New to Amiga

[yock1960]

Hi All,

  I'm totally new to Amiga. I wanted one when they came out but couldn't justify it financially, went from C64/C128 to PC's and even dabbled in Mac's for a couple of years in the late 90's early 00's. I recently have gotten re-interested in my Commodore roots and dug all of the stuff out of storage, hacked a Hummer/DTV for keyboard/disk drive use and last but not least, purchased an A500.

I immediately had to learn about the hardware because the thing didn't work. Fortunately some folks over on comp.sys.amiga.hardware helped me work through it and after putting a new Agnus chip in, it works great!

It's strictly a nostalgia thing, even though I never had one. I'll enjoy figuring it out and using it for some games and maybe I'll dabble in AmigaBasic a little.

I plan on expanding it a little from it's current 1MB, I missed out on a couple of recent auctions, but I see that Elbox still makes some expansion modules for the A500, the 2MB one not being terribly expensive. Any comments on Elbox?

Anyway...Happy Holidays everone!

[yock1960]

I've come across AMOS and Blitz, I guess my question is, are they useable without a HD?

As I mentioned at the start, I'd like to expand my memory enough to have my Workbench disk on a RAD drive so I don't have to keep flipping it in and out. I'm not sure that I'll ever get a HD for this thing, they just don't seem too common and as of yet I don't have an external floppy, but that's high on my 'want' list. But even if I have an external floppy and a RAD workbench, is it going to be too much of a pain to use either of these? Not to mention, are either going to work under WB 1.3?

I did invest in Cloanto's Amiga Explorer and while not blazing fast, it works (<10 min per disk; hey I remember 300 baud)!

I've got a lot of digging and learning to do, but it'll be fun!

Thanks for the welcome and comments everyone!