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Amiga 4000

Raven

Veteran Member
Joined
Mar 7, 2009
Messages
2,752
Location
DE, USA..
I've never had an Amiga, and would love to have one. I figured I might as well go for the highest-end original one.

Preferably it would have a full compliment of RAM, a Cyberstorm PPC card, and a Catweasel, but "you can't always get what you want".

I am considering splurging and buying a full-tower one with a 68k accelerator, full RAM, and a video toaster (not that the video toaster is a selling point for me, but I will try it and resell if not useful) - this flew up in price and is at $500 now, so I am a bit hesitant. If it goes up much more it simply won't be a sound investment.. as it is, it probably isn't. :p

Anyone got one? I primarily want to use it for 68k Amiga games, but modern computing and coding might be of interest. Can a PPC Amiga do 68k games properly? I know the CPU would be emulated, but sound/graphics? Is there a 68k card for them? I'd prefer a kitted-out 4000 though.

Thanks.
 
Unless you find some kind soul who just thinks that you're the cat's meow, or that just doesn't know what they have, you will absolutely never will you find a PPC-equipped Amiga in the $500 USD range. Even in parts/broken condition, the PPC accel-only tends to pull upwards of $500 for the accelerator itself, and in working condition, expect to pay over $1000 for just the expansion (I haven't seen one go for less than $1200 in a few years now)

It's quite possible to find a working/stock Amiga 4000D in the $500 range, however, sometimes even with a few expansions.

However, if you're just looking for Amiga 68k gaming, I'd suggest the Amiga 500 or 1200. With the new accel/mem expansions out for them both, they're quite easy and affordable to upgrade, and because they had such long production runs, they can still be had quite cheaply if you're willing to wait for your price (lows are probably in the $50 range for stock A500, and $125 range for stock A1200)

Unless you're just after the "best of the best" for your collection, or unless you're wanting to use your Amiga as more than a "for fun" system, the A4000 isn't the system that you want. Nor really is the A3000, although it's certainly cheaper to collect than the A4000. Most of the time, anyways.

Also, in the last 7 years of of following auctions, I've never seen an A4000T go for less than $750, even with mostly stock options. And I can tell you first-hand, those things are heavy beasts - expect another $80-100 in shipping if you're going coast-to-coast (figure 60-70lbs)
 
A PPC upgraded 68K Amiga is a waste of money (spend $1000 to play a crappy quake port). If you just want to play games get a cheap A500 with a second floppy drive. If you like the games you can play from floppy then get an A1200 down the road to play HD installable games, and for the rare AGA title. Make sure you get a Commodore 1084 monitor WITH cable or equivalent.

Currently I have all the decent models (A500, A1200, A2000, A3000, A4000) and a shelf of boxed Amiga games I play. Shooters mostly just boot from floppy and are fun to play. There is a decent overlap in late generation Amiga games and DOS PC games.
 
Amiga 4000s are selling for crazy expensive prices lately. Even broken/incomplete ones sell for $300+. And aftermarket upgrades often sell for more than what the computer itself is worth! Most of the buyers are Europeans with deep pockets.

I was lucky to get a good price on a badly abused but fully restorable Amiga 2500 Video Toaster system. It is only a 25 MHz 68030, but has a lot more room inside for expansion than the 3000 or 4000 desktop case.
 
I picked up an Amiga 4000 desktop with a Video Toaster 4000 card for $350 and was told that was a "heck of a deal". These machines are tough to buy mostly because of the battery leakage problem, plus the SMD capacitors tend to go bad and leak too. My machine needs to be recapped, but thankfully no battery damage as it was removed years ago.
 
Yeah, A4ks are crazy hard to come by at anything below $500. Honestly, for your purposes, I'd recommend an A1200 with a modest 68030 accelerator - just as good for gaming and generally much less expensive. I got my whole setup for $300, including a 40MHz accelerator, CF hard disk, and 16MB of RAM. Even runs iBrowse pretty capably.
 
If this machine doesn't go too much higher I'm gonna go for it, otherwise I'll look into weaker Amigas. I do tend to want to max out a platform though, heh. It probably would be a good idea to pick up a cheaper model and use it a while before sinking a ton of money into it, so I'll do that if/when this one skyrockets in price. :p
 
If this machine doesn't go too much higher I'm gonna go for it, otherwise I'll look into weaker Amigas. I do tend to want to max out a platform though, heh. It probably would be a good idea to pick up a cheaper model and use it a while before sinking a ton of money into it, so I'll do that if/when this one skyrockets in price. :p
All depends upon your definition of "weak"

An A3000 with a 68040 will out-perform a stock A4000 all day long. A fully-upgraded A3000 with the Super DMAC, Super Buster, etc, will outperform a similarly spec'd A4000, and have built-in VGA compatibility to boot!

It's all relative. The one thing to remember is that the more you trick out your Amiga, the more difficult it is to game on it.

Honestly, for a gaming PC, pick up an A500. Pick up a Kickstart ROM switcher so that you can switch between OS 1.3 and 2.04/3.1 (note: there are 3-rom switchers available as NOS on ebay to go with all 3). If you want a cheap hard drive and memory expansion solution, check out Kipper2k's items, or if you want to max out the platform and get A4000-performance out of it with the ability to switch Kickstarts to guarantee easy compatibility with your games, wait for Mr.Vince's Zeus64.

Trust me, that particular expansion, with all that it offers, beats any legacy expansion available for the A500/2000 series by FAR, and will probably rival or beat Jens's upcoming ACA500 (it certainly has more features, though I believe Jens is much better known in the Amiga hardware world)

Also, note that the A4000 that you're bidding on isn't an official A4000T, but is an after-market expansion to convert an A4000 desktop into an A4000T. If you do win out on this one, be careful when purchasing A4000 accelerators for it. Some may install differently into the desktop motherboard than they do on the real tower motherboard (in other words, make sure to ask questions first - beware of impulsively buying any one that you see)

All that said, that A4000 is still quite the nice system, and in great condition. Certainly better than my A4000T (it's previous owner treated it like the old computer that it is, sadly, though the internals are in perfect shape, and it should work fantastically once I get around to replacing the old, failing hard drives - I can't complain, though... I found a guy who didn't know what he had, and traded him $170 worth of new Wii stuff for an A4000T/Toaster and an A1200 with 68030/50 expansion)
 
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The auction ended below $550, consider me surprised! The only reason I went for a 4000 vs. the 3000 is the fact that the Toaster 4000 card utilizes the AGA chipset for some features. Its a bummer Commodore cheaped out on putting a scan doubler in the 4000 though. The lack of SCSI can be fixed with a Zorro card (my solution) or an accelerator card with on-board SCSI.
 
I find it is better to jump into a new architecture with something simple and cheap. If you like what you see then you can start buying more capable (and expensive machines) without having buyers remorse if it didn't work out.

My first Amigas was the A500 (luckily it came with a bootable Workbench disk), a null modem cable to dump images to disk (using Amiga Explorer), and an external floppy + 500K trapdoor expansion the same week. I looked into Amigas for quite a while before I jumped in (for retro gaming). I liked old school Amiga gaming enough that I started hunting down boxed games for it, and eventually I wanted a HD to play HD installable games. Since A500 HD sidecars were pricey at the time (super pricey now wish I would have jumped in 10 years ago) I purchased an A2000HD and an Amiga 1084 monitor and found a great deal on a Northgate Ultra T keyboard to use with the A2000 (basically $10 for the keyboard, maybe $50 shipped for the A2000 back when shipping was cheap and Amigas were being dumped 10 years ago). This worked out great until I joined the English Amiga board forum and read up about AGA games, this led me to research and finally purchase an A1200 + Blizzard IV 030/50 + FPU (basically the best gamer setup for Amiga gaming). Its also nice that the A1200 using common IDE laptop drives (kept the original 80MB and put in a 3.2GB one) and uses common PCMCIA laptop network cards (must faster using the network to move images instead of serial cables). The A3000 I stumbled over from a guy out west moving and dumping all his gear in the trash, had a friend pick it up free (was in the original box with keyboard and optical mouse, video card and ETHERNET!) while he snagged some classic mac gear and shipped the Amiga to me. Many years later I snagged the A4000 as-is and was lucky it actually worked (came with an audio card). The big box A3000 and A4000s are nice if you want to do any serious work, same with the A2000 with upgrades (I have a nice GVP 030/40 with 16MB of odd GVP RAM for my A2000).
 
Anybody have a 1200 to part with? eBay has one unverifiable-if-working one with a missing key, and two overpriced (for me anyway) refurb ones with boxes and etc.. I'd prefer a Commodore-branded one, upgrades a plus.
 
I have one I'd consider selling. It would have a choice of two expansions, has 3.0 ROMs, I believe (I could make 3.1 roms if need be), has the original hard drive, which was added as an expansion to the A1200 (non-HD model) by an authorized Commodore Dealer (sticker still on the side of it). Currently there's a GVP JAWS accel/mem expansion in it (or possibly Jaws II - forget). I've also a spare Paravision/M-Tec 1230-XA, which is a 68030/50mhz expansion that supports up to 128mb RAM and was actually tested by a couple of the Amiga magazines at the time as faster than the more popular Blizzard 1230 Mk-IV (a 68030/50 accel supporting 128mb + an additional 128mb with the SCSI+ add-on)

Pricing wouldn't be super-cheap. I could use the money but am in no real hurry to sell. PM if you're interested.
 
my problem with the a500 is the lack of an easy HDD install or how much you need to upgrade it to get whdload to run. they are great "plug and play" systems and with the 512k mem expansion they play a huge chunk of the amiga library but old amiga floppies arnt going to last and i find corrupted ones all the time. a hdd in an amiga with whdload is a godsend as far as i'm concerned I just wish all the whdload stuff wasnt PAL thus creating speed issues on a NTSC system but even then I find alot of stuff plays fine.

a 1200 gives you aga graphics and its easier to add a hdd. A4000's are pricy though. I lucked out big time when I got an A1000, A3000, A4000 2 amiga monitors and several boxes of software/expansions for $300. after alot of trouble I've finally got my A4000 running well and it was worth the effort. an Amiga with a CF HDD drive and WHDload is indespensable IMHO.

wish they would of made that aga capable A3000. it is the best looking of the Amiga's. never cared for the wierd ZIP RAM though.
 
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