It was 20 years ago, I still remember it like it was just yesterday. Like all bad (so to speak) things, remembering them is all to easy and all to vivid.
Manchester 1990 - a 13 year-old me is begging my mum for a new computer. I begged and pleaded and grovelled and wrote letters and left notes and everything I could think of, to buy what I thought was THE best computer ever at that time: A ZX Spectrum +2. 128kb RAM! built-in datacoder (cassette player)! The possibilities were endless. If I got it, I'd be the talk of school once we inevitably went back to Baghdad.
The begging eventually worked - and I went to the local Tandy (now called Carphone Warehouse or RadioShack depending on which side of the pond you live) and I was smiling all the way back, with me was my amazing ZX Spectrum +2A, complete with light-gun and loads of amazing games!
Oh how I enjoyed it! I hooked it up to the teeny TV we had in the flat and played and played and played! It was just superb.
Unbeknown to me at that time, my brother's friend was in London at the same time. They had spoken once or twice over the phone, and that friend was talking about the computer he had bought. He mentioned to my brother that we really should get one. I only found this out AFTER we had gone back to Baghdad. To say I almost wanted to kill my brother there and then was an understatement.
Fast-forward to 1991 - sometime after the first Gulf War. We were in Baghdad, a city mostly in chaos trying desperately to rebuild itself, but also one that was still high on the spoils of invading Kuwait. I started my 2nd year of intermediate school (college if you wish), and just couldn't wait to show my new Spectrum off, especially to all those friends that had a 48k last summer, just like me.
I was still making new friends early in the year (in their infinite wisdom, the school decided to shake the groups up after just one year) when a good-but-bad-influence friend suggested it would be a good idea to bunk school and go to "Hassan's" to play games.
Brief interlude:
Hassan was an Egyptian guy that owned a shop near our school where you went and played video games. The shop had a name, but we all called it "Hassan's". It wasn't an arcade as such, because a\ arcades were banned in Baghdad (cos they led to gambling allegedly) and b\ it didn't have coin-ops, but actual computers and consoles to play on. You paid the man a price and you got your go at say a football match, or a round of some shoot 'em up etc. If you were a good player and lasted long, Hassan would come threatening to reset the machine unless you paid up.
It was also somewhere to smoke freely. In other words, for a computer geek who also smoked during his teenage years, Hassan's was an institution, a Mecca, a way of life.
So, off we went to Hassan's. I walked in to the smoky room and also into a scene from my dreams - loads of kids playing games, shouting at the screens and at each other, swearing, and most importantly those amazing sounds. It was the sounds that hit me first - these were no ordinary bleeps and bloops, these were fully-fledged and meaty sounds. Amazing music, awesome voice effects, and rumbling bases.
By then, I could tell something wasn't right. What were these machines they were playing on? Some fancy console stolen from Kuwait, one which would have a few games and then disappear cos it's too expensive to maintain? That's what I thought initially.
I saw the first TV and stood to watch. I was transfixed by a scene I could never forget: two boys were playing a coop game. Each player controlled a dude who was just bad ass - jumping, shooting, and amazingly even FLAME THROWING (complete with 2D flame physics and effects!) through some amazing levels. All to the beat of some phenomenal music. The graphics weren't the usual 8 colours a Spectrum could do - these were graphics with MILLIONS of colours, pixels you couldn't see, and backgrounds that scrolled, not flipped.
I literally died a little that day. I watched with awe and an ever-dropping jaw that game, and then I dared to look at the computer below. What greeted me was the most sexy, beautiful, enigmatic, out-of-reach computer I had ever seen: The Commodore Amiga 500.
I traced every line of the machine, poured over every little detail, and took as many mental pictures as I could of this thing from the future. I watched as disks went in and out of the side, as the iconic hand-holding-a-disk would briefly flash before the game's loading screen came on, and as how the game loaded within a minute, as compared to after 3 or 4.
I also watched Battle Squadron being played that day. A space shoot 'em up with vertical scrolling and 2 player coop, and one of THE BEST SOUNDTRACKS you will ever hear.
I watched. I cried inside. And at home, I cried outside. A lot.
You see, my beloved Spectrum +2 was nothing compared to the Amiga. With its 8 colours, colour-bleeding, tinny bleeps, and stupid built-in datacorder, it was nothing but a huge disappointment. Still, I could show it off at school to my old 48k friends right?
Wrong.
All except a very few (who had actually moved on from playing games anyway) had bought an Amiga that summer, the same summer we were in Manchester, THE SAME SUMMER MY BROTHER WAS TOLD BY HIS FRIEND TO BUY AN AMIGA. Yup, his friend had bought one and told my brother we should. Except my brother kept that little fact to himself.
So, my friends were telling me how awesome their new computer is - how it had 4096 colours, how it had 4-channel sound, how it could read double-density floppies; and how, most importantly, it had the most amazing games ever.
By then, a jealousy of Othello-proportions had built inside me. I spent every waking minute obsessing over the Amiga. I would doodle the Commodore logo everywhere; beg, steal, or borrow scraps of Amiga magazines to read and read and read again and again. Trouble was, all the magazines I saw were UK publications: Amiga Format, Commodore User, Amiga Power, ACE (Advanced Computer Entertainment) and I would see what I missed out of in Manchester - all those great £499 deals, the Flight of Fantasy Amiga pack, the Batman Amiga pack and so on.
Of course, I also become obsessed with going to Hassan's A LOT. During the initial chaotic years after the war, we were kind of excused if we couldn't make the first lesson at school (cos of lack of petrol in that oil-rich land). I could walk to school (would take about 45 minutes) but the teachers didn't need to know that. Instead, I'd walk to Hassan's, help him open the shop (literally) and play most of the morning. We were so frequently there that Hassan reserved an Amiga for us. If we showed up that would be our machine that morning, and sometimes for the whole day. How we graduated is still beyond me.
And that's more or less how I spent practically all my teenage years. I was forever in the shadow of that C= logo, and my Amiga-owning friends. Of course I also begged and pleaded and cried to my mum that I really needed one - but deep inside I knew that would never happen. The period wasn't an easy one for her (my dad was in prison for exactly those years 1990-1995) so there was never gonna be any spare cash to throw around to buy me that stupid computer. And I already had a Spectrum and didn't I beg for that and claimed it was the best thing ever?
When I finally managed to get a new computer, it wasn't an Amiga. It was an Atari 520 STFM. Now, had that been in the UK it would have been fine - more than fine cos by then (1992) the Atari ST was more popular than the Amiga here. Not as good, but as popular. Many games, demos etc.
In Baghdad however, it was different. The ST had been imported by a company who's owner wasn't really interested. It wasn't advertised, and it didn't take on. I had a handful of games, all of which were a\ old b\ were much better on the Amiga and c\ crap mostly. This definitely was no Amiga.
I tried to show it off to my Amiga friends. I would quote how it was a musician's dream machine (to date some musicians STILL use an Atari ST, cos if its MIDI capabilities). Of course, this was nonsense to me and my friends - none of us were musicians. They had the games, I had MIDI.
Looking back, I loved my Atari ST then. Even though I thought I hated it, it was still my first "real" computer, one I spent many hours on playing games I mostly convinced myself were better. While it was miles better than the Spectrum, the fact that it wasn't an Amiga and had very few games meant that its image was always going to be tarnished.
Slowly, the tide started to change. In 1992 also, a certain German-Iraqi man who called himself Nile Warp came back to Iraq to live for a while. Nile happened to be friends with another guy called AveHave (pronounced aa-ve-haa-ve). AveHave was very large in the PC Scene back then, being a founder and site-op of many BBS groups and boards.
So, Nile came to Baghdad with 1.2 GIGABYTES of games - all on tape streamers. Nile was quickly introduced to two other guys, one called SnakeHead and the other called DMA48!!!
Together, they opened a computer office called Orbit Computer Company (or OCC) and the rest is history - the PC went from being a crappy bulky machine that played Prince, to a highly desirable games machine, with amazing 3D games like Doom, simulators like TFX, and even all those Amiga games like Turrican 2, Pinball Fantasies and the like.
It wasn't an instant transformation. The Amiga fought on till its dying breath (the ill-fated 1200) and the PC market never really took off before 1994 or so, mainly cos of the expensive components. Not many people could afford a PC that could run these newer games, and except for the elite few (OCC included), most of us started off with XT or simple 286 AT machines that could run perhaps one or two games properly.
OCC became the new "Hassan's".
The seed was sown, and people paid more attention to the PC as a games machine. Also, and perhaps most importantly, in the mid-nineties PC components started coming thick and fast, and very cheap from one important place: The United Arab Emirates. Jebel Ali area to be precise. Suddenly, a 486 with VESA gfx and a Super I/O became within reach.
By the time I left Baghdad (June 2000), the Amiga was well and truly dead, and the PC was king. But that still didn't change the first 5 years of the nineties, those years I spent longing for something I never got.
Until now that is.
You see, for the last 10 years I've been content with the amazing Amiga emulation scene. WinUAE and the great Amiga Forever packages are all good, and go from strength to strength. Except, you're not really using an Amiga.
So, a few weeks ago I decided to buy a real Amiga, and I went on eBay and bought an Amiga 600 + Joystick + internal Compact Flash IDE hard drive. Along with a MASSIVE 1mbyte RAM extension, and a HUGE 2mb Fast RAM card.
It turns out the Amiga hardware scene still hasn't really died. Companies are still making products for it, the CF/IDE HDD one of them. With that installed, games can be loaded within seconds from the Hard Drive directly. This turns the failure Amiga 600 into a very desirable retro games machine.
I've hooked the machine up in my spare room, with my old-fashioned CRT TV. I turn it on sometimes, load Battle Squadron, close the door, crank the volume up, and for a brief moment I imagine it to be 1990, and for me to be 13 years old in my room in Baghdad, playing this cutting edge game on this futuristic machine.
And sometimes when I press the reset keys (CTRL+AMIGA+AMIGA) I imagine Hassan, how he would come over to our machine, cigarette in his mouth, his fingers ready to press the reset button if we didn't pay up. All the time shouting at us (tikamil? tikamil?) - continue?
It's been 20 years, but I've finally gotten what I wanted: An Amiga all of my own.
