fragment wrote:
It depends what you are planning to do with it. Just old games or something more power demanding...
I second that. Its all about horses for courses, really. Your desire for a 'really nice' amiga is a bit ambiguous at the moment, so its probably best to fill in some blanks.
1) The 'classic' amiga. This encompasses all the original 680x0 systems. The true successor to the A500/+ line, the A1200 is highly expandable. It can take CPUs up to 68060 and PowerPC 603 (dual processor cards with a 68040 or 60 and a 603 were made). The 68060 running at 50-75 MHz is many times faster than the original A500's 68000.
You can shove the A1200 mainboard into a tower case, add a PCI busboard alongside your processor upgrade and fit PCI gfx cards, sound cards, network cards etc.
The A4000 is a similarly highly expandable machine. However (and this is a contentious issue for many) I feel the A1200 is a better machine in terms of reliability. I have never seen an A4K system that hasnt needed some repair work due to age, whereas even my 1993 vintage 1200 still works fine.
2) If you want more poke, there are 2 hardware successors to the classic line. They are the Pegasos and AmigaOne. Both are technically very similar, using PowerPC G3 and above processors, SDRam, AGP/PCI and using standard formfactor motherboards.
The Pegasos runs an amigaos clone called MorphOS which reportedly offers very good compatibility with both 680x0 and existing powerpc amiga software (I can't personally verify this since have never used it beyond a very early pre alpha version). The Pegasos is no longer manufactured (around 600 units were made), but the Pegasos-II will soon be availaible (AFAIK).
The AmigaOne is very similar architectuarlly. It is slated to run AmigaOS4, the offical successor to 3.x. There are several versions of the hardware available. Early versions had the CPU hardwired, but all the newer systems use a socket to allow different CPUs (ranging grom G3 400MHz to G4 933MHz or higher perhaps). The latest addition to the family is the A1 Lite which uses mini ATX (or was that mini ITX?) form factor for impressive dinkiness :-) It offers only limited expandibility using embedded graphics and so on, but at least the CPU is still upgradable.
OS4 isn't available yet and is still in the final stages of development. It is being demonstrated at various events currently, so it is reasonable to assume it wont be long before it is. The hardware runs Linux at the moment.
Both OS4 and MorphOS have incarnations that run on classic amigas kitted out with a PowerPC upgrade. That's currently limited to the A1200 (Using the BlizzardPPC) or the A4000 (Using CyberstormPPC). I'm pretty sure the A3000 can take the latter processor card also, but don't quote me on that :-)
3) AROS. This is an open source endeavour to recreate OS3.x for various platforms. NO prizes for guessing the x86 is at the most advanced stage of development. However, the developers involved seem hell bent on making it run on everything with a CPU in it...
4) UAE. Well, we've come almost full circle. UAE is a very mature emulation of the classic amiga. It is limited to running 680x0 code only, but thanks to JIT emulation techniques and the good price/performance ratio of PC hardware, WinUAE is capable of running at silly speeds compared to a real 680x0 amiga ;-)
Your only real problem is in choosing. Unfortunately, it seems many users have settled into camps on this issue. Whilst I personally find this rather sad, its only human nature I guess. No doubt my mentioning Pegasos and AmigaOne and AROS in the same post will result in some old points of contention being dredged up, but lets all try to be adult for once...
