Hi

I'm Merlin, I've been posting on here but haven't put any deets up about yours truly, so here goes....

I am VERY old skool, having been brought up on a diet of Vic 20, C64, Dragon 32, Spectrum 48k, Amiga 500 and 600 then onto IBM Model 30 286 PCs (whoo!)...

I am a hardware specialist mainly and my soldering iron is my magic wand, I got the handle Merlin for being able to bring basket cases back to life like magic... on EAB I have taught Zetro and Sarek2k a thing or two about soldering and cheap hot air rework stations, :rolleyes: :lol:

I loved my Miggy dearly and regularly got involved in putting hard drives into A600s and 1200s along with making A520 modulator extension cables (you could kick then without wrecking the Miggy) and Cyclone dongles (a bit redundant these days, you had to be around then to undersatnd their worth), and I recently got into Cloanto's Amiga Forever and got re hooked, I have since got myself an A600 to pimp and I have an A1200 on the way that cost me a tenner plus postage, I remember them being a LOT more that that back then... :blink: :o

Oh, and I am an Aries, I am just like my avatar, I love animals and I want to save all the little children :blink: :lol:

Merlin

nice to get an intro from you merlin (only took 26 posts lol:))

anyway looks like you jumped on the computers just before i did! i never had vic20 or dragon 32 as at the time they where out of my reach but the intrest was all ready developing! i had seen those machines as well as the others.

i started on a 16k spectrum (got scammed on that!) and went on from then!

good to have you on board m8 anyway welcome to this nut case place ;)

TBH Sarek the Dragon 32 was a pile of crap, it never did work as it was intended to. My Speccy was nicknamed Brain Damage for the amount of times it crashed, it had the poxy Kempston joystick interface which cocked everything up if you breathed near it.

The "fun" I had converting C64 games to work on 5 1/4" floppies on the C1541 disk drive, the hours spent typing in a listing from a magazine only to get "?redo from start" on the Vic20, you missed out on loads mate.... NOT.

A mate had an Atari 520ST and bragged MIDI and about programs that could run like Calamus on the ST (bloody hell, I am full of sad facts!), then he came round and tried my 2Mb A500+ running Final Copy 2, Directory Opus 4 and Octamed and he said the Miggy was streets ahead.

It's a testament to the design of the Amiga that it had survived so long, it was well engineered (even if the design at times was a bit suspect) and gained a good following, it's a shame that the consoles and PCs started to take over.

I intend to grag my Miggys kicking and screaming into the 21st century and keep them running for as long as I can, as far as I am concerned the Amiga is a legend.

Merlin

Yup, cheers for the intro Merlin and it always good find out peeps backgrounds.

As I've discussed with Sarek many times, I always liked to go against the grain and was always non-conformist, so I missed the speccy and early commodore scene and went the japanese route with a Sharp MZ-700! Was an ace machine but that's another story. :D

Glad you were nostalgic enough to buy 'real' Amiga's again and mod them to your liking. Always lots of compromise but always loads of fun. ;)

@Sarek: waddya mean nutcase place? ;)