New Amiga Owner Wants Opinions

[carls]

Personally, I wouldn't mind using it but I'd take good care of it. Dust it of once a week, keep it out of the sun etc.

But like someone said, if you want to get the Amiga Experience (tm), I would recommend an A1200 with a hard drive. Better OS, better graphics, and it can still run a lot of the old A500 games.

[Crumb]

as someone said you can cover the HD hole with tape...
An A500 won't allow you to easily transfer adfs from uae etc... I would go for a second hand 1200... you'll get a computer that will run almost everything the A500 ran, you'll be able to access pc formatted disks more easily thanks to the OS, you can plug an ethernet pcmcia, cheap accelerators, you can plug it directly to your TV... The A1200 is a great little computer :-D

-edited- If you decide to buy an A1200 and you want to plug in an ethernet pcmcia you'll have to use a 16bit ethernet 10 card (ethernet 100 won't work...)

[DoomMaster]

To jasongins:

The Amiga 500 is a toy.  I only use them for spare parts on my Amiga 2000HDs.  My advice to you is to sell that "mint" Amiga 500 on eBay and then buy yourself an Amiga 2000HD.  It is a much better machine then the Amiga 500.  You can usually pick up a nice Amiga 2000 system for less then $100.00 (not including monitor).  Then you could also buy an A2320 Amber board and plug in a nice SVGA monitor.  The A2320 Amber board de-interlaces the video signal and gets rid of the scan lines for a nice crisp clear picture.  If you must have the AGA chip set then buy an Amiga 4000.  Do NOT buy the Amiga 1200.  The Amiga 1200 is also a toy, but it is good for spare parts to an Amiga 4000.     :-D

[xeron]

Go DoomMaster on your ill-advised crusade against wedgie Amigas!

[Kronos]

The A1200 good for A4000 spare parts ?

Only if you got some experience in SMD-(de)-soldering .... :-D  :-D

Really Do(u)mmy you start to annoy ME !!!

And let me tell you I'm not easiely annoyed  :-x

[alx]

@jasongins

The big question is "what do you want to do with it?".  The A500 runs an old version of AmigaOS, and is limited in some aspects, for instance, it uses an older Custom Chipset (the part of the Amiga that does graphics among other things) than the more recent models.  The A500 is great for retro games, but little else nowadays.

If you do want to do something a little more serious, I'd recommend getting your hands on an A1200 (with a hard drive).  Its capable of running far more recent software than the A500, and despite having a smaller case, appears to be easier to expand.  You can also get them very cheaply.

If you did get an A1200 then I'd definitely keep the A500 in its box, as it could become fairly valuable.

[carls]

@DoomMaster
If you only want to play non-system-friendly disk based games, watch the odd oldschool demo and dabble with DPaint I see no reason why you would need an A2000HD.

Spending money on scandoublers and VGA monitors is useless when you just want to play games. Hooking up your miggy to the TV will work just fine.

You seem totally obsessed with calling the smaller Amigas "toys". I can agree to a certain point, but that's not always a bad thing. Why fork out huge amounts of cash on big-box Amigas when you won't use all their potential?

I wouldn't trade my A1200s for any A2000HD in the world. OCS graphics and a 7MHz 68000 - how unprofessional :^P

[Im>bE]

HOLY SMOKES.

if you haven't experienced the joys of amiga 500 games, then get the best of them and start playing!!!!!

nb: MANY games are crap. Just like it is today.

[Floid]

carls wrote:

Spending money on scandoublers and VGA monitors is useless when you just want to play games. Hooking up your miggy to the TV will work just fine.

Yep.  That said, it *is* convenient to be able to use an off-the-shelf VGA at what feels like a 'normal' resolution.  If you have an OCS/ECS Amiga, a delacer is a nice investment (and some aftermarket boards were made that wedged into a 500, too).  

You seem totally obsessed with calling the smaller Amigas "toys". I can agree to a certain point, but that's not always a bad thing. Why fork out huge amounts of cash on big-box Amigas when you won't use all their potential?

The original poster is new to the scene, so it's important to point out that the 500 and 2000 (HD or not) is practically the same machine, as far as chipsets are concerned.  The big difference is the size of the case and the expansion potential, but the 500 was popular enough that pretty much every form of hardware addon released for the 2000 also saw a version that could somehow be strapped to the 500.  (Though maybe not from Commodore, and maybe not as 'plug and play' easily, in the case of accellerator cards and the like.)

I wouldn't trade my A1200s for any A2000HD in the world. OCS graphics and a 7MHz 68000 - how unprofessional :^P

Yep.  If I were serious about it, I'd trade my 2000HD for a 1200, just to take advantage of the PCI busboards and the like of today.  (And of course, to clarify, 1200s have IDE controllers built in, hard drives aren't an issue, stock AGA has the screenmodes that work on regular VGA monitors if you've got one of those little silver adapter dongles for the video port...)  

But if you're mostly using it to get your retro-fix on, a hard drive and a network connection add some convenience, and there are probably one or two things that run on an 'old' box that don't sit so well under AGA.  (Of course, those things probably require a 1.3 ROM and the hard drive and any memory expansions disabled, too.)  You can drop Ethernet or USB cards into a 2000 - convenient, if you can find an IP stack to use with them - but you can also just hook a 500 up with a null-modem cable, and use oldschool BBS software to transfer files back and forth... or PPP or SLIP over the serial line with an IP stack on either hardware.

[Floid]

Crumb wrote:
as someone said you can cover the HD hole with tape...

Just as a followup, I've never found tape alone to work well enough.  The little switch-pin in a high-density drive will usually just puncture or dent the tape, rather than getting held down, and you'll sit there in DOS (or on your *NIX machine), wondering why it won't let you format it in the older, wider-track fashion.

Then, when you try using sturdier tape, then you discover that it screws up the way the disk sits in the drive, and you have trouble inserting/ejecting it.

So the ghetto solution I've found is to fold up a scrap of paper and wedge it in the hole before taping, which works long enough to copy over a cool demo or, one supposes, a 'terminal emulator' with XModem (or ZModem, or Kermit...) file-transfer support so you can use a null-modem link instead.

If you're serious about 'making your own floppies,' you could probably find some plastic, Dremel off plugs of appropriate size, and crazy-glue some 'patches' of transparency film over the top and bottom to hold it on.

But at that point, you may as well be on Google, and seeing who still produces and stocks 'real' DD media in this day and age; there must still be a demand for it somewhere in government, if nowhere else.