Yeah, it's rare that you find any selling second hand. Overheating is a big problem, whether you expand or not. We had to drill out the cases and put three and four extra fans because the PAR and TBC-IV would make the cases so hot you couldn't touch them. If I remember right, the 4000T wasn't as readily available and drove the per-station cost up more than we wanted, plus it couldn't fit on the monitor carts we had stationed around the studio.
Me and three other Amigans put the proposal together to build these things to take the strain off the bottleneck to our single Accom DDR. I think we built six or eight of them for the price of one Accom with about a minute or two of 601 playback for shooting animation, comp and render tests to. By comparison, I think each PAR had some 45min of footage on a 45Gb disk. I wrote the CSH shooter script that folks used on the IRIX side and another fellow wrote the ARexx script that my program talked to to handle conversion and clip management. It was great, until Commodore went tits up. Then it was like, almost on queue, boom, boom, boom we started getting failures.
The last couple that were still operational ended up being commandeered by the guys on our motion-control stages because once they found out one of our PAR stations could replace the 3/4" video setup they used to preview miniature moves they wouldn't give them back. Amiga4000 + PAR pretty much revolutionized the way miniature photography was done for a while, on True Lies, Apollo 13, Interview With the Vampire. By the time we got to The Fifth Element and Titanic I think the last of the Amiga PAR stations had died and had been replaced by an NT box with what replaced the PAR, the Perception Video Recorder.
Mine died after about a year of casual use, after the warrantee was up and not long after Commodore filed too. I think I was still paying for it a year or two longer on a, get this, Apple Credit Card (bought at Creative Computing in LA).
