I have the news you've all been waiting for: the Amiga is home from New Zealand! The trip took a hair under three weeks and she traveled about 18,000 miles.

Most amazingly, she made it home in just four days! I guess I won the customs lottery on the return trip.

I can't say enough about the guy who fixed my Amiga. If for some reason you should ever need an Amiga repaired... he's the best game in town. The only game, probably, but he's also really, really good. And the repair cost less than the estimate... when has that EVER happened?

Why didn't you fix the broken memory holders? Because my fast RAM is stored on the Warp Engine card... so the SIMMs on the motherboard are useless to me. It didn't seem worth the $100 to replace them for the potential to add 16 megs of RAM (when I'm already at 130, far above what Wing Commander would ever want.)

So my dad and I (mostly my dad, working eyes and so on) put the Amiga back together step by step. We didn't EXACTLY have instructions so there was some fuzzy-memory-guesswork but everything fit together. After a little trouble booting (the CPU card wasn't seated properly) everything started up. And we had...

SOUND! Okay, you can't technically hear that photo but... it's pretty neat. Wing Commander Amiga music through my 5.1 system was pretty darned cool. I can't wait to play through the game on the Amiga.

I would imagine that this was an extremely early preview long before the game was playable. Ultimately, the decision was made to drop to 16 colours so that it would run on A500′s whereas this demo makes use of a larger palette and looks all the better for it.