Crumb wrote:
In Europe there are few A3000 and lots of A4000 so these machines cost more or less the same. The first A3000 I bought years ago was 210€. It had rom 2.0, ocs, a 030/16Mhz, 8MB of ram and was crap. I tested it for 2 days and gave it back to the original owner. A month later I bought an A4000 with 040/25, rom3.0, buster11, 16MB, HD Floppy drive, etc for only 60€ more. Guess what computer was more useful? That A3000 required expensive roms 3.1 and most of shops charged 70€ for them. And I didn't have an accelerator yet...
Some points here (some maybe obvious).
- A3000 never had OCS, they were always ECS.
- Of course a 25MHz 040 is more usefull than a lowly 68030/16Mhz + 68881 FPU
- A3000 and A4000 3.1 ROMs are usually the same cost. I've never seen a great difference in cost as you say. (and, I believe most A4000s were shipped with 3.0 ROMs)
- A3000 were shipped with HD floppies also. (my bought in 91-92 A3000/25 had a HD floppy)
- Upgrading chips isn't necessary (and when they are it's necessary in the same sense as the A4000 ie. buster 11). (BTW, my buster 11 install on the A3000 took approximately 30 minutes due to the location under the drive tray... On the A4000 it took 2 week turnaround due to the soldering.)
If you buy it already upgraded an A3000 can be a nice machine, but if it's not upgraded and you want better features you'd better get a Pegasos.
You can say the same thing about the A4000. Excluding AGA, the A3000 can be pushed just as far as the A4000 can. Even unmodified it has better features like a flicker fixer, SCSI, etc.
