Hamby wrote:NamelessPlayer wrote:If I had $5,000, forget the Amiga 1200 - I could actually AFFORD the Amiga 4000 for a change, perhaps with one of those rare PowerPC accelerators thrown in and a good RTG card to sweeten the deal, and on top of all that, an Apollo Vampire 500 V2+ accelerator that I bought my Amiga 500 for.
Not to be argumentative, but according to some Amiga engineers and developers I've talked with, the 1200 is actually a better machine (in terms of quality). Otherwise I'd want a 40000, also.
My A3000 is sitting in the closet (no doubt rotting from acid from the battery 🙁 ) but my favorite Amiga I had (A1000, A2000, A3000) was the A2000. Dunno why, because the A3000 was much better.
Holy crap, you have an A3000? Get that thing out ASAP, you really don't want that clock battery to ruin your day, just as this A2000's corrosion has ruined mine for the past week. It's ridiculously unreliable, especially with the full 1 MB of RAM enabled. I suspect it's because of the corrosion on some of the CPU pins (address lines, going by the schematics), the socket pins, and some of the nearby traces.
It's driving me nuts because the potential is right there in this system, I know it's repairable, but I haven't figured out what the problem traces are, exactly - nor do I have a PLCC puller for the Fat Agnus or a desoldering gun to remove the 68000 socket and its corroded pins entirely.
KCompRoom2000 wrote:SpectriaForce wrote:KCompRoom2000 wrote:Let me think, what retro hardware would I buy if I had $5,000?
- A Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh
That thing is overrated. It looks sort of interesting, but the case is all plastic with wear and tear sensitive metallic paint and the Bose speakers and subwoofer sound horrible (like a home cinema set). If you want a pre-Steve Jobs Macintosh, then take a Macintosh 9500 or 9600, those are really interesting because they have lots of expansion possibilities.
It was the one thing that I've always wanted if I had money to waste ever since I was 10, simply because I thought it looked neat, but since they're subject to Apple's typical design flaws of the '90s, I'm OK with substituting the TAM for one of the Power Macintosh models you've suggested.
Now that I've replaced the 6500 (same mobo as the TAM) with a 9600 at last weekend's Vintage Computer Festival (same place I scored the Amiga 2000 and some other stuff), I'm now aware first-hand just how much the 9600 would've blown away the TAM for a lot less money spent.
Granted, the comparison isn't entirely fair here; this 9600 came loaded with one of those XLR8 CarrierZIF adapters (it's kinda like a Pentium III/Athlon slotket adapter) with a 400 MHz G3, alongside numerous expansion cards installed. I just had to add a hard drive.
Word of warning to anyone who just tries to drop in a 6500/TAM HDD for use in a 9600 with a PCI ATA controller, though: you're going to have a very bad day trying to boot or even read the thing. Use a different Mac to copy your old stuff over, or pray that the old HDD in a FireWire enclosure with your choice of FW card in the 9600 actually works.
These things really, REALLY want to boot from their integrated SCSI buses specifically, and if I didn't have an external SCSI CD drive to install the OS, I would've been totally hosed. Make sure to stock up on SCSI drives if you ever have to deal with these things.
