2001 is now here, the miggy scene is changing pretty dramatically with Power Computing, Eyetech to name but two bringing out one alternative route for the miggy by going over to PCI hence PC-clone hardware, OK, so up till a few years ago the word "PC" deserved a good mouth-rinse to the dedicated Amigaite, but most of us now have already not so much betrayed the cause by using 3.5" hard drives, which were only really designed for PC users, we have gone over to CD ROM drives, again, they were only ever intended for PC users.
CDRW's are the new Amiga users tool now, and yet again, these beast's were never meant for the miggy, but thanks to the Amiga firms and dedicated staff who work for them, more and more PC-clone hardware is now being created or made available to miggy users everywhere thanks to not only the actual individual items of hardware re-designs, but also new interfaces.
Some time ago if your miggy's internal drive went up the spout your only remedy was to ask around your mates for a spare one, or fork out �20 or so quid on a new one, but thank God for computer boffins, because those days have gone, now, as far as I know, there are two choices. (1) Is the old way of asking around for a spare one or buy a brand new one, or (2) get one of the many devices that will allow you to connect a PC HD drive to your miggy which will act as DF0: These newly available floppy drives to the miggy user aren't as rare as rocking-horse shit like their miggy counterparts are, also they are a lot cheaper at around �10 at the most, as opposed to about �20 for a normal Amiga DF0:
But my advice to you all is that if you do decide to go for a normal Amiga DF0: and your lucky enough to find one, don't use it, keep it for a while because it'll be an antique after a year or so.
But changing the subject slightly, I love the miggy scene more so now that I think I have ever done in the early days, OK, so you might ask why (go on then) "Why Steve", OK, I'll give you my opinion, in the early days just about the time that the first A1200's came out we had either of the following miggy's, an A500, an A500+, an A600 (that was a joke computer I'm sure of it) or at that time, the super machine of them all, the A1200, and regardless to what hardware add-ons or various paint proggies and text proggies we were all running, I think that I can safely say that the one thing that we all had in common was "Workbench" never mind what versions we were having to run on a various spec machines, but WB was the face of the Amiga at that time.
But now, well, probably one of the best and/or most successful packages to be created for the miggy to take over the job (and it's done it very well) is Dopus Magellan, OK, so admittedly there are those who adore the program, I am one, Dungeon Master (Ray Hawkins) is another, there's those of you who love the proggy, and of course there's those who hate it, Craig Daines (Hercules) is one of those, OK, so we all have our differences, so, apart from various hardware add-ons years ago, the fundamental necessity of WB, all in all the overall look if you did a sceengrab of your A500's WB, your A500+, you A600 or your A1200's WB screen, they all showed only slight variation's in the general look of the WB, regardless of colours, icons etc, the overall look of the 4 machines was pretty central.
Also, in the days before any of us housed our miggy's in towers, we had computer desk's in our lounge's, bedrooms, or if you was and still are lucky like me to have my own computer room, we all had setups with various bits of hardware hanging out of every possible miggy port and orifice that the relative machines setup and PSU would allow, with loads of yards of various cabling running all round our desk's, then the idea was to put our miggy's into towers or desktops, brilliant, out went the need for external floppy drives to be piled as high as the ceiling, out went the old miggy's dilapidated PSU's followed with loads of cabling, mind you, after running your miggy for a while on a cold day, the old PSU's was a brilliant hand warmer, wasn't they folks.
With towers being the order of the day, yards of cabling suddenly disappeared inside our towers, Eyetech being the better firm at the time, and still is in my opinion, created a keyboard interface that would allow us to dump our old and quite expensive miggy keyboards in favour of the more easily to get hold of PC keyboards which were a bloody lot cheaper as well, or, if you wanted to still have a miggy keyboard, these new interfaces allowed the connection of A4000 external keyboards, excellent, by this time, quite a few of our machines were taking on different shapes, what I'm saying is that by now, some of us had changed the look of our miggys from how we first set it up, to a semi-PC clone as far as it's looks, workability wise, well, it was still our old miggys thank god which on average were far more stable and user-friendly that PC was or will be, but, again, with all the various configurations of our respective machines, we all or most of us still had one thing in common, WB.
OK Craig, maybe you can see where I'm going, and your wrong, I'm not going to spend the next few minutes or so, I'm only going to say that then DOpus Magellan was created, and could be used as a WB replacement or a WB manager program that could be made to run in the background, and with Dopus being able to do this, it gave us all the chance to get away from the normal WB look of the miggy, which at the early days, the miggy's WB was great, but times change, and the old WB started to show it's age, then after many promises by various people of a new WB look we finally got it via the brilliance of Haage & Partner, they bought us OS 3.5, and of which due to the high amount of buyers of OS 3.5 who have installed the package and never looked back, H&P have recently bought us OS 3.9, but at present there seems to be a lot of installation problems with.
Speaking as an average computer knowledge-related miggy users I had no problems whatsoever installing both OS 3.5 or OS 3.9, now, OS 3.5 was a totally new WB re-write and in most cases, a bloody good one as well, on the other hand OS 3.9 is a sort of upgrade to it's predecessor, but nevertheless in it's own right is yet another good bit of work from H&P, the general specs for an A1200 user with a middle range miggy was pretty basic in order to be able to install and use OS 3.5, you know, a decent sized hard drive, a fair bit of fastram fitted to a good accelerator board, a buffered interface of whatever you decided or decide on buying and you were almost there ready to install OS 3.5, by buying a decent monitor Scandoubler and Flicker-Fixer you were able to take full advantage of OS 3.5 Newicons/Glowicons facility on higher resolution screens, now with the arrival of OS 3.9, the graphics card which you were thinking of buying is even more a essential part of upgrading to OS 3.9, a graphics card was/is also a pretty needed piece of hardware to have even under OS 3.5, but not essential.
I know of at least 10 contacts from my earlier time on the miggy scene that simply got bored with the miggy and sold their complete setups only to recently see how much our machines are changing, so they've decided to buy A1200's in the hope of getting back into the scene, which goes to show even with all the high specs of the PC with now 1Ghz processors sound card, TV cards and graphic cards coming at PC users from every angle, the humble miggy and it's respective users for the first time in the miggy life I personally think has now started to get the notice such a "Versatile" machine deserves, that's the keyword, "VERSATILE", and also it's the tile of this article.
Now, amongst all the downsides to the Amiga such as it's original design for 2 types of memory of which one was a joke, yep, 2Mb of chip mem for a computer which uses that as it's main memory on bootup, so only having 2Mb of chip is and has to most of us been a pain in the arse from the start, but with the inclusion of graphics cards, and now the long awaited PCI media, 2Mb of chip mem is a thing of the past for most users, the primitive IDE interface which in the early days was more than adequate for the old, slow and small and very expensive 2.5" hard drives is now showing it's age, but again, due to good but long awaited support from various firms, some of the stress and strain has been taken off this particular interface with the arrival of such devices as the IDE 97' buffered interface, the updated EIDE 99 interface which allows it's user to add the cheaper, bigger and far more readily available PC hard drives which are also a lot faster than their old 2.5" counterparts.
The Powerflyer and Powerflyer Gold are yet two more good essential new IDE interface upgrades, so all in all, from the very first Amiga up to the present day the Amiga may be no where near as powerful in the speed factor of the PC, but with it being such an amazing machine at multitasking, it now starts to show it's versatility as far as the new forms of hardware that has recently been designed for it, the Amiga as we know it may not be very powerful, but it's probably one of the best versatile machines still around nowadays, and with few users that leave the scene, they themselves come back to it, plus new users who have never been connected with the scene join us, firms in the past have also decided to leave our format, Gasteiner was probably one of the more known names, but have we really suffered with those small losses, I don't think so.
Big firms such as Tao have joined us, be it in an indirect way, but they are with us, Haage & Partner are also very much involved with the miggy scene, Elbox who are manufactures of the new Mediator PCI busboard, and a host of other new or not- so-new companies, so what once seemed like a dead end for us which did supposedly take years to get to that situation, but with quite a few "The Amiga is Dead" half-headlines along it's route, we, up to a few months ago all thought that eventually this was the last straw, but due to the miggy's overwhelmingly strong support in past years, yet again, like a phoenix rising from the ashes (sorry for the quote) we seemed to have risen yet again, but with an even stronger lust for survival.
Well, I don't think that of all my years on the miggy scene I have ever read such a headline as "The Amiga Is back" which is just what I read a couple of issues ago in the mostly PC orientated computer magazine called Micro Mart, to get a headline such as that from a mag that deals with about 97% of the PC market just goes to show that the Amiga after all this time and turmoil that it's suffered can still make and warrant such a headline, what we must all realise that the Amiga is one of the only machines I think that has gone through a sort of metamorphic stage, just like a butterfly, OK, so it sounds a stupid idea, but am I mad, well, in a word "YES", past readers of The Crypt already know that I'm an utter madman, but take a few minutes to think about my statement.
We first started to on basic A500's A500+'s, A600, A1200, then we had to import new and big alien to our machine hard drives etc., but we stayed alive, then came alien CD ROM drives, re-writers, graphic cards, big-box accelerators boards etc. etc. etc., did we die, huh, no chance, we staggered for a while, but sticking to our guns like most loyal Amigaites have done so many times before, we moved with the times and upgraded, only to find that these new but alien devices made, not, destroyed our beloved miggys, now, PC users have had the easier alternative, their machines have from the word "Go" always had the advantage of big, fast and cheap hard drives, CD ROM etc. etc., so their struggle has been nowhere near as bad as ours, but with all this onboard flexibility at their fingertips have the flew right past us miggy users and left us in the past, I think not folks, in fact, we as miggy users has seen our humble miggy grow far better that it was ever thought possible.
At first it was just a "Games Machine", but is it still known as that now, the answer I think is "NO", OK, so most of us still play a few games here and there, but I for one prefer to use serious software such as Draw Studio, PPaint (although I'm not so good with PPaint as our two co-editors) I think PPaint is an excellent package, I use Protext v6.52 for doing articles for The Crypt because it's fast and has go a basic but quite fast inbuilt spell checker, but for printing speeds it's naff, so for normal letter-writing I use Wordworth 7, now, being an ex-PC user, I think that on the Amiga, Wordworth in it's own right almost equal to Word on the PC, ok, so their will more than likely those of you who think that I'm talking out of my butt, fair play to you, but have you yourselves used both packages, if you have and still do, then you still might think that I'm talking out of my arse, then ok, that's your opinion, but if you've never used either or both, then you won't know what I'm on about.
Word on the PC is probably one of the best all-round programs I've ever used, ok, so selling my PC some time ago and not using a PC for ages might not give me an idea of any new similar programs on the PC, but my views go back to my days with both machines, Wordworth is an all-round excellent package, but due to the miggys crap parallel port, print out on the miggy with Wordworth is very slow, quality of document output is probably the best unrivalled package on the miggy, even better than Final Writer, and yes, I've used that package as well.
Now, the only way the normal A1200 user will get any printing output of any quality and a slight increase of output speed is a combination of two components, one is a good quality printer, the higher end of the Epson Stylus printers like the 600 and up to and including the 760 (which is what I've got, coupled with the latest version of Turboprint 7.10, these to components when used together, make your printouts look good, and print out faster, ok, not so fast an output as on a PC, but for a humble miggy which has supposedly died a long time ago, pretty fast.
Now, although the new 3.5" hard drives, CD ROM and CD re- Writers, better printers, graphics card, better accelerators boards etc. etc. etc. are mere enhancements, surely they go to prove that by adding them to a supposedly "Dead machine" they can and has made the miggy a once again great machine, well, the miggy can be such a crap machine as PC users and the like reckon that it was because if it was such a situation as "Flogging a dead horse", would new firms such as Tao and the like join us, no way, because if I was a boss of a company and was offered to team up to support such a financially lame project I would naturally laugh at the offer, no, the new input from these new supporters have done their homework and have realised that the Amiga is far from dead, ok, so it's going to change, and one change will most probably be in the shape of the new AmigaOne machines, and although they won't be the old type of Amiga's we all once knew, they will still bear the Amiga name and our logo.
Which just goes to show as I've said before, the powers to be think that the Amiga name and product is so financially sound now that they are willing to stay with us, which brings me to the last statement, and the title to this article, "Versatility is our keyword"......