TL;DR: My old Amiga, was trapped in a corrupt 7z archive for 30 years. A single shifted byte was the culprit, and an AI model finally found it. The Amiga (and the BBS it held) is now running again on a Raspberry Pi 400, with rebuilt scripts and brand new ANSI art. You can dial in below.

Back in the 90s in London, I ran an Amiga BBS called Slimelite, using a number of different BBS packages. I started with an NComm script I wrote myself (about as basic as you can get), then moved on to MAXsBBS Pro, and finally became an alpha tester for Zeus Pro BBS software.

In 1996 I mothballed the BBS and saved my drives to a 7z file so I could take it with me when I emigrated to Italy.

Unfortunately, years later I found out that the archive had become corrupted, and I was never able to retrieve the files from it. I was devastated, as it held all my years of Music-X compositions and my entire Zeus BBS. For many years the file just sat on my PC, with the occasional failed attempt to fix it.

Roll on to 2026. I’m now building websites for a living, AI has become a thing, and I’d been using it for the odd task. It occurred to me that maybe AI could recover my lost files from the 7z. Worth a shot, right?

Two days and many attempts later (I was literally pleading with it to try again and again), Claude gave up. I figured that was it and everything was gone forever.

After another night’s sleep, I decided to give it one last go. I remembered you could switch Claude to a more capable model for complex tasks, so I tried that. Ten minutes later it had found and fixed the 7z. Every file was available and nothing was corrupt. A single byte shift had mangled the whole archive and touched nothing else.

I was ecstatic. It was the best day I’d had in quite some time, birth-of-a-child levels of joy.

I spent the next days and weeks exploring my old Amiga files. I got everything running in WinUAE and was soon back messing with my old Music-X songs. I fed the MIDI out to a Kawai K1 II soft synth in FL Studio (the same synth I used back in the 90s), and hearing all those familiar sounds again made the nostalgia come flooding back.

Next I turned to my old Zeus BBS setup. I had an older Raspberry Pi 400 lying around, so I thought I’d set up the Amiberry emulator and see if I could get the BBS back online via Telnet over the Interwebs. It took a bit of work, but I got it all running.

Then I asked myself: should I just put it up exactly as it was, with my crappy 90s ANSI and rather unfriendly navigation? Nah! I’m a web designer now, so my aesthetics brain kicked in and I really wanted to make it better.

With Claude’s help, I spent a few days rebuilding the scripts almost from the ground up, making them far more user friendly and much more visually appealing, and adding features I could never have imagined back in the 90s. I even created a brand new Windows-based ANSI graphics editor, because I couldn’t find anything that did the job the way I wanted, and I needed it to create the new visuals.

Today I put the revamped BBS online, to the applause of absolutely no one (not many people use BBSes these days). But that didn’t matter. It was all for me, for my own joy and nostalgia at creating something, and if the occasional person happens upon it and enjoys reliving the old days, then it has done everything I wanted. All the old users, files (mainly Amiga related) and messages are still there to browse, download and read.

If you fancy a look, you can connect with any Telnet or SSH client that supports ANSI:

Host: slimelite.mycloudnas.com
Telnet port: 6023
SSH port: 6022 (read only)
SSH login: bbs / bbs

Don’t have a client? Try this web-based Telnet client: https://youfiles.herokuapp.com/telnetclient/
Or grab something like SyncTERM for your PC if you want the full-fat experience.

If you do drop by, leave me a message on the board. I’d love to see Slimelite get a few new callers after all these years!

Just posting this here if some Amiga Gloom Fans are around... 😄

Compatible with Gloom (Classic), Gloom Deluxe, Gloom 3 and Zombie Massacre - AGA/ECS/P96.

Version 3.0 Preview for Amiga 68k (PiStorm highly recommended)

• Native P96 resolutions: 640×480, 640×512 (5:4) and 854×480 (widescreen)
• Soft fade-out for wall, monster and weapon reflections
• Reflections for grates, windows and see-through doors
• Fourth violence mode: WIMPY
• Wall blood stains in NASTY mode
• Distance-scaled flying blood and gap-free blood pools
• CONTINUE GAME with an automatic save at every level start (ONE PLAYER only)
• Level statistics on the intermission screen (kills and hit rate)
• Muzzle flash lighting (menu option and F5)
• New F-key layout (F5 to F9)
• Lighter highlight bar instead of blinking in all menus
• Menu flicker fixed on AGA, ECS and P96
• P96 font fix

Free Version 2.4.0 available on GitHub and more features and fixes in the soon to be released Version 3.0 on Itch.io.

It looks really familiar.

Note, no mouse is plugged into the mouse port.

My first ever reddit!

Im 45, I have an old mate coming over from the UK to stay with us in sydney at christmas. We were swos/sensi obsessed. How likely does anyone think it is i could track an old amiga and swos down in australia? He would be astounded!

I imagine I have zero chance, was hard enough finding zipsticks at uni in England 1999!

But, you never know...

My retrospective video review of all the Rambo games released. I grew up with with the early home computer and the Sega console versions. Also loved the arcades games too. However, not too fond of the later and more recent games. Most are pish. Let me know your favourite and I hope you watch and like my video too. It certainly took me flipping ages to make.

This time LC Games releases an awesome arcade conversion called Tutankham to all Amigas, available for free or whatever you want to pay over at itch. LC Games is famous for his arcade conversions. I'm not affiliated with him in any way, just a big fan of his work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDxUGBOM1ss

Having a few issues with my Amiga 1200 - when loading from floppy it clicks twice then goes back to kickstart. Using gotek external df1 in boot menu- I’m using flashfloppy 3.41 and loads but I get an error in flashfloppy “lba change test failed”. I’ve just had it recapped, but i have notice that the ide pins have been damaged before and there must have been leakage. I’ve not seen many solutions online and spent a bit of time trying different scenarios, different floppies and usbs. Any guidance most welcome and my next steps will be to get a technician to diagnose or possibly new power supply.

Hey guys just found out there is an amiga Atlanta community, if you’re in Atlanta Georgia or the south you guys should check it out

Stay tuned for articles about my new acquisition for my Amiga 1200.

Professional Studio Quality Sound in a PCMCIA form factor.

My retrospective game review of all the versions of DARKMAN from Ocean Software. Anybody else remember playing these games? Did you think that the levels were repetitive, difficult, bland with wonky controls? Interested in your thoughts and memories to see if was close to the general consensus. 😉

Hi everyone,

My first computer was an Amiga 500 Plus back in the early ’90s. I was pretty obsessed with it. It’s where I learned to code in AMOS, figured out all sorts of things by trial and error, and spent a lot of time playing games.

Years later, I started looking into what was happening around the Amiga and kept going down rabbit holes. New hardware, FPGA projects, operating systems, emulators… I honestly hadn’t realized how much people were still making.

I wanted somewhere I could browse all this stuff and get a sense of how it connects, so I made Amiga Constellation: amiga.kexperiments.com

It started out of curiosity, but also a lot of affection for the machine and respect for the people who’ve kept things going.

There are over 300 entries so far, covering hardware, software, emulation, preservation, and more. You can search and filter the catalogue, wander around a map of the connections between projects, or follow a few guided routes. There’s also a Workbench-inspired theme, because I couldn’t resist 🙂

I’ll definitely have missed things or got some details wrong. If you spot anything, the site has a suggestions section for missing projects, corrections, pictures, and so on. You don’t need an account, and you can also give other people’s suggestions a +1. I’ll work through them and update the catalogue.

I’d love to hear what you think here too—anything from “you’ve forgotten this project” to “this bit is awkward to use” is welcome.

And if you’re one of the people making or preserving any of this stuff: thank you. Finding your work has been a lovely excuse to get back into the Amiga.

Edit: Never mind, I'm an idiot.

And more to the point, why is it doing it on frames when the code isn't called?

    If SColl(plr\sprchan, 2) AND hitcool=0
      plr\score=plr\score+1
      sweet\ypos=Int(Rnd * 190)
      sweet\xpos=Int(Rnd * 200)+100
      hitcool=5
      ; update score bitmap
      Use BitMap pts
      Cls
      BitMapOutput pts
      Locate 0,0
      Print plr\score
      GetaShape pts, 0,0,24,10
      Use BitMap HUD
      Boxf 100,3, 125,13, 3
      Blit pts, 100, 5
      GetaShape HUD, 0,0, 320,16
      Sound trill, 8, 64
    End If

The Print statement prints the score to both the pts bitmap (where it is supposed to) and to the corner of HUD bitmap(where it isn't). It's definitley that line because if you comment it out, both disappear. (the witch is the player sprite)

It appears not to do it every frame, as the unwanted number in the corner of the HUD flickers, and I managed to capture a screenshot without it.

My computer: 2012 Mac Mini/osx10.14/FSUAE

Amiga setup: Amiga 600/2meg chip, 2 meg fast. The CPU is set to 68040, because the blitz compiler crashes if you set it to anything else.

[On a related note, why are the colours mangled on the second ghost? It's supposed to be blue.]

Has anyone any ideas?

Sun out, retro rigs on! We caught up with the Amiga faithful at the October 2026 Kickstart gathering in Ottershaw, where Michael dropped jaws with two new versions of the Gotek Touch Interface (GTI)—taking touch-screen disk loading to a whole new level.

We also dived into tabletop gaming with Sam Byford and tackled a touching community mission: building a network to preserve and re-home retro computers when their owners pass on. Wrapping up, I dropped the details on Retronauts Assemble, our big community meet happening in Surbiton on Saturday, October 31st—grab your tickets, and we’ll see you there!

https://djmike.itch.io/addams-family-amiga-backgrounds-edition

Back in 1992, Ocean released their video game tie-in The Addams Family across multiple platforms, including the Amiga. But, alas, when the Amiga version was compared to its 16-bit brethren, one thing was noticeably missing — the backgrounds! Well, no more!

Eenhanced edition of The Addams Family for OCS and AGA Amigas, now with restored backgrounds!

May i ask, if:

You'll be able to connect CD-ROM drive? Will compilation discs like Assassins or Aminet work?

Will i be able to play games downloaded from Aminet after i copy them on SD card?