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I'm here thanks to the Commodore Amiga, that flat beige biscuit of a computer which celebrated its 30th birthday this week, and saw off the 8-bit computers as surely as an asteroid did for the dinosaurs. Admittedly, it was those 8-bit computers - specifically my beloved ZX Spectrum - which got me into gaming in the first place, but it was the Amiga that helped me transition that childhood passion into an adult career.At a time when the technical advances between hardware generations is harder and harder to perceive, it's easy to forget just how seismic the impact of the Amiga was. Certainly for those of us weaned on the single-digit colour palette and squawking buzzer sounds of the Speccy, the difference between the old and the new was as eye-popping as the transition from black and white to widescreen technicolour in The Wizard of Oz.
Here was a computer that could do sumptuously detailed and colourful graphics. It could produce music that sounded like real instruments. It had games that were in solid polygon 3D and, unlike pioneers such as Driller, these games were smooth and fast. Well, fast for the time, at least.
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