snorg wrote:Should I just get a copy of Amiga Forever from Cloanto and run it on a PC? If I'm going to end up spending several hundred $$$ to get a decent system, would I be better off looking at an A3000 or A4000 as opposed to an A500, A600, or A1200? Are there any special pitfalls or concerns I should be aware of?
Others have done a pretty good job advising you, but since I can never resist giving my opinion...
I'd recommend that you first try UAE, the Amiga emulator. You can download it for free and you can probably find somewhere to get a copy of the Kickstart (like BIOS) ROMs. Note that downloading the ROMs without owning the actual machine isn't legal, but then neither is downloading the various Amiga games and I suspect that's what you'd be doing rather than buying original disks that may no longer work.
By trying the emulator first you can get a feel for it and see if you like the games enough to invest in the real thing. Plus with the emulator, you can plug in and use any USB joystick or controller (and even get a cheap cable to plug in a real Atari style joystick if you want), and you have Save States, meaning you can save/load your game at any point regardless of whether the game itself has a save option.
If you want a real machine...
The Amiga line is split into the OCS/ECS models (A500/A2000/A3000/A600) and the AGA models (A1200/A4000). The OCS/ECS models won't play any AGA games (of which there are a few, but they're in the minority), and the AGA machines won't play all the old OCS/ECS games. Of the two lines, the OCS/ECS models have the biggest selection of games.
OCS/ECS models are further split by whether they have the OCS (Original Chip Set) or ECS (Enhanced Chip Set) and what version of Kickstart they have. An A500 or A2000 could have either, but an A600 will be ECS. You want an ECS machine. The reason being that it can be easily switched between NTSC and PAL through the use of a program. Many PAL games don't work properly on NTSC machines and the opposite is sometimes true. An OCS machine can be upgraded by swapping the Agnus chip, but if you do it wrong you can crack the chip socket and cause all sorts of problems. As for Kickstart, the A500/A2000 might have 1.2 (rare), 1.3 (more common) or 2.0 (also common as many people upgraded). The A600 will have 2.0. There are some incompatibilities between the 1.3 and 2.0 Kickstarts. Many older games don't like 2.0 and there are a few games that won't run on 1.3. The best of both worlds is a Kickstart Switcher. This is a small board that has both chips plugged into it and allows you to change which version is in use. A good one stays switched until you switch it back or you power down the system. You don't want one that resets to the default when you reboot, the reason being that toggling PAL/NTSC modes also requires a reboot, making it impossible to toggle both Kickstart and PAL/NTSC. You can "soft-kick" a different version of Kickstart into memory, but that assumes you have extra RAM to hold it and it also doesn't survive a reboot. Finally, I'd avoid the A600 since it's lacking a numeric keypad, you can't play any game (mainly flight simulators) which use those keys.
Some additional notes about the OCS/ECS models: It's easier to add a hard drive to an A2000. You add the controller card, then add the drive (SCSI). On the A500, you have to buy an external controller/enclosure. Not many games are natively hard drive installable, other than the Lucasarts adventure games, some Microprose flight sims and some of the Cinemaware games. People have created hard drive installers for many other games, which are basically hacks. Also, most freeware games came as LHA archives which you simply unpack to a drive and play, so a hard drive is the most practical way to do this. The original 7Mhz Amigas were slow for any kind of flight simulator. Wing Commander runs like a slideshow. An accelerator will speed these games up, but is usually incompatible with arcade style games. The most compatible accelerator was the Supra Turbo 24, since it used a faster 68000 chip, rather than a 68020/030/040/etc. You could even switch it while the system was on. It's useless without extra RAM though (the 512K "trapdoor" expansion for the A500 doesn't count). If you plan to download disk images off the net and write them to real floppies, you'll either need enough extra RAM to hold the image in a RAM disk while you write to floppy, or a hard drive to hold the images. That's not even counting having to use MS-DOS formatted floppy disks to copy the files over to the Amiga...
As for the AGA models, most games were targeted toward the A1200. I'm not an expert on the AGA models, but I believe that they use IDE hard drives, so you'd have an easier time adding a hard drive than with the OCS/ECS models. I'm pretty sure that they can be switched between PAL/NTSC, so that shouldn't be an issue. The Kickstart version and the 68020 CPU will cause incompatibilities with old games though.
Whichever model you get, an option to consider is a floppy drive emulator that uses disk image files on an SD card. You put the disk images on an SD card, then plug it into the floppy emulator on the Amiga and select which disk image you want to use. From then on, the Amiga thinks it's using a real floppy. I haven't used one myself, but people speak quite highly of them. No need to jump through hoops to transfer the images and write them to real floppies, no buying games and discovering that they disks have errors, etc.
