Hi everyone,
Thanks for visiting my blog. 🙂
Today I’m happy to tell you that Old School Game Blog is now 10 years old! How time flies! 🙂
I’d like to take you on a trip through the years of Old School Game Blog, looking at some of the things I’ve written about over the years, as well as happenings in the world of Amiga and the retro scene in general. It is a long text, but I hope you will check it out. 🙂 Thanks in advance and enjoy!
2011
The first text I wrote (apart from the one wishing people welcome) was about the Playstation 2 and called “The Playstation 2 – Alive and Kicking”. It was published on March 25th 2011 and contained information about the sales of PS2 worldwide, proving that the platform was far from dead. A couple of years later, the production of this console was finally put to an end, but the second-hand market lives on today.
After a few more texts, I made a piece about the Natami, an advanced Amiga compatible machine. This one was published on March 31st 2011. Little did I know back then that the Natami would lead to the Vampire project, which is now very popular amongst Amiga users. You can read the text here.
It is interesting to note that a few months later, in June 2011, I posted an announcement about a new Amiga 600 FPGA Accelerator from none other than Igor Majstorovic! He is now a well known part of the Vampire team. At this point in time he was waiting for a prototype to arrive.
2011 went on and I wrote reviews of different games for the Amiga, as well as PC and MSX. Examples are North & South (Amiga), Knightmare (MSX) and Warblade (PC). Also covered news and developments, like the Project Metropolis from DiscreetFX, which was an application storefront for Amiga users, that the funding of Viva Amiga (a documentary film about the platform) was complete and that the AmigaOne 500 from ACube Systems was revealed.
The most interesting news, in my opinion, from 2011 was the announcement of a netbook running AmigaOS 4 from Hyperion Entertainment! This was announced at AmiWest and I remember people going completely wild about the thought of this. I must admit to being hyped myself and I was very eager to buy it when released. Sadly the netbook never became available for purchase and this was a huge disappointment for the whole Amiga community.
My good, old SVI Spectravideo got some coverage in 2011 as well with my Gaming on the SVI Spectravideo text. 🙂 I loved writing that one! This computer is actually in its original bag behind me as I write this. I still plug it in once a year to see to it that it is working properly. Usually around Christmas time. 😉
2012
A new year and new possibilities. 2012 started fine with the arrival of a 1084S in the post! It was sent to me by a Norwegian Amiga user (hi Mads – long time, no see! :D) and was incredible well packaged. Also took my Amiga 1200 Online and shared some photos of it here.
As for Amiga news, January saw the delivery of the AmigaOne X1000 from A-Eon Technology to customers. MacSociety (now known as TJ Ferreira on YouTube) shared videos of him unboxing his new computer, which I wrote about in this post. In connection to this, the first guest blogger on Old School Game Blog ever, namely the user AmigaNG (now the author of this great website) wrote an excellent review of the AmigaOne X1000 containing many photos. Thanks for this one mate, appreciate it a lot! 🙂
This was also the year Trevor Dickinson of A-Eon Technology started blogging, which I covered here. Back then we had basically no regular Amiga podcasts like today or big retro YouTube channels, so blogging was an important way to reach out to the community and outside it. In 2021 we got a ton of stuff to choose from like Amigos Retro Gaming, Nostalgia Nerd, The Retro Hour, RMC and much, much more.
Now, in my opinion, one of the coolest news from 2012 on this blog was that Petro T. Tyschtschenko had obtained 500 Amiga 1200 Magic Packs. These would go on sale for 150 EUR each. Considering the prices today, that is incredibly cheap for a NOS Amiga 1200. Later in 2012, I reported that Petro was in the process of shipping out the A1200’s. Good times for sure! 🙂 You can read it here.
2013
Looking back on this year, the thing I remember the most is this sad news. A friend and fellow blogger, Patrick aka Coder of Coder’s Blog passed away after a tragic accident. I still think of him and miss his posts, comments and e-mails. Hope all is well with his family today.
The blog saw the emergence of several reviews of Amiga demos, like Arte by Sanity and Extension by Pygmy Projects. Also covered the diskmagazine Miracle by IRIS, which I loved when it was released back in 1996.
On the Amiga Scene, news arrived about The TiNA Project from Italy. Their goal was to create FPGA re-implementations of the Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200. I don’t know what happened to the project, but it all sounded promising. Today we are spoiled for choice with the MiST FPGA, MiSTER and so forth. A-Eon Technology also announced new hardware at AmiWest 2013, while a remake of Battle Squadron was announced for AmigaOS 4 by Cope-Com. I think, in retrospect, that this remake was excellent and have covered it on my other blog, Gaming on AmigaOS 4.
2014
The first part of 2014 saw the news about The Armiga Project. They wanted to make an Amiga system based on emulation containing a 3.5″ floppy disk drive compatible with Amiga floppies. A good idea and stylish design in my opinion, but sadly it never became the success it looked to become at the start.
It is worth mentioning that A-Eon Technology bought Amiga.org this year from DiscreetFX. Later on in the same year, they went on to purchase Amigaworld.net as well.
Also important was the news that PPC support would be added to WinUAE by Toni Wilen. This caused a lot of discussions on the different Amiga community forums as you can expect, especially since this meant that AmigaOS 4 could be run through emulation on a PC. In 2021 I’m actually running AmigaOS 4 on my main PC through emulation and it is very handy when writing reviews, developing with Hollywood or taking screenshot of games and so forth.
The Sam460 is still for sale from ACube Systems, but did you know that this board was first announced in 2014? Here is the news about it.
Even though I write a lot about Amiga, I sometimes cover other platforms too. 😉 One of the most popular articles on this blog is not related to the Amiga at all, but about running Lord of the Rings – Battle for Middle Earth on a Windows 8 PC. This post has 161 comments, the last one from 2018. The article itself was posted in October 2014. Another PC game mentioned is The Stanley Parable, an amazingly strange game that I actually played again not long ago.
In 2014 I got my first encounter with MorphOS through an iBook G4. I was very impressed with the OS and today I have a MacMini running the latest version with the excellent Wayfarer browser.
2015
This year I shared some photos of my retro gaming collection. Here I made posts about one of my all-time favorite titles such as The Secret of Monkey Island for Amiga and the ones included in the LucasArts Entertainment Pack.
I also wrote about the controversial news about Hyperion Entertainment going bankrupt! This was a big shock to many in the Amiga community, myself included. A clarification would appear later in the year, which I wrote about here.
2015 was also the year of the Amiga 30th Anniversary. A VIP charity dinner was announced featuring RJ Mical, David Pleasance and many others, as well as the big event in Amsterdam. In California the Amiga 30th US was arranged after a successful Kickstarter campaign.
Not many might remember this, but after reading about the events, I must give a mention to Radzik of AMIcast who saved the day at the Amiga 30th in Amsterdam. The official stream failed several times and many Amiga fans could not access it all, which was disappointing. Radzik managed to provide streams through the Periscope function on Twitter and saved the day! An Amiga hero!
In December 2015, the team behind the Vampire announced that the V2 turbo-card was due for release for Amiga 600. Needless to say, demand for Amiga 600’s increased on eBay and many were eager to get hold of the new cards. A video showing Wolfenstein 3D running smooth on an Amiga 600 could be seen on Vimeo.
The Amigos Podcast saw the light of day this year. John and Aaron did a great job of reviewing Amiga games and many people, myself included, became regular listeners of the show. Years later, in 2021, Amigos Retro Gaming is a big thing with their own webpage and a YouTube-channel covering not only Amiga, but other platforms as well.
2016
The Vampire surely took the spotlight in the beginning of 2016. Many videos were released showing it in action. In the videos in this post, we got the opportunity to see the Amiga 600 streaming Internet radio, running NES and RTG games and so forth. Closely after, Modern Vintage Gamer did a video review of the board, and Radzik of AMIcast did an interview with BigGun from the Apollo Team.
A new Amiga racing game was in the works. It was called Amiga Racer and it was a blast! I played it quite a bit on the AmigaOne and it is sad that it has disappeared. It had excellent graphics, good music and sound effects, and performed well in the gameplay department too. I don’t remember why it was removed, as it got quite a bit of publicity back then.
Another game worth mentioning is the Day of the Tentacle Remastered, which came out in 2016. A fantastic game with a well fitting remake! Actually, I played through the remake on Xbox One not long ago to get all the achievements, hehe. 🙂 Anyway, like The Cyber Druid did (hi there!), I pre-ordered it right away and anticipated the release with bated breath.
My demo group, Void, got a new homepage in 2016 and we started getting really active on the Demoscene again. Since then we have released a total of 49 productions for both Classic Amiga, AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS. At the end of 2016, we announced that we were going to start up the Amiga Demo Chart “Versus” again and needed people to vote for their favorites.
On this blog I started “The Aminet Files”. The idea was to select random games to play and review from Aminet. I started out with a game called “Hamburger Heaven” and then went on to “Advanced Lawnmower Simulator”. This reminds me that I should do more of these reviews in the future.
As for AmigaOS 4, A-Eon Technology announced that people could register their interest in the upcoming AmigaOne X5000. Price starting at £1699. Later on it was officially released after an announcement at AmiWest. A video showing the Tabor (now A1222) in action could also be seen running an early development version of AmigaOS 4.
When checking AmigaKit today, there are no X5000’s for sale. Maybe a sign that Tabor or X5000/040 is on the way? Time will show. 😉
Speaking of AmigaOS 4, I actually started the Gaming on AmigaOS 4 blog in 2016. Here I started the whole thing by reviewing Pang!, Who Becomes Amiga Guru and Battle Squadron. The blog is still up and running today, so please check it out.
2017
This year began well for Void and our friends in Nukleus, since we released a brand new issue of Versus! Making this diskmagazine involved a ton of work, especially counting votes. 😉 I was exhausted, as were many other members of the team, when we finally released the issue.
I also published a big post on this blog about “Swapping – When we swapped disks through snail-mail worldwide!”. It contains a lot of information, as well as photos of some of my old floppies. Well worth a read, I think, if you are curious about what this part of The Scene was all about.
A funny thing I’d like to mention is that an Amiga was spotted in an episode of the TV-show “Father Ted”. It was Dreamkatcha of Amigos Retro Gaming who discovered this. The Amiga (in the form of AmigaOne X5000) was also spotted in a commercial for SPIKE Supercuts, which you can see here.
One thing I remember very well is the home video recordings from The Gathering 1993 demo party in Norway. It was uploaded to YouTube by Trondmm. Excellent stuff! Cool to see many Amiga’s there!
Speaking of YouTube, 2017 was the year Old School Game Blog got a YouTube-channel. It has not grown much since then, but I do upload some videos there from time to time.
Many of you might be familiar with the Amiga Ireland show, as well as podcast. It was in 2017 they started their podcast and has become very popular since then. The AMIGArama Podcast was born too by Lorfarius. I liked this one a lot and became a supporter on Patreon back then. Sadly he stopped doing episodes in 2019 I think, but they should still be available for listening on YouTube.
2018
It’s a new year and it started off by Trevor Dickinson showing a video of the Tabor (now A1222) in action on his blog. The computer has still not been released in 2021, but hopefully the launch is not too far away. A positive note for AmigaOS 4 users was that a remake of the classic Stunt Car Racer was released, but not least the amazing game Tower 57! Tower 57 is my favorite game on AmigaOS 4 and it runs great. Superb gameplay and replay value! Just writing about it makes me want to play it again. 😉 I wrote a review of it which you can read here.
As for Void, we released quite a few productions that year. The 1 KB intro “Voidboot” got a lot of good feedback, as well as the new issue of Versus (number 8). The demo I was most happy having made that year was Green Heat, even though it didn’t do very well in the contest at Compusphere, I really enjoyed making it. The music by Jeano is excellent in my opinion. 🙂
As for other happenings, Stephen Jones presented his new Checkmate A1500 Plus project at the Greenford Computer Club. Manuel Jesus presented a preview of the Vampire V4 as shown on The Guru Meditation YouTube-channel. The game Barbarian Plus was released for classic Amiga.
Near the end of 2018, I made a blog post about my SVI-738 X’Press Spectravideo (MSX).
2019
It was 2019 and a good way to start the year was apparantly to write about “How to Install AMOS 3D on AMOS Pro”. It is a good thing I did, as I have now forgotten how to do this. I mostly use AMOS Pro by itself and have not ventured into the land of AMOS 3D for some time. 😉
I also got myself a Plipbox Ethernet Adapter for my Amiga 1200, which worked great! What a fantastic device! Easy to set up and worked like a charm. If you are looking for an great way to get Online with your Amiga, I can recommend this route. In connection to this I wrote about my adventure of using Telnet / BBS with it.
A notable release for the Amiga was IBrowse 2.5, which was released after many years in the making. The Apollo Team announced the Vampire V4 Standalone, which was later sold for the first time in public at the Amiga 34 event in Neuss, Germany. Here we could also see MorphOS booting on x86 hardware for the first time. Radio PARALAX made a video of the event which you can see here in this post.
Near the end of the year, a “Pre-order Registration for the A1222 Plus Early Adopter Limited Edition” was announced by A-Eon Technology.
As for Void, we released many productions this year, including a new issue of Versus, the diskmagazine, but also the first issue of Feedback for AmigaOS 4. We also released a demo called Checkerboard Madness, which I enjoyed a lot.
2020
Strange to think about 2020. It all started well with Amiga Ireland being held in January. During this event, John Shawler made an interview with Dave Haynie, and Doug of 10 Minute Amiga Retro Cast interviewed Trevor Dickinson. After that, a new version of MorphOS was released, this time version 3.13. We also had the GERP 2020 demo party in Sweden, where we in Void released a new issue of Feedback and a wild demo called Hard Days Swapper.
A bit later, in March, the website of AmigaNG was launched. This is a site with a lot of resources and the aim is to cover all next generation Amiga platforms.
Unfortunately it was around this time that the COVID-19 pandemic started and the world changed. 😦 As I write this, April 2021, it is only a short while since lockdown was lifted here. There are still strict regulations, but now shops are allowed to be open. Let us hope that things will get better for everyone during the next months.
The Amiga and retro communities continued their activities. Even though many events had to be cancelled, some decided to arranged Online meetings instead. A good example of this is Revision Online 2020, which brought The Scene and Sceners together through the Internet when it was not possible to meet in person. The party was a success and people joined up from all corners of the world. This counted for AmiWest too, which found a way to host both an Online event and a physical one at the same time. Very impressive to see all the creativity around! 🙂
Abyss, an Amiga demo group, certainly put their mark on 2020 with three tiny games, namely Tiny Invanders, Tiny Galaga and Tiny Bobble. All games running smooth as butter and being highly playable.
One review I’m very happy with in 2020 is the one I did on Amiga Power – The Album With Attitude. The author was so kind to send me a copy of it. I absolutely loved it! If you haven’t checked it out before, I recommend you clicking the link above and read the review.
I’d also like to mention my reviews of Death Mask and Gloom, which took some time to do. 🙂
As for MorphOS, many people in the community will have noticed the rise of the Wayfarer web browser. With this program it was finally possible to use all kinds of web pages on my Mac Mini. I could even starting doing work on this computer! Excellent! I truly wish that we had this kind of browser on AmigaOS 4. It would do so much for the platform. Anyway, development of Wayfarer continues and it is only a few days ago since the last version was released. It now plays YouTube videos!
2021
It’s 2021 as we speak and the year has been ok so far. We are still in a pandemic, but vaccines are out there and people are getting vaccinations. Let us hope that normality returns in the near future. 🙂
As for retro computing and gaming, a lot of interesting things has happened already. A public release of MorphOS 3.15 was released, ACube Systems made a new batch of Sam460 boards (which sold out quickly), and Apollo Computers launched their own webstore. For people interested in the Demoscene, a brand new issue of Jurassic Pack was suddenly released and Revision Online 2021 saw a ton of excellent releases. At this party we in Void released one demo called Open Your Mind – Let Us Inside and one intro called Bears.
In the world of AmigaOS 4, we can’t forget mentioning the release of Enhancer Software 2.0. Now we hope that possibly the A1222 will be out in a few months. 🙂
Ok, I have taken a quick look at this text and noticed that it is very, very, very, very long. I had not intended to write this much, but had a lot on my heart. 🙂 Haven’t even begun telling you about the statistics yet, so let us get to that.
Friends, Fellow Bloggers and Retro Freaks
Over the past 10 years of blogging, I’ve interacted with a lot of people, mostly from the Amiga community, but also from others. I’d like to send out some greetings to you guys and thank you for some great years. 🙂 I’d especially like to mention The Heretic (desertpunk68), who made a great logo for this website and has been an inspiration with his comments and blogging over the years. Hope to see more from you in the future. 🙂 Also thanks to Steviegill, Vincent (AmigaNG), everyone in Void, Angel, Radzik of AMIcast, Backtothecode, Sean Retro Otaku, Jeano, Radzik, Stiggy, Van Rockingham, Doug of Dynamic Computing, Amigos Retro Gaming, Lorfarius, Amiga Ireland, Mads, Kim, Nick the Gent, mAZE, Browallia, Nukleus, crazysnake512, Vintage is the New Old, The Well-Red Mage, Tecon/Planet Jazz, Eldee Stephens, Daniel and all you others out there who have visited this blog, commented, spread links and so forth. 🙂 Cheers!
Statistics
10 Most Popular Posts on Old School Game Blog – All-time:
- How to get LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth working on Windows 8
- How to get LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth 2 (BFME 2) working on Windows 10
- Play Infocom Adventures Online
- Amiga: First Person Shooters
- AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition: Now Shipping to Dealers
- Zeus68k: New Accelerator for Amiga 500/2000/CDTV
- The Return of the Amiga 1200 Magic Pack
- He-Man and the Masters of the Universe
- Amiga: UltimatePPC Accelerator for Amiga 3000/4000
- Review of the AmigaOne X1000 by Guest Blogger AmigaNG
Various Statistics:
1,044 posts
3,081 comments
Monday is the most popular day with 16% of the views
5 PM is the most popular hour with 7% of the views
Thanks so much for reading! See you in another post here on Old School Game Blog, a Void production or possible on the other blog, Gaming on AmigaOS 4. 🙂
Cheers!
Old School Game Blog 