I'm New Here and to Amiga - Please Help...

[TDude2K]

Hey all! I'm new here and to Amiga. I've never operated an Amiga or played with an emulator, but I've often heard about how good the Amiga is. I've been a Mac user since 1999, but have been an Apple fan since I was 1987 when I was 5 years old. I've also dabbled with PC's. I like the Classic Mac OS, but don't care much for OS X, User Interface wise. I was wondering about the Amiga for a possible future platform change. Could someone explain to me where Amiga stands today as opposed to back then. I'm a complete newbie here. I've heard a lot of times how good the Amiga is.

It's been a heck of a year for me. My Dad was diagnosed with both bladder and prostate cancer earlier this year and he's been through numerous radiation treatments, but his prognosis looks good. I've been helping him out with his medical bills (what Medicare won't pay). I face a choice I'm afraid of whether I should stick with the Mac or move to the Amiga. I was wondering if anyone here had an Amiga of any kind they don't need anymore that I could kind of toy around with to get an idea of what the Amiga is like? I can't afford anything right now because of helping my Dad with his medical bills. I do have 2 Mac CD's with TONS of old Mac apps, old Mac games and system software as well as the updates for them dating back to the original Mac that a friend burned for me a few years back that I would gladly trade for an Amiga. That's all I have to offer now though. :-(

Either way, I'd like to learn about the Amiga. Is the Amiga up to date enough to completely replace using a PC or Mac? Any tips and tricks about the Amiga world? I'd like to know whatever anyone wants to tell me. :-)

My name is Tommy. Thanks for having me here. :-)

Take care,
Tommy

[Matt_H]

Hello, and welcome.

You've made an excellent choice to look into the Amiga. Truth be told, though, getting into the Amiga as a non-hobby machine right now is a bit difficult. Hardware is fairly difficult to come by, expensive, and will usually require a bit of user-maintainance to get operating nicely.

Things to be aware of:
-clock batteries in older Amigas may be leaking; this can damage the motherboard so make sure the battery is removed or recently replaced before committing to a purchase
-if you're intending the Amiga as a full PC/Mac replacement, you'll definitely need 3.1 ROMs, at least a 68040 processor, 32MB of RAM, ethernet card, and a retargetable graphics card (the Picasso and Cybervision line are quite good)
-Only the Amiga 3000 can be directly connected to a standard PC monitor. Others will require a television & 520 adaptor, Amiga monitor, or scandoubler.
-Hard drives larger than 4GB are a bit fussy. You'll need some software patches to get them working properly. AmigaOS3.9 deals with this transparently, and is highly recommended if you're new to the platform.
-Aminet is your friend for software
-The Amiga is severely lacking in up-to-date web browsing software, and is rather weak in Wordprocessing and spreadsheet programs. Presentation software and DTP software is very good on the Amiga.
-The Amiga doesn't handle modern media formats very well.
-90% of Amiga support is community-based. We don't have much commercial help these days.

I do think you'll be a little disappointed switching completely to the Amiga, compared to what you're probably used to as an OSX user. I've used one since I was a kid and I can't bear to switch to something else because I love its interface, system structure, responsiveness, and manual control capabilities. It is my primary machine, but I find that there are things I can't do. I'd strongly suggest buying Amiga Forever and setting up an emulation environment on your Mac. It's a good way to try out the system to see if you like it, with a very minimal investment.

Again, welcome. Best of luck in these troubling times with your medical expenses. Feel free to ask if you need any more info.

[SuperTurbo]

If you get an OS 3.9 CD and the 3.1 kickstart and have a PC compatible computrer,
you should try downloading amikit: http://amikit.amiga.sk/
Its a complete package for Workbench containing some of the
best free apps availble. It looks great and is very easy to
use...

[motorollin]

Hi Tommy, always good to hear people showing interest in the Amiga platform. AmigaOS is a very flexible operating system and is also very stable, as is MacOS 9. You may find that the Amiga is a bit more active now that MacOS 9 is being abandoned in favour of OSX. I don't know for sure as I don't use OS9.

Sorry to hear about your father, and your financial problems. If you can borrow an Amiga to try out, then great, but in the mean time why not think about using an emulator? This will allow you to try out the operating system first without committing to buying any hardware.

--
moto

[chris]

Hi Tommy

If you want to know a bit more about the Amiga's OS, a good place to start is Hyperion's AmigaOS 4.0 website - especially look at the Amiga@20 section, as most of what you see there is also present in older versions.

If you are getting into the Amiga as a replacement for a Mac, you ideally need to get one that can run OS4.  That means an A4000 or A1200 with a PPC board, an AmigaOne or the Troika board.  None of these will be particulary easy to get hold of or cheap, the Troika is due out by the end of the year.

An alternative is the Pegasos board which runs MorphOS (an AmigaOS compatible, based on v3.1).  I'll leave others to discuss the relative merits of these.

Most new software tends to be written for OS4 and/or MorphOS.  Older software written for 68k machines has a good level of compatibility with both.

Both the AmigaOne and the Pegasos can also run Linux and MacOS via MacOnLinux - so if you want to slowly migrate across to the Amiga this may be an option, without losing any software you currently use before Amiga replacements turn up.

Chris

[X-ray]

Allo Tommy

Hi and welcome to Amiga.org. Sorry to hear of your father's medical situation but at least if they are treating him locally with radiation that is a good sign, especially if they have implanted 'seeds' in the prostate gland.

Anyway, as regards the Amiga, I must tell it to you straight: no Amiga can replace your PC or MAC unless you are prepared to spend a lot of money. That is the bottom line about buying hardware, even 'old' Amiga hardware. And even if you did pay for quite a fast Amiga, you would definitely lose out on some applications that simply aren't available on the Amiga. In my case those applications are Poser, DESLock and certain scanning/graphics software.

What I would recommend is this (because Amigas are fun and you should definitely have a look at them):

1) Try an emulator first, as some users here have suggested. That will give you some familiarity with how the Amiga works.

2) Look for a plain Amiga 1200. I reckon that you can get an Amiga 1200 secondhand for a reasonable price. It is the accelerator cards and the 'bigger' machines such as the Amiga 3000 and the Amiga 4000 that cost quite a lot. But a 1200 you should be able to get if you keep an eye out on Ebay for a good deal (or maybe a user here sells his). You can upgrade that 1200 in your own time, eventually it can be transplanted into a tower case, with a fast accelerator board, graphics card, network card, perhaps even PCI cards. The A1200 is the cheapest classic Amiga you can buy that has the expansion potential to replace a PC or MAC (for general computing)

Or, you could stick with the emulator and save up for a fully-kitted out A4000 or even try a Pegasos or A1. These options are more expensive than a standard A1200.

[xaccrocheur]

Tommy, your social life ends here. :-P

Run, run for your life !

PS - Welcome, man.  :-D

[nasty]

Hi TDude2K and welcome

Firstly I'm sorry to hear about your fathers problems and the money problems, I myself suffer from Serous health problems and know what a hassle it is to try and get some sort of support from the goverment and the medical world.
But to be honest with you, if you are looking for a computer that can do everyday things and wont cost the earth. I would recommed a PC granded there not an Amiga but what they have in there favor is there cheap, well cheaper atleast so if you can get ahold of a PC then get yourself Amiga4ever and it will give you some insight to the higher spec amigas. then you'll have a computer that lets you do almost everything you want and you will also be able to use the amiga emulator to play amiga games/apps etc. As whats been pointed out above building an higher spec amiga system will take alot of money and more important it will take longer to build (trying to get hold of the parts, but it depends on what you want to do on the amiga)So I would say to go for a PC and emulator first :-D and then if you like the amiga setup on the emulator then buy a second hand A500,A600,A1200 and so on, off ebay/amibench just to get you into the real amiga :-)

well thats my two pennys :roll:

[dammy]

Sorry to hear about your family medicle problems.  As far as Amiga and it's different incarnations, the one thing that has yet to be brought up as a alternative is AROS that can run on just about any cheap x86.  Even an old 233 MHz system feels snappy with AROS.  There will be a major distro released called AROS-Max sometime before Xmas that has significant improvements to floppy, file system and GTK<->Zune(MUI clone) wrapper.

Dammy
TeamAROS

[motorollin]

FYI - ArosMAX has already been released.

http://www.aros-max.co.uk/

--EDIT
Oh I notice you're on the Aros dev team, so I guess you already know that  :-)

[dammy]

I'm not a Dev, but I was referring to the next major release which will be AROS-Max 0.5.0.  That's being slated for pre-Xmas with the floppy controller rewrite (thanks to Ogun), SFS as default file system and hopefully the GTK2<->Zune wrapper as well alot of smaller bug fixes and improvements.

Dammy

[motorollin]

Oh ok. Think I'll have to get an x86 emulator up and running on my iBook again  :-)

--
moto

[roguebeck]

If you watch ebay and can save up a bit, you can get a stock Amiga 500 pretty reasonably. I'd have to say my A500 is still my favorite even though I have a big beefy 3000 right here on my desk.

[TDude2K]

I want to thank everyone for welcoming me and for the suggestions. At current, I can't afford anything right now. I may try an emulator. The main reason I thought about jumping to the Amiga platform is because although I do like Apple, and always have since I was 5 in 1987, I just think that OS X is a step backwards when it comes to User Interface. The Classic Mac OS to me was simple, refined, maybe not perfect, but it didn't add in all that cutesy crap and bog down. I miss the Application menu in the right hand corner, the REAL Apple menu and I hate the Dock. I know there are haxies that will get you this stuff and that you turn the Dock off, but adding haxies makes the OS somewhat less stable.

I know that the Amiga is not what it used to be as far as popularity, but I'm no stranger to limitations. It's actually a challenge to me. The Amiga world is confusing though. I'm hearing of a lot of variations of the AmigaOS such as 4.0, Morph, AROS, etc. What is the difference between them? Which do all of you like better?

The trade offer for the Mac CD's is still available if anyone has any old Amiga laying around they don't need anymore. That's all I can offer at the moment. I really want to learn about the Amiga OS. The Amiga OS just seems like it's modern enough, yet it's not overloaded with cute aqua crap. Am I wrong?

Thanks everyone for everything. :-)

Take care,
Tommy

[motorollin]

You are right about AmigaOS being less bloated than OSX. It can be as simple or as complex as you want.

As for the variations of the OS, here is a quick rundown:

AmigaOS 3.x
Runs on "classic" Amigas (most likely what you will be interested in).
Runs the majority of Amiga applications and games.
Will only run on older Amiga hardware or an emulator

AmigaOS 4
Can only be run on an AmigaOne board (very expensive). Will run some 3.x applications, but not games.

MorphOS
Similar idea to OS4 - it's designed as an updated Amiga OS. MorphOS only runs on the PegasOS boards, and I don't think it runs classic software unless you use an emulator.

AROS
An Amiga-like operating system that will run on any PC. Will not run any Amiga software unless you use an emulator.

--
moto