More Good Clean Fun!
The next platform I got hold of was the Commodore Amiga. It was, and probably remains, a landmark computer. It had separate processors for sound, video and data computations. Since the glory days of Commodore, the Amiga has been through more owners than most American sporting teams. In fact, I don't think Commodore ever invented it, they just produced it. Either way, as a gaming platform, it was a sad disappointment compared to the C64. The graphics and the sound were infinitely better, but as any gamer will tell you, that does not a game make. Games ported to the Amiga from the C64, like Wizball or Double Dragon suffered badly in the gameplay department. In short, they were too simple. The gameplay was dumbed down in a serious and degrading way.
Like the IBM PC, you could do more with an Amiga than just play games. It could be programmed, boasted cool apps like GEO and ran a huge variety of music programs. The platform still has a serious cult following.
I never owned an Amiga for too long for many reasons; it had 512KB of RAM as a default, which was huge for its time, but it wasn't enough to do anything fancy with some of the built-in graphics apps it had. I kept getting out of memory errors several minutes into playing with it. It was an Amiga 500, by the way. The memory was upgradable. A small plug-in RAM card was available with boosted it all to 1028KB or 1MB. I imagine things have only gotten better since, but I haven't owned one for well over a decade now.
But games were the main reason I ditched the Amiga. They just blew chunks in the gameplay department, whether it was Barbarian, Pawn, Turrican or any other game. It was too dumbed down. The C64 may have looked like a bunch of pixel blocks moving around, but it was eminently playable. Oh well, Amiga.
I then did the IBM PC thing. It was a superb 286SX with 2MB RAM with a 5¼ inch floppy and some very small hard-drive, like 10MB or so. It came with DOS 3.0 and I remember buying a DOS book from Tandy (Radio Shack) so I could figure out arcane magic like FORMAT.COM and APPEND.EXE. I was with this system, especially after I bought a wonderful Sound Blaster 8 for it, that I experienced the mind-bending fun that is bootdisks. Oh yes, Two out of every three games I bought required a bootdisk due to Microsoft's glorious segmented memory model.
That is: the 640KB limit. If you, by some chance, have never experienced this, do a search on Google for such things like memmaker, himem.sys, umb, etc. More than you ever wanted to know, to be sure. Armed with this bodacious system, I played numerous games ranging from puzzle to side-scrolling actioners. It was when SSI started to release a lot of their now famous Gold Box games that I realized my 286 didn't cut it any more. The earlier ones ran fine on this, but later ones like Pools of Darkness had dramas.
The next system I owned (and forked out a lot for) was an IBM PS/2 486DX. Very much state of the art for early 1993 as they came. Built-in 1MB S3 VLB video, 2 PCI slots, 4 ISA slots, 3½ floppy drive and a 300MB hard drive. Things got even better when I added a Sound Blaster 16 (with a thumbwheel volume control) and a CD-ROM drive. I owned this computer for 5 years. Yep, it survived the earlier Pentium age, AMD and Cyrix clockspeed doublers and a few other innovations.
With this system I entered the Official Ulujain Golden Age of Gaming...
Onto the next page.