Old Computers Won't Last Forever

   When I first started looking into buying an Amiga, I found that there were plenty of different models to choose from, and so I had to do a fair bit of research at the time about each model and reading up on the history of Commodore and the Amiga range of computers, all of which was fascinating and made me hunger more for one of these old machines.

   Then, as if waking from an amnesia type brain freeze, I remembered that I already had one, an A2000 sitting in the shed, along with a tone of software. Damn my ineptitude and complete lack of foresight! Trust me to store a great computer in a damp, dusty, cobweb filled shed instead of storing it somewhere proper and safe from the environmental effects that could kill an electrical device off faster than the main man Chuck Norris. It wasn’t a machine I had in my youth, nor one that me or my parents bought at the time it was on the market, but it’s a system I acquired and messed about with until I ran out of space to store it. Yet I wasn’t into retro gaming at the time, and I knew little if anything about the Amiga or its significance, so in the shed it went.

   Of course I was kicking myself when I rescued it from the damp shed, as I was becoming strongly entrenched in retro gaming, and enjoying plenty of games and systems from my youth, and having a blast on old games as well as the latest and greatest a modern system could offer. But would it still work though, that was the question, would the A2000 still fire up after all these years in the shed? After taking the cover off and inspecting the insides, everything looked ok, the ribbons connecting all the drives looked a little worse for ware, but everything else seemed ok. Lucky for me it fired up, and after turning it on and off more times than I care to remember the hdd eventually kicked in and Workbench appeared, as you can imagine, I was relieved, more so than a vegetarian being told that what they were eating was in fact quorn balls and not hairy cows bollocks dipped in gravy.

   Though the A2000 still worked and Workbench fired up, the machine had still taken a hit: the floppy drives had bit the dust, they damaged one floppy disk then didn’t want to work, and the ribbons looked in a state of serious decay. So even though the system still lived on, it needed some serious TLC, something of which it wouldn’t need if I had looked after it properly in the first place.

   Well 4 years later and I’m still in the process of doing my Amga 2000 up, I got as far as replacing the two floppy drives and a drive ribbon, but that’s about it, but now, with the system in a permanent place under my TV, I’m ready to start refurbishing the system again. Late last year I did strip the system down, and clean the whole thing from top to bottom, all boards, the case, connections, everything. I was even pleased to find that the clock battery had not leaked onto the main board (something which I thought had happened,) and so on the advise of others, I de-soldered it from the main board as the big box Amiga’s suffer from clock battery leakage, and this has the potential to kill the system.

   One unforeseen side effect though was that when removing the main board from the system, which was a complete pain, and in hindsight was a two man job, some of the legs on the second mouse port snapped away from the board. It was far to awkward to re-solder them back on as there were other components in the way, so I wouldn’t have been able to get to the legs in question, so after careful thought, I decided to remove joystick port 2 completely. The plan was to solder wires from the main board to the corresponding legs, this I managed to do, but it was a sloppy job and the wires eventually came loose. So recently I tackled the problem again, but this time I bought a D-Sub9 connector and some soldering flux and it worked a treat. I re-soldered wires back onto the main boards D-Sub9 joystick port 2 connections, planned the route around the board I wanted the wires to take and used insulator tape to stick them down so they wouldn’t move, then soldered the wires onto the D-Sub9 and popped that into a back port plate. So now I plug a controller into the back of the A2000 where port 2 is newly located.

   I basically did what I had to do to save joystick port 2 and get it working, as many Amiga games take advantage of controllers and joysticks, but through the second port, and so if that’s out of action, it’ll make it very awkward to play many games. Upon looking at it it’s a bit of a ‘what in the Frankenstein’s monster!?’ But my A2000 isn’t getting any younger and over time things break, so I have done what I needed to do to keep the machine going, it’s not the best solution, but it works, that’s the important thing.

   As time marches on and we all continue to use these ageing machines way past their intended usage, its inevitable that things will break or stop working and repairs will have to be carried out. Some will be repairable, others won’t, it’s just the way things go, and over time it’s a fact that old computers and consoles will become rarer and more uncommon as the years tick by. Yes even all the abundant sun faded turd brown Super Nintendo’s you can find for sale online will one day become a wild and not too often seen item, more ripe chance for asshole sellers on eBay to charge through-the-arse prices on the auction site no doubt. I already own two A1200 because one has a dodgy expansion port and the other stopped outputting sound at one point, and add to that a cassette player for the Spectrum that’s now just dead electronic weight. It’s amazing that a lot of these computers and consoles are still going and we can only do our best to preserve them while actively using them, so it’s sad to think that one day, if these machines don’t re-enter production somehow somewhere in the future, that emulation will be the only real way to experience them, food for thought.

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Tin Toy Adventure

   Tin Toy Adventure was released in 1996 for the Amiga, so it was released quite late in the day, and by that time all but the most hardy and dedicated of the Amiga hardcore were still enjoying the fruits the system was able to offer up. So as you would expect with such a late Amiga game it’s an AGA (Advance Graphics Architecture) title, and honestly it really shows.

   This game has some beautiful looking graphics that are well drawn, well animated, with plenty of parallax scrolling. But what really shows off that this is an AGA game more than anything else is the sheer amount of colours displayed on screen; the game is very colourful with a diverse range on screen all throughout each level. The only other AGA title that I have come across that can match and equal this game in its graphical detail and amount of colours on screen is Simon the Sorcerer.

   Tin Toy Adventure is toy themed with each stage taking part in a different stage of a house, and each being differently themed in terms of design to coincide with each different room. Each stage consists of three levels with a boss fight at the end. The levels are well designed with interesting layouts and a good use of imagination for each one, but what really becomes obvious about the game is the fact that it is a tough platformer, and as a player you really have to know the levels inside and out if you want any hope of reaching the next level.

   The difficulty of the game is perhaps the most addictive thing about it, as the incentive to keep playing is the sheer sense of satisfaction you will be rewarded with when you have managed to get to that next level. The difficulty is quite reminiscent of a lot of the old 8-bit home computer games of the 80s, yet the game isn’t infuriating and impossible to complete like those games of old.

   You have quite a few different abilities at your disposal, you can jump on enemies to kill them, though they will take quite a few hits, which is something that will steadily increases the further you progress through the game as enemies get tougher to eliminate. Pressing down on the d-pad will scroll through a number of different abilities, that when selected will only last several short seconds, but can be more than useful when faced with a tough part of a level. You can select a tornado, and much like Taz from Taz-mania, it lets you wiz around the level really fast, knocking out enemies as you go. There is a power that inflates your characters body which will let you float above the level for a short distance, but the drawback of this is that when the ability wares off it can easily drop you onto spikes and enemies. There is even a magical top hat that will appear and walk in front of your character, knocking out any enemies that get in its way and it also doubles as a platform for you to access those hard to reach areas.

   Overall I honestly think that this game is a little jewel in the crown of the Amiga’s library, it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea due to the steep difficulty level, but it is certainly a top quality title high up there with the Turrican series, Fire & Ice, James Pond, Super Frog et al. To me this is a platformer that managed to stand out from the crowd of 90s platformers, yet I reserved judgement until I had played the game proper, and it turned out to be an amazingly addictive and fun game, but don’t take my word for it, go and play Tin Toy Adventure.

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