Geez, how did I miss this thread?!!! My buddies and I all had C64s in high school. I started college in the fall of 1985 and one of my friends said "Commodore has a new computer coming out. It's called an Amiga." After dropping out of college I joined the military. I finished all my training and I was in Phoenix waiting for orders. I had saved up my paychecks, enough to buy an Amiga 1000. That's late 1986 I think. I brought it home while on leave and my friend went nuts...we spent several late nights gaming, although I only could afford a few games (along with a few I got for free): Mindwalker, Moebius, Marble Madness, Mean 18, Defender of the Crown, Little Computer People, and The Bard's Tale. I took the system with me when I was sent to Korea for a year and it was a big hit with my fellow airmen. When I returned to the states, I picked up F-18 and it was hugely popular on my airbase.

Later I sold the A1000 to buy an A500 as I was having problems with the A1000. I wish I could have kept it, but I wasn't making a lot of money back then and needed the money to "upgrade" and put towards games. I went on to waste a lot of time with Indy 500, Captain Blood, Faery Tale Adventure, Battle Chess, The Chaos Engine, The Three Stooges, Shufflepuck Cafe, Ultima 5, and at least one pinball game (but I don't recall which one). Eventually it started collecting dust when Commodore went bankrupt and I got into PC games.

I still have the A500 upstairs in my game room, although it's not currently hooked up. I'll have to go through my games and see what I still have...

Yeah, I remember all the crazy copy protection attempts..."what is the fifth word on page 12 paragraph 2 line 4 of the manual", or the crazy wheels that made you line up the cutouts...then there were the hardware dongles, and snarfed boot sectors to try to prevent copying. There was always some enterprising person to develop a way to crack the copy protection. I tried to purchase most of my games in order to help support the software market, and I think that you are right in saying that software companies struggled with it. I think it stifled development and caused some games to be ported from DOS rather than re-written to take advantage of Amiga's superior architecture.

And you aren't wrong. I had several guru meditation issues with my A1000. I don't think it was expandable past 512k, didn't have a hard drive, and had trouble running Kickstart/Workbench 1.3...it was an easy choice to ditch it at the time but now I'm a bit nostalgic for it.

Man, I forgot about those rental places! And yeah, it would have been better for companies if people bought the software. OTOH, if they hadn't charged $40 a game (which was a lot of money back then) people would have been able to afford it. Software companies were basically shooting themselves in the foot with their high prices.