Ellis: I think an 040 will be fast enough for me, the 060 boards are really expensive, as are the PPC boards. I want to stick to the 68k chips anyway, as I'm familiar with their asm syntax and have books on them.
You are right about the performa drive, I checked online last night. Well, scsi cd-roms are relatively cheap now. It seems to be the hard drives that are harder to come by. I have seen asking prices of over $100 for very small drives! An ide controller might be worth it just for the extra space I would have. Do you know which IDE standards the buddha supports?
Dan: What do the super dmac and ramsey chips do, out of curiousity? it looks like I will need a gary chip as well. It does look like the board (yes, it's that one from ebay) was stripped for parts but given how much the chips go for separately from the board I don't think it necessarily means it was not working at that time. (fingers crossed)
Sandpiper: I have found a source for the Rev 8 SCSI chip (and the ramsey and super buster) - compuquick-amigadirect.com has the scsi chip for $29.
Hmmm.... vesalia.de has listed:
IC 81-Super DMAC 390563-02
Yet, amiga-hardware.com says:
Super DMAC 81 390537-02
The 390563 is not marked 'super' in amiga-hardware.com. I think this is a typo but which way it goes I'm not sure of; I will have to enquire about it. Anyone have thoughts on this?
That leaves me looking for a PLCC gary chip, at the least. Well, I didn't do this to save money - I could have stayed in bed to accomplish that!
Seriously, it is more fun this way than if it was easy.
Thank you all for the help. I will post more as the project progresses, and pics too!