I recently rediscovered WinUAE. It has allowed me to relive my Amiga days. I’ve essentially created an Amiga virtual machine with a hard drive full of my favourite games, applications, and scene demos. Whenever I want I can jump back into a nostalgic game or application from my past. The joy of emulation!
Tag: amiga
Emulators
I love emulators.
They allow me to take a nostalgic trip back in time running software and playing games from yesteryear without leaving the comfort of my current desktop. I can load up WinUAE for example and delve back into my Amiga days playing forgotten classics such as Cadaver, Dreamweb, or Alien Breed. Or fire up Directory Opus and play around with the Amiga OS.
In most cases I don’t even need to run an emulator on my OS as there are plenty of websites that will do that for you. Catering to the retro scene you can play just about any game on a myriad of bygone computer hardware or gaming consoles.
Maybe you are in the pub talking to your mates discussing the video games you played in your youth. You could pull up a YouTube video to show what it looked like, or you could fire up the game via emulation and actually play the game yourself in real time. The power of the internet!
I do love emulators!
Now for a quick game of Galaga..
Deluxe Paint
Watching the young ‘uns today playing games like Minecraft takes me back to the late 80s / early 90s when I used to create graphics for the Commodore Amiga using tools such as Deluxe paint and Photon paint. The resolutions we had back then plus the number of available colours were not as great as they are today. We had to learn techniques such as anti-aliasing and cross-hatching to give the illusion of smooth graphics with less rigid edges.
Why people want games with blocky-looking graphics escapes me, but it does trigger memories of nostalgia for the days when I had to create such graphics every time I see such games. Memories of Beneath a Steel Sky, Universe, and Monkey Island. Or the Amiga scene demos.
Now where did I store those old floppies..