CompuServe Messages

I would suspect that he has been offered the chance to buy a 500, as the highest model designation for the Amiga was the 4000. Stock 500's have a 68000 CPU running at just under 8 Mhz. There are add ons that allow the 500 to emulate a Mac +, and with an external Mac 800K drive to read and write Mac formatted disks as well. I do not know of any program that allows the Mac to read Amiga disks. There are also utilites to allow the 500 to read/write 720K MS Dos formatted disks. If you have a SuperDrive 1.44 in your Mac you could read the 720K disks from your friend's machine. Most of the Amiga Word Processors have no counterpart in the Mac field. There was a version of Word Perfect for the Amiga, but it has been out of production for some time. However most programs can save out the files as ASCII text. (A straight text file, however you would loose all formatting such as italics/bold/underscore/etc. While I have been and continue to be an Amiga owner/user for 9+ years… Unless the price is extremely low, and the machine comes with just about all the software your friend will need, I would not recommend the purchase of the machine. The Amiga is currently not in production. The 500 has been out of production for several years. There are bidders to take over the technology and restart production, but so far no firm resolution is in sight. Thus your friend could wind up with a machine for which parts will become hard to obtain, and with software and soiftware support becoming also harder to obtain. Were the Amiga still in production it is a reasonable entry level machine. With the Amiga out of production… I could not recommend it to a friend.