Reunited with Paula, Lisa and Fat Angus

No, it wasn't a school reunion and neither was it a swingers party.

I mentioned previously that I had purchased a cheap, second-user Windows laptop from eBay to help my web development work. I've managed for the past few years to get by with a bit of "Virtual PC" emulation and a bit of luck to get my stuff working on both Mac and Windows platforms but as my need for more intense DOM hacking increased, I really needed to be able to test directly on a Windows platform. Virtual PC is good, but only emulates a Pentium 1 300mhz computer which is just painfully slow. The new version of Virtual PC is meant to be quicker but I realised that for little more money I could just bite the bullet and get a cheap-o laptop. So that's what I did.

I'm a long term Mac user and I'd love to now list all the things I hate about Windows - but I can't. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, Windows is actually OK. It's no OS X but it's useable although there is something about it that makes it feel unproductive but I can't put my finger on it. Secondly, I've not really had much of a chance to work in Windows. Why? Amiga. Forever.

Fifteen years ago I owned an Amiga A500. The built in 512k was massive and it had an inbuilt floppy drive! It was a computer ahead of its time. The chipset (of which, several chips were codenamed with human names, hence Paula, Lisa and Fat Angus) was aknowledged as the best in its class. I spent many hours with the Bitmap Brother's game, Speedball II which still stands up today. Another favourite was Dune II an early RTS game which had me hooked for months. This was back in the day when crackers put their phone numbers in a little flashy demo before the cracked game would load.
The Amiga's OS, Workbench was really pretty good, considering you had to load it from disk first. It's stunning to think now that an entire OS was able to fit on one 880k disk.
I stuck with the Amiga for years. I eventually upgraded to an A1200 which featured an improved graphics chipset and more memory (still no built in hard drive, though). I wrote games in AMOS (a BASIC language for the Amiga OS) and released them into the public domain. Unfortunately for the Amiga, Commodore went bust and Escom followed shortly after a few blundered attemts at re-launching the Amiga brand in 1995.

So, ten years after the last Amiga was sold here I am re-living my mispent youth via the wonders of emulation. All I need to do now is track down a copy of AMOS and see if I can find the 8 year old source code for my break-out clone which I actually named "YABC" (Yet Another Breakout Clone). I'm still refining my rusty Speedball II skills and the Harkonnens are getting the better of me on planet Dune.

Open Windows? I'd rather play with a workbench.