#Amiga 600
Bob,
My first recommendation to you would be to check out the new Amiga 1200.
It comes with a faster, more powerful CPU than the A600 (14mHz 680EC20 vs.
7mHz 68000) and a much more capable graphics chipset. The A600, like all
previous Amigas, can only display 4096 colors at once (out of a palette
the same size) while the A1200 can display over 256,000 colors at once out
of a 16 million + palette. SVGA resolutions like 640×480 and 800×600 are
supported, as are video-friendly resolutions like 1280×400. The A1200 is
also much more capable than its predecessors when it comes to animation.
One important thing: for the A1200 you'll want a multiscanning monitor
capable of syncing down to 15.75kHz (most go no lower than 31kHz these
days) as some Amiga resolutions require such a rate.
I bought an A1200 last week. So far I'm very impressed by it,
particularly its graphics capabilites. It's my fourth Amiga, three of
which I still own. 🙂 It came with 2 megs of RAM (expandable via
expansion buss to 10 megs), an internal 40 meg IDE hard drive, and cost me
around $850. You could probably do better cost-wise by getting the 1200
minus HD and then getting the HD from a third party supplier, but I opted
for convenience. With the 1200 being so reasonably priced, I think the
600's days in North America are numbered unless it catches on as a low-end
games console (which I doubt). The 1200, being the first widely
affordable second-generation Amiga, is likely to be around for some time.
BTW, if I were you I'd hang on to that Epson PC clone and get the Amiga as
an addition to your arsenal rather than a replacement. Amigas are not
MSDOS/Windows compatible right out of the box, although various
PC-on-a-card solutions can be had for extra $$. The 1200, though, is a
brand-new machine with a new expansion architecture…there are no
hardware PC emulators available for it yet.
-Dave (via AutoPilot)