Amiga Paradise did not begin as a website. It began as a personal need: preserving and listening to Amiga music easily, long before streaming, MP3 players, or modern websites made that simple.
It all began during the summer of 1997. At the time, I was simply playing games on my Amiga, but one thing stood out more than anything else: the music.
The Amiga had something special. Its soundtracks were unique, emotional, and often more memorable than the games themselves. I wanted to keep them.
So I did the simplest thing I could think of: I started recording them onto audio cassettes.
Using the Amiga's stereo audio output and a home cassette recorder, I began building my first personal collection. It did not take long before I had filled around ten 60-minute tapes with Amiga music.
It was not practical. It was not perfect. But it was the real beginning of the project.
Technology moved quickly, and by the end of 1997, we had a CD burner on our family PC.
I connected my cassette player to the computer's audio input and recorded everything into WAV files. Then I manually split the recordings into separate tracks and burned them as audio CDs.
It took a lot of time, and honestly, it was not a very satisfying process. Still, I suddenly had more than 10 hours of Amiga music to listen to in my room, and that already felt amazing.
Around 1998, everything changed. On a cover CD from a video game magazine, I discovered a small program called Winamp. It could play MP3 files.
That was a revelation. MP3 files were much smaller than WAV files, which meant I could store much more music on a single CD. I converted my audio CDs into MP3 format and started rebuilding the collection as data CDs instead of standard audio CDs.
I even got a CD player capable of reading MP3 files so I could listen to them more easily.
Later that same year, I found a CD containing many .mod files, and a large part of them were Amiga music files. I was amazed to discover that I could play them directly on my PC using software such as ModPlug.
Some files, however, refused to play. These were the famous "exotic" Amiga audio formats.
We had just gotten internet access at home, and internet time was expensive back then, billed by the minute. I spent many hours, spread over several days, searching for a player capable of reading those formats.
Eventually, I found one. If I remember correctly, it was already DeliPlayer. That changed everything.
Once I could finally read those files properly, I established my own recording method: play the music in full, allow one loop, then apply a fade-out.
At first the fade lasted 10 seconds. Later, I increased it to 15 seconds. That became my standard.
I then began recording complete soundtracks seriously. The collection grew very quickly, and by 1999, I already had more than 1000 MP3 files.
Around that time, I also built my very first website, hosted on a free platform called iFrance. It was a very small space, around 50MB, with no PHP or database support.
The site was entirely made of static HTML pages, one page per game, with all information written manually: track listings, images, and audio links.
I quickly experimented with streaming using RealMediaPlayer by converting my recordings into .ra files. This allowed visitors to listen to the music online, even on slow 56k connections, although the quality was heavily compressed.
It was very basic, and not particularly practical, but it worked. At the time, it already felt like a big step: sharing Amiga music over the internet.
I shared the site with a few friends through ICQ and AIM, and even though the audience was small, the feedback was positive.
When I later entered working life, the site was eventually abandoned and left online as-is until it disappeared.
After that, life became busier. Work and everyday responsibilities took over, and the project slowly came to a stop through lack of time.
For a while, the collection simply remained a very personal thing.
Around 2010, something almost miraculous happened: despite several computers, hard drives, and moves, the MP3 collection had survived.
That gave me the motivation to start recording again, quietly, in my own corner, with no real plan to share it.
At some point, I mentioned the collection to someone online — I believe it was on IRC, though I am no longer completely sure.
That person told me it would be great if I could share my work.
To be honest, I was surprised. I did not think anyone would care. Listening almost exclusively to Amiga music all day felt like a very niche obsession. Still, I kept the idea in the back of my mind.
I first looked for free solutions, but very few relevant options existed at the time.
I eventually created a very small playlist hosted on a free 50MB space, using a Flash player. There was almost no text, just a title and the music.
That was when I came up with the name Amiga Paradise, without much thought and without even checking whether the name already existed somewhere else.
From time to time, I changed the music files manually, but it was painful to maintain and far from representative of the real size of the collection.
At that point, I asked myself a simple question: Would I be able to build a website to share the entire collection?
I no longer had the old HTML pages from my teenage years, so I started again from scratch. I first designed static HTML skeletons for the pages I wanted: a homepage, content pages, and even a small internal search engine.
Then reality hit me: creating hundreds of pages manually would take forever.
That is when I discovered that PHP and a database could automate the whole process. Since I did not have much money, I chose an affordable shared hosting plan at OVH.
In early 2011, the first real version of Amiga Paradise went online.
It was still very basic, very imperfect, and very DIY. It was also entirely in French at first.
Later, the site was translated into English to make it more accessible internationally.
Security was far from perfect, and the first dynamic versions were fragile and improvised, but they worked — and at the time, that already felt like a major achievement.
From 1997 until today, one thing has never changed:
The goal was never simply to build a website.
The goal was to preserve, organize, and share Amiga music in a way that felt accessible, enjoyable, and complete.
What started with audio cassettes has become a much larger project:
Amiga Paradise is still growing, still evolving, and still driven by the exact same passion that started everything back in the summer of 1997.