Space is always one your most valuable assets in your home. Sufficient space can allow you to build and manage large projects, showcase large collections, and provide you with a host of entertainment options. Anyone who has a home, be it an apartment, small house, or a large suburban palace, understands how quickly that space can become occupied. I am always fighting this problem. I need to periodically optimize my project space by selling, reorganizing, and discarding household items. My wife and I have a long standing agreement that most of our house is off limits for my own projects. That doesn’t mean we can’t use that space for projects that we both want to build, but it generally means my retro computing hardware, maker equipment, and other toys are confined to the basement. This suits me fine most of the time since our house is fairly spacious. In some cases, however, I need to think outside the box if I want to setup some equipment, or showcase a collection, when space is at a premium.

Enter my fledgling Amiga hobby. Despite owning an Amiga 1000 computer for several years, I have had little opportunity to use it. I have used emulation in place of the real thing, but in the last six months, I have really had an itch to use the real hardware. As is the case for many older computers, the complete machine takes up a lot of space, and that space is currently being used by other machines. Even though I have painstakingly eliminated several pieces of equipment over the years, through attrition or acts of God (freak electrical storms), I am still fighting for each additional foot of space I manage to free up. You can see lots of YouTubers who are single men, or married men with no kids, or simply folks with lots of free space, having numerous machines setup, fully kitted out, and ready to go at a moments notice. I am not in that situation. As a result, I decided to take a different tactic with my Amiga hardware. Since I now own an Amiga 1000, Amiga 500, and an Amiga FPGA device called a Minimig, I knew it was time to find a solution…

Categories: Reflections
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