Recommend an Amiga

[bjjones37]

Seriously guys, I want to buy an Amiga.

Don't mean to start the Amiga Wars all over again, but I would like some recommendations. If I have, say, $300-$400 to drop on another Amiga, what can y'all recommend? I know...I know, it depends on what I want to do with it. First and foremost, I want to explore the AmigaOS. Of course gaming is sort of a given. Perhaps some light programming. And somehow network it to my Windows box - NIC, serial, parallel, Flash card, whatever. I am strictly a hobbyist so a little of everything without too much of any one thing. I do not require a lot of speed but I do insist on a hard drive. Oh, one more thing, I do not want to buy an Amiga that is going to die a month after buying it. My Atari 800XL and Commodore 64 still work fine for goodness sake.

I have WinUAE, but it just is not the same to me as using an actual Amiga.

Any thoughts?

[bjjones37]

I was hoping for an experienced opinion, and I guess I got one.  Just not in the arena I was hoping for.

[bjjones37]

Thanks for all the feedback. I'm sold.  So can you recommend a vendor or is ebay the way to go?

[bjjones37]

What country are you in?

I am in the US.  I looked at amigakit, but they seemed to be out of stock as far as I could tell.  And they only seemed to sell PAL systems.  Will PAL even work in the US?  If they do have something I can use, I would certainly be interested.

[bjjones37]

How much should I pay for a used (or new) Amiga 1200?

[bjjones37]

If you want a completely new A1200, you can buy one from Petro.

If I order one from petro, will I be able to get it with a USA power supply?

[bjjones37]

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.

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?

I am looking possible issues in both keyboard and power supply. Is there anything else that might not be compatible for use in the USA? Will the OS be in German, menus and such?

[bjjones37]

After all was said and done, I seemed to have ended up with an Amiga 3000.  It has a bad internal drive but it came with an external drive and has two scsi hard disks inside.  It has 2MB Chip RAM and 7.5MB Fast RAM.  
So can somebody tell me what I have ended up with?  What is it best for?  Is it a good hobby machine? Does it have good compatibility with most Amiga software? Can it play games?
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.

Of course the first thing I did was to cut off the battery that had already started to leak. I think I caught it in time.  Then I took it outside and blew all the dirt out of it.  Then I plugged it in ...  and prayed and fasted ... and turned it on with fingers, toes, and eyes crossed.  Amazingly, it came on.  So I am hopeful that I now have an Amiga that will last more than two months.

At long last I begin the pleasant journey of learning the Amiga OS.

[bjjones37]

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.  Then I was going to install Workbench 3.1.  Will it be compatible with Kickstart 2.04?  Do I have to put WB2.1 back on?

And finally, what is WHDLoad?

[bjjones37]

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.

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.

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?

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.