Dan Fox bio photo

Dan Fox

Software developer interested in learning New Things and applying them in Real Life

Just in case anyone is wondering, “Amiga” is Spanish for girlfriend. So this post is really about the Amiga… an amazing home computer sold by Commodore in the 80s and 90s.

I’ve owned an Amiga 500 and currently own a 1200 and a CD32. I was brought up playing games on the Amiga and really want to get into doing “something” more productive with my 1200. I have no idea what it is I want to do. I think I must have a nostalgia itch which needs scratching…

Anyway, I want to share the journey with you. At the moment my 1200 has a Compact Flash card adapter fitted so it can use CF cards instead of IDE hard drives, and a memory expansion. The 1200 originally shipped with 2MB internal RAM, and the expansion takes this up to 10MB. As a developer I really want to do some programming on this machine, and get it online! Going to be a battle because I don’t code in any of the traditional Amiga languages, and I have no idea how I’m going to write something that runs in 10MB of RAM. I think I’ll need to expand that, but I do find it amazing that developers used to work inside these constraints. These days I spin up a website hosted in IIS and half a gigabyte of memory is used up even before it’s done any work! It’s like another world.

Anyway, next post I’ll be hoping to share my experience on getting the Amiga online!