The Amiga always had, and still has a special place in my heart.
I first met the Amiga 500 with friends, early during my teenage. At this time, I had an Amstrad CPC, and the sound and graphics capabilities of the Amiga were of course far superior. I remember being impressed with games like Lotus II and Moonstone; when a friend bought a 512kb RAM expansion, we were blown away "there are digitalized voices !". I spent hours watching demos running on the demonstration Amigas in the stores.
I also spent hours with a friend discovering, hacking, playing, copying floppy disks, talking about this machine, reading magazines... There was "the ones who have an Amiga" and the others, having an Atari ST, or even worse, an IBM compatible as these machines were called. I was only wanting one thing in my life : an Amiga.
Then came this day, in 1992 : I got my own Amiga ! The store where we bought it offered me two game I could choose : I chose Monkey Island 2 and Cryo's Dune. I still play these games today, especially Dune which is my go to game whan I need to escape and recharge my batteries.
At last, I could start hacking on this machine ! It started with making my custom workbench disk and my own utilities floppy. At some point I found a book named "la Bible Amiga" by Micro Applications (not "the real" bible), which contained enough information to start coding things in assembly; I was using AsmPro and has been using it for a long time.
I loved watching demos. Two 1991 demos have a special place in my memories : Phenomena Enigma and Silents Global Trash. I still watch them from time to time. And I remember I used to launch some games just to watch the crack intro (Vision Factory Dynablaster cracktro for instance). Coders were my heroes.
With Commodore filing for bankruptcy in 1994, the glorious Amiga days were behind. For some years, it was easy to find cheap Amigas, as they were just old useless machines no one wanted any more. Not useless for enthusiasts, which made very good deals.
With the years passing, floppies and drives failing, capacitors leaking (on the 1200/4000), it became increasingly expensive to have a working Amiga. You need adapters for display, expansions and some way to emulate an IDE hard drive and/or a gotek to not feel the pain of using floppies. FPGA alternatives comes at a cost. Fortunately, a range of machines became powerful enough to emulate Amigas flawlessly.
I've used winUAE and Amiberry on various machines but my favorite emulator is vAmiga on macOS. I also like its web variant vAmigaWeb. vAmiga works very well, with CRT filters it feels like a real Amiga on a real CRT monitor. But it lacks some features one may want like faster processors or RTG. Still, this the most convenient solution for me.
A few years ago, I put back in action my Amigas (they where sleeping in my garage), I even wrote a blog about it (in french). But I had a flood at home and my Amigas retired again. I have two working 600s, one 1200 who needs a recap, a 500 who needs a new membrane, and a completely dead but well equipped 4000. I don't have the budget and motivation to take care of these machines right now.
When I was a teenager, my only source of information was books and magazines. Years later, Internet gave me access to documentation, tutorials, and source codes I could only dream of back then. And soon I learned enough to achieve an old teenage dream, code my own intro. Not impressive, but I was happy and a little proud 😊.
Initially I was coding using AsmPro on an expanded A600 (2MB + hard drive) and 1084S monitor, today I prefer the modern comfort and cross assemble/compile with vasm/vbcc (I made an installation script for linux/macos). The community is very active on forums, youtube, github, and it's not difficult to find information or help.