real amiga vs winuae

[danybebe]

Hi all.

I want to assemble a working amiga that is actually usable, and is not too
difficult to use (I want my kids to be able to load games too), but  I've
never actually owned or used an amiga in the past until now (but ZX Spectrum, c64s and 128), so I'll have to learn how to use it well (I don't think is too difficult).

- I own an Amiga 1000 and an Amiga 3000, they both work fine (I
personally tested them, I can boot workbench and some games), have a 1084 monitor, joysticks and mouse, these are complete computer (with a couple of external floppy drives), and I have tons of floppies and many brand new blank floppies.

The problem is that they don't have a hard drive, and I have no idea
of how much memory they have installed (I can check) and  I noticed
how long do programs and games take to load.. How do I install a hard
drive o sd memory or cd reader in these things?

My other option is to just use an old PC computer (an amd atlhon 2200)
runing Winuae, and live with it (without having to actually put the
real Amigas to work) and a couple of joysticks. And why not, it can
run MAME too.

I'd like to listen about what do you think I should do, use the 1000,
3000 or the pc with winuae.

Thanks in advance.


Daniel
Drumheller, ab, Canada

[danybebe]

Hi, thanks to all, I'm definitely going to try just the pc with Winuae, I think is going to be enough for my usage, and later I'll see. Anyway, I love to tinker with the hard, so I'd love to actually put one of them to work, but I'm afraid I'm going to go bankrupt doing that. :-)

Anyway, I did a mistake, today I took a look again to my collection (I have a lot of stuff stored for the last years, so much in fact I couldn't remember everything) and I found out the Amiga 3000 is not a 3000, but a 2000, and I found out I have other 2 amigas 500, so the complete list of what I have is a Amigas 2000, 1000 and 2 500s, none with hard drive (and 1 powers up but do strange things or crash in less than a minute, many be has damaged memory?).

I see the Amiga 2000 have ISA slots, can I install a pc IDE card on them?

Is any of this worth of installing a hard drive or putting back to life?

[danybebe]

Even for AGA games it might be better to just use a real Amiga if you want to connect to a TV. That said I haven't followed up lastes developments on WinUAE, I remember there was some tweaks it made to the gfx (antialiasing etc.) that real Amigas didn't, that might make the output more acceptable on a high resolution screen.

What are you talking about? The monitor of the pc I'm going to put the Amiga emulator is at 37" LCD TV (using HDMI, DVI or VGA) so I think the emulator is so much better and flexible that the real thing.