I've been wondering the same thing. I know the Amiga 500 was the most popular model and is compatible with most of the games out there, but myself I'd be interested in getting an A1200 for the faster CPU and AGA support. How many games actually took advantage of AGA?

I originally owned an A500 with 1MB, and later upgraded to an A2000HD with 3MB. I think you really can't go wrong with any system with a hard drive and more than 1MB of RAM. If I were to get back into the Amiga scene I would probably go with an A1200 though, since they are easier to expand and a little more modern. If you have money and want a challenge there are also upgrades for the original A1000. A500s seemed to be the most common, and are probably the cheapest.

I'd definitely go for a 1200 if you can find one, or even a 600 if you don't want AGA. The 500 is tough to get into. It's really limited as a base system and expanding it to the point where it's remotely useful is *expensive*. You can pick them up all day long for <$100, but unless you get a bunch of software already on (working!) floppies, a PSU, mouse, monitor, video cable, etc. with it it's not really worth it. Don't pick up a bare console with nothing.

Note that you can't (easily) download disk images for an A500 off the internet and write them on a normal PC. And they don't have a composite video port by default so you need to do some futzing around if you want to plug it into a normal TV (unless you're in SCART land.) The PCMCIA & IDE interface and video outs on the 1200/600 will make your life a TON easier.

Leave the "big" Amigas alone (A2000, 3000, 4000) until you're well steeped in the mythos. They are supremely cool, but money pits.

EDIT: I should mention that probably the easiest/cheapest way to get software onto an A500 is to swap its floppy drive for a Gotek.

Is it true that less than a million A1200s were sold?

If you never used an Amiga before I recommend an Amiga 500 with the 512K trapdoor RAM, mouse, external floppy drive, serial transfer cable, Amiga explorer Software, TOSEC games archive, a good bootable Workbench 1.3 disk, a stack of DSDD 720k 3.5" floppies, some kind of Atari 2600 compatible joystick (Wico are what I mostly use) and probably an Amiga A520 TV converter box.

Most of the old school games are floppy booters so if you can get the base system booted to Workbench you can then run Windows Explorer (free download) to dump images from the PC to the external floppy drive using a serial transfer cable. Then just boot the game and play.

If you actually like the system then you can sink a bunch of money on better equipment, but until then keep it simple. Eventually you will probably want an A1200 with 030/50 accelerator to run games directly from the HD.

I like the systems so I have quite a few including A1000, 2x A2000, A3000, A4000, A1200 and the A500 I started with. Plus a shelf of original games. Amiga hardware can get pricey and decent Amiga monitors that work are getting rare.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Is it true that less than a million A1200s were sold?

Not sure, but Amiga didn't sell that many before they went bankrupt and tons more were sold when their assets were purchased and sold again. The A4000 tower sold more units after the bankruptcy I think then before.

Quite a few people stripped A1200's out of their cases and towered them.

I got a Mist FPGA recently and thought about getting a real Amiga, but there is just too much to it. The Amiga alone is just the start, it really is an expensive hobby.

But I had a choice, I would go with a plain A500 with memory expansion and GOTEK USB floppy installed. I'm not much into hard drives, WHDLoad and all of that. But working with hundreds of real floppies isn't enjoyable either. The GOTEK would work well for me.

Unknown_K wrote:

Eventually you will probably want an A1200 with 030/50 accelerator to run games directly from the HD.

Ami accelerators are a bit overrated, and thoroughly overpriced for the tangible benefits. A 4MB trapdoor RAM card is plenty for WHDLoad.

They are supremely nerdy and cool, and I'd LOVE to have one, but you can get HEAPS of fun from your Amiga without one.

The main purpose will determine the build. For classic gaming an 1200 with an upgraded processor like an ACA 1221 @28 mhz and 33 MB RAM is enough (classic Wing Commander reference speed) but if you are into modern demos, get ready to shell out megabucks for the Vampires and stuff... to get into Pentium 2 territory and above.

The now free whdload is a must IMO.

030 accelerators for the A1200 are almost a requirement if you also want to setup a decent Workbench environment to explore new stuff. Not all are expensive but you need to search/wait for some time.

Personally if I was going for a bare-bones A1200-whdload setup I'd ditch the whole ramcard deal all together and get this , way better that just a ramcard and almost the same price as one. The it's all a matter of getting a cheap IDE->CF adapter, a good CF card, install ClassicWB and transfer the whdload game packs. (btw whdload is now free software).

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Is it true that less than a million A1200s were sold?

They sold NOS Amiga 1200's for a long time, until a few years ago, so the production/sales balance was pretty off at least.

Accelerators are awesome, I was only saying that they aren't *necessary* like some people think they are. Sure, if your aim is to go down the rabbit hole of using your Amiga for modern computing, but if you want it for OCS/AGA gaming, they're too much cost for the benefit you get.

For ages, all I had was a 4MB RAM card for my A1200 (The only readily available accelerators for ages were Blizzard style ones costing hundreds of Aussie dollars). I could WHDLoad basically everything. I got an accelerator since then, and it has enabled some new tricks, but the A1200 with 4MB was already shitloads of fun without it.

I also got interested in Amigas about 2 years ago. I'd always read about them in magazines and heard mention of them in demo competitions etc but apart from viewing some demos on YT I'd never actually used or even saw one in person. I won an auction for a non-working A600 and managed to get it to work by doing some minor motherboard repairs. That was my introduction to the Amiga world.

I chose the 600 because 1200s can get very expensive and I wasn't quite ready to invest big money yet. Even just a base A1200 can get spendy even before you get into accelerators - and the A600 has the hard drive and PCMCIA support that makes it easer to use today than an A500. A500s are more compatible with older software (which seems to be where the bulk of Amiga support happened) but you can usually get an A600 to run anything written for an A500 with a few tweaks.

Of course the upgrade bug bit me pretty early and I ordered a bunch of stuff from Amigakit. Firstly just a CF hard drive kit but eventually I ordered a full-re-cap kit, the memory upgrade and even the VGA output adapter. It's made my A600 quite a fun little machine.

One thing that surprised me with the Amiga - having never used one before - was how poor the hard drive support is/was. Coming from a PC background where even the oldest CGA games either directly supported hard drive installation or at least ran fine when manually copied over to hard drive, the level of hard drive support struck me as fairly poor on the Amiga. Most of the games I tried did not support hard drive installation at all - it's only through the WHDLoad project that you can run most Amiga games from hard drive. The floppy drive in my A600 is noisy and slow but most games seem to be designed to run purely from floppy - not surprising I suppose since so few A500s had hard drives, but even later games continued the trend - mostly for piracy concerns I suppose.

My A600 can only run one or two games through WHDLoad unfortunately, because the application really needs so-called fast RAM. The Amiga uses two types of RAM, fast ram and chip RAM. As I understand it fast RAM is what we PC users would just call normal RAM, but chip RAM is RAM dedicated to the Amiga custom chips (sort of like VRAM on PC), but which runs slower than the CPU itself. The A600 can only support 2MB for chip RAM and no fast RAM unfortunately. That means unless I invest in a fairly expensive CPU/RAM upgrade card for my A600 I'm SOL when it comes to most games via WHDLoad. I may eventually get the upgrade - in fact there has been quite a burgeoning industry of upgrade cards for A600 recently so I might get one of those when they come available.

What I did instead was import an A1200 part-by-part. It works out cheaper to buy parts sometimes than a complete A1200 - especially when I can re-use the drives and power supply from my A600. The A1200 is a better machine all-around. It also does not come with chip RAM, but upgrading it is easier as far as I can see and it comes with 2MB chip RAM already installed - as opposed to the A600 which had to be upgraded to 2MB. The A1200's CPU is only slightly faster than the one in the A600, but speed improves when fast RAM is installed and the A1200 also supports AGA (256 colour) graphics. Unfortunately AGA support is not brilliant in the Amiga software library since the A500 was by far the most successful model, but AGA is a nice bonus for software that supports it. That CPU upgrade linked to above is an excellent way to upgrade an A1200 - although the VGA output option is apparently not as reliable as the one for the A600.

I think overall the Amiga is a lovely little platform, but I did have to temper my expectations a little based on the rave reviews the hardware gets online. It's basically an excellent machine from the late 80s to early 90s. Since I started my PC career in earnest with a 386 PC with VGA, Amiga software can look a little basic to me, but if you dig a little you can find some really excellent software for the machine. Turrican and Turrican 2, Cannon Fodder, The Chaos Engine and The Secret Of Monkey Island are all excellent - although adjusting to the fact that most games only support one joystick button can be painful.

If you want to find out where the better versions of so many early 90s DOS ports came from I'd say the Amiga is a platform well-worth investigating.

Yeah, I'm not willing to spend big $$$ either. I found complete 500s on ebay for 100$ or less witch sounded like a good deal. The 600s and 1200s are a different story price-wise -> too rich for my blood.

I often wonder why most of the Amiga's library only supports one-button joysticks, especially considering how advanced of a machine it was for its time otherwise. Anything less than four buttons (preferably 6) on a 16-bit system just seems absurd to me.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

I often wonder why most of the Amiga's library only supports one-button joysticks, especially considering how advanced of a machine it was for its time otherwise. Anything less than four buttons (preferably 6) on a 16-bit system just seems absurd to me.

This I am wondering as well 😵 , it's just crazy.
The amiga joyport has direct support for 2 buttons (better than 1 , at least you get a dedicated jump button 🤣 ) and the programmers could use a library IIRC that enabled 6-button joysticks - just like the CD32 pads that work perfectly fine on amigas and work as expected if you run a CD32 title on your A1200 for example.
It's just one of these crappy things that led to the platform's demise, keeping it stuck in the past.

@SquallStrife
yes, it's true that a WB3.1 setup + 4MB fastram is perfectly fine for whdload gaming, maybe it didn't come out right from my end when I wrote about the new 9MB expansion (which I still think is a better deal than a 2nd hand ramcard). The only reason one would want a 030+ cpu is to have a faster and more pimped workbench experience or to run more demanding 3d games on the amiga (which is pointless IMHO). Still a 030/040/060 cpu won't make the amiga "usable" in todays standards 🤣 - so no modern usage there 🤣

At a guess I'd blame it on a lack of Commodore leadership. In the early days 1 button joysticks were common because they used the same standard as the Atari 2600 and Commodore 64/VIC machines. Commodore simply never really pushed developers to support 2 or more buttons despite there being a spare pin for that on the plug - developers just fell back on the lowest common denominator, not wanting to alienate gamers using those old joysticks. Some games do support 2 buttons though - I think Turrican 2 does at least. I was tempted to wire up a joystick adapter to make up into jump as so many Amiga games use up to jump. Using up is sort of OK when playing on a keyboard (I played Bubble Bobble DOS that way quite happily) but I could never get used to using up on a joystick. I suppose it doesn't help that I'm using a Master System controller on my Amiga.

^ I have the same problem with up=jump , I solved it by using one of the PSX adapters for the amiga - I cloned UP to X , fire to [] and 2nd fire to O, saved the setting and now I have a great pad to play with the added bonus of the analog stick working as well (great for shmups). It's true that some games do support the 2nd button but they are a minority.

keropi wrote:

^ I have the same problem with up=jump , I solved it by using one of the PSX adapters for the amiga - I cloned UP to X , fire to [] and 2nd fire to O, saved the setting and now I have a great pad to play with the added bonus of the analog stick working as well (great for shmups). It's true that some games do support the 2nd button but they are a minority.

Wow - I was not aware of that adapter. That's definitely one thing I've found with the Amiga community - if you have a problem with an Amiga there is quite likely going to be a community or homebrew project out there somewhere to solve it.