Classic HW, SAM440 or EFIKA ?

[amigadave]

@Palm,

The MorphOS team has said not to expect MorhpOS to be released for the MacMini anytime soon, which in normal Amiga terms may mean 6 months to 2 years.

If you want something now, you must decide what is most important to you, 1. Backward compatibility, 2. Money, 3. Newest hardware for AmigaOS4.1?

From Everblue's post in this thread, it seems like you have already decided that for you the SAM440ep would be best, so save up a ton of money and get one.

From your original post, if money is your consideration, the EFIKA is the current hands down winner for hardware to run a next-gen Amiga-Like OS.

If you still want to play old Amiga games that hit the custom chips, you should get a Classic, or use WinUAE on your PC.

[amigadave]

Have you seen and used an EFIKA?

If not, you should.

As for the form factor, mine came with a perfectly nice case, though it is not fancy.  I like it because it is smaller than an external 5.25" CD-ROM, runs faster than a CyberStorm 233 PPC Classic Amiga, and only uses a tiny amount of electricity even with the 128mb Radeon 9250 graphics card.

The performance is very close to that of the SAM440ep, but it won't run AmigaOS4.1 if that is what floats your boat.

It fits in the "Palm" of my hand (pun intended).

[amigadave]

@Ruud,

what do you find so limiting about the EFIKA?  I know that it has near zero expandability and that it is not exactly a powerhouse, but what can you do on your SAM440ep that you can't do on your EFIKA?

I am just curious, as there doesn't seem to be any non-biased reviews comparing the two machines out there.  It you could provide one it would be useful to a lot of potential buyers.

I know it is hard not to be biased, one way or the other, when it comes to AmigaOS4.x vs MorphOS2.x, but if you can try to do so and give us a list of differences and things you do on your SAM440ep that you feel or know you cannot do on your EFIKA, I would like to see it.

There may be some MorphOS experts that will see your post that can tell you how to do some things with the EFIKA that you did not know, which will be helpful to me and other newbies to MorphOS.

[amigadave]

recidivist wrote:
Has anyone used one of the Iomega or similar USB CD/DVD drives on efika?

Yes, I have a USB DVD burner connected to my EFIKA, but of course the 1.1USB interface can't cope with DVD burning and might even have trouble burning to a CD.  I have not tried yet.

I have only used it to load programs so far.