Your new Amiga - what peripherals came first?

[X-ray]

My peripherals have been 'adopted' by subsequent Amigas.

1) First got an Amiga 500, followed by a RAM expansion, followed by an external floppy.

2) Had an A600 for two weeks, ditched that, got a B2000. Then got a Canon BJ230 A3 bubblejet.

3) Got an A1200. Still had the printer and external floppy. First upgrade: a Microbotics 030 and a 68882 FPU. Then a Squirrel SCSI and an external 1gb SCSI drive. Finally (after years of TV use) I got a second-hand Philips monitor for the A1200.

4) Big sell. Sold it all, except the external SCSI drive and some joysticks and software, and the printer (still got it).

5) Got the A4000T and M1438s monitor and lots of upgrades:

Cyberstorm MK II 060
Lola 2000 Genlock
Vidi 24 RT Pro digitizer
Technosound Turbo II audio digitizer
CD-Rewriter (that went into an external case)
External SCSI Zip 100
CyberSCSI module for MKII

And finally, recently, I got the Big Three:

DKB3128 (128mb on it now)
PIV (with Concierto and Paloma)
PPC card (604e/233, 060)

and spares:

030 CPU card for testing
AT PSU (new old stock, bought for £6)
A2000 Keyboard

My next purchases:

Spare floppy (HD preferred)
Mouse adapter (so I can use PC mouse from early-startup)
Pablo card (if I can find it, for PIV)
PPC Cybervision (as a spare GFX card, if it comes up reasonable price)

I also want to design a brand-new case, because mine is dented, has a few scratches underneath, and the bezel is yellowed. Also, the A4000T is not a nice case to open and is very heavy. I'm sure I can design a better one and just get the backplane laser cut to my specs.

[Brian]

I bought a brand new A600 with 40Mb HD. First I bought a joystick. Not that long after I got a second joystick and an external diskdrive and soon after that I bought a memory upgrade to 2Mb Chip for it aswell.

Next I got an A1200 second hand with a modem and a printer and it's first uppgrade was a PCMCIA CDRom. That was followed up by an order of a Blizzard1230 Rev3 with 8Mb memory and a 200W PSU specialy made for Amiga. I had to sit with that for a while and be happy, but HD space became a problem (120Mb isn't much even if it seemed like that compared to the 40Mb on the A600) and so I bought the biggest HD I could buy for money witch was a Quantum Fireball 3.2Gb drive for about 500$ (I belive the 4.3Gb HD was advertised the month after my purchase or something but still 3.2Gb would be the last HD purchase I would need... I thought at the time... most PC's I came by didn't even break the 1Gb back then). In the mix of all this my 28" TV died and I bought a very expencive Panasonic 14" monitor with Scart connector so I could get better picture... little did I know a decent Amiga monitor would've cost less and would've produced a better picture.

[HopperJF]

When I got my first AMIGA computer the first peripheral I remember buying was an external high density disk drive. Worked wonders with DCopy  :-)

[dkovacs]

Amiga 600 (Feb 1993)

- 1MB Ram Expansion
- Golden Image Hand Scanner
- 120MB Hard drive
- SquirrelSCSI interface and CD-ROM drive
- Golden Image (?) external floppy drive 880K

Amiga 1200 (Jan 1995)

- Moved HD and SCSI from A600
- DKB1202 + 4MB Ram
- 28.8kbps external modem (Zoom)
- IOmega Zip SCSI
- FPU for DKB 1202 (40Mhz ?)
- DCTV

Now:

- AMD Athlon XP 2200+ 1.9Ghz 256MB Ram running WinUAE

Dan

[Hyperspeed]

Wow, nice upgrades!

My upgrade path was a lot slower but I suppose it gave me time to get
the most out of every last byte of memory and disk space. It's a good
discipline to have less and make the most of it - an Amiga tradition!

I wish I got a monitor the same day as my A1200, I had to use a 25"
telly for a few years, then got a PC SVGA NEC Multisync 3D (hey they
seem a popular monitor for scandoubler users!)

The Dataflyer would be an interesting bit of kit for CD32 owners if
they had an SX32 since it would allow them to use SCSI scanners, CD
burners and flash card readers!

miksuh: Do you still have your IBM `DeathStar'? They have a bit of a bad rep!

Chunder: I meant it goes against the grain and doesn't feel quite
right!  ;-)  Ripping the shielding off, stuffing the motherboard in a
tower (at an extra £100+) then getting a Zorro busboard and keyboard
etc. It's not the sort of thing your average Amiga owner wanted to do
back in the mid 90's.

:-D

Turambar: The best Amiga mouse was the Wizard 3-button (560dpi) mice
in black and vanilla - very accurate, great microswitches and the
middle button could be assigned to shift or used in Quake to run/jump.
I still think the CD32 pad is the best you can get for Amiga, not sure
about joysticks but 'The Bug' was a little too wobbly for me.

X-Ray: The A4000T would be most peoples' dream upgrade...

;-)    ;-)

[X-ray]

@ Hyperspeed

Yup, I was in a state of near-arousal when I first opened up the A4000T box back in 1996. I was also excited about having the 1438s multisynch monitor.

And I have to agree about the Wizard mouse. I have had mine since 1996 and it is excellent. The middle button could also do something in Brilliance (swap between main and buffer?) IIRC.

[Bezzen]

For my 1200HD the first thing I got was a multisync monitor. A Datic. It's still my backup monitor in case the one for my PC stops functioning (it is showing those signs at the moment).

The next thing was a Blizzard 68030 with 16 Mb of RAM. Quite expensive back in those days.

* A Turbosound sampler than I never really used.

* A very expensive HP printer (it was completely crap and dropped from HP's range a couple of months later). The print head collected dust and you had to clean the head after every single page if you didn't want to get ink dragged across the page. Directly after a clean it did print some rather awesome colour photos though. I've never had any luck with inkjet printers so now I've got a really cheap Minolta PagePro 1200W laser printer (no coulour). It works like a charm and has extremly low running costs.

* A Squirrel SCSI with 4x-speed CD-ROM (the CD-ROM unfortunately died after two years)

* A SCSI Zip drive to work as an extra (and replaceable) hard drive.

[Hyperspeed]

I got a printer before I got an accelerator. Graphics were my joy so I
got a Canon BJC 600 which was £600 GBP at the time.

I could have bought a Blizzard 1260 for that back then!

:-D

I remember the BJC600 was a delight to use but there was no TurboPrint
back then so I made do with the Workbench drivers. It was wonderfully
quiet compared to an Epson and had 4 replaceable colour carts in a
frosted plastic so you could see how full they were in the blink of an
eye.

They were 50% sponge, 50% liquid unlike an Epson cart which is 100%
sponge in terms of volume.

360dpi was a breakthrough back then, especially when the latest craze
was the Citizen ABC 24-pin dot matrix.

Another of my early purchases was a Squirrel with a Reno-CD drive (the
one that snapped in half and doubled as a discman!). It was too noisy
to be a discman and too slow to be a CD-ROM drive - crashed a lot too.

Eventually I decided I needed a SCSI-IV and a PC case to house the
drives.

[swift240]

Well my first Amiga was an A600, shortly after I got a 512K expansion ram module (They sold it to me as a 1MB could not take it back as the shop closed down)  Then it was a second floppy drive unit.  Made a scart lead for the TV so I got RGB instead of the normal PAL.  

 :-)

[Robert17]

Well my First amiga upgrade I ever bought was a Blizzard 1230IV  :-)

[MrZammler]

I got my A500 and a 1084S at the same time.

Added a 512k memory expansion, just to experience kick off better ;-) (AFAIR it had some extra sounds with more than the stock 512k mem). Plus I could now hear the wind when ejecting in Interceptor.

Edit: Forgot the Star LC24-10 printer ;-)

Then I got an external floppy, a sound sampler, and a new internal keyboard since my brother smashed the num key enter button by accident.... ;-)

[blakespot]

My first Amiga was the first Amiga 1000 sold in the state of Virginia, USA.  I got it and a 1080 monitor in October 1985 from a local dealer.  Within 2 weeks I went back to the store with my mom (I was 13 at the time) to get a 2nd 3.5" drive and ended up also getting the front-bay 256K mem expander.


blakespot