Driving me Backwards

As established previously in this blog, my teenage years were spent as an Amiga owner. Not for me the thrills of SNES, Megadrive or PS1. Nope, I had an Amiga 1200 and a very limited access to games and even less people to talk to. But no matter: I had some good times on the Amiga and was deeply fascinated by the Amiga being a vehicle for many bedroom developers having a crack at making their own games. Indeed, I've had a soft spot for the Amiga ever since.

The Amiga I owned was an Amiga 1200 - something of a big deal as it was marketed with an Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA) chip that could boast a range of 256 colors over the previous range of 32. Whilst this presented some stunning graphics, for it's day, along with some beefed up hardware, a problem soon arose. For the Amiga 1200's predecessor, the Amiga 500, had enjoyed a large amount of success as a games machine - but due to the Amiga 1200's advanced specs, many of the programs wouldn't work. Some games got re-released with AGA tweaks whilst others flat refused to run - indeed, when determining compatibility was nothing more than trying one's luck with a 50-50 chance of success. This in turn resulted in some bad press for the Amiga 1200 and effected it's sales.

I am recounting all of this becuase I am reminded of it everytime I see this:

And they say history never repeats...