About

Welcome to Amitopia Amiga Magazine. This is a website magazine about the Amiga computer and its community. The Amiga magazine has been a part of Michal Bergseth’s life since 1998. Then in 2009, it became part of the Distrita websites project which is still going on today. It is the mission of this Amiga magazine to deliver quality Amiga News, Amiga Interviews, Amiga Reviews, and Amiga Moments to you. Lots of other media that don’t know about the Amiga. They write things that are bogus in many chases and Amitopia’s mission is to correct all information that makes the Amiga platform look bad.

Amitopia is here for Everyone reading our words and sentences. You are here to get the right info about the future of Amiga computing and that it is brighter than ever because of the loyal and strong Amiga community. It is time for the Amiga to say hello to the world and Amitopia is here to make it clear to everyone that Amiga is a Survivor!

Amiga, Amitopia, MorphOS and Michal Bergseth

Born in Swinoujscie, Poland on the 12th of August 1979. I grew up with my grandparents because of the situation in Poland. In January 1985, I moved with my mum to Oslo, Norway where I began my young life here. Norway was so much different than Poland in the ’80s. It was like night and day difference. I came to the 80’s version of Norway where Sky Channel was humongous popular. I watched DJ Kat Show and Fun Factory a lot I remember. The national TV channel NRK (BBC in Norway) had a much worse program schedule, but I do remember them. Then in autumn 1988, my parents decided to buy my very first Amiga which was an Amiga 500. They asked me if I wanted to get a Commodore 64 or Amiga 500 and without knowing much. I chose Amiga 500 and since my first eye on the very first Amiga game that I played (Winter Games from 1987). I became the Amiga-interested person that I am today.

Big retailers in Norway had huge success with selling Amiga 1200

In 1993, I sold my Amiga 500 because of all the Amiga 1200 advertisements everywhere. I also tried the computer at various electronic malls such as Spaceworld. It was an amazing time. I decided to save all of my weekly money, birthday and Christmas presents. I tested various PCs and Macs in the 1993-1994 period but none of the machines triggered any love at all for me. AmigaOS 3.0 seemed so futuristic and when I finally got my Amiga 1200 with 260MB Hard Drive and a Microvitec CRT monitor in August 1994 for just 11500 NOK (1096.19 Euro), the Amiga era was in a state that I couldn’t believe. Commodore did so much for the Amiga in Norway. But as I got to use AmigaOS 3.0 and later AmigaOS 3.1. I knew that this operating system was more than the names. It was way ahead of anything at the time. Until Windows 2000. AmigaOS 3.1 kept on pushing Classic Amiga forward then as it is doing now. Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME were nothing for me. AmigaOS 3.1 with Dopus Magellan was in my view the king of setup.

Yes, I know AmigaOS 3.1 ain’t perfect. But there is no operating system that is in my view. However, the strengths of AmigaOS such as its multitasking, the change of looks, hotkeys, switching between screens, and the versatile ways of making AmigaOS look the way you want made AmigaOS feel free compared to the other mainstream operating systems on the market. It then didn’t matter to get System Failures because of the need for memory protection. Because in just seconds, you booted and you were back again when Windows 95 got a blue screen. It took several minutes to use it again. I felt way more comfortable using AmigaOS in the longer term. Learned to save often and to change the filesystem on my Amiga Hard Drive partitions to SFS or PFS3. Moving to them from FFS was a caramba good feeling to get. With SFS installed. I never looked back to the PC or Mac world before Windows 2000 came. Later I got my first PowerBook with MacOSX as my first Mac and now I sit with several Amiga computers, MorphOS compatible Macs, M1 Mac, and an ASUS laptop PC.

I didn’t mention MorphOS a lot here. But it made me burn for the Nextgen Amiga platform after visiting AmiGBG. Ambient (Workbench on MorphOS) took me by storm. Got several features from Dopus Magellan 5.82 and running on much faster hardware than Classic Amiga. I was waiting for months for AmigaOS 4 to come, but it didn’t. So, MorphOS became my big thing. I got a reputation in Sweden for being paid by the MorphOS Team to spread MorphOS propaganda. I never had any issues with the AmigaOS 4 (the red side of the Amigawars), but I felt that it never came when AmigaOS 4 finally came out. It was expensive as hell. I mean, MorphOS invited me to the Nextgen Amiga. MorphOS could have become AmigaOS 4 back in the day, but there were some interesting forces at Hyperion that didn’t make that happen. So, today I run the latest MorphOS and AmigaOS 3.2 side by side.

Amitopia Amiga Magazine Since 1998

During my first Amiga period 1988-1993, I started to experiment with Deluxe Paint, Protracker, and SCALA on my Amiga 500 after getting a bit bored playing games all the time. I found out that Amiga is a computer and not a console. I did the magic 512KB RAM upgrade to be able to run Lotus III and to be able to create longer animation sequences in Deluxe Paint III. I started to read Amiga magazines and go to various electronic malls selling only Amiga computers. There were many in Oslo, Norway in 1993. Library chain Libris, Spaceworld, Elkjøp, and various stores everywhere sold Amiga computer packs with hard drives. Amiga 500+, Amiga 600, and Amiga 1200 were huge hits selling computers in Norway. You could walk into stores testing Amiga computers everywhere. I loved it.

During my year 1993-1994 without any Amiga at home, I saw how my interest in Amiga was torn down because of the fall of Commodore in June 1994. Friends I had moved over to PC as if Amiga without an owner was going to perish. But I didn’t want that to happen. I saw how amazing AmigaOS 3.0 was compared to anything else on the market. So, when I got my Amiga 1200 in August 1994 I knew in my heart that Amiga was the computer that I wanted to fight for. From the moment I turned on my new Amiga 1200 for the very first time. I installed AmigaOS 3.0 for the first time and booted! It was like a revelation to me. I do not kid this feeling at all!… AmigaOS 3.0 booted in 2-3 seconds for the very first time from my new 260MB HD. Nothing could come near my Amiga 1200 in terms of speed in 1994! Whatever graphics card that any PC had at that time couldn’t coup with the speed of AmigaOS then as even now in 2021. AGA didn’t have the same screenmodes with HighRes graphics, but AmigaOS 3.0 turned Amiga into a beast at that time.

Then in 1995, I purchased my very first Blizzard 1230 68030 50MHz accelerator. My Amiga 1200 out of sudden had 32MB RAM and more speed which was a lot at that time. I could play Gloom Deluxe, and Xtreme Racing, and work faster in Final Writer, Deluxe Paint, and later Photogenics. I continued reading Amiga magazines from the United Kingdom and Sweden as the fall of Amiga there wasn’t as dramatic as in Norway. It kept my interest going.

Also, Breathless came as a valid Doom competitor on the Amiga. I knew Amiga had so much! My Amiga 1200 went online in 1995 with my very first modem and I started visiting various Amiga sites such as Amiga Web Directory and Aminet which is still going strong today. I saw tons of PC users from Norway. Mainly the PC users here spread all sorts of various claims about the Amiga that were beaten time by time because of the amazing people in our Amiga community. Claims that Amiga can’t run Doom and Quake. Amiga cant do MP3s or video. All of these claims were crushed and I saw what the Amiga demoscene did. They pushed the Amiga together with all 3rd party developers, and this led me to start wanting to do an Amiga magazine.

First I made AmigaPosten which many Norwegians didn’t like because of the name. This happened in 1996. The first magazine was made in Deluxe Paint before I moved to Final Writer and in the end, I used PageStream. Then in 1998, the very first issue of the Norwegian version of Amitopia got out. There were tons of internal issues with the magazine because of my competitor at that time. Everyone in Norway knows who I am referring to. It turned really badly for me but the magazine peaked at 430 unique subscribers. I did it all by myself. Writing the magazine and publishing. It was a learning experience for sure. In 2008, I gave up fully with the Norwegian version of Amitopia. I had already started with Amitopia TV back in 2006 and so I made more and more clips for the net in English.

In 2009, Amitopia changed from Norwegian to English completely as Distrita was launched by Trond Grindvold and me. Amiga content of the online magazine was made from Amitopia, so I never gave up on the name. Then in October 2016, the Amitopia site that you read now finally got launched. Amedia Computer France has been the main supporter of the site since 2018. There have been several ones supporting us from time to time and without all of you. Amitopia wouldn’t have grown as much as it has been doing. You’re all worthy readers to me. Because Amiga is my passion and it is my passion to share info about it.

Thanks for Reading Amitopia!

Amitopia Amiga Magazine Timeline

Weekly stats for Amitopia between 23rd of March and 27th of March

In 1998, Amitopia was formed as a paper magazine about Amiga in Norwegian that lasted until 2008
At its peak, the paper magazine had over 430 subscribers
In 2003 the last copy of the paper version of Amitopia was manufactured and everything went on-line
In 2006 www.amitopia.no was made but taken without any reason
In 2006, Amitopia TV started up and gave the world the very first Amiga channel on-line on YouTube and Vimeo
In 2009, Amitopia became part of www.distrita.com website
In 2016, Amitopia finally got www.amitopia.com

Since the 17th of October 2016, Amitopia has finally on its own website with the aim of giving you Amiga content both online and through streaming content. The goal of the magazine is to get the world to know about Amiga.