault 2 – the CD32

I made fleeting reference to this in the lego post – and decided that since I’m waiting around for some approvals on some things before I do any work today I’d write about it now.

The Amiga CD32 was the most technologically advanced Amiga I ever played with – and I got to play with a few courtesy of dad’s freelance writing gig (reviewing computer games).


Released in 1993 the console was out a year and a half ahead of the PSone – and offered pretty much the same capabilities – just without the volume of games. 

It was a last ditch effort to save the mother company – Commodore – which declared bankruptcy in 1994.

Pretty much the coolest thing about the console was the game it came bundled with – or vice versa – Diggers which probably inspired a generation of mining exploration in the same way that lego inspired modern architecture. It was a race to find valuable minerals – teams of five race(r)s all with unique racial characteristics – literally battled for underground supremacy. You could win by wiping out the other teams – or by reaching certain cash thresholds. Mining revenue could be spent improving equipment – with automatic drilling machines vital weapons in the battle to (un)cover the most ground.

I think I downloaded a Diggers ROM to play using the Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator (UAE) and it was still fun years later. You can download it for PC here.