Hardcore Amiga users: opinions on getting an Amiga

[+wood_jl]

I'm really wanting an Amiga. I don't know enough to make an intelligent choice. Please help!

 

 

I ask here because I like this site and the users, and - this being an Atari site - you'll likely be more understanding of a someone who knows very little about Amiga.

 

I have narrowed my desires to A500 and A1200.

 

Needless to say, I want to play the games I missed out on in the 80s/90s.

 

Amiga 500: There are lots of motherboard revisions, different chipsets. Not easy to get hard drive going (without buying a bunch of crap or serious internal mods). If I went this route, would use the floppy emulator (most likely) since this machine will be a more primitive setup. 1MB necessary.

 

Amiga 1200: Comes with more RAM, easier to expand RAM, internal IDE cable already there. Put internal CF drive (is 4GB the max?). No having to screw with the floppy emulator. To run a full-blown WHDload setup with "relokick" and whatever else you need to play all the old games- what kind of specs do you need? I mean, is the standard CPU enough? Is the standard RAM (2megs??) enough? I just want to play games - lots of games. I'm not inclined to want to mess with serious upgrades for novelty or bragging rights - only what is necessary to play GAMES GAMES GAMES!!!

 

I have been outbid on some A500s and now I am starting to think maybe the A1200 is what I want. I was planning on starting with A500 and the floppy emulator, then upgrading to A1200 later and running WHDload but now I'm thinking it's not that much difference in buying the machine, and it would be a whole lot neater to have internal CF drive and WHDload instead of kludges hanging all over the place.

 

Save2600, MrAmiga500, FastRob - what are you guys using?

 

 

 

Edit: And can the 1200 switch to PAL mode like the 500 and play those games? Or just play everything with no mods? Can a PAL 1200 be converted to NTSC?

Edited April 2, 2010 by wood_jl

[Rybags]

The 500 is probably the most compatible so far as games go, believe it or not.

 

Most games ran in 1 meg, but there are AGA-only games and games that need more but in most cases they were just revamps of games that already had OCS versions that ran on 512 or 1 meg 500s.

 

On the other hand, there were compatability issues with some games and later OS versions, but like the ST, it's fairly likely that hacker groups developed fixes.

 

Why not just get a 500 and then get a 1200 later? 500s are still fairly cheap and you should get a bare system for anything from $25-$40.

Sure, it probably means enduring floppy load speeds, but they're not all that bad. Also, I imagine there's still a ton of good games that have no alternative other than floppy anyway.

 

Don't know about elsewhere, but here I don't think I've seen a 1200 go for under $130 on eBay for a few years.

[+remowilliams]

An expanded A1200 makes a fantastic classic Amiga games machine with WHDload. A bit more CPU grunt and significantly more memory than stock makes the difference. Though even a stock A1200 is far better equipped to run WHDload games than even a somewhat expanded A500. WHDload is by far the preferred method to run classic Amiga games.

 

My A1200 is: GVP 1230 Turbo+ Jaws (68030 @40Mhz w/FPU) / 20MB RAM / 4GB internal CF HD / Indivision AGA / Catweasel MK2 / PCMCIA Ethernet

 

I also run a minimig with ARM expander which is fantastic at running direct HD installable games, and straight floppy images with up to four emulated drives.

 

Neither of these are cheap however.

[AB Positive]

Oooh, but if you have an HxC Floppy emulator that you'd replace the floppy drive with.. the cheaper and more reliable route would be an a500 - you'd have the "Already there on the SD card" joy that WHDLoad already gives, without the glitches that sometimes occur... and the full a500 gameset to play with.

 

Yes, you miss out on AGA but after futzing about with a WHDLoad setup via WinUAE... AGA isn't a game-playing boost as much as you'd think it is.

 

Now if you're into Demos... I'd look harder at the 1200.

[+remowilliams]

Oooh, but if you have an HxC Floppy emulator that you'd replace the floppy drive with.. the cheaper and more reliable route would be an a500 - you'd have the "Already there on the SD card" joy that WHDLoad already gives, without the glitches that sometimes occur... and the full a500 gameset to play with.

Also not a bad route depending on what you want out of it and are able/willing to spend. One very large potential drawback however is that even the SD HxC devices are read only for Amiga floppy formats, so no saving data or games.

[roland p]

Does WHDLoad work with every amiga game?

 

If you only want to play games, why not go for an A600? It's small and it has a built-in ide-interface.

[+save2600]

Floppy emulators and the like - I've never used anything like that on the Amiga. Screw ePay too, especially since you mentioned being sniped out of a couple of machines. If you want a no nonsense approach to Miggy goodness, hop onto Amigakit.com and get yourself a built to order Amiga 1200. Then, get yourself the IDE<>CF adapter and install 3.1. If you're on a budget, you don't have to purchase an accelerator. Instead, try to find yourself some trapdoor expansion FAST RAM, (2-4mb) which will double the computers speed because it's true 32-bit RAM, not bottlenecked by the CHIP RAM built into the A1200. Transferring files to and fro is a cinch with an Amiga Emulator like UAE or AmigaForever. Ask Mirage more about that stuff though as I know he's able to transfer files to and fro the A500 I sold him using that method. Total package on something like that (without FAST RAM) will probably end up costing you in the neighborhood of $300. But, Voila! done Amiga deal and one that's ready to play the many WHDLoad stuff out there.

 

Have upwards of $850 to spend?? I could hook you up with one sweet A2500 setup (060, 128mb RAM, 2mb Chip RAM, CV64/3D video card, CD-ROM, keyboard, mouse & 1080 monitor, OS3.9, and TONS of goodies).

 

I do have a spare IDE<>CF card adapter though, if you decide to go the A500 route (add a "hard drive" to your machine - $90). Oh and A500's are natively more compatible with the majority of software out there, but WHDLoad and Degrader takes care of that on an A1200.

 

My main machine(s) are an A1000, A2500 and A3000. Love all of 'em and pretty much end up regretting selling an Amiga stuff a little while later! lol

[desiv]

From my recent experience..

 

The A500 is pretty easy.

It is fairly compatible with almost all games, but you will need to write your games to floppy and play off of floppies (unless you get an A500 with a HD and some RAM, but that's getting spendy). Since most disk images seem to be PAL, finding NTSC versions can be tricky.

Also, the A500 outputs to an Amiga monitor or "monochrome" composite. So if you want color, you'll want an adapter. (A520 is standard, but pretty bad quality. amigamaniac (a guy in Australia) makes some GREAT Amiga<>s-video adapters.

Then the only real issue you will have is the NTSC/PAL issue. Well, that and you can't play AGA games, as the A500 didn't support them, but most of the classic games are available non-AGA.

 

If you go A1200 (which I also recently got), you have a much better path for whdload based games. The 1200 has IDE, most come with HDs and you can add one easily. (Or CF IDE)

whdload takes care of most (not all) of the issues with kickstart versions and PAL/NTSC swapping (assuming you have a monitor that will take PAL and NTSC). The issue is RAM. whdload really wants RAM... The standard 2M will let you play most A500 single disk games.

 

But I had to add memory to play a lot of the games. It's easy to add 2M using an SRAM PCMCIA card. It does slow down the 1200 (16bit slower fastram :-), but allows you to play many of those games. I got my 2M card for about $45. A much better solution is real FAST RAM, but those cards seem to cost at least $100+ if/when you find them. Even better is an accelerator/RAM card, but even more expensive...

 

Clear as mud? :-)

 

desiv

[nonner242]

I just got my hands on afew Amiga 2000/40mhz HD& Toasters with all the goodies, like being able to run a LCD monitor.

Im going to give them the works the next coupe of weeks and see if there are any issues in some tests.If you would like one I can get you a fair price on one as long as everything checks out with them.

Also picked up a really nice white 4000/60mhz HD & 4000 Toaster that Im currently messing around with. Finally got to play some of my AGA games, nothing all that cool except Stardust so far.

Plus I havent decided what system I want yet.

I also might have have a great A1000 (4/6meg)system with tons of add ons to get rid of once I make my final decision.

And yes I know who might want that A4000 already... (looking up)

 

 

[+wood_jl]

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU ALL FOR AMIGA ADVICE.

 

I had seen on Amigakit.com the NEW IN BOX Amiga 1200 (everybody alltogether now, "HELL YEAH") but it's PAL!!!! The little selection box where you build your own won't change. I had also read somewhere (Wikipedia article, pehaps????) that the last were built by Escom (?) and they used 1.44HD drives and there's some incompatibilities. But mostly the PAL thing.

 

 

But I found a 1200. I'm in negotiations right now for this:

 

 

Not for sure yet, but looking good.

[+save2600]

I hear what you're saying, but PAL Doesn't bug any of us Amiga users. We can switch between PAL and NTSC instantly in Workbench AND, you can save your prefs to boot a PAL machine into NTSC right away, so again - not a big deal.

 

As far as Escom units go, of which I've only had one... someone else might have to chime in about the floppy drive scenario. I am not aware of any incompatibilities electronically. Button wise, they might look a little different however.

[+remowilliams]

As far as Escom units go, of which I've only had one... someone else might have to chime in about the floppy drive scenario. I am not aware of any incompatibilities electronically. Button wise, they might look a little different however.

My main unit is an Escom. IIRC there was something about media change detection issue I think with some titles. Not an issue to me though.

[+save2600]

As far as Escom units go, of which I've only had one... someone else might have to chime in about the floppy drive scenario. I am not aware of any incompatibilities electronically. Button wise, they might look a little different however.

My main unit is an Escom. IIRC there was something about media change detection issue I think with some titles. Not an issue to me though.

Media change detection with the floppy?

 

The only "bug" I'm aware of that way was with the PCMCIA port. The reset line sometimes doesn't work. The mod is easy... just a resistor soldered to the board, but there's also an $8 fix in the form of a plug in board over Gayle also.

Edited April 4, 2010 by save2600

[+remowilliams]

Media change detection with the floppy?

Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Limited to only some titles though.

 

I do remember having a card reset thing in the startup now as well.

[Mirage]

Awesome, hope you get that 1200. Then we can compare notes on our setups. One thing is, you sure will like the 020 for general use, and it will help run some of the HD games that I can't run. I do love the 500/CF setup I got from save2600. I am still going through all my floppies, and have so far been able to set well over half of them aside to get rid of as I will no longer need them with the HD/CF setup. Owning an Amiga today sure is different than it was in 1989 (without having a ton of $ back then)!

[tjlazer]

Yeah if you can swing it get the A1200. But an A500 also is nice to have for those older games and that retro late 80's experience. LOL I would check Craigs List often, that is how I got lots of Amiga stuff, including a decked out A1200 for $25 and a FREE A4000!

[ToddUGA]

I owned both at one time and the 1200 was the better machine. Buy some extra RAM and install a hard drive and you can run pretty much anything using whdload.

 

I still miss my Amiga. Of all the computers I've ever owned it was my favorite.