Retro Craze Pt. 2

With the recent release of the A500 mini console, it’s the perfect time to talk about the legend it was cast after. The Amiga 500.

It’s been a while since the A500 was announced and as the C64 Mini left some room for improvement I wasn’t too excited at first, especially given the pricetag of 130 € here in Germany. Besides I never owned an Amiga, I only played on it a few times at a friend’s house. Actually I skipped most of it, when I went from C64 to a DOS PC. First, a 286 of my mother, where I played early VGA games, and then a 486 SX that I took over from my brother. That was my introduction to multimedia games and I didn’t look back anymore. Not for a quarter of a century that is. 

But while looking for C64 gear on Ebay I stumbled across a few Amiga auctions. If you thought 60 € for a C64 was crazy, try almost twice that much for an Amiga 500.
Now as it turns out, my wife used to have an Amiga 500 for a while, until it disappeared between moving from place to place. A few times she talked fondly about what little she remembered of it.

I already had a Raspberry Pi for emulating various systems and it was good enough to take a peek into the Amiga game library, but it didn’t convey any real emotion.
When playing games or even just talking about games, it’s the emotions and personal stories connected with it, that I find interesting.
Playing on the Raspi is so detached of that, it just doesn’t cut it for me.

One lazy evening I was browsing Ebay again, making fun of the crazy prices people were asking for old gear that seemed worthless fifteen-twenty years ago.
I remember when people used Amiga CD32 consoles with CDRs full of ripped and converted Amiga games as an alternative to a regular amiga, because it took less space. I thought the idea was interesting, but skipped on it back in the day, because I didn’t feel like spending up to 80 bucks on it. Today prices easily hit eight times that much for the base system.
It’s cheaper for me to get a new PC for creative work than a fully working setup of an Amiga 1200 for playing around. It’s bonkers.
Anyway, I eventually stumbled across an Amiga 500 that looked fine and on a whim I pressed Buy It Now.

I felt kinda bad about the pricetag, but justified it as a hobby, as research and an investment. Besides, it looked really cool. Nice bright color, screenshots showed system information and games running, it even had the original seals still intact.
The words »no warrenty« were only a formality at that point, after all the machine is old and most auctions say it, just to be on the safe side.

Boy was I wrong. Never use Buy It Now if you want a good deal. Turns out the seller was a scumbag, who made barely working used ones look like they were never opened. When mine arrived, I heard an ominous rattling sound. Screws fell into my hand, the top part of the case was not fully connected anymore and the case looked yellow as old teeth. The power supply looked like it had been found in a pyramid of old Egypt and the strain relief was torn off. The joystick was junk, the mouse looked okay, but didn’t come with a ball and was useless. The screenshots had suggested software, but nothing came with it. And of course there was no video cable included, so I couldn’t test anything.

So I first had to order a video cable and a few disks before I could do further tests, but I was already plenty bummed out.
When I got the cable and I booted up the system, there was the next surprise. The drive made shredding noises and didn’t read any disks.
Upon closer look I noticed that the seal looked nothing like the original Commodore seals and was in fact just a generic hologram sticker you can buy – guess where – right – on Ebay. What was even stranger was that the serial number didn’t match the one on the photos, even though the seller claimed he had just »found« this Amiga during a house clearing. He made it sound like he didn’t have any others.
So I contacted him about the obvious faults of his goods, I also mentioned the fake seals and that he shipped me the wrong unit and he agreed to give me a refund.

Something felt fishy. I was about to call it off and ask for a price-reduction instead, I figured I could fix those problems. But if he already offered a refund, why bother?
I decided to buy a different unit instead and ship this one back.
Some days later I recieved an angry e-mail from the seller claiming, the unit had been in great condition and it was all my fault that it was now broken. Besides, my reasons for the refund were invalid, the drive was fine, he said. He wouldn’t give me a refund. To illustrate he posted a picture of a tiny crack in the lower corner of the top case, that hadn’t been there when I sent it. Ebay agreed, no refund for me.

Now I knew what kind of a seller I was dealing with, I knew for a while, but didn’t want to see it. Aren’t we all fellow retro lovers after all? Not this one.
He had his goods and my money and Ebay thought that was fine business. I felt like puking.
Eventually the seller agreed to send the unit back to me, if I paid another round of shipping. I feared the worst when the package arrived. What was not very well packaged in the first place, was terrible now. I opened the box and the whole upper case was trashed, as if somebody had stepped on it in several places. Two screws were missing and not in the package. The screws that were there were of a different kind than before.

On the bright side, I could now see the insides of the unit. It didn’t look good on the inside either. Most metal clips of the shielding were missing, not in the package either. Turns out nothing was original anymore and most things had been tampered with by somebody with little skill.
What makes this even more absurd is, the drive sounded just fine. Now I don’t believe the drive magically fixed itself by being thrown around. It had to be a different drive, but why go through the trouble of replacing something, if you’re trashing the rest?
Only much later I discovered, it wasn’t just a different drive, a Teac instead of the usual Chinion, but actually a converted PC drive.
I felt so disappointed by this whole experience, that I didn’t look at the unit for a while.

Fortunately the next package that arrived had a working Amiga in it, but the drive was a bit picky about what disks to read. But it read Kickstart and that was enough to get me started on more Amiga experimentation.

Actually there is still a novel set in the mid nineties, during the multimedia revolution, that I want to complete at some point. So I can reframe all this as research. ;)

In the next post I will talk in more detail about my quest to refurbishing the Amiga 500 that had been treated so poorly and what I learned on the way.