CompuServe Thread

Mark, I have it on good authority that the A5000 will not be available until April 1. Announcements of its availability appear every year on that date. Bill

Marc – There is no Amiga A5000 on the market or announced to be on the market. There is an Amiga 500, is this what your friend was offered? Jeff Schweiger

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.

Mark – I see you've been getting non-responsive replies. Any Amiga user can save text as raw ASCII text, which could be imported directly to a Mac, if you and he have either a modem connection or other ways to physically transfer the file. There is usually more trouble going the other way, because the resource fork has to be stripped from a Mac file for it to be readable on the Amiga. There are Macintosh hardware/software emulators for the Amiga that might allow him to have his machine think it IS a Mac (my A4000 runs nearly at Quadra 840AV speeds), but only if the machine is a "slot-box" model (2000, 3000, 3000T, 4000) and not a "typewriter-case" model (500, 600, 1200). As people have mentioned, there is no A5000, only rumors of thoughts of plans for one. jsaklad@welchlink.welch.jhu.edu . . JimDoc, on AutoPilot

Mark The general feeling about an A5000 is that A5000s are supernaturally fast, can read minds for input and use movie screens and symphony orchestras for output. On the other hand if we are talking about an A500 there are ways to move files between the 2 systems. MS-Dos format disks or null modems are probably the best ways. You will need to tell more about your and your friends capabilities before more specific advice cann be given. Ie OS versions, Mac disk capabilities etal. -ash Kyfho