Amiga computers

[sickdrummer420]

can someone give me the scoop on all the amiga computers? I used to have an Amiga500 and was thinging of getting one again to play the classic games. I see now there are many amiga systems out there. Which is the better one and why? What should I look for ? I need to play Sinbad and the throne of the Falcon!
thanks

[anagrama]

The lineage looks something like this:

A1000 (1985)
A500 (1987)
A500+ (~1990)
A600 (~1991)
A1200 (~1993)

There's the A1500, A3000 & A4000 & maybe others aswell, but I'm not sure where they fit in.

The A500 is a condensed A1000, and the A500+ has some minor upgrades but is incompatible with a bunch of A500 games. The A600 chops off the numeric keypad, and had 1mb RAM built in (I think).
The A1200 is the AGA-enhanced big brother to the A600 (and is a chopped down version of the 3000/4000? Not too sure about that), and is the most powerful of the 'common' Amigas. It had a few exclusive games and plenty of others were AGA-enhanced [The CD32 console is basically an A1200 with a CD drive and no keyboard].

The A1200 is the best overall, but (like the A600) you'll need a boot-disk thing to play a few incompatible A500 games. If you just want to play a few of the classics, then an A500 will probably do the job.

[farfel]

A2000 is a better choice than A500 - same computer but with a full-sized case for expanation

Get at least 1 megabyte for better graphics.

[sickdrummer420]

can u make a diskette image on a regular pc and make the disk to work on an amiga computer?

[Ed Oscuro]

In that case, you can take the disk image and play it right on your PC using an Amiga emulator (no idea on compatibility though, the Amiga series has its twists and turns).

[sickdrummer420]

yea i know of winuae but i wanna run it on an actual amiga. Is this possible?

[Ed Oscuro]

Yeah, but I unfortunately don't have any idea what program you'd use, or what sort of hardware you'd want to connect to your PC.

Thus...bump?

[robotriot]

No, you can't write Amiga disks on the PC due to floppy controller differences (well, there is some sort of hack requiring two disk drives on the pc side and a modified floppy cable, but I couldn't get it to work). You'd need the Catweasel controller on your PC. The other option is to copy the disk images to the Amiga via Nullmodem cable, network or CD-ROM and write them to disk there.

[Flack]

Talk to Icbrkr, he does this. He has one hell of a modified 1200.

[rbudrick]

Yes, Amiga Floppies are fundamentally VERY different that PC, due to hardware differences.

However, I had no idea about this floppy to floppy + modded cable technique. Could you tell me more about this?

-Rob

[le geek]

I've done it with floppies and a stock AMI 2000. It was kind of a pain in the ass, but I got Space Quest this way. I have the 2.0 roms though if you have earlier ones you need a nullmodem cable...

Ben

[robotriot]

http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi <- This is what I was thinking of, but actually it only supports reading and no writing I guess

[icbrkr]

If you're looking into getting an Amiga to play games, you need to ask yourself some questions:

1) Do I want to play older bought games (1985-1991 era)? If so, get an Amiga 500 for cheap. The Kickstart 1.2 or 1.3 that comes with it should be plenty to use most games. Make sure that it has 1MB of ChipRAM for maximum compatiblity.

2) Do I want to play older games that I got from the Internet? In this case, you'll need to get yourself an Amiga that has a hard drive (to make life easier), minium 1MB of RAM (2MB preferred), Kickstart 2.04 or higher, PC2AM (available from aminet.net for free), and a parallel Laplink cable that's available from Office Depot or anywhere else. Using this program and the cable, you can copy the ADF files to the Amiga, and using ADF2BLITZ make real disks from them. I did this for awhile. Here, you can use any Amiga, but if it's just strictly for older games, an Amiga 500 or 2000 will work fine.

3) I want to play everything that the Amiga has to offer, 1985 through present. Get an Amiga 1200 or 4000 but ensure that it has an 030 or better processor, 4MB minimum RAM, and a hard drive. The Amiga 1200 and 4000 have different graphics modes than the older 500/2000/3000 series, and a lot of games use this. The downfall is that a lot of older games are incompatible with the 1200/4000 series "out of the box". However, a program is out that allows you to install "disk only" games to the hard drive called WHDLOAD (whdload.de) and makes these games compatible. The bad thing is it requires an 030 processor better, and 4MB of RAM. Finding an Amiga 1200 shouldn't be hard with these specifications. The nice thing with the 1200 is that you can get an older PCMCIA Ethernet card for it so you don't need the above cable, and you can put it on your network and download files straight from the internet using FTP or WWW.

Hope this helps.

[rbudrick]

Wow, thanks, icbrkr! I've been wondering about the most effective way to do this for a while. That's the best explanation Ive heard yet! I will definitely keep this in mind for when finally break down and get an Amiga....right now I have 0 room left (though I keep saying that and keep accumulating more stuff )

-Rob

[Raedon]

Best to have for home use

A3000 - Has the ability to use VGA monitors right out of the box.
A1000 - highest compatability with Kickstart 1.* games and Video out.

[Raedon]

there are lots of ways to get ADF files back to disk.

1) use PC floppy emulation on the Amiga, it can read and write MS DOS floppies. compress thes .ADF so it fits on the DOS floppy (770k vs 880k) use a unzipper and ADF to floppy from CLI. I've done this with just an amiga 1000 with 2 meg of ram... no HD

2) get a network card and connect the Amiga to your network.

[98PaceCar]

Best to have for home use

A3000 - Has the ability to use VGA monitors right out of the box.
A1000 - highest compatability with Kickstart 1.* games and Video out.

I agree completely! The simple fact that you can plug any old vga monitor into a 3000 without any mods is worth the price of admission. Plus the 3000 has built in SCSI support. The only downside is finding memory to use with it. If you want to fully expand it, you need to find 16mb worth of 1X4 zip ram, which isn't terribly easy to locate.

If you do get a big box Ami (2000, 2500, 3000, 4000), look into getting a video card for it. I'm running a 4mb Picasso card with Cybergrafx 4.0 drivers and can achieve 1024X768 at 60hz from my unaccellerated 3000. Makes the workbench much nicer to look at!

As far as transferring files, you can get a 10 megabit ethernet card for any of the big box Amigas. It's not cheap (I think around $100 or so), but if you run the latest OS with it's built in tcp support it will allow you to share your drives between pc and Amiga as well as printers and what not. I can even surf the net from my Ami through my cable modem!!

No matter what, pick one up. Even if it's just a 500. You'll love the games!

[icbrkr]

Best to have for home use

A3000 - Has the ability to use VGA monitors right out of the box.
A1000 - highest compatability with Kickstart 1.* games and Video out.

I agree completely! The simple fact that you can plug any old vga monitor into a 3000 without any mods is worth the price of admission. Plus the 3000 has built in SCSI support. The only downside is finding memory to use with it. If you want to fully expand it, you need to find 16mb worth of 1X4 zip ram, which isn't terribly easy to locate.

I purposely left out the 3000 for the simple reason he said he wanted to play games. Due to the 030 in the 3000, he'd have to run a degrader or something similar (WHDLOAD would work too) to get a lot of games to work. Therefore, it would be simplier to just grab a 500 or 2000 for older games. I disagree using the 1000 for anything due to the lack of Kickstart in ROM and the inability to easily add more Chip RAM, hard drive, etc. The VGA attachment with flicker fixer on the 3000 is nice though If you're going to bother though with expanding, modding, etc, I'd just grab a 1200 or 4000 for full compatiblity.

[98PaceCar]

Best to have for home use

A3000 - Has the ability to use VGA monitors right out of the box.
A1000 - highest compatability with Kickstart 1.* games and Video out.

I agree completely! The simple fact that you can plug any old vga monitor into a 3000 without any mods is worth the price of admission. Plus the 3000 has built in SCSI support. The only downside is finding memory to use with it. If you want to fully expand it, you need to find 16mb worth of 1X4 zip ram, which isn't terribly easy to locate.

I purposely left out the 3000 for the simple reason he said he wanted to play games. Due to the 030 in the 3000, he'd have to run a degrader or something similar (WHDLOAD would work too) to get a lot of games to work. Therefore, it would be simplier to just grab a 500 or 2000 for older games. I disagree using the 1000 for anything due to the lack of Kickstart in ROM and the inability to easily add more Chip RAM, hard drive, etc. The VGA attachment with flicker fixer on the 3000 is nice though If you're going to bother though with expanding, modding, etc, I'd just grab a 1200 or 4000 for full compatiblity.

Given a choice, I'd have a 4000 myself, but even the 4000 and 1200 have issues with some of the older games. Unfortunately, there is no total solution short of WinUAE or something similar. But other than the AGA games, I haven't run across anything I couldn't get working on my 3000. Mainly using WHDLOAD. I guess it would depend on which era of gaming he's after, pre or post AGA.