Hey! My name's Dowell, i'm a student at boarding school in England. I've allways been interested in computers, but have never really got into programming as much as I'd want to. I'm currently running on a iBook 700 on 10.3, and I hate it (as much as I love it). It's a prototype model, and after about 3 hours of standard use the GPU fan kicks in, clicking against something and annoying the hell out of everyone nearby.
I first got into computing on my grandfather's Atari ST back in the early 90's (i'm 16 now, and i realise that must sound like blasphamy around here :\ plz forgive!). When my sis broke that I was computerless until 1996 when as a family we got a hideous Compaq P1 266, and I first witnessed quake. After about 2 years that thing fell apart and I got my own 486 pos, which I ran win 98 on to start with, playing doom, and quake (at 1 frame a second). I then remembered there were other systems out there, and a friend introduced me to Linux, I became a opensource cowboy, through this computer and a celeron 488 (which i dual booted to run quake 2/3). Until 2002 when I got my iBook.
After 4 expensive repairs to this machine supposedly made out of bullet proof glass I've had enough. I've been interested in the 'retro' neiche for a long time now (I have a NES, an Atari ST (which never worked, i got it off a skip :\), 2 super nintendo's for some reason, and a sega master system) and now I realise I don't need fancy, shiny, white, sexy *shakes head around* modern computers, and all i want is a machine i can develop for, play quake 1 on, do my homework on, read news and email, do irc, web, do graphics, and telnet to MUCK/MUDS, which is reliable and most importantly has a small neiche fanbase of commited fanatics ^.^.
Soooo, I want an Amiga :3. I considered going back to the ST, but after emulating it for a while I realised that it was nothing in comparison. I was wondering... where to start?
As I said, I'd like a machine with a fast enough GPU/CPU to run Quake, an ethernet card, CD/Floppy drives and something i've lost since my 486, a scanner and printer, and software to do sprite based graphics (i'm starting to do games dev for the Nintendo DS :3) like a photoshop clone or something, a word processor, Quake, a newsreader/mail client, a web browser, an irc client, a telnet client and a simple text editor for coding etc.. (oh and is there Java on the amega?).
How much would this set me back (I may consider selling my iBook if it's too much)? Where would I get it from? And sorry for asking so many questions... I hope I made them specific enough ^.^;;;;.
Thank you very much if you've read this far, I'm going to do some more research now (I wanted to get my queries in first, so I get the information faster :3). And I can't wait to get involved in the community.
-Peaceout-macbunny-Dowell-xx
(EDIT: And I think I am looking for classic amiga kit rather than the AmigaOne stuff, but convince me if you feel like it, I have no clue).
