I just bought an Amiga, any recommendations?

[abbub]

Yeah, for me, the three big things with a new retro computer (Amiga or otherwise) are:

1) Hook it up to a modern monitor
2) Ability to move files onto and off of it easily (network, usually)
3) Replace spinning media with something a little less likely to fail (i.e. replace phyiscal hard drives with compact flash or sd media)

A lot of it *really* depends on what you want to do with the computer, though.

[Ulysses13]

I’m definitely keeping the internal floppy drive, even though I’ll have some sort of internal storage. The disks and the loading noises are a big part of the nostalgia for me.

[abbub]

Originally Posted by Ulysses13

I’m definitely keeping the internal floppy drive, even though I’ll have some sort of internal storage. The disks and the loading noises are a big part of the nostalgia for me.

Oh, yeah, I mostly was talking about the hard drives (though, on a C64, there's something to be said for finding an alternative to the 1541 if you value your time! lol).

[Ulysses13]

OK, so an update...

I had my board recapped and cleaned by AmigaPassion. Really lovely guy. I got the RF modulator removed too so that perhaps in the future I'll use that space for something else.

I'm displaying it on my TV with the three A/V cables. Not amazing but much nicer than the RF aerial thingy, and will do for now.

I cleaned up the underside RF shielding which was rusty, and got a new insulation layer for that as the old one was rust stained.

I bought the SD card IDE adapter from AmigaKit and installed Workbench 3.0 on the card so now I can boot straight to that.

Then I got Cloanto 3.1 ROMs and put those in. I think that's the furthest I want to go as I don't want to lose the 'double tick' logo on the boot screen! Guess I need WB3.1 now though, right?

So next, I think I need more memory. I was expecting to just get an accelerator card which would handle this for me too, but perhaps I was getting carried away, which is easy to do. They're expensive and neither the Vampire or the Warp options are actually immediately available anyway.

Perhaps a modest memory expansion will do so I can start to play with WHDLoad and then a scan doubler so I can use HDMI, which would be ideal.

Until one of those accelerators comes along of course....!

[aeberbach]

Have you seen the Individual Computers AGA MK3 scan doubler? Looks like it will be excellent...

I'm waiting on a Warp 1260.

[Ulysses13]

That looks like the scan doubler to have. I'll keep my eye on that.

Is there anything on the market that does that job but with HDMI output? Or is HDMI only really part of these more fancy accelerators because it has to do with the Audio as well as the video?

[khph_re]

Many LCD Tv's have both VGA and composite, I've got both hooked up to my
A1200 at once. It's a crappy ALBA tv, but will happily switch between 30 and 15khz. Poor man's multi-sync :-)


Don't forget adding RAM to an A1200 will also over double it's speed. The RAM expansion below will take you from 1.33 mips to 2.91.

http://amigakit.amiga.store/product_...ducts_id=12690

A compact flash WiFi card is useful for grabbing files from various places. Make sure you get one that supports WPA/WPA2. (Mine doesn't, so I briefly set up my phone hotspot with no security, bad I know, but only half an hour t a time).

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by aeberbach

Have you seen the Individual Computers AGA MK3 scan doubler? Looks like it will be excellent...

So did the Indivision. It can't even scroll the screen smoothly.