What is the most powerfull Amiga setup for gaming? Beyond A500?

[sharpie]

I'm partial to the Pegasos II w/ a G3-600 or G4-1000, a Voodoo4 video card, and SCSI controller.

Sorry for my ignorance but does that run the original Amiga game titles?

[Karlos]

Only under emulation I would expect.

[sdesros]

The Amiga had various chipsets over the years.  The major variation deals with Graphics.

OCS is the original chipset.
ECS is the Enhanced chipset, essentially it's exactly like OCS but it has a few 64colour screenmodes called "Extra Half Brite".  Essentially it took the first 32 colours and then dimmed them to half their intensity.

A500's had either OCS or ECS.

AGA is the Advanced Graphics Architecture (AFAIR).  It allowed for screen modes of up to 256 colours, and HAM8 mode would allow for almost true-colour graphics (instead of HAM6 which gave you 4096 colours).  There were a few other upgrades, but essentially AGA had more colours and more screenmodes.

AGA were used in Amiga 1200's, Amiga 4000's and CD32's (oh, and those Index Access computers.)

AGA is fairly compatible to ECS/OCS, and in fact you can boot your AGA systems into ECS/OCS, but some games still had some compatibility issues.   To make matters worse, all of the AGA systems had 020 or better CPUs which caused more problems with incompatibilities.

So, if you're really into playing older games, you might want to have an A500, KS1.3, extra floppy, 512megs of ram with the slow fast ram.

For the AGA games an A1200 is pretty decent out of the box.  And it can use your A500's monitor, joysticks and extra drive.  The A1200 already has 2 megs of chip ram, so most games should be happy.

Oh, almost forgot, some of the newer "Escom" era A1200's use a modified floppy drive which might not boot any of the older games.

However, a lot of the newer games require a more powerful CPU, harddrive, CD drive and more ram.

Confused yet?

[jeffimix]

Don't Feed The Troll.

@Downix dammy people post quickly.

[redrumloa]

jeffimix wrote:
Don't Feed The Troll.

You're a troll :-?

[redrumloa]

Thoughts? I am in the market for more Amiga hardware

Whoa how did I miss this? :-D Keep an eye on my auctions!


CLICK THIS LINK AND BOOKMARK

[sharpie]

Is it not possible to use a HD with the A500?

[downix]

@sharpie

Only modern games, like Quake II.

As for a HD, there are several 3rd party HD options for the 500, but it does not include one by default.  You can even make your own using plans from Aminet.

[sharpie]

Ok, so I get the picture that the A1200 is probably the best bet.

Can someone detail me the *ideal* A1200 in terms of speed, graphics, hard drive and any other peripherals?

Whenever I see people talk about their Amigas they always mention things that I have never heard of, Fast Ram this, slow fast that, bla bla bla. If price were no issue, what would be the setup for the perfect A1200, with gaming in mind?

Btw, thanks to everyone for the great info so far.

[Karlos]

@sharpie

Some basic terminology that is banded around..

OCS/ECS/AGA refer to different versions (in chronological order) of the chipset that gave the amiga it's original graphical and sound capabilities. AGA was the largest improvement, offering greater speed and more colourful displays.

This chipset share a block of memory with the processor, called 'Chip Ram'. Only the chipset or the processor can access this memory at any given instant. On the original amiga systems, which used a motorola 68000 processor, this set up was ideal, since the 68000 could only access the memory 50% of the time anyway (slight oversimplification but generally true) - usually every even clock cycle. The custom chips therefore were able to use every odd clock cycle.

So  the design allowed the 68000 to run virtually unimpeeded whilst the chipset did its magic in parallel.

The problem with this design is when you get faster CPU's such as the 68020 and above. These can access memory every cycle and are forced to wait when the chipset is accessing the memory.
Even the 68000 itself can be slowed down when there is a lot of chipset activity using the Chip Ram (hence needing more than 50% of the available time).

So, the designers also came up with a solution for that too - an area of memory useable by the CPU but off limits to the chipset. This memory is generally known as 'Fast RAM'.

On the original 68000, the presence of fast ram made only a small impact on the speed (apart from in a few rare cases where both CPU and chipset were very busy at the same time).

However, on systems using faster CPUs such as the 68020 and above, the impact of fast ram is rather more profound.

A bare A1200 which uses the AGA chipset and a 14MHz 68020 CPU typically doubles in speed when you add some Fast RAM (usually as an expansion card that fits in the trapdoor of the case).

For CPU expansions carrying a faster 68020, or 68030,40 or 60, Fast RAM is a must. My 68040 actually runs *slower* than the bare A1200 if the fast ram is removed :lol:

[Effy]

Another easy way to put it, comparing to pc things, Chip Ram is like the memory  on the gfx card, Fast Ram is like the Ram you add on the motherboard. It's ofcourse a lot complicated than that but it the easiest way to explain ...
Adding a harddrive to your A500 is no problem, keeping a few things in mind. Most harddrive-cases are attached on the left side of the A500 and demand a scsi harddrive and not ide. That's one thing. Also to make full use of it you better have kickstart 2.0 because I think that you are too limited when using lower kickstarts ...

[Panthro]

well the most powerful Amiga beyond the A500 without a doubt has to be the AmigaOne XE!! :-D
only issue is I dont know if the PCI card with the AGA chips on it ( to play old games 8-) ) is still going to be released.

having said that this is the eXtrEEm PoWeR Amiga to play games on but I mean the sort of games you et at LAN parties not games like Lotus3, thrust master, or Lemmings ;-)  :-(

the price at this stage means you'd need to be pritty serious about your amigas so a base A1200 might be a good place to start these can be had for about $100AUD ($50USD?) second hand

[Borut]

A1200 with Blizzard1230IV an 32 MB FastRam and big harddisk is a good thing to start!

Playing Genetic Spezies makes me happy :-)))))))))

[ajk]

@sharpie

Ok I think you are being provided with perhaps too much information at the moment :-)

For a nice system that will play most (not all, though) games, you'd like an A1200 with an internal hard drive (needn't be big, a few hundred megabytes will do it) and perhaps some extra memory. Extra memory can be had as such, or together with an accelerator. An accelerator may speed up a few games a little (most games were designed to work with an A500 anyway, so an A1200 is quite fast enough), but is not really necessary.

An A500 with a hard drive is of course a possibility too, but then you will miss out on those AGA games, there were some good ones too!

You can probably find a nice A1200 setup at EBay for a good price, I suggest you go do some hunting :-)

[4pLaY]

woow you lot know how to confuse a poor "newbie" listen here sharpie:

if you want ONLY the oldest games get an A500 1.3rom with some extras (easy to find on ebay.com/amibench.org just follow the auctions a while and see what things go for so you dont get ripped off) extra hd + ram etc is also very nice to have

IF you also want the newer games + some of the same games you can find on A500 only with better gfx etc get an A1200 also (if it were me and i only wanted to get into gaming again id get both) just make sure you get an Commodore A1200 NOT Escom A1200! HD ram cpu upgrade etc are nice things idealy get a 030 card! if you get all this (should not be that hard to find at an ok price) you will be able to run at least 90% of the games you can find on Amiga.

[sharpie]

Thanks for all the great info. Seems like the HD for the A500 is doable but would be better with the KS2.1 which as it happens might not be compatible with all classic games that came before it, creating somewhat of a problem?

Does this problem exist for the 1200 as well?

Also, I heard there is somekind of switcher to allow you to switch your A500 between the 3 different KS versions, is this easy to operate,aquire, etc.?

I think I am going to cover both bases and get both the 1200 and 500. Is there any advantage to getting a 500 that has ECS instead of OCS? And does anyone recommend a certain hard drive for it?

Thanks again for the stellar info.