CompuServe Messages

Nick, The 2000 is an older machine, but you can still upgrade it a good deal. First, the bad news – when the 2000 came out it blew the doors off IBM graphics. these days, 256+ color VGA displays have better color resolution than the 2000, although the generally can't display graphics as fast as the Amiga can. (Which means your 2000 is still far better at animation.) The good news is – you can upgrade your 2000's processer and get 486 class performance for as little as a few hundred dollars; you can get a new rom "2.05" is the latest, I think, and a new version of the OS (2.1). The rom and OS will cost you $90 – and the improvement to the OS is nothing short of incredible. Finally, depending on how much you want to spend, you can drop between 300 and 2000 dollars on getting a third party graphics board which will offer you greatly improved video; or you can do like most of us and wait for Commodore to release an add-on board for the 2000 that will give you the same kind of graphics the new amigas have. Your 2000 is a solid machine – I used mine for years until a lightening strike sent it to the computer bone yard. It will run all Amiga software except stuff written for the brand new models (the 4000 and the 1200), and it'll be far more enjoyable to use. Oh, and about the 1.44 drives – your 2000 probably doesn't have a 1.44 meg disk drive, but you can buy them and install them for about $100 each. PS – to do "wild cards" on the amiga, the "*" doesn't work (because they used that character to mean something else). Instead, type "dir T#?" the "#?" does the same thing as the "*" on a PC.