Getting an amiga...

[commodorejohn]

I'll put in a good word for the 3000. While it doesn't have the AGA chipset, it's a nice machine otherwise: compact but durable, easily exandable (with the faster Z3 bus,) and not nearly as sought-after as the 4000 (which means you can get it cheaper.) I got mine a couple months ago, and I'm already loving it.

1200's probably the nicest games machine, but the downside is that, like the other keyboard Amigas, it's a lot more of a pain to expand.

[commodorejohn]

He had to pick from an A500 or 600, A1200, or an A2000 with Video Toaster.  A3000 wasn't one of the choices.

Ah, my bad. In that case I'd say either the 500 or the 1200, but probably the latter. I wouldn't go for the 600 - I hear they're a real pain to upgrade. The 2000's not bad, but it's an absolute tank of a machine, especially as compared to the keyboard models.

[commodorejohn]

It depends on what you want to write and how much time you have. High level languages allow you to write software quicker at the expense of execution speed. However if the CPU isn't the bottlekneck or the code is executed rarely then the overhead of coding in assembly isn't worthwhile.

This is true generally, but really 68k assembly is halfway to being a high-level language already - I'd just stick with it, myself.