Which is your favorite Amiga model?

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Torti-the-Smurf

The A2000 was in a Leftover PC Case; that why it looks so... äeahm, "boring".

The A2000 was a combination of the A1000 and Sidecar, so it needed to be in a PC sized case. It was a good solid workhorse and a lot easier to work on than the A3000 or even the A4000.

The case design appears to have been inspired by the C900 (developed in 1984), though it is a bit narrower and obviously custom-designed for the A2000.



The PC-10 had similar styling (though not as interesting) but the case design was quite different, with a fixed front and lid sliding off to the rear.

[Torti-the-Smurf]

Yup, the A2000 is a Workhorse, but it had also budged reasons why the A2000 looks like this.

They had alot of leftover PC cases in Braunschweig germany and they stuck the A2000 in it.

I think you know the story about the canceled "Amiga Ranger Project".

Money was tight

[Dunny]

The A2000 is the only Amiga likely to survive a nuclear war.

[source]

I am partial to the A2000. It was the computer that got me through most of high school and 8 years of university. The machine still works today. It seems to be a tank. The second would be my A4000T. I do have other models - 1000, 500 3000D 4000D

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Torti-the-Smurf

The A2000 was in a Leftover PC Case; that why it looks so... äeahm, "boring".

Contrary to people in thread i never saw Commodore PC in enclosure shared with A2000 - IMHO PC10, 20, 30 are different than A2000.

Originally Posted by Torti-the-Smurf

I always loved the looks of the Amiga Desktops (A500/A600/A1200) the most.

Yep... wedge design is eternal but i bet every owner of the wedge-Amiga dreamed about serious and boring A2000, 3000 or 4000 - some even about 3000T and/or A4000T

Originally Posted by Torti-the-Smurf

SGI was cool yeah, but a SGI Indy or SGI Indigo isnt to hot in my eyes, but hey, at least they tried.

Well at least they tried to brake stereotypical office computer look - had idea to buy some SGI when it was cheap (around 2002..2005 on ebay you could buy SGI systems even very expensive quite cheaply - in price of previous gen PC) and use SGI enclosure to fit Amiga inside (my choice was Crimson, Onyx, Challenge or Octane - strangely i always like idea to have computer size of small fridge).

[Torti-the-Smurf]

Originally Posted by pandy71

Yep... wedge design is eternal but i bet every owner of the wedge-Amiga dreamed about serious and boring A2000, 3000 or 4000 - some even about 3000T and/or A4000T

Maybe, but i had a A4000 60/50mhz Desktop with Cybergrafx and still;
i loved my A1200 Blizzard 30/50mhz the most

Dont know why; maybe i have a softspot for those wedge designs

If i had to choose between a A600 with a Vampire or a A4000T;
i would take the A600; its so cute . But thats just me, i guess.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Torti-the-Smurf

If i had to choose between a A600 with a Vampire or a A4000T;
i would take the A600; its so cute . But thats just me, i guess.

In fact this is very popular approach - one of my colleagues never own Amiga in past (younger than me, definitely PC guy) but in wave of retro nostalgia he get from his brother set with A600 - i asked him why A600 - his answer was straight - smallest Amiga machine - to play games you don't need numeric pad and A600 is smallest so best pick for people willing to use Amiga from time to time for entertainment. So nowadays A600 model is one of most desired by casual Amigan's.

[mr.spiv]

Originally Posted by pandy71

So nowadays A600 model is one of most desired by casual Amigan's.

I have A600 as a "test slave" but maaan that was a picky machine to get run stable..

[Megalomaniac]

Originally Posted by pandy71

to play games you don't need numeric pad

Are keypad-requriring games like Railroad Tycoon, Damocles, most Coktel Vision games up to and including Fascination, and most earlier flight sims (F29 Retailator and Flight of the Intruder for a start) not 'games' then? I see this kind of inverse snobbery occasionally, and it feels misguided, especially as people who liked flight sims generally did buy them rather than just copying them. Add games which are affected in some way by it - cheat modes in Carrier Command and EPIC (to the extent that you can call it a cheat...), keyboard-based movement in Civ (it can be done with mouse or even joystick instead though), player 2 substitutions in Kick Off 2 etc and you can see the limitations of an A600.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by pandy71

to play games you don't need numeric pad!

Blasphemy!!!

To punish the guy, take away all his games, except flight simulators.

[CCCP alert]

Originally Posted by Dunny

The A2000 is the only Amiga likely to survive a nuclear war.

Only if there are any left due to battery corrosion on the motherboard lol.

[Leffmann]

The A600, being both compact and fairly expandable.

[masteries]

Amiga 600

It has the 2 MB chip RAM capability of Amiga 500 Plus,
with the addendum of already present hard disk interface,
and a reduced size compared to A500 and A500+

[Megalomaniac]

People overestimate the difference the A600 made for hard drives. The A600HD only had a 20Mb unit, way too small in practical terms (could you fit both Monkey Island 2 and Fate of Atlantis on it at once?). Getting anything bigger as an upgrade wasn't cheap. https://archive.org/details/AmigaFor...e/n37/mode/2up in December 1992 charges £270 more for an A600 with a 60Mb hard drive compared to the floppy-only unit (or £230 for the upgrade kit to fit yourself, at your own risk) compared to £329 for a 52Mb hard drive for the A500. Not a huge price difference, and once you add a hard drive you'll want to play games which need a keypad, or you'll think about an accelerator, where you're stuffed with the A600. It may be different with today's hardware upgrades though.

[alexh]

If Kipper2k or someone else ever does a replacement keyboard for A600 I'd like to see them include a HW numeric keypad like some modern laptops by using a function key + existing keys. There are blank keys on the A600 UK layout to facilitate this.

[CCCP alert]

A2000 was a mistake, cost a fortune, had all the subtle design elegance of a dog turd on the pavement and still only the same specs as an A1000.

As for PC compatibility, an Amstrad PC1512 for £499.99 in 1986 was a cheaper option. Bit of a shit stain on Amiga, as was the piss poor design/looks/build quality of A500, on Amiga really YMMV.

Between A1000 and CDTV there is nothing worth mentioning unless you are pretty clueless or drunk on those effing rose tinted spectacles. A2000/500 are the reason Amiga is a failure IMO, A500/2000 did more damage than good.

[Calabazam]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

People overestimate the difference the A600 made for hard drives. The A600HD only had a 20Mb unit, way too small in practical terms (could you fit both Monkey Island 2 and Fate of Atlantis on it at once?). Getting anything bigger as an upgrade wasn't cheap. https://archive.org/details/AmigaFor...e/n37/mode/2up in December 1992 charges £270 more for an A600 with a 60Mb hard drive compared to the floppy-only unit (or £230 for the upgrade kit to fit yourself, at your own risk) compared to £329 for a 52Mb hard drive for the A500. Not a huge price difference, and once you add a hard drive you'll want to play games which need a keypad, or you'll think about an accelerator, where you're stuffed with the A600. It may be different with today's hardware upgrades though.

The onboard IDE and PCMCIA weren't so great in 1992 because those expansions weren't cheap, while the A500 already had numerous expansions of all sort. Even in the Amiga reviews, no one was enthousiastic about the A600.
But by the end of the 90's bigger laptop harddrives were available cheap, and PCMCIA became useful for network, file transfer with memory cards, even WiFi, and the A600 took over the A500/Plus.
Only in the late 2010's did the A500 almost catch up with some new expansions like TF and Vampire.

[Calabazam]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

Between A1000 and CDTV there is nothing worth mentioning unless you are pretty clueless or drunk on those effing rose tinted spectacles. A2000/500 are the reason Amiga is a failure IMO, A500/2000 did more damage than good.

I think you are mistaken. No one would be talking about the amiga on this board by now if the A500 had not sold by millions in the 80's/90's.
The A2000 was good enough for the time but should have been directed better to its professional market.
CDTV, people seems to like it by now but very few were interested at the time.

[alexh]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

A2000/500 are the reason Amiga is a failure IMO, A500/2000 did more damage than good.

You're dreaming? I never saw an A1000 in the UK. Amiga sales in UK only really took off when the Batman Pack came out in 1989. The A500 was the lifeblood of CBM/Amiga in terms of sales. Not saying A500 was my favourite model but it certainly sold the most.

[Megalomaniac]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

A2000 was a mistake, cost a fortune, had all the subtle design elegance of a dog turd on the pavement and still only the same specs as an A1000.

As for PC compatibility, an Amstrad PC1512 for £499.99 in 1986 was a cheaper option. Bit of a shit stain on Amiga, as was the piss poor design/looks/build quality of A500, on Amiga really YMMV.

Between A1000 and CDTV there is nothing worth mentioning unless you are pretty clueless or drunk on those effing rose tinted spectacles. A2000/500 are the reason Amiga is a failure IMO, A500/2000 did more damage than good.

Ridiculous. The A2000 cost about the same as the A1000 did on launch (especially once you upgraded the A1000 to 512k chip RAM), you didn't have to reload Kickstart every time you turned it on, A1000s couldn't take hard drives or network cards, and the A2000 was much more expandable later. And the PC bridgeboard was cheaper than the Amstrad, and not limited to monochrome or 8088.

The A500 being about 40% of the price of the A1000/A2000 is why we remember Amigas today. £399 was an affordable mass-market computer, over £1000 wasn't.

The A1000 may have looked cooler, but the A500 looked like a home computer, and the A2000 looked like a business computer.