Another Newbie to the Amiga experience

[commodorejohn]

Hey! Always good to see another Amiga user in the USA...so many of the folks here seem to be across the pond, so it's nice to have a little balance amiga.resource.cx is your best friend when it comes to upgrade information. In this case, it looks like the primary differences between the 2090 and the 2091 are that the 2090 also supports Shugart-standard hard disks (not very useful in this day and age, but there you go,) but does not support booting from the hard disk (very not useful.) The 2091 can auto-boot, and also supports XT-IDE disks, for what that's worth (another format nobody uses anymore except us vintage computer enthusiasts.)

The 2091 is most likely your better option, but I do have a GVP Impact SCSI controller that you can have for the cost of shipping. It's nothing fancy, but it does work and supports auto-boot. (As for software, auto-boot requires Kickstart 1.3 or newer - I have a spare KS1.3 ROM too, I believe.)

[commodorejohn]

I know of at least one other Amiga user in Texas, but I don't know how common Amiga stuff is down there. You can check thrift stores, but a lot of them are, unfortunately, not carrying computers anymore, since they don't usually distinguish between older machines with an active hobbyist community and plain old junker PCs (and you can imagine how many of those would get dumped there.) A better place to look would be your local recycling center; usually they'll let you have what you find there for less than or equal to its scrap value, and sometimes the sorters will even keep an eye out for stuff for you, if you ask nicely Finally, if you have a local county newspaper, sometimes they'll let residents put in free classified ads - this is a great way to locate systems that would otherwise be thrown out to make room in someone's attic.

[commodorejohn]

The AmigaDOS shell is kind of a weird hybrid of MS-DOS and Unix, commands-wise, but it's mostly similar to DOS. There's a reference here.