Which Amiga.....?

[TCD]

Someone should point out that the A600 has no numpad... Also if you're going to run non-AGA floppy games, I'd say you can't get 'more compatible' than with an A500.

[Anakirob]

I'll say again what I've said countless other times on other threads when the issue of OCS/AGA compatibility arises.

I have yet to come across a piece of software which cannot be made to run on my A1200 when I'm using the rather excellent The Ultimate Degrader And Enhancer.

Sure using it will require a little know-how and inconvinience, but getting those ADF's onto floppies using a KS 1.3 A500 will require that much more know-how and inconvinience.

[LocalH]

Agreement and big thumbs up for TUDE. I've used it on both my A3000 and A2000 (which seems to have a bum 68k but luckily has a GVP '030 accel+SCSI combo) and gotten many, many games to work. It's even handy when trying to watch demos, but compatibility is still hit-or-miss as compared to a stock OCS system.

[Djay]

A1200... (i have one)

transfer adfs to floppies using EasyADF
2Mb Chip Ram
AGA support
use Relokick or TUDE to support older games
lots on ebay, maybe slighter cleaner than the A500
easy install HD using CF and adapter
smaller than A500 with no modulator hanging out the back

A500...
its a classic!
cheap RAM upgrades
datel action replay 3 "cheat" card works with it

A600... (i have one)
its cute

A4000...
power
collector kudos

[Djay]

Originally Posted by LocalH

Agreement and big thumbs up for TUDE. I've used it on both my A3000 and A2000 (which seems to have a bum 68k but luckily has a GVP '030 accel+SCSI combo) and gotten many, many games to work. It's even handy when trying to watch demos, but compatibility is still hit-or-miss as compared to a stock OCS system.

i have A1200, is TUDE better than Relokick?
Does it boot from floppy?

[laffer]

Bucko - just wanted to chime in to say that to begin with, I also didn't bother with harddrives and all that as all I used to own as a kid was a regular A500 without any harddrives.

However - regardless of whether or not you have any experience with using harddrives and WHDload and all that - there's no need to fear it will be very stressful to start using.
It's luckily quite easy and quick to set up even with practically no background knowledge... simply by googling or better yet - searching the forums here.

And you will find using an A1200 with a harddrive and WHDload is extremely much more convenient and fun (especially for games spanning several floppies), even despite lacking the nostalgic floppy drive loading sound.

In any case, even with all that set up, nothing is stopping you from using the floppy drive... you'll just have another very convenient option that I suspect you will very soon start taking advantage of

[Djay]

Originally Posted by laffer

any case, even with all that set up, nothing is stopping you from using the floppy drive... you'll just have another very convenient option that I suspect you will very soon start taking advantage of

although brand new DS/DD are fairly hard to come by.... if you see any on ebay BUY THEM!

[Dreedo]

Good thing about floppies tho, is that practically all of them are re-writable, if you own any Amiga floppies that you don't really want, you can just format them. I have about 5 Magazine Coverdisks that are really common and had no games/utilities on them i would play, so i formatted them and use them for things i want to do.

[amigapd]

Hi, thought I would share my experience as about three years ago I was pondering the same question. This is my history of Amiga buying and hopefully you will learn from my purchases.

I first bought an Amiga 500 - yes it was cheap but the disk drive was very unreliable - some games loaded one day and then failed the next.I think I spent £20 but feel this was a waste of money and I didn't keep the computer that long. I also forgot how much space the amiga 500 takes up, especially if you are using the TV module.

I then got a CD32 - it came with the 444 game disk cd and meant that it had most games I wanted. However it didn't have a disk drive to save games like Monkey Island. I could have bought a SFX-1 (think thats right) which turns the cd32 into a A1200 but these cost about £100+ on ebay. I ve still kept this as even though it was a machine with a short life there are some great games available for it.

I then bought an Amiga 600. Loved the smallness of the machine - it played most games from floppies. I used easyadf from amigakit to transfer games to disk and I bought a hard drive to save Monkey Island. Everything was fine until I started to get interested in WHDload. Most games wouldn't load due to limited memory on the Amiga 600. If Commodore had made it easier to expand the Amiga 600 it could have been a brilliant addition to the amiga family of computers.

I then ended up buying an Amiga 1200 with a CF hard drive with WHdload - in order to get larger games to play I also ended up buying a blizzard and extra memory. Since then it has been my most used retro machine and I wished I had bought it from the start as I would have saved £100 to £150 which is the costs of the A1200.

My advice would therefore be - if you have basic computer knowledge go for the Amiga 600 and use Easyadf - you can run most games on the Amiga 600 and use re-lo-kick for earlier games and it won't take up much space. If I hadn't got interested in WHDload I would have still been happy with this computer - it is easy to find replacement parts especially disk drives as it uses the same type as the A1200.

If you are confident with computers get the Amiga 1200 - as soon as you use Whdload you will never look back - the quickness of running SWOS from the hard drive makes it difficult to go back to the original disk load method.

Which ever computer you go for don't forget the wonderful amiga pd games which were released. www.amigapd.com

[Dreedo]

I would also just like to add, that as the A600 starts with 1mb of RAM and the 1200 with 2mb of RAM and you realize later 1mb isn't enough, which if you use it for something other than official games will become apparent, then you'll end up paying up a fair amount just for an extra MB of RAM, so really your paying about £20-30 more for a A1200, but it has twice the processor power and twice the RAM, i'm not sure of the usual price for RAM, but a Trapdoor (easiest way to expand RAM) RAM for the A600 is selling for £10+ on eBay, so its not necessarily cheaper in the long run to buy an A600.

[Djay]

also if you are playing game like Frontier - Elite II, then A1200 is really the only option

[Anakirob]

Originally Posted by amigapd

... I could have bought a SFX-1 (think thats right) which turns the cd32 into a A1200...

Ooh, so close. It's actually SX-1 :P

But seriously, amigapd's advice is the best advice given so far.