The best & worst Amiga deal you ever did?
 

Post stories about the best buys, sells or swaps of Amiga hardware. They can be "Oh my god I cannot believe I sold xxx for as little as yyy!" or "An A1200 with 060 for 50p from a neigbours wife" etc.

Best Deal

It was 1997, I was working for a games company called Argonaut and they were giving away some long since disused Amiga hardware. For a mere 2 hours play testing Croc on the PS1 on a Saturday I got to take as much as I wanted. In the end I took:

Video Toaster 2000
Amiga 2000 with 2x psu
A2620 68020 accelerator
2* A2091 SCSI cards
Amiga 3000 (no PSU or hard drive)

Worst deal

Again 1997, the A3000 I got free didnt work. It had no PSU. A3000 PSU's were (still are?) like rocking horse poo. With no money and no idea if the A3000 even worked I sold the other parts on Amibench for about £80.

I used some of the cash to buy a replacement PSU and hard drive bracket (from Amibench creator Mark Wilson) fortunately it DID work and I spent the next 3 weeks getting to grips with KS1.4

At the time I thought that it was a good deal, I got a working A3000 and I saw no use for the other bits. With hindsight £80 was pretty low.

Best Swap
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1998, I swapped 4 * 128Mbyte SDR DIMM's (which was a hell of a lot back then) for an Amiga A4000/040@25, 16Mbyte fast ram, a Picasso II graphics card and Dataflyer 4000SX SCSI card.

This made my A4k FREE. How? You are correct, the cost of new 4 * 128Mbyte DIMMS was MUCH more than the cost of an A4000 at the time, but I was working at a computer shop they were return rejects.

Dont worry, I didnt diddle some unsuspecting Amiga user.

The DIMMS were perfectly ok RAM wise. However they had bad SPD EPROM's and any motherboard which relied on SPD didnt boot with them in. The shop was buying its RAM at the time from a company with no returns dept. so they were binned. I fished them out and as chance had it the vendor didnt have such a motherboard and the swap went ahead.

Anyone else got any good stories? Perhaps involving sceners?

Best deal:
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This one includes the som of the sceners part, atleast since this was at Kindergarden 99 in Oslo (Amiga demoparty). Scala sold off a lot of Amigas/Cd32/Custom Scala stuff/Etc..

I didnt have much money with me, but got a Cd32 for 100Nkr - 15Usd :) Wish i had more money as there was a lot of goodies going ...

I still use and got the Cd32 !

@alexh you always have been a lucky bastard lol:) first on his block to get anything! (mobile fone that wasn't the size of a house brick, snes copier and the big endless list you see above ;))

me on the other hand opposite if i get something it don't work if i get it for FREE be sure it dosent work :) hell even if i've paid for it, it still don't work!

My current Amiga setup i got from patience and waiting. much like every other computer before. I seem to have the worst luck going in early stages of owning a computer c64,spectrum,Amiga,PC,ps2 horrible experiences with them all in the begining!

I guess the old saying everything comes to he who waits springs to mind (no hard feelings Alexh just jealous lol:))

Worst:

I bought Body Blows Galactic from a local computer store. It had an error on it. I returned it, and they said they would fix it, or find a replacement. This process was to be handled overseas, so it would take awhile. I waited months. When it finally arrived, it had been marked as "replaced" - yet it had the same error. I took it back again, annoyed, and they gave me an external 3.5 disk drive.

@Sarek2k
You were the first person I knew to get a 1084S monitor. (Damn if pictures didnt look sharp on that). How did you get the money for that... wasnt it some insurance thing?

@Alexh no m8 got it out of the catalouge cost me a fortune (about 450 quid lol:)) Intrest and all! Still it did last me a good many years! after i sold it for 50 (had no Amiga by then) it only lasted 5 weeks!

Never really had an amazing Amiga deal but, when my original A500 completely died and I returned it to the shop, I didnt put in all the original games Id got with it (Batman the Movie, New Zealand Story and Interceptor. When the shop rang me to say the Amiga was fixed (lying bstards it was a different machine) they had put new copies of Batman, TNZS and Interceptor in with it!

So I then had 2 original copies of all 3 games.

Bonus :)

did some work for Gremlin, and got given two developer A4ooo's with dual o2o/o3o cards for nowt

Best Swap

I swapped a basic 1mb a500 and a standard a1200 for a Towered 1200 + PPC 603e/166 and 040/25 + 32mb, squirrel scsi, HD blah blah

Worst Deal

I gave AWAY my a1200 + Apollo 040/16mb, powerflyer ide, 4.3gb hd, sony cd-r, printer, monitor, all original games, magazines to my cousin who proceeded to sell it all off..

I managed to get the magazines back as he couldn't sell them, but I'm gutted I let this baby go

Best:
CD32 with a control pad, plus SX-1 module (including 4MB ram and 20MB 2.5" HDD) and an absouletly mint A2000 keyboard! I saw this at a boot sale, asked how much they wanted, "it's free!" they said. :nuts :D Ok, the CD32 had a fault with the video encoder, so it was missing a colour, but it did work, and the SX-1 was fine. A few weeks later I got a replacement CD32 for next to nothing. (< £10 I think.)

Worst:
Amiga 600 *unboxed* with a couple of disks, but the A600 was mint, and white as snow. Bought it for £50, what the hell was I thinking...! This was only 5 years ago, and it would have been cheaper on ebay! :nuts:crying

I love these stories.

Best:
When one of my old companies were chucking their dev cluster, there were stacks of amigas in there. I snagged an A4000 full kit, a brand new in the box a1200 and three a600 of varying conditions. Still had my A1200 at the time, so sold them while amigas were still worth something. I still have the A1000 in its box in my folks loft. Box is opened, but all the manuals and leads are still sealed in pack. Dont think the machine has ever been unpacked.

Worst:
I bought worms the day it came out. Got mugged for it on the way home. Went back the day after, got another copy, mom spilled her coffee on it that evening. £60 down, I decided to just go get some copies from the car booty.

Best:
Local paper ad for A1200 with 3.1 roms, 1gb HD, 030/40 32meg, 1084? monitor, boxed genlock x 2, boxed overdrive CD with squirrel, sound digitiser, canon Bc120?, scala, photogenics, xcad, tens of pro software packages and approx 1000 disks with misc software (difficult to remember everything - there was so much).
All for an accepted offer of £100 in year 2000

Worst:
Big 100 commercial games package.. rubbish PD games bundle

Unfortunately I had to sell most of the above after my employer had a 'company reorganisation' in 2003, but I managed to hang onto what I felt was important. :great

Best:
(1) Bought an A1200 with a 120Mb hard drive - cost around £600 IIRC. The company closed shortly afterwards and never cashed my cheque! After waiting a while I used the money to buy a 68030 accelerator.

(2) Bought a "box of misc. computer parts, floppies etc." off eBay for £20. When it arrived it had (amongst other random things) five or six 386 / 486 motherboards with CPU, RAM and everything, a PC RAID controller with a 40Mhz 68030 on it and (ta-daa) ... 300ish original Amiga game disks :great

Worst:
Paid EUR250 for an 060/PPC card to a guy advertising on a well known Amiga classifieds site, but he was a total rip off merchant and I never saw a card or my money again :mad

@best finds and gives
1.
Got given an A1200 3.0roms + 030 (16MB) + 1.2GB Hdd (no floppy). Got given an internal DCE scan magic Scan Dblr & Flicker Fixer as well as an external IOMega Zip drive.

2.
Found badly damaged A1200 in case when i was taking my garden rubbish to tip, (case fecked beyond fecked and mobo cracked 'n split on mouse port), cut board and resolded mousey fly over (now working in a near complete specail project) it had (and has) 3.1 roms onboard.

3.
Found Apple Mac & Monitor as i was doing a run to local tip (after i had moved home theres always extra rubbish figure..) any way the Mac workd by the monitor did'nt.

@best buy
1.
Bought off shelf day of relase A1200 pack for £175 (they were retailing for £325) managed to blag the manager saying commet was doing one cheaper than dixions (obviously before commet was owned by dixsons group) that was a nice blag.

2.
Car booty action, got a box of Amiga bits for £5, it had in it Apollo A1230, Mouse / Joy switcher, Broken Genlock, 24bit colour Hand Scanner (still works)
Midi interface inc. leads, 8 and 16mb SIM, bunch'o'disks and a joystick that didn`t work. (good thing i haggled that old woman down from a tenner...)

3.
bought a bunch of old 2.1 sound systems (about 6 various with only 1 base box) for £2.50. got it home splaced a few wires and volia 400watts of audio power! *still use it today on my PC*

@worst deal
1.
Lent my sister an A1200 with my Blizzard 030mk2 +16mb ram 1gig drive ext. modem all towered up it was.... when i got it back (3yrs later) the chasis had been warped, the mobo never did 'fire up ever again, the accelerator had some gunk on it (looked a bit like solder flux but god knows what it really was).. and has never worked since... sold it to a friend for a tenner, he could couldn`t get it to work either... about the only things left that did work was the modem and memory. even the mousy and keyboard was fecked. (the keyboard was an A4000 Keyboard too)

2.
Swapped a 6GIG 3.5" disk with a friend for a 2gb 2.5" hard disk. was going to pick it up at the weekend, got round his, and he'd moved back up north with his parents... bastard!...


sigh... some good memories... and some not so good ones...

Best deal:
Amiga 1000 with 1Mb in original box
Amiga 500 with 1Mb in original box
1084 monitor
Roctec Slimline external floppy
7 Amiga programming books
SAS/C, Pagestream, Distant Suns, FinalWriter (with manuals)
15 good Amiga games in original boxes (including rare Mindwalker)

ALL FREE! (reasonable shipping cost only)


Worst deal:
Toastscan Scandoubler $129 US

Best Deal
1999 - A battered old A1200 with no keys and a cracked case for £2, had a blizzard 1230 MkIV 128mb and a buffered IDE interface in it.

Worst Deal
2001 - eBayed a barebones A1200 tower and got £20 for it!

Worst Swap
2001 - My Apple PowerBook 1400 for an internal scandoubler that tuned out to be dead.