I reckon going for the best I can for around the 2 grand mark should do the trick, just needed a bit of advice and info from folk before buying such a beast.
Hi,
For two grand you could buy one hello of a computer in the PC market. In the MAC market you would probably have to add another 1000 to get half the power of an A500.
Anyhow, enough of the MAC jokes because MACs are a joke. Lets discuss why I use Cloanto's Amiga forever and Amikit. I basically use it because I know that the original Amiga hardware is getting scarce, if something goes bad in my Amiga 4000 or my A1200, it would be hard to find a place to fix them. So I use them when I want to update my data for my disk files, insurance photos and data, my pictures and home videos. I use the emulator when I want to try programming, play games or just experiment. You will find that the emulator works super fast with a quadcore intel PC, and it works just about as good on my AMD 3700+ PC (although it gets strangled on megaball when it hits a lot of blocks and skips on the sound during this time.
Now lets look at the cost advantage, $39 or $49 for Cloanto Amiga forever, I just received an Amiga video to VGA adapter and a PCMIA port for an Amiga 1200 that just about cost that much. How about a USB port for an Amiga, $105 for one for an A1200, and $150 for one for an A4000, comes free on most modern day PC's.
OK, now are you going to buy a system, or build a system, I use Tiger Direct at
http://www.tigerdirect.com to buy most of my computer needs and I build most of my computers, I find it a lot cheaper that way and get the most bang for my buck, when building a computer don't skimp to much on the graphics card, you will be sorry if you do.
My 6 year old AMD 3700+ and ASUS motherboard, with 2 gigs of memory, and 80 gig ide hard drive, with an AGP Sapphire ATI Radeon 3850 is still hanging in there and it plays most modern day PC games, and emulates the Amiga quite well, Cloanto's Amiga Forever 2010 just about does anything that any Amiga /CDTV / CD32 will do and by doing this you are saving your Amiga Hardware.
Anyhow have fun, don't be like the rest of these tightwads that use an old 486 machine and expect it to do huge things, it just ain't going to happen.
Have fun looking, if you have any questions about building your own, just ask.
If you buy a MAC sorry can't help, I would rather use my A500, or better yet my emulator.
On my Quadcore 6600, with my ATI Radeon 5750, and 4 gig of ram, Amiga Forever screams, sometimes when playing megaball, you really have to keep on your game.
smerf
