Upgrade the Amiga 500 or save for A1200?

[Neil79]

I have an Amiga 500 and I've tried most of the Amiga floppies and they work apart from some, however I'd like to give it a new boost of life!

Shall I upgrade the A500 or look to buy an A1200?

[Neil79]

Forgot the pics!

[dJOS]

I put a HxC in my 500 which works great and I run WHDLoad on my a1200 after discovering it didnt work that great on my 500+ even with 8mb fast ram & 2 mb chip running 3.1 roms and a HDD.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by Neil79

Shall I upgrade the A500 AND look to buy an A1200?

Fixed that for you...



Seriously, it all depends on what you want to do..
If you want AGA and some networking, the 1200 is the way to go.

If you don't need networking and/or AGA, then an expanded 500 is great...

Now, expanding a 500 can be a bit spendy and the options have been limited, but there seem to be a bevy of 500 expansion options on the horizon....

I'd go for the 1200, but an expanded 500 is a great machine..

My 500 has 2M CHIP and 8M fast, but no HD (yet??).. It's put away currently. I find I use my 1200 mostly, and then my 1000 (which has a HD, but I use it mostly with floppies).

desiv

[Neil79]

Thanks both

[alexh]

The HxC slim is now only £49 delivered.

It will effectively give you ever single floppy disk ever on one SDHC card. You won't need anything else. No memory upgrades, no hard drive. You'll be able to play the entire Amiga game back catalogue and 68000 demos.

But....

For £48 (plus whatever you can get for selling your A500) could you buy an A1200 with a CF card hard drive and a WHDload license?

You'd get one or two AGA games you wouldn't otherwise be able to play, workbench would be slightly faster with a 68020 CPU, loading from hard drive would be faster...

It is borderline...

[desiv]

Originally Posted by alexh

You'd get one or two AGA games you wouldn't otherwise be able to play,..

I realize there aren't that many AGA games..
but... 1 or 2 ?? ;-)

Even if you discount the games that have OCS versions, I think there's more than that..

desiv

[alexh]

That work on an unaccelerated 2Mbyte A1200 that are worth playing (more than their ECS counterparts)??

Using HOL (AGA) and from the games I've actually played only these come to mind :

Aladdin
Alien Breed 3D (II)
Banshee
Brian the Lion AGA
James Pond 3
Jurassic Park AGA
Pinball Illusions
Slam Tilt
Super Stardust
T-Zero
Virtual Karting (II)

Ok so 11 games maybe one or two more but not worth that much!

[desiv]

Originally Posted by alexh

That work on an unaccelerated 2Mbyte A1200 that are worth playing (more than their ECS counterparts)??

Well, I wasn't considering just unaccelerated. I figure, anyone who gets a 1200 will add RAM before too long.. ;-)

desiv

[roy bates]

ive got a 500+ with kickstart 3.1 workbench 3.1 2 mb of chip and 8 mb of fast(not really fast) and 4 gig harddrive.

it will all depend on what you want to do with it and how much you want to spend,i did all that for about £75(including the 500plus and monitor)

obviosly most peaple wont be able to do it that cheap.

[Lord Riton]

I see you have CAPTIVE ! Thats's all you will ever need

Nice game collection.

[Lord Aga]

Neil, don't do an "either - or" choice, you'll regret it either way
Do both. A little bit at the time. Save something for your A500, and then something to buy (and further upgrade) an A1200.
They both deserve plenty of love

[Neil79]

Is the Amiga 600 any good? they seem to be going for very good prices

[desiv]

The A600 is a great little machine too...
Pros:
-Has IDE for hard drive (the CF/IDE adapters to use a Compact Flash card are only a few bucks)
-Has PCMCIA for easy file transfer and/or networking. The PCMCIA to Compact Flash adapters are also pretty inexpensive...
-Has some nice RAM expansion/accelerators available (I think they are still ??? Not sure....)

Cons:
-No numeric keypad (a few games use that.. Not many tho..)
-No AGA (covered above)

Add some RAM and it makes a great little WHDLoad machine...

desiv

[TCD]

A600 has an 68000 and it's certainly not bad as a WHDLoad machine, but it's not great either... too many installs have issues on 68000 and a missing quitkey. Depending on the price difference the A1200 is certainly a much better WHDLoad machine

[desiv]

Originally Posted by TheCyberDruid

...too many installs have issues on 68000 and a missing quitkey. Depending on the price difference the A1200 is certainly a much better WHDLoad machine

QuitKey??
This is an Amiga.. We want to play another game, we reboot!!!!
;-)

OK, that's a good point... Although the reboot is usually quick,,,,

I do really like the quitkey feature on the A1200... ;-)

desiv

[TCD]

Sadly there's also quite a number of installs that don't work correctly on 68000 (A600)... I get that the A600 is a nice WHDLoad alternative, but it's not as simple as to say it's 'up to par with A1200 except for AGA games' I'm afraid. An A1200 is the better WHDLoad machine, no doubt.

[dJOS]

Originally Posted by TheCyberDruid

A600 has an 68000 and it's certainly not bad as a WHDLoad machine, but it's not great either... too many installs have issues on 68000 and a missing quitkey. Depending on the price difference the A1200 is certainly a much better WHDLoad machine

I Agree completely, the best combo is imo an a500 with "stock" 512k+512k ram and a HxC SD Floppy Drive emulator and an a1200 with an ACA12xx for WHDLoad Games!

I've got an 8MB fast ram board (non-autoconfig) in my a500 and it never gets used.

[demolition]

Originally Posted by desiv

QuitKey??
This is an Amiga.. We want to play another game, we reboot!!!!
;-)
OK, that's a good point... Although the reboot is usually quick,,,,
I do really like the quitkey feature on the A1200... ;-)

One could also just replace the 68000 with a 68010 like I did in one of my A600s, then the quitkey works.

[dJOS]

Only issue is most whdload ports were done on a1200's and play up on 68k/010's - I had a pimped out a500+ and sold it to buy my a1200 cause it was just painful even with 2mb+8mb ram and cf-IDE.