What ever happened to Bandit LOAF?

When we last left our hero, he was on the top of the world. The Amiga had returned from New Zealand and been lovingly reconstructed, a thoroughly unnecessary VR helmet sat atop Karga's yellowed frame... all was right with the world.

One part of the story you didn't hear is that Karga is not the happiest computer in the world today. As the man who would be Maniac said: you bojo, those boards don't work on water. Unless you got power. And I don't, at all. The VR helmet's bizarre USB competitor, Access.BUS (real thing!), sucks so much juice down a weird hole that Karga can't power her lengthy joystick-and-keyboard mess.

Add to that the issue of Wing Commander I, II and Privateer 2 running too quickly. There was hope early on that Mario would create patches, but he's bogged down with other projects and parts of his life that don't involve Wing Commander (?!) So it's time for an executive decision. And that decision is: split Karga in two and give one half to each villager.

Karga will remain the idealized Wing Commander Prophecy machine, featuring a Soundblaster Live, 3dfx card and so on. All the DOS toys will go to a new computer, to be named. And this is the story of how we build that computer. The ideal candidate should be able to run Wing Commander I to Wing Commander IV with enough ISA slots to handle some of my oddities. Maybe even so many ISA cards I can do something more. I haven't even properly specced it out. This is seat of the pants stuff right now.

Which brings us to the turbo button.

What's a turbo button, you ask? That's a stupid question, you exclaim angrily in response to my assuming you would ask that question. It's obviously a button that makes things turbo! Well hah-hah, smartass, you're completely wrong. It's actually a button that makes things SLOWER.

Now I know what you're thinking: knowing that, why would anyone ever press the turbo button? Under what circmstances would you possibly not want your computer to be as fast as possible? Well, people are dumb. But that isn't the reason. In the early days of personal computing, processor power multiplied far more quickly than software had been designed to cope with. So when your office upgraded to blazing new 286 computers sometimes the fifty thousand dollar custom spreadsheet program built for your IBM ATs just didn't run anymore. Thus, the turbo button.

I heard back from the Amiga surgeon and his rates are entirely reasonable... I just have to remove the motherboard and mail it to New Zealand! So, look forward to seeing some pictures of Amiga guts this weekend. My big worry is remembering how to put it back together... but it should make for a good story, and that's what we're here for!

(I KNEW that joke about Australians at the start of the thread would come back to haunt me.)

(Yes, I know Australia and New Zealand are actually different countries.)

I talked to Hades on IRC last night and he linked me to this: http://aminet.net/package/game/demo/WingCommander

The Amiga Wing Commander demo! I had no idea it was available to the public. He said he'd tried to emulate it but that it didn't work... so it's up to me to try it on the real thing!

IF this is the demo I've heard of then it should be pretty cool. It's not playable but has 64-color graphics instead of 16... and it shows the Sivar dreadnaught from Secret Missions, which never made it to the Amiga!

The problem is that I have no idea how to get this demo from my PC or Mac to the Amiga. I tried burning CDs a few different ways and the Amiga didn't recognize any of them. I did test its drive by loading some of my proper CD32 discs, which showed up just fine.

I've read online that you need to burn at very slow speeds, 2x or so, to get a CD32 to read CR-Rs... unfortunately, my burner won't go below 10x. So I'll have to experiment with different methods in the hopes of finding something the Amiga can read (I DID try downloading a CD32 ROM and then adding the wingcommanderdemo folder to the ISO... no luck there, either.)

Failing that, it sounds like there's a way to connect via null modem... if the Amiga has the right software for that onboard then maybe I can push the demo over from Karga. But I guess I'll have a few weeks to think about that...

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I know what you're thinking: an update on Saturday night?! Don't you write these at work to kill time? Shouldn't you be out partying with supermodels?! The answer to all three questions is yes, but this has been such an eventful night in classic Wing Commander machine-ing that I decided to go ahead and write a quick update now.

Thanks for the name suggestions! I'm really not sure what to go with, but I'll make a decision soon. Other ideas, from Twitter for the record: F-36, Amigo, The Behemoth, Eagle-1, Pathetic Insect and Hamburger Inferno. I do think the Amiga is female? Bertha was a girl for obvious reasons and Karga was male because Kilrathi ships are.

So, the Amiga's first surgery was this morning. My father, who has working eyes, helped strip it down to remove the main board. The board will be shipped to New Zealand on Tuesday for repair and if we're lucky it'll be back here in about a month.

If you're reading this and thinking: what the heck is an Amiga? then you're probably... an American! Amigas were available here but they were never more than an also-ran, a distant third or fourth or seventh in the titanic struggle between Macintosh and PC.

If you're reading this and thinking "Amigas, eh? Jolly good." then you are British and know what's going on. The Amiga was HUGE in Europe and England especially, where they were the last desperate strike against having to use the same kind of computer as normal people (you know, along with the BBC Micro and the Sinclair and the Acorn and half a dozen other weird space computers.)

(Finally, if your reaction was: "eh mate, thems a fuzzy wagger" then you are an Australian and should seek help.)

The one exception is in professional video work, where American Amigas found a real niche. Thanks to an invention called the "Video Toaster" (yes, we're all thinking of the After Dark flying toasters right now, just let it happen) the humble Amiga became an unexpected powerhouse in the field of video editing and 3D effects work. In fact, the still-popular LightWave 3D package got its start as software bundled with the Toasters. The quality of a given 1990s TV show can be determined entirely based on whether or not an Amiga was involved in the effects work and editing. SeaQuest? Amiga! Sliders? Amiga! The X-Files? Amiga! Babylon 5? Amiga... okay, so it's not a hard, fast rule.

The Amiga had a graphical interface which I assume without checking was called AmigOS, and was appealing in that period of history before Microsoft decided to just force everyone to use Windows. The line ended in the early 1990s and they were always a little underpowered compared to their PC equivalents... but they were plucky and have a host of fans to this day. Amiga people continue to do insane things to Amigas, much like Wing Commander fans continue to do insane things to Wing Commander. There are even some weirdo modern Amigas made by other companies that may or may not be real.

All well and good, but why does LOAF care? Well I'll tell you, you jerk, I care because there's...

... A PORT OF WING COMMANDER FOR THE AMIGA!

It's true. In fact, the Amiga port of Wing Commander was the very first one announced, in 1990. In the first Origin catalogs that listed Wing Commander an Amiga port was listed as "COMING SOON" from Origin.

And it never happened.

But you just said it DID happen! Jeez, let me tell the story, internal narrator.