The arrival in the post of some Amiga goodies!

This morning, Mr delivery man delivered not one item, but two items of Amiga goodies for me to unwrap and play around with.

The first item to pop through my letter box was the latest bi-monthly issue of Amiga Future which for those who do not know is now the only full-time published Amiga magazine published both in English and German.  It is also the oldest Amiga magazine in publication and has been going now for close to 20 years.

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Issue 127 of the English Edition was delivered with a CD which is packed with games and other items from the public domain for use on Classic Amigas, Amiga OS 4, Morph OS and Aros.

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The magazine which covers all flavours of Amiga machines, so there is something for everyone.  As you can see it is printed in full colour and although the magazine may be small at only 52 pages, it certainly packs more content than Amiga magazines used to back in the 90’s when a lot of the magazines like Amiga Format and CU Amiga were in excess of 200 pages, but mostly full of adverts.

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This month’s magazine covers Amikit X which is the latest build of the brilliant Amikit operating environment.  There is also a review of Hollywood 7, a number of games reviews and show reports.

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The non CD version costs EUR 6.50 or the version with the CD costs EUR 9.50 and is available at most Amiga online retailers such as Amigakit www.amigakit.co.uk, Amiga Store www.amigastore.eu or Vesalia www.vesalia.de.  It also is available to purchase direct from the publisher at www.amiga-future.de   I personally subscribe to the magazine and recommend that you do the same as a yearly subscription  of the CD version works out at EUR 69,90.

The other thing that arrived later this morning couldn’t fit through my letterbox, and was the arrival of a new keyboard to complement my X5000 machine.

Up until now, I had been using an Amigaone keyboard which was supplied with my Amigaone 500 machine. However for a few weeks now I have been wanting to look at changing  my keyboard for a number of reasons.  The first being that ever since the latest U-Boot update which the Amigaone 500 and Amigaone X5000 both use, there have been instances where certain keyboards suffered from a repeated key press issue and the second main reason for getting a new keyboard was that I quite fancied going back to using a mechanical keyboard having grown up using a Commodore 64, Amiga 600 and later Amiga 1200.  I am also a fan of FPS (First Person Shooter) games like Quake and Doom and having a good responsive keyboard is a must if playing these types of games.

I also have a tendency to bash and batter keys much to the annoyance of my fellow work colleagues, so I also wanted to get something that would last a little longer.

This keyboard that I have purchased is made by a Taiwanese firm called Ducky Zero and the model of my keyboard is the DK-2108SZ  which can  be purchased at Amazon for around £90.00.  As you can see from the picture below it also is backlight with some blue LEDs which make it look quite nice especially at night.

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If this keyboard looks a little familiar to some people, it is because it is similar to the type of keyboard a certain Mr.Loriano Pagni uses to furnish with his custom Amiga keys to create his fantastic replacement keyboards and which many a Next Generation Amiga user is currently using.

2First impressions are that it is heavy, compact and rectangular and I like the look and feel of the keyboard , I can certainly see this one lasting as the build quality of this particular keyboard is very good.

So far I have managed to get rid of those nasty Windows keys by replacing them with some Amiga stick on keys, however I did have to swap the position of the keys round to ensure that when I do CTRL+Left Amiga+Right Amiga, it does a soft reset.

I am still deciding if I should keep with these or get some custom Amiga keys for it.  There is a company www.wasdkeyboards.com which specialises in some fantastic custom keys, but I will see how it goes before making my mind up for sure.

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In terms of performance so far, well I have written tonight’s blog on the keyboard and am happy with the feedback from the keys. As someone who tends to look at the screen whilst they type instead of the keyboard there is a reassuring click from each of the keys.  So far I have not encountered any of the repeated keys problem plaguing my old keyboard.  As for the feel and texture and touch of the keys I would probably say this is about the closest I have got to the original Amiga A1200 keys which isn’t a bad thing.  Certainly I can now see why these keyboards are very popular amongst the Next Generation Amiga users and why they come highly recommended.

That wraps up today’s post, I guess its time to put this keyboard to the test on a quick game of Quake II before I head off to bed.

Until next time, enjoy your Amigas!