--- Roger Merchberger <zmerch_at_30below.com> wrote:
> Rumor has it that Gary Hildebrand may have mentioned these words:
>
> >Merch, what are yo looking for, early or late Amiga??
> I'd prefer a later Amiga (3000/4000, but I'd even be happy with a 1200)
I may have an A3000 I could free up. Not sure what they are worth
these days, though. I can make sure it has Ethernet, if that's
important. I don't have a second set of 3.0 ROMs to include with it,
if that matter; it'll be runnning KS 2.04.
> mainly for the ability to use not-quite-so-nonstandard hardware (ie IDE
> or SCSI drives, PeeCeelike floppies, and the ability to use a multisync
> VGA monitor would be *golden*...
High-density floppies are somewhat rare with Amigas. Most used "720K"
floppies at 880KB, formatted (80 tracks, double-sided, 11 sectors of 512
bytes per track (22 per cyl), IIRC) The high-density floppies spin at
1/2 speed to keep the bit rate the same, if you didn't know.
> Whazza AGA Amiga? Never had one before, so I don't know all the
> intracacies of the Amiga line...
The A4000 and A1200 had a newer, higher performance custom chip set
called AGA for "Advanced Graphic Architecture" (AFAIK). More colors,
more bit-planes, more flexible video modes. There are lots of games
and whatnot that require AGA. Prior to that, the predominant chipset
was "ECS" for "Enhanced Chip Set", enhanced over what came out with
the original A1000.
Of the boxes you'll probably want to play with, the A2000 and A3000
are ECS, the A4000 and A1200 are AGA. The A4000 and A1200 are natively
IDE (4GB limit with older ROMs), the A3000 has SCSI built-in, and the
A2000 routinely had a drop-in SCSI controller. The A1200 has a PCMCIA
slot for networking; the other boxes have Zorro slots and ISA slots, so
you can go with an A2065 Ethernet card, a more modern Zorro-interface NIC,
or a GG2 Bus+ with ISA NIC. Not sure about options for the A1200 PCMCIA,
but essentially, nearly all the Ethernet solutions for the Amiga are
10mbps. There may be a few 100mbps interfaces, but they are uncommon.
Are you getting an Amiga just to get one, or is there some compelling
task? If you want to play with a Toaster, I'd recommend an A2000 with
accelerator card if you can't find an A4000 - more room for goodies.
-ethan
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Received on Tue May 21 2002 - 15:23:21 BST