Looking for advice going back to Amiga.

[Argus]

If you've got $500-700 to spend, I'd personally just plunk down for an A4000D.  They are relatively plentiful in the US market second hand, there's far more accelerators for them here and you'll have ZIII slots for either a Zorro2 or 3 graphics card, ethernet, fast serial or even a toaster/flyer setup to fool around with desktop video production.  The A1200 is a nice machine with the pcmcia slot and all, but a close second choice would be an A3000, which is essentially an A4000 with scsi rather than ide and ECS instead of AGA chipset.  A graphics card is the great equalizer between an A4000 and A3000.  Still, if AGA is what you want, get the A4000D, you won't regret it.

[Argus]

@koafder

I think you're exaggerating the prices a bit.  You could get yourself a GVP Spectrum rtg graphics card for less than $100; a Cyberstorm MkII for probably $300; 128MB simms for the Cyberstorm for $30; and a XSurf ethernet card for $100-120 (new from Software Hut).  That and $30 for 3.1 roms (if you don't have them) gives you a pretty nice miggy for $500 or so.  I give you that you can get halfway to a nice Athlon 64 PC system for that price, but then you still need $50 for AmigaForever and $100+ for a Catweasel PCI card.  The amiga native A3000 solution lets you run most of the available software base, sans AGA, and it's actually cheaper than the AmigaForever solution brand new (since you already own an A3000).