New to Amiga...some questions

[Moto]

Greetings Zildjian,

I had a lot of experience on Apple ][s back in the day as well.  Still love the Woz's craftsmanship.

To answer your question about the internal drive.  It is IDE, not SCSI.

For your original question, depending on how much you want to spend:

1) A used Amiga 500 with an external floppy drive.  This will allow you to play just about all of the original Amiga games (before the model 1200/600s came out).   All amiga games should run fine on an NTSC amiga.  You can use the A520 video adapter to output to a normal television.  The video jack on the 500 only outputs monochrome video so it's pretty useless.

2) A brand new Amiga 1200 - There is a company in the UK (Amigakit.com) that sells new "old stock" and they can even fit your 1200 with a hard drive, accelerator, flicker fixer and a ton of other things.  I'm actually having one built right now from them.  I'm like a kid at Christmas!   As other people have said, they are mostly compatible with older games.  I won't know for certain until I start putting my own collection through the paces once my A1200 gets here.  

-daniel

[Moto]

Careful - many televisions in NTSC land do not handle 50Hz (PAL). While you can force games/demos to run in NTSC, in many cases it screws the timing.

That's true about the NTSC timing being different.  All my friends and I had NTSC Amiga 500s running PAL games and I guess we just never knew any better about the timing being messed up.  The only noticeable difference was the bottom section of the game would be cut off.  It was all those Euro mega-demos that really made us mad because the music was not correctly sync'd to the graphics.  

On that note, the 1084 monitor flickers when I put the Amiga into PAL mode which is more annoying than playing the games with the bottom cut off.  And that's why I'm very anxious to try the Indivision scan doubler for the A500 when it gets released.

-daniel