When was the best time to buy an Amiga?

[Megalomaniac]

Nobody who had the option of spending £25 on an A501 memory upgrade bought an A500+ for £400 instead, and nobody expected the A500+ to immediately improve existing games. Ridiculous. Longer term, the Plus was a better system, despite the teething problems (which were at least partly the fault of programmers ignoring Commodore guidelines, which were available in late 1990). 1.3 caused compatibility problems initially in late 1988 too, but who even noticed by 1990?

[TCD]

Longer term? You mean the half year it was sold. Now that's what I'd call ridiculous

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Nobody who had the option of spending £25 on an A501 memory upgrade bought an A500+ for £400 instead,

Of course not, but people paid £400 for a Cartoon Classics pack expecting an A500 that could play almost every game out of the box and not have compatibility issues!

[Megalomaniac]

Sorry this is all a bit off-topic, 1991 was still a very good time to buy an Amiga if you hadn't had the chance previously, whichever version you got, but:

These compatibility issues always happened with upgraded models though, from 128K Spectrum to STe to Intellivision II. All of those were better systems longer term too - and the Plus cost the same, and came with the same software, as the earlier models - longer term it was a free upgrade, even if games took time to see the benefits.

I know Commodore could have launched it better (the original plan was to wait until early 1992, but they basically ran out of standard A500s), but things improved quickly. Developers had to take their share of the blame as well, especially with newer games (most of which did work, in fairness). The quick cancellation of the A500+ in favour of the A600 (which internally was much the same as the A500+ until you tried to upgrade it) doesn't make it a bad model either. My personal view with hindsight is that the A600 was probably a mistake, or at least should have been held over for release alongside the A1200 as part of a wider range review.

[dreadnought]

If as the AI says A500+ really launched in 1991 with 400 quid price tag then buying it seems pointless to me, because you could probably get a standard A500 for 100 less, which is a big difference.

And A500+ advantages didn't mean much to somebody who just wanted to play classic games. These maybe look interesting now in 2024, but back then I wouldn't think twice about it.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Sorry this is all a bit off-topic, 1991 was still a very good time to buy an Amiga if you hadn't had the chance previously, whichever version you got, but:

These compatibility issues always happened with upgraded models though, from 128K Spectrum to STe to Intellivision II. All of those were better systems longer term too - and the Plus cost the same, and came with the same software, as the earlier models - longer term it was a free upgrade, even if games took time to see the benefits.

I know Commodore could have launched it better (the original plan was to wait until early 1992, but they basically ran out of standard A500s), but things improved quickly. Developers had to take their share of the blame as well, especially with newer games (most of which did work, in fairness). The quick cancellation of the A500+ in favour of the A600 (which internally was much the same as the A500+ until you tried to upgrade it) doesn't make it a bad model either. My personal view with hindsight is that the A600 was probably a mistake, or at least should have been held over for release alongside the A1200 as part of a wider range review.

Not really off-topic as the time when the A500+ launched in Q4 1991 for me was not the best time (which is the word to remember) to buy one as you ended up with the plus model.

Of course developers had some blame, but i wasn’t talking about specific issues, i was just stating Commodore didn’t tell anyone a different model was in the box they were buying that had compatibility issues, a big deal at the time.

[TCD]

Does anyone have the price that the Screen Gems pack was sold for?

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by tcd

does anyone have the price that the screen gems pack was sold for?

£399

[Karlos]

I bought a second hand A1200 ( Rev 2B ) for peanuts in around 1996 from someone that had just left it gathering dust. That was a pretty good time to buy.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

£399

Thanks.

[Megalomaniac]

The time that the Screen Gems bundle was out might have been a relatively bad buy to get a standard pack Amiga, because the included games were so bad (and Deluxe Paint II was getting a bit old). If you were prepared to go to an independent dealer you could get something like the Tenstar or Astra pack thrown in with it (and maybe save £30-50 on the RRP), but if you didn't have someone like that nearby and weren't confident buying through mail order you were probably stuck with Beast II, Back to the Future 2, Days of Thunder and Nightbreed - you'd be bored by Boxing Day. Just about all the other backs included at least one bona fide classic, or 2 or 3 really good games, but this one was a stinker.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Karlos

I bought a second hand A1200 ( Rev 2B ) for peanuts in around 1996 from someone that had just left it gathering dust. That was a pretty good time to buy.

The best time.

Accelerator cards were coming down in price, lots of second hand stuff was going for bargain prices, and magazines came with cover disks or CDs with full commercial programs! My only regret is that I sold so many second hand Amigas in my shop but didn't keep any for myself (how was I to know that I would want them 30 years later?).

[Megalomaniac]

Maybe the best time and reasoning to buy an A500 was to buy in new in 1989 for games, but the best time to buy an A1200 and upgrade it was 1995 or later, with at least the computer itself being second-hand, with serious stuff the main reasoning? It does depend on what you already had, of course - if you'd bought an ST in 1988 you probably weren't gaining enough by replacing it with an A500 (especially if you got a Megadrive or SNES for action games to augment it), but an A1200 was probably a decent step up (almost all the great Amiga-but-not-ST games worked out of the box on the A1200) and late 1992-1993 was the kind of the time the amount of ST releases was really tailing off.

You could get a Playstation, a second-hand PC (a 486 with CDROM, maybe 486DX with 8Mb if you were lucky) AND a pretty souped-up Amiga for much the same cost as a Windows 95 low-end Pentium in late 1995, which would give you good coverage for serious tasks and most types of games. I think running Mac emulation on a powerful Amiga was a suitable way of playing Civ 2 (which eventually got a Playstation version, albeit nowhere near as good as the PC one), Settlers 2, Sim City 2000 and others). Grand Prix 2 is about the only thing that has no real suitable equivalent for any of those systems. The time would come when you'd realistically need a PC, ideally not until Windows 98 which was much less buggy than 95.