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Rare Amiga Bought on eBay For $2,500 (eurogamer.net)
Long-time Slashdot reader Mike Bouma shared Eurogamer's report about a rare Amiga 3000 auctioned on eBay:
Mike Clarke, who worked at legendary UK game company Psygnosis from 1992 to 1999 doing audio work, rescued this particular Amiga 3000 from destruction after it had been placed down in a corridor, ready to be thrown out. Over 20 years later, Clarke is selling it on eBay... According to Clarke, this Amiga 3000 was first used by artist Jeff Bramfitt, who scratched his initials in the top of the case in pen "just in case someone took it off his desk".
Bramfitt used the machine to work on the title screens for Carthage, Infestation, Shadow of the Beast 2 and more classic Amiga games, but its headline claim to fame is it was used to create the original Amiga Lemmings intro and logo. Lemmings, which came out for the Amiga in 1991, was developed by DMA Design (now Rockstar North) and published by Psygnosis before the latter was bought by Sony. Later, it was used for Microcosm (3DO, Mega-CD), Scavenger IV (aka Novastorm, Mega-CD, FM Towns), and unreleased games such as No Escape, a tie-in with the Ray Liotta film, aka Penal Colony for Mega-CD.
Files for all of these games and more remain on this Amiga 3000's hard drive. "I think the above games were all in 1993, which was a very busy year because we got bought by Sony and alongside working on games by third-party developers, Sony pushed all of these film licenses onto us and gave us almost no time to make them," Clarke said. This Amiga 3000 is not without its problems, however. The floppy drive doesn't work anymore and the hard drive is "temperamental", which means you might have issues booting the thing up.
After 16 bids, the Amiga sold for £1,850 -- about $2,300 USD -- plus another £170 ($215 USD) for shipping.
"So much early gaming history has been lost mostly because, much like the BBC erasing Doctor Who tapes, nobody valued it when it was happening," Clarke tells Eurogamer. "I was the only person who saw the historical value in rescuing these machines and I also rescued over 800 development disks that were going to be binned at the time."
Bramfitt used the machine to work on the title screens for Carthage, Infestation, Shadow of the Beast 2 and more classic Amiga games, but its headline claim to fame is it was used to create the original Amiga Lemmings intro and logo. Lemmings, which came out for the Amiga in 1991, was developed by DMA Design (now Rockstar North) and published by Psygnosis before the latter was bought by Sony. Later, it was used for Microcosm (3DO, Mega-CD), Scavenger IV (aka Novastorm, Mega-CD, FM Towns), and unreleased games such as No Escape, a tie-in with the Ray Liotta film, aka Penal Colony for Mega-CD.
Files for all of these games and more remain on this Amiga 3000's hard drive. "I think the above games were all in 1993, which was a very busy year because we got bought by Sony and alongside working on games by third-party developers, Sony pushed all of these film licenses onto us and gave us almost no time to make them," Clarke said. This Amiga 3000 is not without its problems, however. The floppy drive doesn't work anymore and the hard drive is "temperamental", which means you might have issues booting the thing up.
After 16 bids, the Amiga sold for £1,850 -- about $2,300 USD -- plus another £170 ($215 USD) for shipping.
"So much early gaming history has been lost mostly because, much like the BBC erasing Doctor Who tapes, nobody valued it when it was happening," Clarke tells Eurogamer. "I was the only person who saw the historical value in rescuing these machines and I also rescued over 800 development disks that were going to be binned at the time."
Peripherals too. I've still got a dot matrix printer and a wyse orange screen terminal. They're not worth much monetarily and they're not too rare (yet), but to me that have value due to their historical technical perspective.
People still care about the Amiga?
EBay provides proof that people will try to sell anything...no matter how inherently useless it is.
People still post on /.?
Amusingly, $2300 is less than the MSRP of $4498 in 1991, even if you don't adjust for inflation. (Accounting for inflation, it works out to $8400 in 2018 dollars.)
They did about $11 billion in revenue last year; given that they typically make about a 9% commission. that's $100 billion in total sales revenues through eBay. I'd say they are still a pretty important player...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Heck yeah, I still use eBay. For the parts I need for my projects, the prices on eBay are usually lower than Aliexpress.
And I find eBay easier to use, too.
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Apart from being able to cut glass and focus lasers, diamonds are pretty useless too.
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Lemmings was pretty much the one game that was available on almost any computer.
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Destined for the garbage bin, and actually in the garbage bin, are two entirely different things, legally speaking. Getting official permission to take obsolete assets from most companies is nearly impossible, but soft permission is usually granted when this kind of rescue occures. It is an interesting story, and I applaud our hero, and believe he deserves the auction proceeds, but even if the company no longer exists, I think technically saving that Amiga is larceny and then sale of stolen items, and I hope the story doesn't get our hero in trouble.
Doing music on one. And there's a vibrant homebrew game scene. A lot of little indies find it easier to write for old computers than to compete on Steam with the 900,000+ asset flips out there.
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meant art. Guess I got music on the brain. Google "SID Chip" if you wanna hear folks using old hardware for music. Or track down some OPL3 tracks.
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Many games were widely ported. For example, look at the original Prince of Persia, it was ported to ~30 platforms.
Circumcision is child abuse.
All of the proprietary Amiga ASICs and even the Motorolla 68k series processors used single-ended, open collector logic. As those circuit boards age the capacitence of signal traces will degrade to the point that timing will be changed, and Amigas are already running pretty close to the edge as far as timing goes. Another 10 - 20 years and original Amiga hardware that still boots will likely be as rare as rooster teeth.
Lemmings was the Miner 2049er of the 90s.
Funnest games I remember on the Amiga were Nuclear War (surprised they didn't make Napoleon Blownapart a possible opponent), Ports of Call, Llamatron, and a most awesome Joust clone, that I think was simply called Jouster. I think Star Control was also on the Amiga. Then there were the Amiga versions of the various dungeon crawl games as well. Those put all other ports to shame (and I was an Apple IIGS person back then...long after I was a TI-99/4a nerd).
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an Amiga solved the traveling salesman problem?
Yep, I sold one of my dirty jizz socks on Ebay years ago for a few hundred bitcoin. At the time, that was enough to cover the postage. Wish I still had that bitcoin. And that sock.
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For historians this specific machine is important. And is why it sold for a lot. It could have sold for more if the auction was open for a few more months for others to be made aware of its existence. It has experienced so many important points in history. For example, as we all know Grand Theft Auto, the game, was developed by Rockstar North. And Rockstar North use to be known as DMA Design. And DMA Design was a game developer that started on the revolutionary Amiga computer (which was the most powerful system by far -- well ahead of Macs and PCs) who's critical hits included Lemmings and Walker. This Amiga 3000 was used to develop those two games. And it was those hits that saved Rockstar, allowing them to grow and to soon after begin work on the Grand Theft Auto series. And the rest is history. There are more fascinating historical events associated with this specific Amiga 3000 system, but that's just one.
Never knew, but apparently Amiga was eventually bought by HP, then subsequently sold to a company called Amino, who renamed themselves Amiga. Their plan was to then resurrect the core Amiga OS and release it as the Amiga DE (Digital Environment) on PowerPC, x86, Arm, SH4 and SH5 Procs. No idea what ever happened with that as I'm too lazy to look it up, but guessing not much since I've never heard of anything since regarding that attempt.
I thought the developer of GTA (on Playstation 1) was some other company and Rockstar acquired it. Later versions and even later disks of GTA1 are labeled Rockstar, the first releases are not.
It has experienced so many important points in history. For example, as we all know Grand Theft Auto, the game, was developed by Rockstar North. And Rockstar North use to be known as DMA Design. And DMA Design was a game developer that started on the revolutionary Amiga computer (which was the most powerful system by far -- well ahead of Macs and PCs) who's critical hits included Lemmings and Walker. This Amiga 3000 was used to develop those two games. And it was those hits that saved Rockstar, allowing them to grow and to soon after begin work on the Grand Theft Auto series. And the rest is history.
The development of Grand Theft Auto started on the amiga:
"The game was originally intended to be named Race'n'Chase and to be developed for the Commodore Amiga, starting in 1996.["
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The UK market was separated from the USA by gov educational intervention and strange prices.
The USA had Intel and Microsoft and Apple making rapid advances in computer hardware, software, OS use, audio support and advanced early GPU use.
The UK was held back with demands for education games/software used on set OS and hardware.
Tax issues, costs, poverty, local UK manufacturing efforts, governments, TV systems, educational demands all took the UK years to recover from and eventual move to much more advanced imported US desktop computers.
People all over the world wanted business software, color, audio, games, printers, networking.
Microsoft offered all that on a normal PC but it took time for the UK buy into new systems.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The Amiga is the Retro PC that everyone wish they had, but never got for practical reasons, such as software availability.
An awesome Computer at its time,
While your IBM PC did 4 color graphics (16 if you have a composite display, but will suffer from blurry text) The Amiga had 32 colors from 4k pallet of colors to choose from.
Granted by the time the 3000 released the PC Compatible has caught up in specs, but the 500 were great gaming PCs at the time. Just too bad not to many games were made for it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.