The Commodore Amiga was the COOLEST

Dominik Diamond recently deemed the Amiga as 'painfully uncool'. It is my mission, nay, my DUTY, to set the record straight.

Dominik Diamond is the GamesMaster host of our hearts. He didn’t have a lot of competition, to be fair, with Dexter Fletcher flirting with the role for Season 3. And look how Dexter ended up! A mere celebrated actor and director (Including Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman). Whereas Dominik is outclassing him as a DJ on Toronto radio. Suck it up, Dexter.

GamesMaster was an innuendo-filled video games show that aired 1992 to 1998. It was aimed at children, featuring challenges, reviews and tips. It means I will forever associate Dominik Diamond with video games. And lines such as, “Remember folks: Life is a bit like a mountain bike - tough going up hill, but fantastic going down.”

As such, I was shocked (SHOCKED, I tell you) to read Dominik’s latest column, where although he professes his love for the Commodore Amiga, he considered it ‘painfully uncool’. How could he do this to us?! After all these years?!

If any man could possibly understand cool, IT IS THIS ONE. Screen capture from GamesMaster itself, some time in the 1990s.

As such, I am contractually bound to spend some time giving the case for the defence. Readers, I present to you: REASONS WHY THE COMMODORE AMIGA WAS EXTREMELY VERY COOL INDEED.

Not an Atari ST

We need to get this one out of the way. In the 16-bit computer era, the Amiga was mostly competing against the Atari ST. Was it really a competition? The Atari ST wasn’t great. It won over musicians a bit as it had a MIDI port as standard, but everything else was just… painful. I’m not mad or angry or upset about the Atari: Just disappointed.

In a world full of sadness, there just isn’t anything sadder than the Atari’s GEM Desktop. I mean, just look at it. It’s practically weeping through the screen.

VERDICT: Cool by default.

Sad. So sad.

The One That Wasn’t The Amiga A500

Most people familiar with the Amiga will be thinking of the Amiga 500. It was indeed grey and drab. It was the computer equivalent of what you get when you ask a 5 year-old to draw a picture of a car.

I was lucky enough to get upgraded to the Amiga 1200 one Christmas. Now THIS was more like it. I mean, just look at it! Angular. Sleek. And the coolest things lay under the hood: AGA chipset (better graphics), and the ability to slide in your very own hard disk. Which I did, and it changed my life: Going from swapping floppy disks every five seconds to having 540 megabytes of hard disk space was the stuff of dreams.

Oh, and it was so cool that Calvin Harris whipped his out to perform at the Brit Awards this year.

VERDICT: Reassuringly Cool.

This is an absolutely gorgeous slab of technology. Put it up on the wall.

A World of Friendship

If something is truly cool, you don’t mind your mates knowing about it.

Sensible World of Soccer was the game that solidified that connection between the Amiga and your friends. It was absurdly playable. Many a joystick was waggled to its demise, or hurled against a wall, due to this game. Bedrooms became tournament battlegrounds.

Such is the ongoing coolness of this game, competitions are STILL held yearly (Take that, EA Sports!), and unofficial updates are made to the game to keep league structures up to date.

VERDICT: Sensibly Cool.

STICK THAT IN YOUR GOAL HOLE.

The Sound of Success

Say hello to Paula, the Amiga’s custom sound chip.

Paula allowed four-channel sound and up to 29k samples per second. This meant one thing: The Amiga sounded SUPERB!

Music sounded like music, not the beeps and bops of 8-bit computers. Proper instrumental samples could be used to great effect. And not just by Calvin Harris.

If you have three hours to kill, there’s a great compilation of Amiga music available to listen to via YouTube. Playlists and albums are abound on Spotify. The vertically scrolling ‘tracker’ approach to music production is still in use today.

VERDICT: Aurally Cool.

An example of a ‘tracker’, where music could be created for the Amiga.

The Scene

As a teenager, one of the main things that got my heart racing was a stuffed jiffy bag popping through my letterbox.

The Amiga was a hotbed of public domain (PD) software. Owners would write software of all sorts, for fun, and then give it away. I was really lucky to live a bike ride away from a shop that actually sold PD software (basically charging for the disks and the service). My mind was blown by the sheer variety of stuff on offer: Graphical demos, music disks, games… hundreds if not thousands of disks were available.

There are too many demos to highlight here, but one of the classics was State of the Art by demo group Spaceballs. You can watch it on YouTube. In fact, you should do that RIGHT NOW.

This was all pre-Internet. Trading of software was by post, hence jiffy bags were the weapon of choice. Covering them with multiple layers of parcel tape for longevity was a standard trick. I even got my very own rubber stamp made to save time when sending out packages…. and come on, what could be cooler than THAT?

I graduated from having my very own collection of hundreds of disks built up over time, to creating my own (admittedly very simple) scene productions, teaming up with total strangers met via the wonders of Royal Mail.

It wasn’t just about the floppy disks, either. In some cases, pen pals were made, with pages of writing (and later dot matrix printing) accompanying each trove of digital delight.

VERDICT: Stuffed full of Cool.

I MADE THIS.

The X Factor

The image that accompanies this section, of X-Copy Professional, will stir the heart, or even loins, of anyone who owned an Amiga. Even if they are now a dead inside 40-something adult.

X-Copy was THE disk copying tool for the Amiga. A sea of green zeros meant success. Those games were now YOURS to take from your mate’s house back home to enjoy at your leisure.

Of course, this was only used for the aforementioned public domain titles. It would never, EVER be used for any pirated and therefore illegal software. Not even once.

VERDICT: Suspiciously Cool (Doubly cool if you owned an external disk drive to make this process even quicker).

Amiga Power

The Amiga had a decent selection of paper magazines at is peak. Some were all very grown up and professional. Some concentrated more squarely on the games. The one that stood above them all, like a colossus, was Amiga Power. It was The Fonz of computer magazines.

Amiga Power existed for 65 issues. It oozed cool due to the irreverent, personal style that ran through each copy of the magazine. Strange anecdotes, interviews done in weird styles just for the fun of it, it was all going on. I read a LOT of computer magazines in my formative years (some surprise, right?) and I can point to them for how my own writing style came about. Or blame them.

Such was the impact of this magazine is that every single issue has been archived on the Internet and can be downloaded. You should read all of them.

VERDICT: Rebelliously Cool.

I heard it on the Grapevine

It wasn’t all about the paper. Now, Grapevine was not the only disk magazine for the Amiga. It was, however, the most ubiquitous. It spanned 21 releases in the end, packed full of content on… to be honest, everything imaginable. Scene news? Sure. Game reviews? Expected. How to hypnotise people and get free phone calls? Let’s have some of that as well. I always eagerly anticipated each new release, and you could send in blank floppy disks to be one of the first to get a copy.

I even have some of my own articles immortalised in there somewhere.

VERDICT: Swaggeringly cool.

Copyright disputes are cool

Everyone loves a good ol’ corporate dispute nowadays.

Commodore announced bankruptcy in 1994. Its assets were purchased by Escom, who celebrated by themselves going bust in 1996. Gateway 2000 then snapped everything up, only to sell it all after three years. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly who owns the Amiga in the present day. Books could be written on the subject, and probably have been. It seems to be a fist fight (yes, actual court action) between Amiga Inc, Hyperion and Cloanto. There are now divergent releases of the Amiga Operating System (is 3.9 a later release than 3.2? Good luck making a decision, as they are by different developers!).

VERDICT: Legally Cool.

Is this CD even legal?

Can’t stop the re-issues

Finally, if you missed out first time around, don’t worry: Someone managed to cut through the legal challenges and snag the rights to create a cute re-issue of the Amiga hardware in recent times.

THEA500 Mini (Weird spacing intentional) is essentially an Amiga emulator in a box. It’s tiny, connects to your TV, and comes with 25 classic games off the bat. You can install additional games at your leisure. You even get a mouse and joypad thrown in.

Nostalgia is the coolest thing of all.

VERDICT: Compressed Cool.

Probably actual size.