Gideon 'RetroGiddy' Tebbutt YouTube: @RetroGiddy Top 3 Games 1. Flashback 2. The Secret of Monkey Island II 3. Banshee

Amiga History

I became an Amiga nut fairly late on in the system’s life. In Christmas 1993 I got the Amiga 1200 Desktop Dynamite pack and never looked back. I love that machine and still have it now. Whilst my friends were playing Sonic or Mario Kart, I was creating pictures and animations in Dpaint, rendering in Imagine and using Octamed to create tunes. If I did want to do some gaming, I had a floppy disk box full of the latest releases - all perfectly legal copies of course. Life with an Amiga was good. And 31 years, a wife, two kids, mortgage and a full head of hair later – it still is!

What Does The Hobby Mean To Me?

In my office I have a PS5, a fairly pokey PC and pretty much all the consoles released over the last 3 decades. What do I spend most of my spare time doing? Tinkering on the Amiga of course. I’m still making those Dpaint pictures, still sampling into Octamed and still doing all the things that I used to love doing all those years ago. Only now – the scene has never been more alive. I’ve got the Amiga set up of my dreams and it seems new hardware and software is constantly being released by an amazing community. Not only that, but with the user groups such as NAG I’ve made some great friends along the way. All thanks to the Amiga – it really does make it possible.

Projects

As mentioned, DPaint and Octamed have always been my creative tools of choice. Both allow you to create some pretty impressive results on a standard unexpanded Amiga. Some of my recent proudest Amiga achievements include winning a Polish pixel art competition, presenting a beginners guide to Octamed at one of the Norwich Amiga Group meets and creating a 1980s horror themed AGA demo called Video Nasty. My current projects include tinkering with the CDXL format and SCALA so we can have some official CD32 NAG video releases and making a … wait for it…. a synthwave style album created entirely on Octamed using samples and themes from 80s and 90s movies and kids tv shows.

My Amiga Systems

• A CD32 with a TF328
• A 1200 running a Pistorm32
• A 1200 my original machine – no expansions. Just as it was.
• An Amiga mini