New to Amiga

[yock1960]

Hi All,

  I'm totally new to Amiga. I wanted one when they came out but couldn't justify it financially, went from C64/C128 to PC's and even dabbled in Mac's for a couple of years in the late 90's early 00's. I recently have gotten re-interested in my Commodore roots and dug all of the stuff out of storage, hacked a Hummer/DTV for keyboard/disk drive use and last but not least, purchased an A500.

I immediately had to learn about the hardware because the thing didn't work. Fortunately some folks over on comp.sys.amiga.hardware helped me work through it and after putting a new Agnus chip in, it works great!

It's strictly a nostalgia thing, even though I never had one. I'll enjoy figuring it out and using it for some games and maybe I'll dabble in AmigaBasic a little.

I plan on expanding it a little from it's current 1MB, I missed out on a couple of recent auctions, but I see that Elbox still makes some expansion modules for the A500, the 2MB one not being terribly expensive. Any comments on Elbox?

Anyway...Happy Holidays everone!

[InTheSand]

Hi,

Welcome to A.Org!

If you're after playing games and perhaps a bit of BASIC programming, arguably you don't need to worry about expanding your A500 beyond 1Mb...

Beware of catching the Amiga bug - before you know it, you'll be on eBay grabbing an A1200 and a 68060 upgrade for it!  :-)

 - Ali

[amigakit]

Welcome!

[Opus]

blech!  MSBASIC.  as for the 2M upgrade, A500 is not the best machine for upgrading. A500 does best stock with WB 1.3 for all the old favorite games.  WB 3.x is a much nicer OS tho.
oh, and welcome to A.org?  and good luck.

[McVenco]

Welcome! It's never too late to start using an Amiga :-D

May I suggest AMOS as a programming language? I've used it in the past but found it much nicer to work with than Basic.

[Fester]

Hi yock1960,

Have fun with your new Amiga. It's nice to have that financial revenge all these years later and it's amazing to see how we can be nostalgic about an older piece of technology. I certainly have no such feelings for PCs!

You might be interested in other types of Basic too. Perhaps Blitz 2?

Anyway, welcome!

Fester

[SamuraiCrow]

McVenco wrote:
Welcome! It's never too late to start using an Amiga :-D

May I suggest AMOS as a programming language? I've used it in the past but found it much nicer to work with than Basic.

AMOS is a dialect of Basic.  If it weren't so much trouble to get Amiga floppy images onto a disk for that A500, I'd recommend you to go for it.  As it is, you'd probably be better off grabbing the Kickstart ROM image from the A500 and using EUAE or WinUAE on the PC to run AmosPro from.

See http://www.liquido2.com for more information on where you can download Amos from.

[yock1960]

I've come across AMOS and Blitz, I guess my question is, are they useable without a HD?

As I mentioned at the start, I'd like to expand my memory enough to have my Workbench disk on a RAD drive so I don't have to keep flipping it in and out. I'm not sure that I'll ever get a HD for this thing, they just don't seem too common and as of yet I don't have an external floppy, but that's high on my 'want' list. But even if I have an external floppy and a RAD workbench, is it going to be too much of a pain to use either of these? Not to mention, are either going to work under WB 1.3?

I did invest in Cloanto's Amiga Explorer and while not blazing fast, it works (<10 min per disk; hey I remember 300 baud)!

I've got a lot of digging and learning to do, but it'll be fun!

Thanks for the welcome and comments everyone!

[InTheSand]

yock1960 wrote:
I've come across AMOS and Blitz, I guess my question is, are they useable without a HD?

I don't know about Blitz, but AMOS is certainly usable without a hard drive. You might find a second floppy drive will ease the pain a bit (and these can usually be found cheaply enough). Certainly when I used to use AMOS, I couldn't afford a hard drive of any sort!

Or, if you're into really "old skool" BASIC programming, there's a very good emulator for the venerable BBC Micro, simply called "The Emulator", which you might be able to track down second hand. However, this restricts you to using features from the Beeb rather than letting you do things with the Amiga hardware like you can with AMOS.

If you're considering a hard drive, you may even find it cheaper to get an A600 or A1200 (2.5" HDD interface is built in on both).

 - Ali

[SamuraiCrow]

AMOS definitely works from Kickstart 1.3 .  Why don't you download it now!  It doesn't cost anything unless you want a manual (which can be bought from Software Hut for about $20 USD).  See the thread about where to buy Amos on liquido2.com .