Well, in 2008 something finally went wrong with my stocked to the max A2000. It killed the A2091 card and the very hard to find GURU-ROM that was on it. That was a key component to my system, cured the DMA problem with RAM transfers to my 68040 card. So when it went, I knew it would just be way too hard and expensive to track down another one. I upgraded to WinUAE on a fast Pentium CPU and I can get twice the work done in half the time (I am mainly an Amiga apps user not a gamer) so everything runs great. I keep real Amigas around though for the day I'll get the bug for nostalgic hardware.
But that's not the tramautic story - since I knew it was only a matter of time for that cobbled together jumble of hardware to fail. It was frustrating, but I was resigned to the fact it would happen.
The only semi-traumatic experience I had was one time when I was considering buying a used 68060 accelerator from someone in the US (I am in Canada). I wasn't sure it would work on my older revision A2000 motherboard, but the fellow Amigan was nice enough to ship it to me for testing.
I forgot to tell him two things:
1) DON'T use a courier for cross-border items (they charge import brokerage fees).
2) DON'T claim it at full value on the customs declaration form, instead, check it off as a gift of "sample of merchandise".
The package arrived at my house via UPS. I was not home and my wife signed for it.
There was a $50 cross border brokerage fee charged by UPS just for taking it across the border (the regular postal service doesn't charge this).
There was a $75 dollar Canada Customs import fee (based on the declared value of $500US for the hardware).
There was another $25 in shipping fees on top of that for various "services".
Total: $150 just to get it into the country, which my wife, unknowingly, paid in cash at the door on my behalf (so I owed her). If I had been there when it had arrived and been told I owed $150, I would have refused the package and just had it returned to sender.
It wasn't the sender's fault - as he didn't have much experience shipping to Canada. In fact - I think he's here on Amiga.org (hi!). Nice guy - he felt bad about it - and it's a funny story to laugh about now.
It turned out the accelerator had compatibility issues with my Amiga and I couldn't use it...so I also paid return shipping on top of that.
