Excellent, sounds like a great place, maybe I can pick up some cool stuff for my A2000 there.
I'm sure you can. The last time I visited his store there was tons of old Amiga stuff to rummage through and Ray can help you find just about anything. Ray and his store have lots of character, way more than any PC shop I've been to. Whenever I go in there I'm transported back 20 years in computing--back to when computer geeks were
real geeks and not just iPod/iBook toting wannabes. But I digress...
Anyway, I played around with my A2000 some more and this is what I found out, it says I have Kickstart version 37.175 and Workbench version 38.35. It also looks like I have a GVP G-Force 030, I don't know what any of that means, whether it's good, bad, or mediocre, but that's the only information I could come up with.
The
GVP G-Force 030 is an accelerator card. The A2000 came with a Motorola 68000 processor that clocked in at a blazing 7 Mhz. It also had about 1 MB of memory. The accelerator card you have sounds like it upgraded the processor to a 68030. These chips were several times faster than the 68000 at either 25 or 50 Mhz. The accelerator also may have additional memory and a math co-processor 68882 to speed up some math operations. To see if you have more memory, check the numbers at the top of the workbench screen when the Amiga boots up. There should be two numbers: "graphics mem" and "other mem". Usually graphics mem will be under 1 MB (i.e. 900,000 or something) and if you have any other mem then you probably have extra memory on the accelerator board. Other mem is also called "fast memory". It is faster than graphics mem (also called chip memory), but it cannot hold graphics...at least not data that is currently being displayed. It's similar to the difference between graphics card memory and system memory on a PC.
From the numbers you quoted, it sounds like you have Kickstart 2.04 and Workbench 2.1. Many A2000s shipped with this version. Check out
Workbench Nostalgia for more info on the different workbench versions.
To upgrade to a later workbench you will need to install new kickstart ROM chips. The latest ROMs are 3.1 and you have 2.04. Version 2 is not a bad OS for most things, but it really depends on what you want to do with your Amiga.
If you want the latest upgrades, then the latest OS you can run on the A2000 is OS 3.9. To use this, you'd need to get a CD-ROM drive, 3.1 ROMs, and an OS 3.9 CD. If you went this route then I'd suggest investing in a graphics card and more memory and possibly a faster accelerator board.
But if you want the latest OS for your system without adding a bunch of new hardware, then OS 3.1 is your best bet.
Doh! Argus beat me to it!
