Looking at buying an Amiga A4000/040

[earok]

Hi all,

A couple of Amiga 4000's have come on the market near to where I am.

http://www.trademe.co.nz/computers/v...-746428238.htm
http://www.trademe.co.nz/computers/v...-746435465.htm

I don't have any experience with Amiga computers pretty much at all though so I'm not really sure if they're worth bidding on (starting price is approx 150 pound or 250 USD), and which one I should get. I note that one appears to have a VGA card and the other has a CD-ROM drive, if I get the VGA one I presume it'll take a standard PC IDE CD-ROM?


Thanks in advance

[ajk]

US$250 is a decent price for a working A4000/040. Whether you should pay much more than that depends on what expansions exactly are installed. The old video editing related stuff isn't particularly valuable these days, unless of course that is exactly what you are after. Accelerator boards and graphics cards on the other hand are always in demand.

The CD/DVD drives that the A4000 uses are indeed standard IDE drives, not worth paying extra for.

[Ze Emulatron]

I am going to see the seller on Monday to pick up an auction I won for a Powermac 8500. I was going to see if I could help identify the specs of the machines, but I wont be bidding because they are out of my price range.

[Thalion]

As far as i can tell from the description it's a fair and good starting price for a A4000. So it's a bit of a pitty that you don't have the money for at least one of them. If i could i would buy one as its one of the models i still miss in my collection

[Nobby_UK]

Very reasonable compared to this offer:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Commodore-...item27e5705d1d

[Arnie]

Originally Posted by Nobby_UK

Very reasonable compared to this offer:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Commodore-...item27e5705d1d

Jesus Christ, my eyes, I'm blind

[earok]

Thanks for the advice all, I appreciate it!

Kia Ora @Ze Emulatron, please let us know what you think of them.

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by Nobby_UK

Very reasonable compared to this offer:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Commodore-...item27e5705d1d

So this guy is asking 225£ plus your old A4000 case?

Does he believe to be Andy Warhol or one of those fancy modern artists whose their production, no matter how horrible, costs in the hundreds or thousands?

[Ze Emulatron]

I was told the last time the person had seen them working was in 2003 and then they went into storage.

The white Amiga 4000 seemed relatively ok, the battery looked like it had been replaced at some stage but it is still the barrel type, but the extra memory wasn't working. It had 5 memory sticks in the 5 slots. We took them out and tried them all in the Chip MEM slot and the computer booted up to the boot selection screen (both mouse buttons held down fine) we booted workbench with 1 of the 4 SIMMS without boot sequence and we believe that they are 1MB SIMMS. Having just got home I believe the jumper for SIMM SIZE was on the wrong setting, it was set to 1MB x 32 which is apparently for 4MB SIMMS not 1MB SIMMS so this might be why it wasnt detecting the 4 SIMMS in slots 0 - 4.

Workbench on the HDD was loaded with a whole load of rubbish and when it had finished loading there was only about 200K chip mem remaining out of 2MB before any folders were opened.

The Chinon 357A internal floppy drive didn't like my floppys, when I needed to boot from floppy I had to use my external floppy, I tried to format a new HD floppy disk and it had a problem formatting sector 0 and stopped. I could understand it not liking the other disks I had with me because they are HD disks formatted to DD with the hole taped over. We tried a couple of disks from the disks she had and they didn't work and made the drive screech a bit. It is possible it might be alright after a clean.

There are two IDE HDDs in the computer 1 was split into 3 partitions, 61MB free with 51MB used, about 500KB free with 10MB used, I cant remember whether the next partition was 112 MB free or 112 MB used , the other was split into 2 partitions 1575 MB free, 510MB used and 738MB partition that I couldn't open, possibly due to a lack of memory or needs to be formatted again. Not sure of the overall size of the drives and didn't record their model numbers. The partitions might not be listed in the correct order

It has an Emplant Card http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/emplant this had an Apple 160MB SCSI HDD attached, but the HDD wasn't screwed into the case it was attached via double sided tape to the 5 1/4" drive bay. It didn't show up in the amiga and didn't sound very healthy when it tried to start up. So we took it out to stop it getting damaged if it does work and if it needs to be shipped.

A Cybervision 64 Graphic Card http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/cybervision64 didnt test this with any monitor.


The sunfaded Amiga 4000 unfortunately has battery damage. The seller has uploaded some more photos to the auction to try and show the damage.

http://www.trademe.co.nz/computers/v...-746428238.htm

It has an Oktagon 2008 SCSI card Rev 7 with Seagate ST3600N Drive and a Sony CDU765 CD Drive connected.

It has a Seagate ST31220A connected to the IDE.
Floppy Drive.

We didn't test the components in this Amiga because of the battery damage and we had just put the other Amiga 4000 back together again.

[Hewitson]

That battery damage is extensive. I'd be surprised if a repair was feasible.

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

That battery damage is extensive. I'd be surprised if a repair was feasible.

While nasty looking, doesn't seem too bad either.

If you have a lot of patience it's definitely repairable