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."

Comments

Re: ebay is the dinosaur in the story

[jfdavis668]

People still post on /.?

Less than it cost new

[Solandri]

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.)

Re:Amigas hardware won't run for much longer

[tlhIngan]

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.

Unlikely - none of this equipment is running close to speeds where the circuit board matters. In fact, I highly doubt even "critical" traces (bus lines, for example) are even length matched to any degree. And given most boards of the era were autorouted with very classic tools, that really means the margins are far wider than they need to be. The equipment just isn't running fast enough that it matters and the boards are of such poor quality that there are huge variations board to board that if it did, there would be huge yield problems at the beginning.

The biggest problems in general are boards that have been eaten away because they put a battery on them so after 15 years or so, they leak and destroy the board and nearby components. Even then it's possible to recover the boards with manual hand wiring.