Submitted by First post of the new year – I hope y’all had a good one – and we’re talking Amiga.
In October of 2017 I found a really nice accelerator card on Ebay for my stock Amiga 1000 – the Blizzard Turbo Memory Board. My original thought was I would install it into my 1000 and lose the side-car RAM expansions to regain some valuable desk space. Plus – 8MB? That’s gobs for the work I personally do on my Amigas. It was originally designed for the Amiga 500 or 2000 and additionally gave a modest speed boost of 14 Mhz. From my personal experience, 7 Mhz is plenty for the vast majority of Amiga games and software. However in some rare cases 14, 25 or even 40 Mhz can greatly improve the user experience with some math-intensive games and software. This little board seemed the perfect fit for my 1000’s needs.
I then got to talking to the seller on Ebay who was based in Australia. After a short amount of time I came to learn that he had in his possession an ultra-rare Phoenix board, too. Within a few days, money was exchanged and the Phoenix began its long journey from Australia to Seattle, Washington.
This is one of those stories where you just sit back, grab a warm drink, and just enjoy.
Just curious, what kind of _work_ do people do on amigas nowadays?
Play some really cool retro games.
As far as I know, it is possible to use it for “real” work, like music creation or even video editing. But that would be mostly a nostalgic thing. Similar to some bands that record using only analogic equipment.
I do word processing and coding.
Ofcoure i know that it can be done on a newer system, but it is just fun and AREXX is just so nice as a script language(based on IBM REXX). But when you consider that George R. R. Martin still uses wordperfect on CPM to this day, it might not sound as strange. (I would never compare myself to that man, but it is thoughtprovoking.)
On my Amiga NG i do all my everyday computing, like browse the web, gaming, read email, watch videos and just about everything you can do on a PC except i have to use specially ported games or new designs as the software library for PPC is kinda scant.
Not that games matter much to me, i have thousands of titles from the old amiga days and for new games i just use the playstation 1,2,3,4 which i also have in my posession.
Edited 2018-01-02 19:02 UTC
WordPerfect on CP/M? Pull the other one; it’s got bells on.
Wikipedia says he uses WordStar 4.0 on DOS. 4.0 is particularly nice in that it is the first version that includes undelete. It also supports embedded ruler lines, which are nice. It began life as a competitor that got bought by MicroPro when 3.3 was getting a bit long in the tooth.
That being said, it’s quite a bit more difficult to patch for a new environment than 3.3, so I typically stick with 3.3 these days.
I loved the Amiga. I used to do 3d animation (and won a scholarship to S.C.A.D.) in high school. I loved the 3000 and 4000.
These days, I have no use for it, but it would be fun to have.
This is very annoying. Even today, my outdoor Christmas lights have soldered batteries.. WHY?
Could be worse. Some of those RTCs have the battery buried in the chip packaging. There’s no changing batteries on those without a bunch of work with a Dremel tool.
And Game Boy cartridges with save functionality also have soldered coin batteries.
Which wouldn’t be too bad in itself (I can bear with a little soldering every decade or two), however it means that memory keeping saves is ultimately volatile, so one day I will lose my Tetris DX high scores… 
Also: it’s Amiga news again!
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-28483217
Most of the guys I see using it for video are doing VJing in bars focusing on synthwave/edm. The video quality is only standard definition so it’s pretty useless for modern video applications. Still the Amiga had access to really cool effects for dirt cheap and it can still real time edit SD video like nobody’s business.
Edited 2018-01-02 22:00 UTC