Recommend an Amiga

[ChaosLord]

If you can get a PAL Amiga, then get one.  PAL Amigas are better.

Nobody cares about composite video output because composite went out of style back in the mid 1980s and nobody uses it.  The picture quality of composite output is total garbage and you will hate your Amiga if you use that.  No way in hell will you write code on a composite monitor.  You would either go blind or insane.

Commodore went to a lot of trouble and spent the big bucks to give every Amiga Computer a perfecty quality RGB port for crisp non-blurry clean gfx.  So use it.

It would be really really stupid to buy an RGB computer and then just refuse to use the RGB.  That is like buying a computer with a hard drive connector and then just refusing to use a hard drive.

The thing is since 90% of all Amiga games only work correctly in PAL mode, when you use an NTSC Amiga you have to PAL boot every single game in order for the game to work.  Why bother?  Just use a PAL Amiga to start with.

I have several NTSC Amigas.  The NTSC A3000s have a special jumper on them to allow you to flip a switch and set it to PAL or NTSC.   I set mine to PAL mode when I got them and I never flipped it back.  Why on Earth would I?  If I want to play an NTSC game I just NTSC boot the computer.  But that doesn't happen much.  Most hot games require PAL mode.

My other NTSC Amigas have no PAL/NTSC switch on them so I must waste 60 seconds of my life to PAL boot the computer every time I want to play a game on them.

My NTSC A1200 has been set to use a PAL Workbench since the 1990s.  That is almost 20 years that my NTSC A1200 has been in PAL mode.  The PAL video output is 100% perfect on every single one of my NTSC Amigas.  That includes A500s, A2000s, A1200s, A3000s, A4000.

If you get a PAL Amiga just make sure to flip the powerswitch into North American mode before you use it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Else you will set your Amiga and your house on fire.

Have fun.

[ChaosLord]

Petro's are all German with nonstandard keyboard layout.

I would not recommend one of those unless u r buying a Detatched Keyboard Adapter (Forgot what they are called) that let u use a standard PS/2 PC keyboard.  I use such an adapter on my A1200T for many years (15).

If u want to use an external keyboard I can help u choose one that is not a ripoff.  I have spent last 3 months studying Keyboard Science 24/7.

[ChaosLord]

When you say nonstandard, does that mean the keys will not properly map out to an English OS, like pressing a 'D' and getting an 'L' or something of the sort?

Germany uses QWERTZ layout.

The rest of the universe uses QWERTY layout.

You can set your keymap to UK layout to fix the Y-Z issue but some punctuation symbols might get switched around too, donno.  UK has punctuation in different places than USA.

In any case, if you set your keymap to have the Y key in the normal place, the writing on your Y-key will stay say "Z".  At a minimimum its confusing.  If it was me it would be fantastically annoying.

Germany just decided to make up their own incompatible format incompatible with the whole entire rest of the planet.

I am looking possible issues in both keyboard and power supply.

I can't remember if the A1200 powersupply has a 110v / 220V switch on it or not.

Is there anything else that might not be compatible for use in the USA? Will the OS be in German, menus and such?

You set the language of the OS on any Amiga.  That is not a problem at all.


If you were going to buy Petro's super custom A1200 and put it into a Tower Case and use a real keyboard then all your keyboard problems disappear.  This is what I do.  I am using a brand new 2012 springloaded PS/2  keyboard.

You could buy a $3.00 set of stickers and cover up the Z key and the other key with the proper symbols.  If they swapped around any other symbols, punctuation, etc. maybe u could fix those with stickers also.  Dunno.  Depending on what they did it could get really complicated.

I only learned of German QWERTZ layout a couple of months ago.  Until then I just assumed everyone used the same layout.  HA!

[ChaosLord]

The only reason to not get a PAL Amiga would be if you want to directly record your Amiga video onto a NTSC VHS video tape.

Do you want to make NTSC VHS videtapes with your Amiga?
If Answer$="Yes" THEN
  Buy NTSC Amiga
ELSE
  Buy any Amiga at all
END_IF


Do you want to make PAL VHS videtapes with your Amiga?
If Answer$="Yes" THEN
  Buy PAL Amiga
ELSE
  Buy any Amiga at all
END_IF

[ChaosLord]

All my Amiga 3000s have bad internal floppy drives too!  Its the 3rd thing to break after the keyboards and U202 PAL chips.

Maybe if I blasted some compressed air in there it would work.  Donno.

A3000 is an awesome retro games machine.  Datz what I use mine for.  It has a slightly faster cpu than an A500.  Its not a speed demon or anything but it gives a much better frame rate to Stunt Car Racer and Hired Guns especially when having a party with 4 players at once!


And it is ez to find a monitor for it since it uses Amiga or PC monitors.

It does most everything except for you can't play any of the awesome AGA games on it.

If you wanted to do serious stuff on it you could buy a Mediator for it and add a 256MB gfx card and an ethernet card and so forth.

[ChaosLord]

How did u cut the battery out?!?

My batteries are in all my Amigas and they are all probably dead now

[ChaosLord]

Does it have good compatibility with most Amiga software?

To me it has 100% compatibility with all OCS and ECS software.

But I have the version of A3000 that loads kickstart off of the Hard Drive.  So I can change my kickstart any time I want. hehe

 Can it play games?

It will play at least 10,000 different games perfectly.

And its an A3000 so it is dead ez to install a hardware PAL switch.  It might have come with one if you see a funny switch sticking out of the back installed by the previous owner.

Actually the bad internal disk drive seems to be good now that I have blown massive clouds of dirt out of it with an air compressor.  The question is, how in the world did the power supply EVER work with all of that dirt in it.

Its an antique.  The dirt is probably what was holding everything together

[ChaosLord]

PS/2 Mouse converter and modern mouse.

+1000

Get one of those!


Also I flatly refuse to believe that your Amiga 3000 keyboard works.  All mine broke within around 6 years.


Once you realize your keyboard is broken then I recommend you to get a brand new PS/2 keyboard adapter.

[ChaosLord]

My A3000 keyboard is working great.  I was mistaken about the disk drive though.  It appeared to recognize a disk after I blew it out, but I could not write any files to it.  

It has Kickstart 2.04.  I was going to remove the 120MB and 240MB SCSI drives and replace them with a 1GB.  

If 1GB is all u have laying around then....  I guess it could be halfway ok...
But it is quite small.


I bought a 4GB SCSI drive in 1997.  Back then SCSI drives were a great size at a great price.

It should be really easy to find ancient used SCSI drives in the 4GB to 20GB size range.  But its all up to u what u want to do.

If u wanted to do a full WHDload install then that is something like 10GB in a single day.

In case nobody told u, the A3000 has an AWESOME SCSI hard drive controller that blows away the lame IDE controller that came out 2 years later in A1200 and A4000.  The A3000 SCSI just magically flows data into your computer with DMA so it frees up your CPU and provides great performance.

Since the hard drive controller is so awesome, it would be a shame to cripple it with a tiny sized drive.  It just makes sense to put some sort of decently large drive on it.

But if all u have laying around is a 1GB then you could set that up as your "boot drive" and add a 2nd drive later.


About the kickstart:

I advise you to upgrade to a 3.1 Kickstart.  That is what everybody uses since 1990s.  Its very good and reliable.

Is ur A3000 using a real Kickstart ROM chip?
Or does it have the "ROMtower" thingy that lets you load the kickstart off of your hard drive?

Look in your harddrive under DEVS:Kickstart/ and see if there are any files in there.

[ChaosLord]

Or you could just pop the key tops off and swap the Y and Z around... Too simple?

Oh isn't that sweet

Someone so naive and innocent that they don't realize how completely vile and evil the keyboard industry is.

The plastics companies who actually make the keycaps always lie to the CEO of of whichever company is making keyboards.  They trick them into buying keycaps that are unswitchable-aroundable.  This is to prevent ppl from doing exactly what you have proposed.  And to stop ppl from switching to Colemak layout which is massively superior to silly QWERTY.

But there is a flaw.  Their evil trap doesn't work as long as the 2 keys you are switching around are on the same row.  But if the keys are on different rows you can forget about it.

Give it a try if you don't believe me.

99% of All normal (non-laptop) keyboards have keys where every single row of keys is
1. A different shape.
2. A different height.
3. A different angle.

Yes all 3 at the same time!

This is what I call "Screwball Profile".  It is a total scam ripoff.  That is the world we live in.

Y and Z are on completely different rows on my keyboard.  Switching their places screws up everything badly.

[ChaosLord]

There is a Kickstart file in the Devs directory on the WB2.x volume.  Is this a correct configuration?  If I press both mouse buttons it gives me a menu to load either kickstart 2.04 or 1.4.  When I try to install Workbench 3.1, it fails with an error that I need kickstart 3.0.

You have the kewl version of the A3000!  The A3000 with kickstart as a file on the HD.  A super user-friendly machine by Commodore Business Machines!

I totally forgot about that menu!

I haven't used my A3000 regularly since around 1994.  AGA had taken over everything by then.

The way I switch my kickstarts around is I have all 3 of them in that DEVS: directory named appropriately and then just copy whichever one I want into the default name.  I can't remember the default name ottomh.  I guess "Kickstart".  I have a Kickstart 1.3, 2.04, and 3.1 (and maybe others I can't remember).

I read that there are problems with the ROM version of Kickstart 3.1 on the Amiga 3000.  For instance, I would need to drop my cpu speed from 25MHz to 16MHz.  Is there a way to install WB31 on this system or should I stay with WB21?

100% total complete nonsense!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Use Kickstart 3.1 on my A3000 for countless years!  It is the best kickstart and it works on all Amigas!  

Whoever had a problem either was using a corrupt kickstart or they were using the wrong kickstart for their machine.  You can't just copy over an A500 3.1 kickstart or an A4000 3.1 kickstart.  Each model of Amiga has its own kickstart if u want everything to work 100% correctly.

All my Amigas operate at 25 Mhz and ONLY 25 Mhz.  Some guys tried to sell me one of those lame-O 16 Mhz models and I refused.

I did succeed in transferring the OS to a larger hard disk.  I set the drive up as two 512M partitions. Should I isolate the OS in a small partition of it's own?  I do not mind repartitioning to get it right. It is a little tricky as I cannot boot off a floppy at all.

Partitioning your drives is up to you.  If u start a new thread about it I am sure a lot of ppl will give you their opinions.

It partly depends on what kind of person you are and how you intend to use the machine.

Rather than worry about the partitioning I think you should focus on getting a 3.1 kickstart that works (if you don't already have one).  You probably have one in your devs:  Or use the search function to scan your whole hard drive.  Whoever had the puter b4 u might have had it in a weird place.