Classicamiga Forum Retro Edition
Poll: How old were you when you got your first Amiga?
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How old were you when you got your first Amiga?
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    Thread: How old were you when you got your first Amiga?
    SamuraiCrow 22:04 7th April 2011
    I was 19 and just starting college. The year was 1993. My first Amiga was an A1200HD40.
    [Reply]
    Harrison 01:25 8th April 2011
    I've always wanted to ask someone from the US how much advertising and exposure did the A1200 receive in the US? In the UK it was everywhere and advertised as much as the original A500, and was on display running in nearly all electrical stores. But I've always got the impression that other than the A500 the US market focused mostly on the big box Amigas (A1000, 2000, 3000, 4000) and not the later all in one keyboard models (A600, A1200). Was that true?
    [Reply]
    Tiago 09:02 8th April 2011
    I do know that in the US when the A500 came out, they did a publicity in magazines with a A500 in sepia tones... can you imagine, A500, revolution in multimedia.... sepia...??????

    advertisement in Us was always worst, then Europe. Uk for example, Kit Spencer did a good job in promoting the PET in late 70s.

    Did you know, he order a manual to the PET that didnt have one. Commodore in US, didn't have a manual, Chuck Peddle never got the time to produce one, so Kit Spencer order on e in UK to some hobbylist guy. when Jack Tramiel saw the month reports, he said "hey Kit, what a fxxx is this manual? Why are you spending money on this?"
    Kit said, you didnt have one, i ask you one, no one send me a decent manual to the Pet, i could not sell it just with 5 pages basic setup manual, so i order one myself. Jack said...."ok"... next day, commodore US Called Kit Spencer and said.... Tramiel said you have a manual... can you send it to us?
    [Reply]
    Harrison 12:26 8th April 2011
    You have been reading your new Commdore book I see! I've just got my copy this week and have just begun reading it. Very interesting stuff and far different, more revealing and insightful than anything else ever written about Commodore.
    [Reply]
    SamuraiCrow 22:38 8th April 2011
    Originally Posted by Harrison:
    I've always wanted to ask someone from the US how much advertising and exposure did the A1200 receive in the US? In the UK it was everywhere and advertised as much as the original A500, and was on display running in nearly all electrical stores. But I've always got the impression that other than the A500 the US market focused mostly on the big box Amigas (A1000, 2000, 3000, 4000) and not the later all in one keyboard models (A600, A1200). Was that true?
    Commodore's advertisement of the Amiga always stunk in the US and especially in the later stages. There was nothing outside their own Commodore Magazine. The big-box Amigas only caught on because of the NewTek Video Toaster cards. They used an Amiga to replace television production equipment. Other than that, you were pretty much on your own.

    If you had your Amiga hooked up to a TV you were doubly screwed because hardly any games were written expressly to run on NTSC scan rates and oftentimes would run about 16% faster than they were designed to run. You were stuck if you didn't have a 1084 monitor. Running games in PAL mode was the norm even here in the US. NTSC mode was pretty much a useless appendage for wedge-case Amigas, as was the RF modulator that was used to output to TVs. The RF modulator had lots of video interference from the hard drive.
    [Reply]
    Harrison 03:01 9th April 2011
    That's really interesting to know. Especially the bit about games not supporting NTSC that often. In the UK a lot of our games had a 100px black space at the bottom of the screen, with the excuse from the developers always being that the game was developed for the US NTSC market, when ported to PAL for the UK market the PAL image was obviously 100 pixels larger vertically, so without the time needed to remake the graphics for the higher res, they instead used the same ones and just squashed them up on the screen with the extra space left blank. This was the case for quite a percentage of games released, and I never got why they didn't just find a way that could stretch the original graphics to fit. Once I had a 1084 monitor I tended to run the Amiga in NTSC mode for those games so they filled the screen.

    Also you mentioned games running too fast. By contract magazine game reviews in the UK used to make the excuse that a game felt slow because it was codes for the faster 60Hz US NTSC market, and after porting to the PAL 50Hz UK market it obviously slowed it down from 30FPS to 25FPS, or 60FPS to 30FPS. We always had that excuse with Beat em ups like Street Fighter. But from what you have said, the US market suffered from the opposite just as much. Just shows you can't believe everything you read!
    [Reply]
    zada1989 02:14 14th November 2011
    I was trying to remember this and I think I had just left secondary school as I saved up that summer to get one, so I must have been 16/17. Quite late owning my first Amiga, although I had been a fan and using them for years at friends houses and in a store where you could rent time on them (a bit like an internet cafe today).
    [Reply]
    QuikGBR 18:39 22nd August 2012
    A500plus I was about 15
    [Reply]
    SamuraiCrow 10:25 3rd June 2015
    Originally Posted by Harrison:
    That's really interesting to know. Especially the bit about games not supporting NTSC that often. In the UK a lot of our games had a 100px black space at the bottom of the screen, with the excuse from the developers always being that the game was developed for the US NTSC market, when ported to PAL for the UK market the PAL image was obviously 100 pixels larger vertically, so without the time needed to remake the graphics for the higher res, they instead used the same ones and just squashed them up on the screen with the extra space left blank. This was the case for quite a percentage of games released, and I never got why they didn't just find a way that could stretch the original graphics to fit. Once I had a 1084 monitor I tended to run the Amiga in NTSC mode for those games so they filled the screen.

    Also you mentioned games running too fast. By contract magazine game reviews in the UK used to make the excuse that a game felt slow because it was codes for the faster 60Hz US NTSC market, and after porting to the PAL 50Hz UK market it obviously slowed it down from 30FPS to 25FPS, or 60FPS to 30FPS. We always had that excuse with Beat em ups like Street Fighter. But from what you have said, the US market suffered from the opposite just as much. Just shows you can't believe everything you read!
    Commercial games would run on NTSC because of the underscanned video but I liked free software just as well. PAL emulation was required for most of that.
    [Reply]
    Harrison 16:51 3rd June 2015
    @SamuraiCrow. Long time no see. Glad to see an old member returning.
    [Reply]
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