Only Amiga Makes It Possible...

I'd been eyeing the Amiga for a while at this point.  Reading countless articles about this amazing machine with 4096 colours, 4 channel stereo sound, 512k memory, and all this custom hardware that seemed to make anything possible!  Now up to this point only the Amiga 1000 had been available, and that was out of reach of even my most entrepreneurial schemes,  which at this point in time had grown from selling sweets and eggs, to peddling cigarettes! My sister ( a tobacco rep ) would leave cartons of samples for my mam and dad,  the brands they didn't like would be given to me and I'd take them to school and sell them... I'd take cash,  music (7" or 12" vinyl, tapes, walkmans etc), computer games, computer hardware, or whatever someone would offer.  I'd then sell some of the items to bring in the cold hard stuff.

But now, the Amiga 1000 had a ilttle brother, the Amiga 500... and that was definitely in my price range!   I ordered one from Kays Catalogue so that I could pay it off monthly, and very shortly a shiny Amiga 500 was on my desk.   This was gamechanging for me.  Finally here was a system that I could create anything my brain could come up with.

I quickly got to work honing my skills, I was soon a master of DPaint, creating full screen pixel perfect images, the shiniest logos, sprite animations of spacecraft, robots, and warriors, and fonts, lots of fonts!

AMOS Pro became my second home, I was coding all kinds of weird and wonderful things,  simple games, maze solvers, physics demos, and more.

When I wasn't creating art or code, I was in tracker software creating house and rave tracks, epic soundscapes, or remixes of the latest house, techno, and rave tunes.

I had left school at this point and got a place on a YTS course at the local ITeC.  The course was mainly focused on learning a variety of packages, all on PCs, which at that time meant black and white, cyan & magenta, or red and green graphics.  We got to learn Autocad, did a spell learning word processing, a bit of BASIC programming, but nothing too exciting.  Then a package arrived, from Acorn Computers.  A brand new Archimedes A310!  I'd been reading about these in New Computer Express and Popular Computing Weekly and couldn't wait to get my hands on it!

None of the lecturers there had any clue what to do with it,  they were all PC men and women, so I got given free reign of it.  Here was a machine with 8 channel sound, 256 colour graphics and more processing power than god, that could be programmed in BBC BASIC!  I created versions of my AMOS programs, amazed how fast they could run.  I then created a breakout game which I christened BallArcs,  full colour shiny graphics and sound that would pan left and right across the 8 channels depending on where the bat and ball were and where collisions were happening.  Amiga at home and Archimedes on my YTS Course,  I was in heaven!

But then we moved again, back from the Scottish borders to Northumberland, this time in the Tyne Valley, twenty miles from Newcastle.  I switched from the YTS course at Borders ITeC to a similar course in Newcastle, but no Archimedes.  While there I met another Amiga fan, he had started a demo group called Modesty which I quickly joined.  Over the next few years we would be working on Amiga demos and tools, attending demo parties, and partying.  As well as Amiga, we both loved the nightlife of Newcastle... we were constantly out partying in the city, hitting the clubs and hitting the raves that were popping up everywhere.

I'd finished YTS and taken a college course in computer studies, he had finished YTS and was writing printer drivers for a local company.   Then he got a job at a local games studio as the lead programmer on a racing game.  Another member of Modesty also got a job there doing the PC conversion.  So I threw my hat into the ring and applied for a job as graphic artist, and landed the job right away.

Games and Chaos...