[rescue] The other question...need Amiga advice!?!

[Peter Corlett]

N. Miller <vraptor at promessage.com> wrote:
[...]
> 2 Amiga 4000s, one is the expansion tower case (higher end one).

The A4000 isn't nearly as interesting as the A3000. A stock A4000 is
something like #100-150 (depending on whether it comes with a 68EC030 or
68040 processor), with the A3000 demanding silly prices.

I predict the prices of 68k Amigas are going to crash somewhat when (if?)
AmigaOS4.0 is released and the AmigaOne becomes useful.

> The lower-end one has 1 or 2 GB HD. He thinks both have 16MB RAM.

The A4000 takes bog standard 4MB 72 pin FPM SIMMs and IDE disks (although it
gets "interesting" above 4GB). Neither are exactly expensive. All my Amigas
are maxed out, because I'm swimming in small SIMMs here.

> I'm asking him about the Toaster & ROM versions, as well as TBCs (what's
> that?)

I'm not quite sure whether "TBC" means a "traditional" Amiga genlock, or
something more advanced. I got myself a quite nice Rendale genlock from eBay
for about #10.

The A4000 kickstart ROM will be either 3.0 or 3.1. There's not much between
them - the only benefit I noticed was a bugfix in handling some VGA modes.

The most interesting piece of hardware is going to be the Toaster.

> Do I have to have a special monitor to attach to a 4000?

Amiga video defaults to ~15kHz television standards, so a suitable RGB
monitor will suffice. The A4000 will also generate VGA signals directly, so
you can plug a VGA monitor in via a simple adaptor. Most VGA monitors will
not sync as low as 15kHz and you will get a scrambled display while the
Amiga is trying to display such a mode - which happens when booting it or
when trying to play games.

There are a handful of monitors that support both PAL/NTSC and VGA, such as
the Commodore 1960, and the Microvitec 14xx (I forget what the xx is).

> What about network connectivity, or is that something that's not really of
> much import?

The Amiga doesn't really do networking. There are third-party TCP/IP stacks,
but it's not really something the OS does. PPP comes with the stack,
Ethernet is an expensive add-in option.

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