Captain Future's Amiga Collection

Captain's Log / star date 2010.1207

2010-12-07T15:53:23Z

Just liked to draw your attention to a new book that's come out about Commodore. It's the second edition of a book by author Brian Bagnall that chronicles the rise and fall of our beloved Commodore. I've read and own the first edition of this book, that was originally titled "On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore". It was an absolute blast to read and offered a fascinating inside look into the goings on of Commodore from its birth in the late 70's, to it's glory days in the 80's, to its spectacular collapse in 1994. This original first edition was published in 2005 and has been long sold out, fetching crazy prices on eBay and Amazon ($300 US or more is not an exception).

Now, finally after a five long years a new and revised version of this book is published with so much more new material that it had to be split in two parts. The first part is now available as a 548 page hard cover. You can order a signed edition of the book directly from the publisher here. The book should be available from other online book stores like Amazon soon and no, I don't have any financial interest in this book, nor do I get a kickback for any book sold linked from this site. I just happen to love the original read and hope I can support the author in a small way by giving this book a plug on my site. My signed edition is already in the mail and I hope it'll be here in time for the holidays. Nothing like a good book when it's cold outside!

Captain's Log / star date 2010.1205 -- Commodore A4000T sells for 3700 euro on eBay

2010-12-05T15:24:00Z

Wow! Another one for the books it seems. Today a Commodore Amiga A4000T was sold on eBay for the whopping amount of nearly 3700 euro! At the current exchange rate this comes close to $5,000 US. The Commodore A4000T is one of the last machines that Commodore created before it finally destroyed itself due to incompetence and mismanagement. The A4000T is the tower version of the A4000 desktop (hence the 'T' in the name). You'd be forgiven for thinking this was just the same motherboard that the desktop version had, but stuck inside a tower. The A4000T had a way bigger motherboard, superior expansion capabilities and both SCSI and IDE interfaces and it looked kickass! The design of the A4000T is simply beautiful. Because Commodore was already in dire straits when production of the A4000T took off, it seems that only a handful were produced. It is estimated that only 200 units were manufactured, making this beast incredibly rare and expensive!

The above A4000T was sold in Germany and was a local pickup-only item, which has probably affected the ultimate selling price. It's not completely unthinkable that it would've sold for way more, had the auction allowed for international shipping. The unit was sold as working and included a host of goodies inside, like a Cyberstorm 68060 accelerator card.

Note: After Commodore went bankrupt, the new owners of the Amiga properties released their own versions of the A4000T. Although these tend to sell for good prices as well, they're not nearly as rare as a Commodore A4000T. Also, the case design of these is not as good looking as that of Commodore's A4000T and does not have the Commodore logo on the front of the case.

Captain's Log / star date 2010.1006

2010-10-06T16:12:58Z

Viva Amiga is the name of a documentary that is currently still in the works and will probaby end up being a long overdue tribute to the greatest homecomputer of all times (IMHO)! The documentary is a work of love by Zach Weddington and you can check up on its progress by visiting the official website for the Viva Amiga documentary here.

There's also an official trailer available that you can check out on the Viva Amiga website or by checking out the embedded YouTube video below!!

Captain's Log / star date 2010.1004

2010-10-04T15:51:57Z

Last week a working Commodore 65 prototype was for sale on eBay. The Commodore 65 was the true successor to the venerable C64 and would have been the last 8-bit machine from Commodore featuring a vastly improved and pumped up system that retained backward compatiblity with the C64. It featured 256-colour graphics from a palette of 4096 colours, a 3.5-inch built-in diskdrive (like the Amiga), CPU clocked at 3.5 MHz, 128 kB of memory, expandable to a total of 8MB and a much improved, more powerful version of the BASIC programming language!

When Commodore went tits up in 1994, prototypes of the C65 got into the hands of private collectors. Prototypes of the C65 exist in various states, from non-working to working and everything in between. This auction was for a working model, which is pretty rare. It seems there weren't any takers (that we know of!), because the auction ended without any bidders. The asking price was around €8,600, which is probably out of range for most of us, but it's still a mythical machine that I would love to own one day!!

Captain's Log / star date 2010.0419

2010-04-19T19:31:09Z

U.S. Gold was one of the biggest European game publishers in the 80's and early 90's. As the name would suggest, a lot of their releases were imports from the U.S. One thing that I fondly remember is a little flyer that was included with most of their releases around 1991 or so. I used to literally spend ages looking at the various games that were advertised in there, drooling over the screenshots and hoping I could own them all!

Captain's Log / star date 2010.0418

2010-04-18T13:46:12Z

Just a small site update. I have fixed some dead links and uploaded some new photographs to the Software pages. Check out some of the boxed games I have on the Games page and when you're done, also check out a sampling of the more serious software on the Utilities page. Enjoy!

Captain's Log / star date 2010.0408

2010-04-08T18:49:12Z

Amiga users are cool. Sure, you'll have your rotten apple here and there, but the majority of Amiga users I know or have met (either online or in real life) are really nice people! Case in point, or rather, 2 cases in point! I was recently contacted by a former Amiga user from the UK who offered me his A1200 including loads of extra stuff like 2 joysticks, an Alfa Data mouse/joystick switch, joystick extension cables, loads of extra software and books and manuals. Problem is, I live in the Netherlands, so I replied him that I would be interested if he were willing to send the goods to me and I'd pay for the shipping costs if they weren't too high (shipping abroad from the UK can be a costly exercise, even to the UK's little neighbour, the Netherlands). Fortunately, this generous person had to be in the Amsterdam area for business this week and offered to take the whole lot along with him so that I could pick it up at the hotel he was staying in! So yesterday I drove up there after work and collected these lovely retro goodies. Really cool. I get a warm and fuzzy feeling inside when generous and helpful people like this cross my path in life. So Keith, if you happen to read this, thanks a lot!

Second case in point. I happen to think that CU Amiga is the best Amiga magazine ever made in this universe! A couple of years ago I started to collect the magazine in its various guises and the coverdisks that went along with them. A total of 195 cover disks were published and I have nearly all of them. Only 4 were missing up until recently. 2 months ago I stumbled upon two eBay auctions for CU Amiga cover disk numbers 158 and 159, two of the missing coverdisks in my collection. I was very happy to have won the auction, but alas, fate would have it that the package got lost in the mail! I contacted the seller, but unfortunately there was no way of tracing the package because it wasn't sent by registered mail. He offered me any other 2 coverdisks instead, but seeing as I already have nearly all of them (some of them double, triple of quadruple!) I decided not to take him up on the offer. I also told him I wouldn't be needing a refund. A little while later this same seller contacted me and told me he had a new batch of CU Amigas including the ones with coverdisks 158 and 159. He offered to send them to me only for the cost of shipping! Needless to say I took him up on his offer, but this time by registered air mail! The disks recently arrived safely and have been added to my CU Amiga coverdisks collection, which is now only missing two disks (166 and 191, if you have them and want to sell or trade 'em, contact me!!). I tried to leave this great eBay seller positive feedback, but because the auction was completed too far in the past I was not able to leave this seller feedback anymore. A real shame and I hope this plug on my website sort of makes up for it in a small way. His eBay account name is penfold_t_mole and I can heartily recommend him!!!

So there you have it. Amiga users are cool. :-)

Captain's Log / star date 2010.0406 -- Viper 530 sells for 905 euro on eBay

2010-04-06T18:54:36Z

Wow! Just a couple of moments ago a Viper 530 auction ended on eBay. The highest bid was a whopping 905 Euro! An interesting note is that the auction was relatively below the radar, because the auction did not carry any references to the names Viper or E-Matrix 530 as this supercard is known by. Besides that, the auction was specified with the option of shipping to Germany only, which automatically prevents non-German eBay accounts from bidding in most cases. I shudder to think how high this auction might have ended up were it available internationally and had the auction title and/or description contained the name Viper 530 instead of just a generic accelerator title.

For those who do not know, the Viper 530 is debatably the biggest and baddest accelerator for the A500. Dragging the A500 to a screaming 50MHz speed, delivered by a 68030, IDE interfaces, SCSI interface and up to 128 MB 32-bit Fast RAM memory. The Viper 530 was released fairly late in the A500's life (1997) and only around 350 pieces were manufactured. Most of them seem to have been sold in Germany under the name E-Matrix 530.

Captain's Log / star date 2009.1202

2009-12-02T17:50:34Z

Phew! Been a couple of months, but then again I have been a lot more busy than usual the past couple of months. Especially the past 2 months, because I moved house. Moving sucks, but when you've got a lot of stuff like me, it sucks even more. Anyways, I'm glad to say that my girlfriend, me and all my stuff arrived safely in our new home. As you can imagine I'm still in the process of unpacking and arranging all my things and it'll still take some time before I have everything set up the way I want it to.

The upside is that I finally have some space to set up an AROS system, which is something I've been planning for quite a while. I bought a nice Commodore Gaming case which I will use to build the system and I hope to get around to installing AROS on it this weekend. Stay tuned!

Captain's Log / star date 2009.0526

2009-05-26T15:27:02Z

Last Saturday I had some spare time and decided to play a game on my PS3. Yes, I do also own modern stuff. :-) I had a copy of Burnout Paradise lying around that I had bought on discount way back in December, but never got around to playing it. And that's where the trouble began. First of all I was prompted by the PS3 to download and install the latest firmware. I happily obliged and found myself 20 minutes into the future when my PS3 booted up again with the new firmware level with no noticeable new features or enhancements whatsoever, just like the last 2 firmware updates. Still feeling like gaming I popped in the Burnout Paradise game disc. And immediately I was greeted with the message that an update was available for Burnout Paradise, leaving me with nothing but an "OK" option to start the download of 6 packages which totalled to approximately 1.5GB of data....

About an hour later I got fed up with wasting my precious Saturday afternoon time waiting for all these updates to complete and switched on my CDTV. I hooked up the retro wireless joysticks I purchased recently and was playing a bout of Pang well within a minute of booting up, followed by a couple of satisfying rounds of Jaguar XJ-220.

Although modern gaming has made giant leaps in terms of video and audio quality and connectivity, there are downsides too. The ability to update software and firmware after it has hit the market is both a blessing and a curse. Nobody likes waiting an hour and a half to satisfy a gaming impulse. Luckily the Amiga was around to come to my rescue. ;-)

As for the collection. I recently expanded my collection with some nice new Commodore stuff of which I will add photographs in the near future.

Captain's Log / star date 2009.0330

2009-03-30T14:51:05Z

Last week I faced Dutch prime time traffic in order to pick up a Commodore 128. I spent a total of nearly 4 hours in my car for a trip that shouldn't have taken more than 2 hours. But in the end my troubles were more than worth it as I got the following setup pretty cheap: A boxed C128 including manuals, a 1541-II disk drive, one Final Cartridge III, some boxed original software, two small boxes of floppy disks and a Suzo Arcade joystick.

I have owned a C64 back in the day. As a matter of fact it was my first real computer and I have fond memories of using it along with a 1541-II drive. I have a few C64's lying around but never got around to properly hooking them up. I also only recently managed to buy a boxed 1541-II drive and was planning to connect it to one of my C64's. I have never owned a C128 though and everything I've read about it really convinced me this was a nice little machine to have. It was Commodore's last 8-bit machine (not counting the C65, which was never released) and features near perfect C64 compatibility. But next to that it also runs CP/M (an OS closely related to MS-DOS) and ofcourse the original C128 mode.

This weekend I unboxed the C128 and cleaned it up. The 1541-II disk drive was very dirty, but has cleaned up nicely as you can see from the photographs. After I hooked the C128 up to my 1084S monitor everything worked straight out of the box, as they say. I popped the included Commodore test disk into the 1541-II and ran the performance test program that was included, which runs a test of the drive's mechanics, formats a disk and does some test reads and writes. Thankfully the drive passed with flying colours! The C128 and the drive worked perfectly. As coincidence would want it, I happen to have a spare 1541-II box lying around that came with some Amiga disks I bought off someone a couple of months ago, that will go nicely with the 1541-II I just got as part of this deal.

Well, the rest of the Saturday was spent playing Arkanoid, Last Ninja III and listening to some cool SID tunes! Been a long time since I last enjoyed Commodore's 8-bit goodness and I'm looking forward to going through the stack of floppy disks that I still haven't checked. Good times! Check out more photographs of the C128 and the 1541-II by clicking on the corresponding links in the Collection Menu on the right!

Captain's Log / star date 2009.0304

2009-03-04T16:57:07Z

Recently I continued playing around with my A500 setup and I spent some time finnicking around with the Screenmode settings to try and find the optimal resolution. I have my A500 (A500 Plus actually) connected via RGB to a standard Commodore 1084S monitor. Although I'm pretty content with the standard PAL High Res mode of 640x256, this screenmode isn't really useful when using IBrowse, because of the limited vertical resolution. This means having to switch to interlaced High Res mode, which is 640x512, but the drawback of this mode is the annoying flicker caused by the interlacing. I do have a MultiVision 500 scandoubler lying around, but unfortunately there's no way it will fit inside my A500's case together with the Viper 530 accelerator and I'm more fond of the accelerator!

I did manage to alleviate the annoying flicker problem somewhat by doing two things. First of all I decreased the intensity of white, which causes the most flickering, especially when a horizontal white line is directly above or below a horizontal black line. The other thing was switching the Screenmode to NTSC interlaced High Res. Although this reduces the available vertical resolution from 512 to 400 lines, it offsets this by using a higher refresh rate of 60Hz instead of 50Hz. This makes the flickering a lot more bareable. The 1084S supports both PAL and NTSC, so no problem there.

I further installed AmiSSL which is an SSL implementation for Workbench and works perfectly with IBrowse. SSL is needed to e.g. access GMail accounts. I was quite surprised with the readability of websites even though I'm just using an 8 colour palette in Workbench! Because I have a pretty good accelerator installed I'm also able to push the serial port up to an amazing, planet destroying 76800 baud. I can increase the colour palette to a total of 16 colours which results in even better looking graphics, but whenever I do that AmiPPP starts to stutter as the serial port obviously isn't able to run at such a high speed combined with a colour palette of 16 colours. I've yet to discover at what speed PPP will function again when using 16 colours and see whether the speed decrease makes up for the prettier graphics.

I've still yet to install a replacement for the standard serial device, which could potentially allow for faster baud rates. Also I still need to replace my current trial version of AmiPPP with ppp.device, because it's not possible to register AmiPPP anymore and I suspect AmiPPP throttles the speed of my PPP connection (at least the documentation and the actual transfer rates I measure seem to indicate so). To be continued!

Captain's Log / star date 2009.0214

2009-02-14T08:33:12Z

Not much news to report, because I've been busy with work and life in general, as usual. Though I did find time to add lots of new photographs to my collection pages. The new entries are indicated as [NEW] in the Collection menu on the right. Stuff added includes lots of hard drive controllers for the A500, memory expansions for the A1000, the Hydra Systems Amiganet for the A500 and more! Have a great weekend!

Captain's Log / star date 2009.0204

2009-02-04T15:59:33Z

A stack of CU Amiga coverdisks arrived in the mail this week which has narrowed the number of missing disks of this magazine in my collection to just 4! If anyone happens to have CU Amiga disk numbers 158, 159, 166 or 191 and wants to sell or trade them, do get in touch with me! I have lots of duplicates for trade.

I also continued polishing my A500 installation. After already having installed AmiTCP, AmiPPP and HippoPlayer I decided it was time to install a browser. Currently IBrowse is the best option for a classic 68k machine so I downloaded that. It's slow, but it works! I'll be installing the AmiSSL plugin soon so that I can check my GMail from IBrowse. I'll also be looking at a serial.device replacement, because the original driver is just too much of a strain on the A500's resources. Geeky fun!

Captain's Log / star date 2009.0129

2009-01-29T15:13:02Z

Some more progress on my Secret of Monkey Island disassembly. I've been having some problems recompiling the disassembled code back into a working binary. None of the disassemblers I've used produced anything that I could recompile with DevPac or ASM-One. I'm currently looking into patching the code directly, which shouldn't be too hard as long as I manage to patch the Amiga Hunk header info. The reason I want to patch the main executable is so that I can insert some code that flashes the screen using the Intuition function DisplayBeep() every time that the GetMsg() routine is called to process Intuition input messages, because I need to pinpoint where things go wrong on the CDTV. As I mentioned before there's a problem with the mouse button inputs when I try to play this game on the CDTV. Monkey Island uses system friendly programming and as such has so far been an interesting learning experience!

After more than a week of straight disassembling, analyzing and cross referencing in my free hours I decided to take a break for a couple of days. In another flash of nostalgia I decided to unbox my Commodore 64 and hook it up to my 1084 monitor. I'll be adding a 1541-II diskdrive soon so that I'll actually be able to play some games :-) Playing around with the C64 also gave me the opportunity to take a few photographs of the 8-bit Commodores in my collection. New pics of my C64 and C16 have been added to the collection photo pages. Check out the photos by clicking on the links in the menu on the right!