Trip6,
I was in the same boat as you. Looking to pimp an A500. I had been an Avid amiga user until 2001, I actually used it day to day in a legitimate business alongside macs and PC.s (I was a Flyer user)
I had used higher end Amigas, 4000, 4000T, 3000T, etc and even bought an A1200 when they were being sold for like $179 from Amiga Inc after seeing it on TECH TV.
It's become soooo hard to find reasonably priced Amiga hardware...
In the end I purchased a MacIntel Laptop, an external IDE drive and copied my A4000T flyer drive to the IDE drive that had 15 years of software accumulated onto it.
Got a PC off of craigslist, intalled media center XP 05 and Amigakit, Sys3 and attached the external IDE amiga usb drive to have access to like 95% of all my sofware.
The speed of this emualtion is uncanny. I had the CSPPC 060 back in the day WITH the CVPPC graphics . A throw away PC pentium PC emualting the amiga seems to match/exceed this setup in most all my needs (except PPC native code).
But I can quake on my Dreamcast was better than the Amiga version.
It's no longer viable to seek out high priced Amiga hardware with such good emulation out there.
IF YOU MUST
Scour Craiglsits and the local papers. I was able to get a NEW Amiga 1200 with all the fixins (non yellow, cpu card, ram, gobs of disks) for $35.
A real amiga for A500 games with a PC running UAE for HIGH END CPU work makes the most sense. I've exhauseted way too many hours on this.
We've all got the Amiga bug. So I'm still here and the Amiga 1200 is probalby the best deal. You get enough modern Amenities, the IDE CF card and PCMCIA memory card adapters make this such a great system. I can download stuff on my PC painlessly go back and forth. AGA, 256 color WB and software scan doubling, make it live on the edge of usability with modern hardware.
