Advice for a newbie?

[James1095]

IMHO if you want to play Quake, just get a modern-ish PC, it's going to be a lot cheaper and provide a much better experience. If you want the really authentic retro PC gaming setup look for something like a Pentium-200 with a Voodoo2 card and a 19" CRT, that was my dream system back in the day. The charm of the Amiga is all the awesome classic games, most written for the A500 but they'll run on the other models too. Personally I'm a huge fan of CRT monitors, the classic stuff just looks wrong on a modern LCD but CRTs are getting hard to find.

Something you might consider if you're on a budget is something like the MIST FPGA based retro computer or other similar platforms that support the Minimig core. It's pretty reasonably priced compared to a real Amiga, under $250 I think and it's all brand new hardware so there's no messing around with vintage stuff in unknown condition. I personally like tinkering with old hardware but it's not for everyone and it tends to not be cheap.

[James1095]

I'll still get to try it out before getting it recapped :3

How much does it cost to get an amiga 1200 recapped? o:

And is it a widespread problem amongst amiga computers?

It's a widespread problem amongst virtually all electronic equipment of a certain age, especially anything with surface mount electrolytic capacitors. Late 80s-early 90s Macs are full of them, I've re-capped dozens of those. SMT electrolytic capacitors and memory backup batteries are ticking time bombs that have destroyed countless vintage machines. They leak and eat the traces off the boards.

[James1095]

My personal opinion is that the Amigas are best enjoyed in something resembling stock form. Most of the classic games were written with the stock A500 in mind and do not benefit from hopped up systems. Even the most drastically upgraded classic Amiga is still extremely slow compared to a low end modern PC.

[James1095]

Yes but only because modern web pages keep 'moving the goal posts' defining how fast a computer should be. It's pothetic. Joe Public keeps on replacing their computers just so that advertisers can feed them more intricate CPU draining crap.

Sorry, that was a bit off topic. As for Amigas, I find all Amigas that have a hard drive and some Fast RAM to be enjoyable to use.

I agree there, but for surfing the web the architecture and operating system are largely irrelevant. Wintel, MacOS, Linux PC, Linux on something like a Raspberry Pi, it's all essentially the same experience, Web surfing and email don't make use of any of the uniqueness offered by the Amiga.