@scumble
Hi,
As for those GVP cards, I think you'd be able to find one easily. I have three Impact Series II at home myself (although admittedly two of them are just the cards without the casing). Keep an eye on ebay as the previous poster suggested, or put a Wanted ad in the classified section here or at
AmibenchAs for picking up an A1200, that's up to you, and perhaps depends on what you wanna use the 'puter for. I regret buying the A1200s I have in some ways, as its far easier to get carried away upgrading them and spending a fortune before you know it!
In a lot of ways, I think the A500 is the best machine Commodore made - spares are ten a penny, loads of different expansions, extremely advanced for its time. The only problem being that it doesn't have the graphics capabilities the AGA machines (A1200 and A4000) have, and can be quite limited by the amount of RAM you can add (usually not more than about 9,10 MB total). Also accelerators for the A500 are few and far between, and in my experience, when you DO see them on ebay or whatever they fetch quite a price.
Sorry, went off rambling there. If you just want to use your A500+ again, then look out on ebay for a GVP Impact Series II controller. If you want to get into the Amiga properly as a hobby, buy yourself an A1200, but beware you may find yourself towering it, buying accelerators, SCSI interfaces, hard drives, CD drives, sound cards, graphics cards... and then of course all this for a machine that is in effect years out of date :-(
Oh, and have a look here to see what's available:
www.amiga-hardware.com
