Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: tonyyeb on August 18, 2007, 05:01:46 PM
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Hi all
Just dug out my old A3000 and was thinking of putting it on ebay. I have no monitor, keyboard, mouse etc... for it. It is bog standard with no upgrades. What could i expect for it?
Thanks
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Have you looked at the battery??
If it's been stored for a couple of years, there might even be severe damage from the leaking battery - better take a look quickly and remove/replace it even if it's OK.
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Really depends on the condition and any additions it has (or doesn't have). If the battery has leaked that can seriously ruin the motherboard if not completely kill it. The condition of the case and insides makes a difference. The lack of a keyboard and mouse knocks a few bucks off the value. If it has a hard drive, any software on it may matter. Kickstart ROM version might also be a factor.
It will probably sell for enough to make it worth the hassle of ebaying it. As long as you dont expect some unreasonable price it will almost certainly sell. Look at what others on ebay sold for and you'll see... then start bidding real low and watch the bids come in.
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Well as far i remember it has no extras. It does have a hard drive and boots to Workbench 2.0. Had a quick look inside and there is no evidence of leaks or damage. It has an FDD and works fine. It will cost £20 ($40) to post in the UK so on top of that do you think £30 would be reasonable (£50 in total)?
Cheers
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Mate, if it's in working condition and okay cosmetically then an Amiga 3000 is worth more than £30.
I've been looking for one of these myself actually.
Edit: Also, I think eBay is your best bet for these big-box machines (especially in the UK). Amigas can really push for high prices on eBay auctions these days. Just start it of at 50/60/70 quid, show pictures of everything clean/working and that the battery is fine.
Oh and post a link to the auction here. I think you'll get a good price for it. I might bid on it myself!
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Fixer wrote:
Mate, if it's in working condition and okay cosmetically then an Amiga 3000 is worth more than £30.
I've been looking for one of these myself actually.
Really? What sort of value would it go for? How much do you want to buy it for ;-) ?
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A bare A3000 with 2Meg RAM and hard drive will usually sell for about £60-80 + p&p
It really depends if it has fast RAM, any other hardware, accelerator etc.
They can go for over £100 for a 2+16 fully populated one.
If it had an accelerator and a gfx card we'd be talking several hundred (£300+)
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alexh wrote:
A bare A3000 with 2Meg RAM and hard drive will usually sell for about £60-80 + p&p
It really depends if it has fast RAM, any other hardware, accelerator etc.
Oh yeah he's correct; I've heard fast ram is rare and hard to find for the A3000.
Has it got any?
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Wow! Is it worth keeping hold of it? is it the sort of thing that will go up in value? I love playing with it but i have little software for it and i can do more Amiga stuff with WinUAE than the A3000. It's great to still have a physical link to the Amiga World... just for the day they rule the world once again! :-D
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Fixer wrote:
Oh yeah he's correct; I've heard fast ram is rare and hard to find for the A3000.
Has it got any?
How would i check that? It can boot to Workbench - does it say it in the title bar? Its been a while... forgive me :-(
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tonyyeb wrote:
Fixer wrote:
Oh yeah he's correct; I've heard fast ram is rare and hard to find for the A3000.
Has it got any?
How would i check that? It can boot to Workbench - does it say it in the title bar? Its been a while... forgive me :-(
Yeah it's not hard to spot. As soon as workbench is loaded you should see (at the top) how much chip ram you have and something called "Other Memory". That other memory is fast ram. :-)
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Cheers, thanks for that. Ill take a look on Monday.
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tonyyeb wrote:
Wow! Is it worth keeping hold of it? is it the sort of thing that will go up in value?
Unless someone starts making new Amigas, it probably will gradually increase in value. If you want to save it for later sale, remove the battery before storing it!
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The prices of Amiga's go up and down in value quite a lot.
To give you a history:
1994 : Amiga's at the height of their prices
1996 : Amiga's at the all time lowest of their prices, everyone trying to sell to buy a PC
1998 : Amiga's continue to fetch low prices, made worse by the introduction of GOOD emulation on the PC.
2001 : Prices start to go up, especially on high-end items such as accelerators. Reason: Remaining Amiga users now have left school/university have good paid jobs and free cash. Ebay has had some affect on price.
2003 : Nostalgia and Retrogaming become popular, those that sold their Amiga's in 1996 all want to buy them back, prices continue to go up.
2007 : Amiga's back almost to their all time highest, bidding fever on ebay coupled with the now high salaries (£20k-40k) of the top end Amiga owners have made £100 affordable. PPC, 060, GFX cards now in great demand.
2010 : Amiga owners get married, computer junk no longer acceptable in the house, prices start to go down as the supply of Amiga's on Ebay outstrips demand.
2012 : Most Amiga owners now feeling the pinch of having 3 kids and a mortgage as interest rates spiral. Everything computer like not essential must be sold to pay the mortgage and university fee's! Prices of Amiga's hit rock bottom.
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alexh wrote:
2010 : Amiga owners get married, computer junk no longer acceptable in the house, prices start to go down as the supply of Amiga's on Ebay outstrips demand.
2012 : Most Amiga owners now feeling the pinch of having 3 kids and a mortgage as interest rates spiral. Everything computer like not essential must be sold to pay the mortgage and university fee's! Prices of Amiga's hit rock bottom.
Lol! Brilliant foresight.
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alexh wrote:
The prices of Amiga's go up and down in value quite a lot.
2012 : Most Amiga owners now feeling the pinch of having 3 kids and a mortgage as interest rates spiral.
2012?!? The world comes to an end in 2012. :lol:
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no it doesn't! it ended in 2000. ;-)
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I brought this up many months ago but does anyone know of a way to do a historical search on Ebay. It would be awesome to see the price all the A2000s (etc) went for for the past year or six months... I would think ebay wouldnt let a price indexing resource like they have go to waste.
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You used to be able to search ebay back a long time, but now it only goes back about 3 months. You do a normal search but check the "Completed listings" box.
Way less useful than the feature used to be.
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alexh wrote:
2010 : Amiga owners get married, computer junk no longer acceptable in the house, prices start to go down as the supply of Amiga's on Ebay outstrips demand.
lol... How true that is :) At least me and my fianceé have an agreement for this one :D When we get married I'm gunna move all my computer stuff out of the bedroom and into it's own dedicated room so she doesn't have to see it :D
Roll on Retro-Room :D
2012 : Most Amiga owners now feeling the pinch of having 3 kids and a mortgage as interest rates spiral. Everything computer like not essential must be sold to pay the mortgage and university fee's! Prices of Amiga's hit rock bottom.
Sadly, I can see this becoming a reality :( Except the 3 kids part... On the bright side though, I have a lot of systems and I will hang onto as many of them for as long as possible. (I still regret the day many years ago that my dad cleared out his attic and threw away all the old computer stuff that was up there.. I shoulda said something... :( )
Edit:
On the bright side though.. it may mean I can finally get my hands on an A3000UX and an A2500UX system.. heh
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Uh ! Feels like its 2012 already here then. Wow, :-?
Time for a :pint: to dull the pain :crazy:
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Just booted her up and it says:
927560 Graphics mem (i guess these are in bytes)
248048 Other mem
So 1mb RAM and 256k Fast RAM?
Not sure of the HD size - ill take off the case and take a look later.
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Woop woop! Just found the keyboard and mouse!!!
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Homer wrote:
Uh ! Feels like its 2012 already here then.
Shazam! I'm still working on 1989... :-D
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A3000 is the king of ECS machines. Onboard scandoubler, 030 processor + FPU, SCSI controller, Zorro3 capability, slick, sexy design ... what more can you ask ? AGA is another matter of course. I think you really should get hold of a utility like sysinfo and properly check the configuration. There's also the 16MHz vs 25 MHz 030 issue.
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tonyyeb wrote:
Just booted her up and it says:
927560 Graphics mem (i guess these are in bytes)
248048 Other mem
So 1mb RAM and 256k Fast RAM?
Hmmm..
I'm inclined to say it's stock but didn't the A3000 come with 1mb DIP in the chip and another 1mb DIP in the fast?
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countzero wrote:
A3000 is the king of ECS machines. Onboard scandoubler, 030 processor + FPU, SCSI controller, Zorro3 capability, slick, sexy design ... what more can you ask ? AGA is another matter of course. I think you really should get hold of a utility like sysinfo and properly check the configuration. There's also the 16MHz vs 25 MHz 030 issue.
How do i get sysinfo onto an A3000 with no cd rom, no network, no usb (!) etc... Do they take IDE CD ROM's? :-?
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There's no native IDE on the A3000.
But tbh that's part of its charm to me. :-D
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Edit: Also aren't the 16mhz versions rare - almost negates the fact that it's slower.
You can always find one of those A3630s on eBay for cheap surely? So I'd say that doesn't really matter.
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I cant even use serial transfer as the amiga looks to be a blank install. Anyone got sysinfo on a floppy they want to post to me!!!??? :-D
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if you have wb 2, you should have crossdos. check storage/dosdrivers. if there's a pc0 you're in luck. double click on it and now you can use 720k dos formatted floppy disks.
if you have a spare dd disk, format it 720k on your windows (there's a command to do it for windows xp, but it excapes me at the moment) put lha and lha'ed sysinfo in this disk. and expand sysinfo at amiga side. you also unzip sysinfo and copy it directly to disk, but dos filename restrictions will mess amiga filenames.
if you don't have a dd disk, you can use a hd covering the extra hole with a duct tape.
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Cheers for that - ill give it a go tomorrow.
Just looking at wikipedia and it says that the A3000 came with 2mb RAM? Does that mean that mine could be missing some fast ram or is faulty as it only shows 256k other mem?
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tonyyeb wrote:
Just booted her up and it says:
927560 Graphics mem (i guess these are in bytes)
248048 Other mem
So 1mb RAM and 256k Fast RAM?
That's a 100% stock A3000. It came with 1 MB chip and 1 MB fast RAM. Probably 512 KB of the latter are used for the Superkickstart, and some of it for the running system.
If you hold down both mouse button on cold(!) starting the machine you will see the boot menu. It's either for switching caches/diagnosing expansion cards (2.0 or later ROMs) or choosing Kickstart 1.3/2.x (older Superkickstart machine with 1.4 boot ROMs).
I take the guess it's a Superkick machine.
16 vs 25 MHz does make a difference in potential price. 16 MHz is pretty rare, but a lot slower - but won't matter if you put in an accelerator board.
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Just booted her up and it says:
927560 Graphics mem (i guess these are in bytes)
248048 Other mem
So 1mb RAM and 256k Fast RAM?
The memory you see at the top is whats available. Keep in mind that is not what is installed, it's what is free after the OS and other apps have been run.
Open a Shell and run "ShowConfig" It will layout your specs. You can also use the command "avail"
How do i get sysinfo onto an A3000 with no cd rom, no network, no usb (!) etc... Do they take IDE CD ROM's?
Like was mentioned, you can use a 720k FAT12 disk on the PC to copy files over. Download SYSINFO from Aminet to a PC disk and mount the PC0: DOS driver to read the disk!
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Cheers for all the help guys. Ill have an update tomorrow morning. Thanks again!
Is there an easy way to get a network card into my A3000?
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Right update:
It does have a superkickstart, the mouse and keyboard work fine if a bit yellow. ShowConfig returns unknown command. There isn't a storage folder in the workbench area. Oh and the harddrive is a quantum 100mb.
How can i get stuff onto this machine? Any ideas?
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2012 : Most Amiga owners now feeling the pinch of having 3 kids and a mortgage as interest rates spiral. Everything computer like not essential must be sold to pay the mortgage and university fee's! Prices of Amiga's hit rock bottom.
2050: Amiga owners are mostly dead or dying. The Amiga is about a valuable as the first solar calculator...nobody knows what it is or even cares. It's not even worthy of being in a museum since it didn't even make it into the "Pirates of Silicon Valley" movie.