Best big box Amiga to get into.

[trixster]

Originally Posted by indigolemon

As Jope (rightly) said - for most classic games (WHDLoad stuff as mentioned) You end up using your native video output again. I have a VGA switch box so I can switch from the Radeon to the Indivision AGA output as required.
I have played some RTG capable games using the Radeon which worked perfectly - and for general workbench use its really speedy and looks great. The Soundblaster has AHI support, and I means I can playback 16bit audio now, I have the standard Paula audio into the line in on the card so I can route all audio from the Soundblasters audio out into my amp.

The Mediator has been plenty stable for me, no real issues to report at all, and it allowed me to lump the Radeon's spare memory in with my fast ram This whole project has kinda been my attempt to build the machine I always wanted back in 1999ish, but could never afford at the time. One note was I started from scratch to get the mediator going, fresh OS 3.9 install etc - Daedelus really helped me out there!

Anyway - here are some piccies of the machine in action, including MI2 via WHDLoad and the desktop running native 1280x1024 (excuse the black DVD rom, beige replacement is inbound): https://goo.gl/photos/WZs91k7WjjcxEQ158

Looks great!

[indigolemon]

Originally Posted by Toryglen-boy

looks nice. sharin' is carin'

Originally Posted by trixster

Looks great!

Thanks chaps! I have plans to make the tower look less generic - but I'm still working on those so they shall remain a secret for now

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by Toryglen-boy

yeah, just curious really. I know that A1200 has a Zorro II slot, and the A4000 a 32bit Zorro III. i just wondered what difference in the architecture made to performance.

The A1200's expansion is similar to Zorro-II indeed, but it's a lot faster than Zorro-II so RTG will perform better on it than a Zorro-II big box Amiga. Zorro-III removes the need to push all transfers through the 8MB Z-II window that the A1200 is saddled with though, and adds DMA which gives it a big advantage over the A1200. But Zorro-III graphics cards are also slow in themselves, being based on GPUs from the late '80s or early '90s, so newer PCI cards have an advantage there, especially when it comes to running large screenmodes. The ultimate for performance therefore is probably a Zorro-III Amiga with a Mediator and a Radeon, or a Voodoo 3 if you're looking for 3D acceleration.

[b0lt-thrower]

A4000 + Mediator 4000Di, + lots of cards and a nice fat accelerator (maybe even a blizzard upgraded to 300 or 350mhz if you can swing it).

If you go with a USB solution regardless of Mediator + PCI card or just a Z3 card, you'll solve 99% of your expandability issues: USB NIC, USB sound, USB storage...you'll only want for a graphics solution at that point.

[b0lt-thrower]

Oh and on the issue of an A1200...with the caveat that I had an A1200...I liked the A1200...I wouldn't go with a tower solution. Too many failure points, plus timing issues on various board revisions, plus it's not really meant to go in a tower anyway...

I'd stick with a 3000 or 4000 for the reasons in my earlier post.

[Amiga1992]

Not as "big", but I'd go for the A3000, it's arguably the best Amiga Commodore has ever built, and I do like the fact that it's a smaller box than the others.

[grelbfarlk]

I would say A4000d is the best option. The A4000T is really overkill nowadays since all those extra zorro and ISA cards aren't really needed anymore, nor are all the drive bays.

An A4000D has mounting positions for 2x internal 3.5" drives, 2x external 3.5" bays and one 5 1/4" bay for a DVD drive. Not that you even need that many drives since a single large drive gives you room for everything with maybe one 3.5" external bay for a CF card for removable storage. A3000 is a great machine but really you are just getting a built in flicker fixer and if you want to mess around with Zorro cards hope that you get one that has the latest DMAC and Ramsey (and Buster). With an A4000 you have to worry about what Buster version is onboard.

With the A4000 you can upgrade the motherboard RAM to 64MB if you want, cheaply. But if you want top end performance, accelerators other than a basic A3640 (which you can upgrade to an 060 cheaply) cost too much. Really a Mediator saves you a fair amount of cash if you add up what it costs for Zorro GFX, Network, Sound and USB cards.