Recommend an Amiga

[magnetic]

bbjones

LIke I stated earlier  you need to get a north american (NTSC) Unit. It will save you alot of headaches.  Yes lord chaos has some points (like I told you they would) but unless you are strictly a hardcore gamer DONT GET PAL.

[ChaosLord]

The only reason to not get a PAL Amiga would be if you want to directly record your Amiga video onto a NTSC VHS video tape.

Do you want to make NTSC VHS videtapes with your Amiga?
If Answer$="Yes" THEN
  Buy NTSC Amiga
ELSE
  Buy any Amiga at all
END_IF


Do you want to make PAL VHS videtapes with your Amiga?
If Answer$="Yes" THEN
  Buy PAL Amiga
ELSE
  Buy any Amiga at all
END_IF

[bjjones37]

After all was said and done, I seemed to have ended up with an Amiga 3000.  It has a bad internal drive but it came with an external drive and has two scsi hard disks inside.  It has 2MB Chip RAM and 7.5MB Fast RAM.  
So can somebody tell me what I have ended up with?  What is it best for?  Is it a good hobby machine? Does it have good compatibility with most Amiga software? Can it play games?
Actually the bad internal disk drive seems to be good now that I have blown massive clouds of dirt out of it with an air compressor.  The question is, how in the world did the power supply EVER work with all of that dirt in it.

Of course the first thing I did was to cut off the battery that had already started to leak. I think I caught it in time.  Then I took it outside and blew all the dirt out of it.  Then I plugged it in ...  and prayed and fasted ... and turned it on with fingers, toes, and eyes crossed.  Amazingly, it came on.  So I am hopeful that I now have an Amiga that will last more than two months.

At long last I begin the pleasant journey of learning the Amiga OS.

[ChaosLord]

All my Amiga 3000s have bad internal floppy drives too!  Its the 3rd thing to break after the keyboards and U202 PAL chips.

Maybe if I blasted some compressed air in there it would work.  Donno.

A3000 is an awesome retro games machine.  Datz what I use mine for.  It has a slightly faster cpu than an A500.  Its not a speed demon or anything but it gives a much better frame rate to Stunt Car Racer and Hired Guns especially when having a party with 4 players at once!


And it is ez to find a monitor for it since it uses Amiga or PC monitors.

It does most everything except for you can't play any of the awesome AGA games on it.

If you wanted to do serious stuff on it you could buy a Mediator for it and add a 256MB gfx card and an ethernet card and so forth.

[ChaosLord]

How did u cut the battery out?!?

My batteries are in all my Amigas and they are all probably dead now

[bbond007]

Its pretty nice system with excellent software compatibility and has good monitor compatibility with built in flickerfixer.  The only snag is no AGA...

You should look into getting some whdload games and registering whdload.

Possible upgrades
convert the SCSI drives to compact-flash
maybe this USB controller (don't know much about it)
http://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?t=39995
Indivision ECS
PS/2 Mouse converter and modern mouse.

[ChaosLord]

Does it have good compatibility with most Amiga software?

To me it has 100% compatibility with all OCS and ECS software.

But I have the version of A3000 that loads kickstart off of the Hard Drive.  So I can change my kickstart any time I want. hehe

 Can it play games?

It will play at least 10,000 different games perfectly.

And its an A3000 so it is dead ez to install a hardware PAL switch.  It might have come with one if you see a funny switch sticking out of the back installed by the previous owner.

Actually the bad internal disk drive seems to be good now that I have blown massive clouds of dirt out of it with an air compressor.  The question is, how in the world did the power supply EVER work with all of that dirt in it.

Its an antique.  The dirt is probably what was holding everything together

[ChaosLord]

PS/2 Mouse converter and modern mouse.

+1000

Get one of those!


Also I flatly refuse to believe that your Amiga 3000 keyboard works.  All mine broke within around 6 years.


Once you realize your keyboard is broken then I recommend you to get a brand new PS/2 keyboard adapter.

[barney]

I'm surprised nobody mentioned the good old Amiga 2000.  Perfect all around machine.  Good expandability and great for games.

[bbond007]

+1000

Get one of those!


Also I flatly refuse to believe that your Amiga 3000 keyboard works.  All mine broke within around 6 years.


Once you realize your keyboard is broken then I recommend you to get a brand new PS/2 keyboard adapter.

I'm actually using a lyra2 and ps2 mouse converter to usb->ps2 converter to Logitech wireless back-lit KB and laser mouse(unifying driver),

my 1200 stays out of direct light.

[bjjones37]

My A3000 keyboard is working great.  I was mistaken about the disk drive though.  It appeared to recognize a disk after I blew it out, but I could not write any files to it.  

It has Kickstart 2.04.  I was going to remove the 120MB and 240MB SCSI drives and replace them with a 1GB.  Then I was going to install Workbench 3.1.  Will it be compatible with Kickstart 2.04?  Do I have to put WB2.1 back on?

And finally, what is WHDLoad?

[ChaosLord]

My A3000 keyboard is working great.  I was mistaken about the disk drive though.  It appeared to recognize a disk after I blew it out, but I could not write any files to it.  

It has Kickstart 2.04.  I was going to remove the 120MB and 240MB SCSI drives and replace them with a 1GB.  

If 1GB is all u have laying around then....  I guess it could be halfway ok...
But it is quite small.


I bought a 4GB SCSI drive in 1997.  Back then SCSI drives were a great size at a great price.

It should be really easy to find ancient used SCSI drives in the 4GB to 20GB size range.  But its all up to u what u want to do.

If u wanted to do a full WHDload install then that is something like 10GB in a single day.

In case nobody told u, the A3000 has an AWESOME SCSI hard drive controller that blows away the lame IDE controller that came out 2 years later in A1200 and A4000.  The A3000 SCSI just magically flows data into your computer with DMA so it frees up your CPU and provides great performance.

Since the hard drive controller is so awesome, it would be a shame to cripple it with a tiny sized drive.  It just makes sense to put some sort of decently large drive on it.

But if all u have laying around is a 1GB then you could set that up as your "boot drive" and add a 2nd drive later.


About the kickstart:

I advise you to upgrade to a 3.1 Kickstart.  That is what everybody uses since 1990s.  Its very good and reliable.

Is ur A3000 using a real Kickstart ROM chip?
Or does it have the "ROMtower" thingy that lets you load the kickstart off of your hard drive?

Look in your harddrive under DEVS:Kickstart/ and see if there are any files in there.

[bjjones37]

Is ur A3000 using a real Kickstart ROM chip?
Or does it have the "ROMtower" thingy that lets you load the kickstart off of your hard drive?

Look in your harddrive under DEVS:Kickstart/ and see if there are any files in there.

There is a Kickstart file in the Devs directory on the WB2.x volume.  Is this a correct configuration?  If I press both mouse buttons it gives me a menu to load either kickstart 2.04 or 1.4.  When I try to install Workbench 3.1, it fails with an error that I need kickstart 3.0.

I read that there are problems with the ROM version of Kickstart 3.1 on the Amiga 3000.  For instance, I would need to drop my cpu speed from 25MHz to 16MHz.  Is there a way to install WB31 on this system or should I stay with WB21?

I did succeed in transferring the OS to a larger hard disk.  I set the drive up as two 512M partitions. Should I isolate the OS in a small partition of it's own?  I do not mind repartitioning to get it right. It is a little tricky as I cannot boot off a floppy at all.

[Nlandas]

Was waiting for all the A4000 supporters from another forum post to post here :-)

I started with the A500 for nostalgia, looking back that was a costly mistake. Finally purchased another A1200 and haven't looked back.

   I realize this is an older thread but I too vote A1200. I for one bought 4 different Amiga 4000 setups including one in a tower and all of them died within a few months. My A1200 still works after all these years. I'm not saying that the A4000 wasn't a cool machine but I just haven't been able to acquire one that was in good shape.

Personally, I wish someone would come up with new hardware that was backwards compatible with the AGA chipset and I'd buy one. I agree emulation is not the same as hardware. I just wish I could boot even a PC directly into AmigaOS.

-Nyle

[danwood]

Germany uses QWERTZ layout.

The rest of the universe uses QWERTY layout.

You can set your keymap to UK layout to fix the Y-Z issue but some punctuation symbols might get switched around too, donno.  UK has punctuation in different places than USA.

In any case, if you set your keymap to have the Y key in the normal place, the writing on your Y-key will stay say "Z".  At a minimimum its confusing.  If it was me it would be fantastically annoying.

You set the language of the OS on any Amiga.  That is not a problem at all.

You could buy a $3.00 set of stickers and cover up the Z key and the other key with the proper symbols.  If they swapped around any other symbols, punctuation, etc. maybe u could fix those with stickers also.  Dunno.  Depending on what they did it could get really complicated.

I only learned of German QWERTZ layout a couple of months ago.  Until then I just assumed everyone used the same layout.  HA!

Or you could just pop the key tops off and swap the Y and Z around... Too simple?

[ChaosLord]

Or you could just pop the key tops off and swap the Y and Z around... Too simple?

Oh isn't that sweet

Someone so naive and innocent that they don't realize how completely vile and evil the keyboard industry is.

The plastics companies who actually make the keycaps always lie to the CEO of of whichever company is making keyboards.  They trick them into buying keycaps that are unswitchable-aroundable.  This is to prevent ppl from doing exactly what you have proposed.  And to stop ppl from switching to Colemak layout which is massively superior to silly QWERTY.

But there is a flaw.  Their evil trap doesn't work as long as the 2 keys you are switching around are on the same row.  But if the keys are on different rows you can forget about it.

Give it a try if you don't believe me.

99% of All normal (non-laptop) keyboards have keys where every single row of keys is
1. A different shape.
2. A different height.
3. A different angle.

Yes all 3 at the same time!

This is what I call "Screwball Profile".  It is a total scam ripoff.  That is the world we live in.

Y and Z are on completely different rows on my keyboard.  Switching their places screws up everything badly.