Amiga horsetrading, how I ended up with my A2500 system

[save2600]

After thinking about all the time, money and frustration spent accumulating and getting things to work on a Legacy system, I thought I'd share my experiences. Be neat to see what others have done and spent getting their systems where they are now. Don't get me wrong. It's all been "worth" it on many levels. Especially the education or at least, awareness side of all this.

This scenario is nothing new to many of us, but I'd consider the example below a typical horsetrading scenario and a way to get Amiga stuff closer to ‘down to earth’ prices. It shows what I paid and what I sold stuff for:

A2500 came with Multistart and 1.3/2.04 roms, A2091 6.6 roms & zero ram, GVP 030 Accelerator w/ 1mb RAM, Dataflyer 4mb Zorro II, SupraRam 2mb - all for $50 (guy just let me have a couple of his old systems for the price of shipping). Knowing I was going to soup this thing up, I sold the multistart w/ 2.04 for $30, Kickstart 1.3 rom for $10, bought 7.0 roms for the 2091 for $20 and paid $20 for 2mb ram for it. Bought 8mb ram for GVP 030 $80, $10 for 4.15 SCSI chip and then sold the complete card for $190. Also sold the Dataflyer for $40 and SupraRam for $30. This Amiga, up until now, ended up costing  me -$120  :-)

Microway FF/SD - $100, ended up selling for $85 because it could not properly handle PAL images.

Bizzard 2060 - $470
Picasso II w/ 1mb ram - $110, paid another $30 to upgrade to 2mb ram
X-surf - $113, sold for $109 after I got Deneb
Deneb - $170
USB Ethernet - $7
DKB MegaChip - $80
Flashdrives - $30
NEC SCSI CD-ROM (from Doomy!! lol) - $20

Estimated total money invested to use this particular Amiga with 1980’s-2000’s technology: $817 and I still don’t have a modern sound card  :-(  If I would not have gotten such a good deal on the A2500 initially, this thing would have easily ended up costing me over $1k  :-D

PLUS.... ongoing Nioxin and Rogaine expenses from hairloss due to trying to get all this junk to work with each other is not cheap!  lol

[save2600]

Nostalgiac wrote:
the bit were you say selling x-pert and buying deneb (and presumably a usb/ethernet stick ? ) sounds very attractive. Maybe I should do same ...

Tom UK

Yes, and thanks for pointing this out. I edited the post to reflect that purchase. There may be some misc. expenses here I might have missed, but it's pretty darn accurate. I already had on hand some pieces, such as HD's and other ancillary gear.  

BTW: Before selling the X-Surf, I did a test comprised of visiting a few common sites, such as this one and downloading stuff off Aminet. If I noticed any difference at all when browsing, I would say the Deneb/USB Ethernet combo was a tad faster and A LOT faster when downloading.

[save2600]

Neat "free boat" story  :-)

I suppose this kind of thing goes on with autos too. Especially freebies within family members. You learn early on to NEVER sell or give away a car to a family member... no matter how "desperate" they may be... LOL!