This week Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) looked back nearly 30 years to the glory days of the world's first true 32-bit CD based home console — Commodore's Amiga32. In the final three months of 1993, the company had sold 100,000 in just three months in Europe, outselling Sega four to one, "and claiming 38% market share of all CD ROM drives sold in the U.K. (according to the Gallup Weekly Report)."

But the next year all over, Mike Bouma writes, summarizing reports from both Amiga Report and Wikipedia: Operations in Germany and the United Kingdom were still profitable, but Commodore was not able to meet demand for new units because of component supply problems — and could not release the (already made) Amiga CD32 stock in the United States due to a legal patent issue!

Commodore declared bankruptcy on April 29, 1994, causing the CD32 to be discontinued only eight months after its debut.
This look back was apparently inspired by a report from retro gaming vlogger Lady Decade about what then happened to the Amiga CD32 after Commodore's demise — and about the system that would've been its successor: the lost Amiga64.

Earlier this week Mike shared the news that attempts to make a 'Doom' clone for the Amiga 500 have already led to a demo map (for both Amiga 500s with one megabyte of RAM and Atari STs with two megabytes of RAM).

And for more vintage retro-gaming goodness, Mike adds that "In my opinion the most impressive game released for the system was Super Stardust by Bloodhouse, published by Team17." It was the sequel to Stardust for the Amiga 500 and Atari STE. Bloodhouse merged with Terramarque (famous for their impressive Amiga 500 game Elfmania) to form Housemarque, which is still making games as of today.

Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) writes: Pixelglass Games and BitBeamCannon are working on new commercial Amiga games. Metro Siege is a 2-player beat 'em up for the Amiga 500 with 1 MB of Ram. You can watch a teaser trailer here. Alarcity is a shoot 'em up for the Amiga 1200 and Amiga CD32. You can watch an earlier campaign trailer here.

If i.e. your classic Amiga broke down there's good news for you. The Amiga 500 mini (Essex Retro Gamer overview) is set to release in early 2022 It will be able to play Amiga 500, Amiga 600 and Amiga 1200 games in WHDLoad format. It's available for pre-order at Amazon.com and local shops worldwide.

Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) writes: A-EON Technology Ltd has released Enhancer Software Release 2.1 for AmigaOS4.1 FE update 2, which itself was released on 23 December 2020. It's an OS enhancement package with large amounts of updated and upgraded OS components.

Also earlier this year Hyperion released AmigaOS 3.2 for all classic Amigas. Here's a roundup of new features by The Guru Meditation on YouTube.

For over an hour on Saturday, retired Microsoft OS developer David Plummer answered questions from his viewers on YouTube.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: He began with an update on a project to test the performance of the same algorithm using 30 different programming languages, and soon tells the story of how he was inspired to apply for his first job at Microsoft after reading Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire.

I decided that this is where I wanted to work, because these guys sound like me, they act like me, they are what I want to be when I grow up. And holy cow, they pay them well, apparently. So I wrote to everybody that I could find that had a Microsoft email address, which was about four people, because I had a software product people had been regisering on the Amiga. And one guy, Alistair Banks... responded and he hooked me up with a hiring manager directly in Windows that had an open slot that was hiring... And a couple of interview slots later, I wound up as an intern at MS-DOS working for Ben Slivka.

So you would think, "Oh, an intern on MS-DOS. What'd you do? Format disks?" No — it's amazing to me, actually. They give you as much work as they believe that you are capable of, and — they get you for all that you're worth, basically. They had me write a bunch of major features, like the Smart Drive cache for CD-ROMs was the first thing I wrote. Then I wrote DISKCOPY, making it work, single pass, bunch of features in MS-DOS. I re-wrote Setup to work on a single floppy disk by using deltas and patching in place, DOS 5 to turn it into DOS 6, something like, or maybe it was DOS 6 into 6.2... A whole bunch of features, within the span of, like, three months, which to me was fairly impressive at the time, I thought. And that only got me an interview...

Later he says that he'd like to see most of 16-bit Windows and all of MS-DOS open sourced, along with some select application code from that era.

I don't think there's any reason to hold back any of MS-DOS at this point. They have absolutely no reason to open source any of it, really — other than PR, because all it brings them is potential liability, complaints and angst, and probably nothing positive for putting the code out there and exposing it to ridicule. Because it's ancient code at this point. It's like, "Ha! Look what Microsoft did!" Well, yeah, I know Linux is cool now, but go look at Linux code from 1991 — and I worked on some of that code. Well, '93 I did. It's not the same as what you see today.

So yeah, MS-DOS probably looks archaic — although it's super tight, it doesn't have many bugs. It's just written differently than you would write code today, because you're targetting something that is a very different CPU and memory system and PC as a whole, and it's so much more limited that everybody's sacred, every cycle matters. That kind of thing that you don't worry about now. But I'd still like to see all the code from back then that's not embarrassing released.

And when asked what he misses most about being a Microsoft developer, he answers:

I miss going for lunch with the people that I went for lunch with, and talking to the people that I worked with. Because they were a lot like me, they had similar interests, they had similar abilities, they were people like me. We went for lunch, we ate food, it was awesome, and then we talked about cool things. And we did that every day. And now I don't get to do that any more. I get to do it rarely, because I take guys out for lunch and stuff, but it's not the same. So that's really what I miss.

And I miss somebody always feeding me something interesting to do. Because now I have to go out and find something that's interesting to do on my own. And I can't make everything be monetarily remunerative...

Hackaday writes: In the early years of personal computing there were a slew of serious contenders. A PC, a Mac, an Atari ST, an Amiga, and several more that all demanded serious consideration on the general purpose desktop computer market. Of all these platforms, the Amiga somehow stubbornly refuses to die. The Amiga 1200+ from [Jeroen Vandezande] is the latest in a long procession of post-Commodore Amigas, and as its name suggests it provides an upgrade for the popular early-1990s all-in-one Amiga model.

It takes the form of a well-executed open-source printed circuit board that's a drop-in replacement for the original A1200 motherboard... The catch: it does require all the custom Amiga chips from a donor board...

It's fair to say that this is the Amiga upgrade we'd all have loved to see in about 1996 rather than waiting until 2019.
Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) shares a recent video showing the latest update of AmigaOS 4 by Hyperion Entertainment, and reminds us of two "also active" Amiga OS clones — AROS and MorphOS.

Further reading: Little Things That Made Amiga Great.

The success of Nintendo's diminutive gadget led to a flurry of copycats, from a tiny Commodore 64 to a miniaturised Sony PlayStation. Some were good; many were flawed, with the play experience only being surface deep. Fortunately, some companies wanted to go further than fashioning yet another miniature plug-and-play TV console. From a report: One, the ZX Spectrum Next, brought into being a machine from an alternate universe in which Sinclair was never sold to Amstrad and instead built a computer to take on the might of the Amiga and Atari ST. Two other companies headed further back into gaming's past and set themselves an equally ambitious challenge: recreating the exciting, noisy, visually arresting classic cabinets you once found in arcades. "I always saw them as more than just a game, with their unique shapes, art, sounds and lights acting together to lure money from your pocket," explains Matt Precious, managing partner at Quarter Arcades creators Numskull Designs. "I was disappointed you couldn't purchase models of these machines during a time when physical items like LPs were booming in an increasingly sterile world of digital downloads."

Quarter Arcades was subsequently born as a project "trying to capture a piece of gaming history" in quarter-scale cabinets. The machines are in exact scale, including the controls, and play the original arcade ROMs. But look closer and there's an obsessive level of detail: the rough texture of the control panel art; mimicking an original cab's acoustics by careful speaker positioning; recreating the Space Invaders 'Pepper's ghost' illusion effect where graphics 'float' above an illuminated backdrop -- all realised by dismantling and reverse-engineering original cabs.

"Steve Jobs is now known for revolutionizing just about every part of the tech world, but back in 1988, he was perhaps best known for getting fired," remembers SFGate: In his first product reveal since his dismissal from Apple in 1985, Jobs unveiled a new project called NeXT at a meeting of the Boston Computer Society. An audio recording of the event was unearthed and released as part of a trove of early tech recordings released by Charles Mann, as reported in an extensive feature by Fast Company...

Computing advances included a UNIX operating system that allows multi-tasking, a one million pixel display, CD quality sound and a then unprecedented 256 MB of storage. The computer would be completely built by robots rather than a human assembly line, which he said resulted in a defect rate 10 times lower than its competitors. The partnership with academia makes even more sense once you consider the price-tag of $6,500.
Fast Company's tech editor Harry McCracken was at the 1988 event, and quotes Jobs as saying "The Macintosh architecture is going to peak next year sometime. And that means that there's enough cracks in the wall already, and enough limitations to the architecture, that the Mac's pretty much going to be everything it's ever going to be sometime next year."

Some clips are available on Soundcloud, but the full trove of tech recordings includes 200 full hours of audio and 16 more of video (available on a USB drive for $59.95) showing luminaries from the early days of personal technology. "In 1985, for instance, a month after Commodore announced its groundbreaking Amiga computer in New York City, president Tom Rattigan came to Boston to show it to BCS members and argue that it left the Mac in the dust." Other recordings include Dan Bricklin, co-creator of VisiCalc, Osborne computer designer Adam Osborne, and investor Esther Dyson, McCracken writes:

Jobs is on three recordings — one from his first Apple tenure, and two from NeXT. Bill Gates is on five. There are folks who were already legends (mobile-computing visionary Alan Kay, marketer extraordinaire Regis McKenna) and up-and-comers (budding PC tycoon Michael Dell, age 23). Everyone from Sony cofounder Akio Morita to psychedelics advocate and part-time technologist Timothy Leary is represented; just the Apple-related material, including CEO John Sculley talking about the company in the 21st century and Hypercard creator Bill Atkinson demoing his brainchild, is a feast...

The audio of Jobs's NeXT demo at the BCS — and dozens of other recordings — exist solely because Mann realized more than 35 years ago that the talks going on at computer user-group meetings and conferences were history in the making... In May 1982, the BCS hosted Applefest, an Apple II-centric fair that featured already-iconic Apple cofounders Jobs and Wozniak as keynote speakers. In this excerpt, fielding a question from the audience, they talk about software copy protection. Woz does so from a technical bent; Jobs, who speaks of a future involving low prices and convenient electronic distribution, sounds like he was thinking about the App Store decades before it appeared. This is rare, rare stuff; if you know of even one other example of surviving audio or video of Jobs and Wozniak talking about Apple together, I'd love to hear about it.

The Amiga Fast File System (AFFS) is making a minor comeback in the new version of the Linux kernel. The Register reports: As noted by chief penguin Linus Torvalds in his weekly state-of-the-kernel report, a change to AFFS popped up among what he described as a collection of "the usual suspects" in new submissions to the kernel over the last week. The Amiga was ahead of its time, but is now largely a curiosity. However Suse developer David Sterba has noticed that "The basic permission bits (protection bits in AmigaOS) have been broken in Linux' AFFS - it would only set bits, but never delete them. Also, contrary to the documentation, the Archived bit was not handled."

"Let's fix this for good, and set the bits such that Linux and classic AmigaOS can coexist in the most peaceful manner," he added. Torvalds appears to have agreed inasmuch as Sterba's code has made it into rc4 of version 5.9 of the Linux kernel. Torvalds said that while rc4 is a big release -- he rated it as "larger than usual" -- it's still "well within the normal range, and not something I'll lose any sleep over."

New submitter bondman writes: Windows 95 was released a full quarter century ago today, on August 24th, 1995. Long gone, nearly forgotten? I'm surprised to not have come across a retrospective article yet. I've linked to the Wikipedia article.

As for me I still haven't grown to re-like The Rolling Stones "Start Me Up" yet. I got so sick of hearing it with all the pre-launch and post-launch hype, as the song was tied heavily to the Win 95 launch event. Microsoft paid the Stones a princely sum to use it.

I still remember how exciting it was to see the full-length, full-screen video included on the installation CD-ROM, "Buddy Holly" by Weezer. Mind-blowing to watch a whole music video on your computer. Crappy resolution by our standards today, and a very limited palette to my memory. But as I said, amazing in the day.

Windows 95 had many fans and many critics. At the time, I recall it as an exciting OS (or GUI on top of DOS, if you prefer). PC users were riveted to all the magazine and other media coverage pre-launch. I remember it fondly (with all the obligatory respect due Mac OS, the Amiga, and all the other early GUIs of course).

Mike Bouma is Slashdot reader #85,252. (And judging by his Slashdot profile, he was also a participant in the short-lived Amiga webring.) He writes: KK of the demo scene group Altair is making a Doom clone for the Amiga 500. The system requirements are a mere 7 Mhz Amiga 500 with 1 MB of RAM!

Have a look:

Dread Ep 01 — making "Doom" clone for Amiga 500

Dread Ep 02 — "Doom" clone for Amiga 500 — Laying out the map...

You can find KK/Altair at the English Amiga Board.

The latest update from Internet Archive brings thousands of MS-DOS games from the '90s like 3D Bomber, Zool and Alien Rampage. CNET reports: On Sunday, Internet Archive released 2,500 MS-DOS games that includes action, strategy and adventure titles. Some of the games are Vor Terra, Spooky Kooky Monster Maker, Princess Maker 2 and I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. "This will be our biggest update yet, ranging from tiny recent independent productions to long-forgotten big-name releases from decades ago," Internet Archive software curator Jason Scott wrote on the site's blog.

One game that might trigger a few memories is the 1992 action-adventure horror game Alone in the Dark, published by Infogrames. In the game, you can play private investigator Edward Carnby or family member Emily Hartwood, who's investigating the suspicious death of Jeremy Hartwood in his Louisiana mansion called Derceto, which is now supposedly haunted. Fighting against rats, zombies and giant worms, you have to solve a number of puzzles to escape. Another retro game included by Internet Archive is a 1994 title played on PCs and Amiga computers called Mr. Blobby (a remake of the SNES game Super Troll Islands). Players can choose from three different characters -- Mr. Blobby, Mrs. Blobby and Baby Blobby. The goal of the game is to color in the computer screen by walking over it. Levels include climbing ladders, avoiding spikes and bouncing on springs.

Mike Bouma shares a post from MorphZone, detailing the latest update to the AmigaOS-like computer operating system known as MorphOS: The MorphOS development team is proud to announce the public release of MorphOS 3.12. This new version introduces brand new dual-monitor capabilities to various Powerbook laptops as well as G5 desktop systems, and features improved thermal management, fan control and dynamic CPU frequency switching, which provide increased energy efficiency and reduced noise levels. Additionally, the Helios Firewire stack has been fully integrated into the core OS and we added support for hundreds of modern printers and scanners. The installation and troubleshooting guides should be carefully read prior to installation. You can download MorphOS 3.12 here.

dryriver writes: The Amiga was a remarkable machine at the time it was released -- 1985. It had a multitasking capable GUI-driven OS and a mouse. It had a number of cleverly designed custom chips that gave the Amiga amazing graphics and sound capabilities far beyond the typical IBM/DOS PCs of its time. The Amiga was the multimedia beast of its time -- you could create animated and still 2D or 3D graphics on it, compose sophisticated electronic music, develop 2D or 3D 16-Bit games, edit and process digital video (using Video Toaster), and of course, play some amazing games. And after the Amiga -- as well as the Atari ST, Archimedes and so on -- died, everybody pretty much had to migrate to either the PC or Mac platforms. If Commodore and the Amiga had survived and thrived, there might have been four major desktop platforms in use today: Windows, OSX, AmigaOS and Linux. And who knows what the custom chips (ASICs? FPGAs?) of an Amiga in 2019 might have been capable of -- Amiga could possibly have been the platform that makes nearly life-like games and VR/AR a reality, and given Nvidia and AMD's GPUs a run for their money.

What do you think the computing landscape in 2019 would have looked like if the Amiga and AmigaOS as a platform had survived? Would Macs be as popular with digital content creators as they are today? Would AAA games target Windows 7/8/10 by default or tilt more towards the Amiga? Could there have been an Amiga hardware-based game console? Might AmigaOS and Linux have had a symbiotic existence of sorts, with AmigOS co-existing with Linux on many enthusiast's Amigas, or even becoming compatible with each other over time?

Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) writes: The IBrowse Team announced the commercial release of IBrowse 2.5 for AmigaOS 3.x (68k) and an improved PPC native AmigaOS 4.x version.

IBrowse was the most popular Amiga web browser of the 1990s when it pioneered advanced features such as tabbed web browsing.
"After many years in the making, development has been on a roller coaster since IBrowse 2.4, with challenging personal, technical and commercial issues complicating the release schedule," reads the announcement on the iBrowse site.

"However, we are extremely happy to finally make this new version available to all the valued users who have been waiting so patiently."

While tech giants like Microsoft and Google are building cloud gaming platforms for the latest blockbuster titles, one start-up is taking a different approach. From a report: London-based firm Antstream says it wants to bring a streaming experience to retro gaming enthusiasts. The company has developed a cloud gaming service that gives players access to a library of over 2,000 classic video games. It's a model that CEO Steve Cottam sees going global. And to bolster that ambition, the company has raised its first significant round of funding, led by the Chinese tech giant Tencent and backed by British venture firm Hambro Perks. For Antstream, the project is about resurrecting an experience long buried in old devices like the Commodore 64 and the Amiga. Cottam told CNBC in an interview that the idea for the company stemmed from what he's been seeing elsewhere in the entertainment industry. "You've got Spotify and Apple for your music, while in movies you've got Netflix and Amazon," he said. "It's so easy to find that content, but games just got lost because of all these different formats, and they didn't work on modern devices."

Long-time Slashdot reader cshamis tipped us off to this story in HotHardware: It is official, folks -- Retro Games is releasing a full-size retro reboot of the original Commodore 64, called TheC64, on December 5...

Of course, modern amenities abound for this reboot. TheC64 can connect to any modern TV via HDMI, to deliver "crisp 720p HD visuals" at 60Hz (USA) or 50Hz (Europe). It also comes with an updated joystick featuring 8 buttons, micro switches, and USB connectivity. It bears a passing resemblance to the original, but with additional bells and whistles. TheC64 will arrive with 64 games preinstalled, including titles such as California Games, Destroyer, Impossible Mission (1 and 2), Monty on the Run, Speedball 2, and many others... [P]layers will be able to add more games from a USB memory stick (not included).

The original Commodore 64 is widely considered the best-selling single-model PC of all time. Estimates have sales pegged at somewhere between 10-17 million units.

Jason Koebler shares Vice's analysis of demoparties -- "gatherings where programmers showcase artistic audiovisual works, known as demos, after a day- or days-long coding marathon that is part bacchanal and part competition" -- starting with a visit to New York's Synchrony. I had arrived just in time to catch the end of a set by the electronic musician Melody Loveless, who was at a folding table near the front of the room writing code that generated the music. These sorts of live coding performances have been a staple of demoparties -- gatherings organized by and for the creative computing underground -- for decades... Demos are often made by teams of programmers and are almost always rendered in real time (as opposed to, say, an animated movie, which is a pre-rendered recording). Demoparty competitions, or compos, are generally divided into categories where demo submissions must adhere to certain restrictions. For example, some compos only allow demos that were made on a Commodore 64 computer or demos that were created using under 4,000 bytes of data. In every case, however, the point of the competition is to push computing hardware to its limits in the service of digital art...

Given the abundance of digital art institutions in New York -- Eyebeam, Rhizome, LiveCode.NYC, and the School for Poetic Computation -- the lack of demoparties is conspicuous and in stark contrast to the European demoscene, which boasts dozens of annual demoparties, some of which attract thousands of participants. With this discrepancy in mind, I tagged along with the Synchrony crew this year in pursuit of an answer to a deceptively simple question -- who killed the American demoscene...?
The article traces the demo scene back to the "cracktros" which introduced pirated Commodore 64 video games (and their associated "copyparties") on floppy disks in the 1980s. Eventually this even led to police raids, but "The crackdown on software piracy was not evenly spread throughout Europe, however. Countries like the Netherlands, Greece, Finland, Sweden, and Norway didn't have strict software piracy laws, if they had any at all, which allowed the warez scene to flourish there." And by the early 1990s games "became a taboo when the community started defining its borders and aggressively distancing itself from other communities occupying the same computer hobbyist domain," wrote Markku Reunanen, a lecturer at Aalto University, in 2014.

Vice adds that "Although the demoscene has many elements in common with the warez scene from which it emerged, it differentiated itself by emphasizing technically challenging aesthetics. Whereas software cracking was largely pragmatic and gaming was about entertainment, the demoscene was about creating computer art that was difficult to produce at the level of the code, but also visually and aurally pleasing to consume. It was, in short, a competitive form of digital art.... Today, the fundamental aspects of the demoscene are the same. Demoparties are still organized around a competition and remain an almost exclusively European phenomenon. Demosceners still police the boundaries of their discipline vis-a-vis gaming and some sceners continue to work exclusively with retro machines like the C64 and Amiga."

Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) tipped us off to "Amiga present and future," an interview with Trevor Dickinson of A-EON Technology, a group funding ongoing hardware and software development for the Amiga community. "Amongst the topics are the still in betatest Mini-ITX and quad-core PPC Amiga motherboards. Trevor regularly writes editorials for the Amiga Future print magazine [English-translated version here] and his company will be attending and is sponsoring the Amiga34 event in Neuss Germany on the 12th and 13th of October 2019."

A-EON now has about 50 part-time developers and beta-testers working on software projects for Classic and Next-Generation AmigaOS, Dickinson reveals: I've been a Commodore and Amiga enthusiast since the late 1970s but only really got involved in the business side of Amiga in 2007 when I provided funding to Michael Battilana of Cloanto to help fast track the development of 'Amiga Forever'. [An Amiga preservation, emulation and support package] The funding allowed Michael to hire Nicola Morocutti, the 'Bitplane' magazine Editor, to embark on a major project to catalogue the tens of thousands of Amiga games and software titles which lead to the development of the one-click 'Retro-Platform' player which made its debut in 'Amiga Forever 2008' and the subsequent development 'C64 Forever' in May 2009. But, if you discount my Hardware donation scheme, it was the 'AmigaOne X1000' project [a PowerPC-based personal computer from A-Eon Technology CVBA intended as a high-end platform for AmigaOS 4] that was my first Amiga next-generation funding...

I've always said as long as Amigans keep supporting A-EON by buying the hardware and software we develop, we will keep developing both for AmigaOS. The motherboards names, 'Nemo', 'Cyrus' and 'Tabor' are characters and place names from the Jules Verne novel, "The Mysterious Islands". There are plenty more names available in that book.
Dickinson also discusses various projects that are attempting to build a portable Amiga laptop -- and his own early efforts to fund hardware donations to encourage Amiga developers to write productivity software, games and applications for AmigaOS 4.0. ("I resorted to buying second hand AmigaOne machines from eBay and other online sources...")

He also describes ongoing efforts to bring Libre Office and better web browsers to the Amiga. "Anyone who has the coding skills and is interested in helping out on such projects should contact me."

Jessica Roy, writing for LA Times: Thirty years ago, Maxis released "SimCity" for Mac and Amiga. It was succeeded by "SimCity 2000" in 1993, "SimCity 3000" in 1999, "SimCity 4" in 2003, a version for the Nintendo DS in 2007, "SimCity: BuildIt" in 2013 and an app launched in 2014. Along the way, the games have introduced millions of players to the joys and frustrations of zoning, street grids and infrastructure funding -- and influenced a generation of people who plan cities for a living.

For many urban and transit planners, architects, government officials and activists, "SimCity" was their first taste of running a city. It was the first time they realized that neighborhoods, towns and cities were things that were planned, and that it was someone's job to decide where streets, schools, bus stops and stores were supposed to go.

Long-time Slashdot reader Mike Bouma shared Eurogamer's report about a rare Amiga 3000 auctioned on eBay: Mike Clarke, who worked at legendary UK game company Psygnosis from 1992 to 1999 doing audio work, rescued this particular Amiga 3000 from destruction after it had been placed down in a corridor, ready to be thrown out. Over 20 years later, Clarke is selling it on eBay... According to Clarke, this Amiga 3000 was first used by artist Jeff Bramfitt, who scratched his initials in the top of the case in pen "just in case someone took it off his desk".

Bramfitt used the machine to work on the title screens for Carthage, Infestation, Shadow of the Beast 2 and more classic Amiga games, but its headline claim to fame is it was used to create the original Amiga Lemmings intro and logo. Lemmings, which came out for the Amiga in 1991, was developed by DMA Design (now Rockstar North) and published by Psygnosis before the latter was bought by Sony. Later, it was used for Microcosm (3DO, Mega-CD), Scavenger IV (aka Novastorm, Mega-CD, FM Towns), and unreleased games such as No Escape, a tie-in with the Ray Liotta film, aka Penal Colony for Mega-CD.

Files for all of these games and more remain on this Amiga 3000's hard drive. "I think the above games were all in 1993, which was a very busy year because we got bought by Sony and alongside working on games by third-party developers, Sony pushed all of these film licenses onto us and gave us almost no time to make them," Clarke said. This Amiga 3000 is not without its problems, however. The floppy drive doesn't work anymore and the hard drive is "temperamental", which means you might have issues booting the thing up.
After 16 bids, the Amiga sold for £1,850 -- about $2,300 USD -- plus another £170 ($215 USD) for shipping.

"So much early gaming history has been lost mostly because, much like the BBC erasing Doctor Who tapes, nobody valued it when it was happening," Clarke tells Eurogamer. "I was the only person who saw the historical value in rescuing these machines and I also rescued over 800 development disks that were going to be binned at the time."