I remember the Fairlight splash screens on so many of my favourite games! The hardware development surge back then was fuelled by everyone buying the hardware in anticipation of getting the games for free from friends! Amiga and C64 eras were great days..... Still have my Amiga 500 with RAM upgrade. :)
Great podcast. Great to finally hear someone be honest about the A1200... Could have and should have been so much more. The one thing that Commodore did get right was the A1200's expansion potential, definitely saved it from being remembered as a failed retro computer relic.
They should have simply ported the Amiga OS onto the x86 architecture in 1993 - then hardware and pricing problems would have been all solved overnight!
I remember the blue box and.phreaking days brings back some memories, the Amiga was way ahead of its time especially when comes to multi tasking. Even now where in 2022 demos are still made with major improvements to coding ect. I Started with c64, A600 then brought CDTV to network though ParLink as a cdrom, moved to the A1200 later adding 030 cpu with 8mb Fastram. Untill lastly got hold of a A4000 box 300 quid back then. Now a heavy pc user but would never forget the Amiga OS and qurks. Good to see fairlight, Scoopex, still going and seeing others returning with fresh stuff. Keep it up 👍
@@FairLight1337 you are right grate things can be archived with so little. Brought a ç64 mini the other day but it's a pie lol,will look into getting a maxi see what's that is.
The Amiga was good enough, comparing it to the X68000 is pretty ridiculous when you consider how much more expensive the latter was, and essentially was the dev kit computer for arcade machines with a lot of the same hardware. The problem the Amiga had is it was cheap to develop for because of floppy disks. Get it wrong on Amiga, chances are you could still break even, get it wrong on consoles and you have unsold cartridges that need major reworking to put something else on. Original software was where Amiga was king. Populous, Cannon Fodder, Battle Chess, Hybris, Battle Squadron, Another World, when it came to original developed software and not some ratty US Gold Tiertex piece of shit, the Amiga compared VERY well to consoles. Mortal Kombat on Amiga made SF2 on Amiga look fucking ridiculous.
Id still say the biggest design flaw on the Amiga was the lack of analog sound. With a SID like chip - lets say one for each side - you would need samples for everything and you would be able to make the same game with a smaller memory footprint.
Here's my main thought on piracy: while it *would* reduce sales, somewhat, what people forget is that the vast majority of us back then simply didnt have the money to buy the games. You're not losing a sale when the person was never going to buy it anyway. We would buy a game occasionally when it was really good, or complicated (like you need instructions and keyboard overlays or whatever) but most of the games we copied we were never going to be able to afford anyway. Pretty much, for most kids you got all the money out of them you were ever going to anyway.
I fully agree. Getting new games was nice but nothing could beat that amazing feeling when you had saved enough money to actually buy a game. That wonderful box, a manual, a pamphlet with other games you could dream about, sometimes other cool stuff. A pirated game just felt incomplete in its simple form. I still have a few games today, left from my childhood. Some of the boxes have unfortunately suffered some damage, but the magic is still there.
I took this topic to be an episode. ruclips.net/video/hTM0ud_eaKU/видео.htmlsi=Q_gmTQnu-zT3CetW A more lawyers view on it is here ruclips.net/video/LUkxdTACCnI/видео.htmlsi=dqNacpQrZMzhR-OA
Hey Galahad, I remember us using that AR Mk1 to learn to hack code on an all nighter waiting for an early coach to Alton Towers. We cheered so loudly the first time we changed an intro message and successfully repacked it we got in trouble for waking my dad up.
Mr.Douglas........my real name is no secret you silly bollocks!!! Those were the days editing in game text with filezap or something similar, we were the coolest "hackers" in Salisbury lol How the fuck did you find this? You still a job shy civil servant or did they close your place down?
@@galahadscxscoopex5190 went down some RUclips rabbit hole and came across it. Brought back some memories, have I made up that we once spent a night sleeping on top of a bus shelter in Sheffield waiting for an Amiga gathering the next day? Incidentally , I was going through some old Amiga files a while back and I found a letter from Pazza of LSD to you As for work, they did close the place down, so I moved to Bristol to be workshy there instead. How's things with you?
@@daved1818 Yeah that was fun, waiting in a dark park overnight because thats the closest time the train would get us there! Letter from Pazza eh, I don't remember my time in LSD very fondly, kinda went onto bigger and better things lol Where in Bristol are you? Presume you're working at Abbey Wood? As for me, I work for myself breaking and fixing cars, and doing unironic Atari ST ports to Amiga, which is more popular than you might imagine!!! Converting stuff that never got done back in the day. Your sisters still speaking with a weird Australian accent from watching too much Neighbours?
I'm up in the Redland area, are you still near Bath? I would say let's have a catch up but not really an option until Covid buggers off (or at least lockdown ends). I've got back into coding on the Spectrum Next for a bit of fun and playing around creating hardware in FPGA. Ha, sisters are both well but, wow Neighbours, how long ago! The accent has faded over the last 30 years. I'll have to check out your conversions. I always thought it would be good to redo some of the travesties that were released on the Amiga as ST ports. I did do a proof of concept of how Double Dragon could have looked (on AGA) but never got close to making it an actual game.
He’s right, it was the 486 DX-2 66 with Super VGA VESA Local Bus, double-speed CD-ROM and SoundBlaster 16 that killed the Amiga. The Amiga 500/2000 had a good run: it reigned supreme for 7 years (1987 - 1994).
It's a method of calling for free, cheating the telecon system. Blue Box, Designed and Built by Steve Wozniak and Marketed by Steve Jobs, circa 1972 artsandculture.google.com/asset/blue-box-designed-and-built-by-steve-wozniak-and-marketed-by-steve-jobs-circa-1972-wozniak-steve-1950/OQGxyXq2DFvKaw
Galahad is right about law enforcements computer crime departments and their knowledge of the amiga. I worked for a serving computer crime officer that had a private business but also worked in the computer crime department in Liverpool and they were rank amateurs regarding the amiga and most pc stuff at the time which was 1998. Those days computer crime departments were regional and most big forces had their own team of amateur officers pretending to be computer forensics professionals. In reality they were ill equipped against users who started out in the 80's and 90's and had an understanding of OS and bare metal programming. In the early 2000's the computer crime units went national so no local computer investigation departments. They were happy days 😜
The reality was that my friends and I only bought an Amiga or an ST because of the ease of getting hold of pirated games. We would spend whatever money we had on buying genuine copies of games, but at £25 to £30 each, that didn't allow us to buy games very often in the 80's and early 90's.
I think its important to understand that piracy and copying games is not the same thing. Piracy is profiting or making money. Copying games with no benefit is just copying. It was only later when they plugged this gap with "Circumventing copy Protection" made copying illegal. However, this was still not piracy. I'm not saying the cracking groups didn't commit piracy, but the average gamer didn't.
I think a point of 'did piracy kill the Amiga?' is that piracy probably quadrupled the sales of the Amiga. I wouldn't have spent 400 quid on a machine where I then had to spend 25 quid on every game I wanted. That goes for the machine itself, I know, but the more that own it, the more the developers want to make games for it, so quite the contrary, piracy probably made it last long than it should.
My main argument is basically that. Without the early c64 cracks we wouldn't have seen the explosion of early home computers which lead to later home computers and the general increase in computer literacy that is also the foundation of today's computer industry.
@@dnvp3644 Pretty sure I would know what group I was in, and I was NEVER in Infect, but feel free to believe whatever you like, keep you out of trouble.... hopefully!
People who've only lived in the years with p2p and torrents literally have no idea of how difficult in comparison it would be to get pirated games back in the Amiga days. If you were lamers didn't know proper contacts in the scene then you were left buying floppies off markets or computer shows. As a scener we would turn up at our local computer club in Doncaster and treated like celebrities when we had all the latest cracked stuff from our own mail traders and BBS sites - we never charged for anything though. In fact we used to go mental at market traders selling 'PD disks' which had our Amiga demos on and charging money for them and demanded the disks off them, which in most cases they complied with. When he talks about AT&T cards I do know folks who got prison sentences for distributing those back in the day for money as well - when you consider folks were getting AT&T cards with PIN numbers you can see the issue...
@@FairLight1337Great times for sure - as one of the coders/musicians in Magnetic Fields/Digital back in those days I can safely say Cosy's insane amount of mail swapping was definitely part of how well we were known (at least in the UK) even before we got to running our own BBS. The guy used to literally get a massive sack a DAY of jiffy bags of disks from the post office (via a van as the postie couldn't carry them all!!) and he would xcopy and return every single bag the same day. Bonkers nowadays when you think about it...
it was a "tool" with a complicated UI for OCS/ECS that claimed to enable AGA graphics if you got all the settings right but it did nothing. cannot recall who created it @@FairLight1337
![Cracking a game like it is 1990 with the Amiga Action Replay [💉💉💉]](/img/1.gif)
a LEGEND amongst mortals, thanks for the memories and savings ;) Sir Galahad of Fairlight
Agree :)
Fascinating, this was my childhood & teenage years.
Thoroughly enjoyed listening to this.
Fairlight and the intros were a large part of my formative years!
I remember the Fairlight splash screens on so many of my favourite games!
The hardware development surge back then was fuelled by everyone buying the hardware in anticipation of getting the games for free from friends!
Amiga and C64 eras were great days.....
Still have my Amiga 500 with RAM upgrade. :)
I guess you are now on the topic of what I covered here:
ruclips.net/video/hTM0ud_eaKU/видео.html
I remember about him being on the Vauxhall forum Migweb, put 2+2 together with the name and the Fairlight logo.
He was there as a private person I guess...
Great podcast. Great to finally hear someone be honest about the A1200... Could have and should have been so much more. The one thing that Commodore did get right was the A1200's expansion potential, definitely saved it from being remembered as a failed retro computer relic.
They should have simply ported the Amiga OS onto the x86 architecture in 1993 - then hardware and pricing problems would have been all solved overnight!
I remember the blue box and.phreaking days brings back some memories, the Amiga was way ahead of its time especially when comes to multi tasking. Even now where in 2022 demos are still made with major improvements to coding ect. I Started with c64, A600 then brought CDTV to network though ParLink as a cdrom, moved to the A1200 later adding 030 cpu with 8mb Fastram. Untill lastly got hold of a A4000 box 300 quid back then. Now a heavy pc user but would never forget the Amiga OS and qurks. Good to see fairlight, Scoopex, still going and seeing others returning with fresh stuff. Keep it up 👍
We see a lot of people returning. Modern computing at work, and doing the retro stuff on their spare time. Look at modern c64 demos - they are insane.
@@FairLight1337 you are right grate things can be archived with so little. Brought a ç64 mini the other day but it's a pie lol,will look into getting a maxi see what's that is.
The Amiga was good enough, comparing it to the X68000 is pretty ridiculous when you consider how much more expensive the latter was, and essentially was the dev kit computer for arcade machines with a lot of the same hardware.
The problem the Amiga had is it was cheap to develop for because of floppy disks. Get it wrong on Amiga, chances are you could still break even, get it wrong on consoles and you have unsold cartridges that need major reworking to put something else on.
Original software was where Amiga was king.
Populous, Cannon Fodder, Battle Chess, Hybris, Battle Squadron, Another World, when it came to original developed software and not some ratty US Gold Tiertex piece of shit, the Amiga compared VERY well to consoles.
Mortal Kombat on Amiga made SF2 on Amiga look fucking ridiculous.
@@FairLight1337 Speaking of insane modern C64 demos... holy shit
Id still say the biggest design flaw on the Amiga was the lack of analog sound. With a SID like chip - lets say one for each side - you would need samples for everything and you would be able to make the same game with a smaller memory footprint.
Thanks for the interview! Also the Fairlight logo is still awesome ❤
The Angeldawn logo is massive.
Great interview guys! Listening to this in 2022, just curious if anything came about from the classic Amiga Galahad references at around 35:00?
Ask him!
@@FairLight1337 Go on, spill the beans, please! ;)
No, the game in question was released without my assistance and was a mess as a result.
@@GalahadfairlightI'm don't follow the retro Amiga scene so much these days, so am not sure which 2022 game you are referring to.
@namakudamono that's because I didn't mention it ;) will leave you with a final hint, Amiga game but not on Amiga
Here's my main thought on piracy: while it *would* reduce sales, somewhat, what people forget is that the vast majority of us back then simply didnt have the money to buy the games. You're not losing a sale when the person was never going to buy it anyway. We would buy a game occasionally when it was really good, or complicated (like you need instructions and keyboard overlays or whatever) but most of the games we copied we were never going to be able to afford anyway.
Pretty much, for most kids you got all the money out of them you were ever going to anyway.
I generally think the early cracks lured us to buy computers in the first place. This has made the market for games grow exponentially.
I fully agree. Getting new games was nice but nothing could beat that amazing feeling when you had saved enough money to actually buy a game. That wonderful box, a manual, a pamphlet with other games you could dream about, sometimes other cool stuff. A pirated game just felt incomplete in its simple form. I still have a few games today, left from my childhood. Some of the boxes have unfortunately suffered some damage, but the magic is still there.
I took this topic to be an episode.
ruclips.net/video/hTM0ud_eaKU/видео.htmlsi=Q_gmTQnu-zT3CetW
A more lawyers view on it is here
ruclips.net/video/LUkxdTACCnI/видео.htmlsi=dqNacpQrZMzhR-OA
The .nfo was the first secret space I learned about fairlight. Never knew they were from the EU :D
Although a Swedish born and bred group, members came from all over the world.
Hey Galahad, I remember us using that AR Mk1 to learn to hack code on an all nighter waiting for an early coach to Alton Towers. We cheered so loudly the first time we changed an intro message and successfully repacked it we got in trouble for waking my dad up.
Mr.Douglas........my real name is no secret you silly bollocks!!! Those were the days editing in game text with filezap or something similar, we were the coolest "hackers" in Salisbury lol
How the fuck did you find this?
You still a job shy civil servant or did they close your place down?
@@galahadscxscoopex5190 went down some RUclips rabbit hole and came across it. Brought back some memories, have I made up that we once spent a night sleeping on top of a bus shelter in Sheffield waiting for an Amiga gathering the next day?
Incidentally , I was going through some old Amiga files a while back and I found a letter from Pazza of LSD to you
As for work, they did close the place down, so I moved to Bristol to be workshy there instead.
How's things with you?
@@daved1818 Yeah that was fun, waiting in a dark park overnight because thats the closest time the train would get us there!
Letter from Pazza eh, I don't remember my time in LSD very fondly, kinda went onto bigger and better things lol
Where in Bristol are you? Presume you're working at Abbey Wood?
As for me, I work for myself breaking and fixing cars, and doing unironic Atari ST ports to Amiga, which is more popular than you might imagine!!! Converting stuff that never got done back in the day.
Your sisters still speaking with a weird Australian accent from watching too much Neighbours?
I'm up in the Redland area, are you still near Bath? I would say let's have a catch up but not really an option until Covid buggers off (or at least lockdown ends).
I've got back into coding on the Spectrum Next for a bit of fun and playing around creating hardware in FPGA.
Ha, sisters are both well but, wow Neighbours, how long ago! The accent has faded over the last 30 years.
I'll have to check out your conversions. I always thought it would be good to redo some of the travesties that were released on the Amiga as ST ports. I did do a proof of concept of how Double Dragon could have looked (on AGA) but never got close to making it an actual game.
@@daved1818 well now the world is more sane, you feel like meeting up, just yell :)
He’s right, it was the 486 DX-2 66 with Super VGA VESA Local Bus, double-speed CD-ROM and SoundBlaster 16 that killed the Amiga. The Amiga 500/2000 had a good run: it reigned supreme for 7 years (1987 - 1994).
Agree...
Erm what is blue boxing? Was in the Amiga scene back in the day and still have an a500 but never heard the term blue boxing.
It's a method of calling for free, cheating the telecon system.
Blue Box, Designed and Built by Steve Wozniak and Marketed by Steve Jobs, circa 1972 artsandculture.google.com/asset/blue-box-designed-and-built-by-steve-wozniak-and-marketed-by-steve-jobs-circa-1972-wozniak-steve-1950/OQGxyXq2DFvKaw
Galahad is right about law enforcements computer crime departments and their knowledge of the amiga.
I worked for a serving computer crime officer that had a private business but also worked in the computer crime department in Liverpool and they were rank amateurs regarding the amiga and most pc stuff at the time which was 1998.
Those days computer crime departments were regional and most big forces had their own team of amateur officers pretending to be computer forensics professionals.
In reality they were ill equipped against users who started out in the 80's and 90's and had an understanding of OS and bare metal programming.
In the early 2000's the computer crime units went national so no local computer investigation departments.
They were happy days 😜
Those were the days. But in schools, students educated the teachers so it was a general lack of knowledge in the adult world.
The reality was that my friends and I only bought an Amiga or an ST because of the ease of getting hold of pirated games.
We would spend whatever money we had on buying genuine copies of games, but at £25 to £30 each, that didn't allow us to buy games very often in the 80's and early 90's.
Agree. Most of us are into computers, propelling the IT industry with demand and competence due to pirated games.
I think its important to understand that piracy and copying games is not the same thing. Piracy is profiting or making money. Copying games with no benefit is just copying. It was only later when they plugged this gap with "Circumventing copy Protection" made copying illegal. However, this was still not piracy. I'm not saying the cracking groups didn't commit piracy, but the average gamer didn't.
I generally agree with piracy being making profit from the copying.
I think a point of 'did piracy kill the Amiga?' is that piracy probably quadrupled the sales of the Amiga. I wouldn't have spent 400 quid on a machine where I then had to spend 25 quid on every game I wanted. That goes for the machine itself, I know, but the more that own it, the more the developers want to make games for it, so quite the contrary, piracy probably made it last long than it should.
My main argument is basically that. Without the early c64 cracks we wouldn't have seen the explosion of early home computers which lead to later home computers and the general increase in computer literacy that is also the foundation of today's computer industry.
He talks like he has nothing to prove, so refreshing.
He doesn't. So competent. So cool.
GALAHAD WAS ALSO IN EAST GERMANY 1993 Member in INFECT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Oh no he wasn't!
@@Galahadfairlight YES YOU WARS MEMBER IN INFECT !!!!!!!!!!!! I HAVE THE MEMBER GUIDE FROM S. S. !!!!!!!
@@dnvp3644 Pretty sure I would know what group I was in, and I was NEVER in Infect, but feel free to believe whatever you like, keep you out of trouble.... hopefully!
@@Galahadfairlight I must accept now ! seltsam einer lügt hier.
@@dnvp3644those lists are never accurate. Echo from LSD is listed in being in several groups yet he was only ever in LSD
Galahad sounds like Ashens just with his voice lowered a pitch or two 🤔
A very manly voice you might say.
Just recorded more talk with him. Works keeping an eye open for .. :)
Galahad aka Phill, right? I know him ;)
YES PHIL, RUFTE MICH DOCH TATSÄCHLICH 1993 an.
And you may be whom?
Probably not the best idea to give someone's personal info out on a RUclips comment's section.
@@nebularain3338 hints work though, treat it as a game show with no prizes!!
hey Phil you still in touch with the other Phil ( spaced out / fine line ) ?
Unfortunately not, hasn't revealed himself either.
Who is the other Phil? The only other UK Phil I know is Megasnail.
People who've only lived in the years with p2p and torrents literally have no idea of how difficult in comparison it would be to get pirated games back in the Amiga days.
If you were lamers didn't know proper contacts in the scene then you were left buying floppies off markets or computer shows. As a scener we would turn up at our local computer club in Doncaster and treated like celebrities when we had all the latest cracked stuff from our own mail traders and BBS sites - we never charged for anything though. In fact we used to go mental at market traders selling 'PD disks' which had our Amiga demos on and charging money for them and demanded the disks off them, which in most cases they complied with.
When he talks about AT&T cards I do know folks who got prison sentences for distributing those back in the day for money as well - when you consider folks were getting AT&T cards with PIN numbers you can see the issue...
Thanks for your view. I had a bit bäof both seed and leech perspective, being a cracker on the c64 and at the same time being an Amiga game lamer.
@@FairLight1337Great times for sure - as one of the coders/musicians in Magnetic Fields/Digital back in those days I can safely say Cosy's insane amount of mail swapping was definitely part of how well we were known (at least in the UK) even before we got to running our own BBS. The guy used to literally get a massive sack a DAY of jiffy bags of disks from the post office (via a van as the postie couldn't carry them all!!) and he would xcopy and return every single bag the same day. Bonkers nowadays when you think about it...
Thanks for the additional backstory for this.
Anyone remember SoftAGA? Excellent troll
No, who was that?
it was a "tool" with a complicated UI for OCS/ECS that claimed to enable AGA graphics if you got all the settings right but it did nothing. cannot recall who created it @@FairLight1337
Sounds silly then...
tried a cracked witcher 3 loved it bought it! the fact there was no drm helped them too.
That ties into my episode on the Society effects of cracking...