You need an Amiga keyboard, or an adapter box for the keyboard. The mouse should be the same as used on the C128, c64? On Thu, 11 Apr 2002, Doc Shipley wrote: M. K. Peirce Rhode Island Computer Museum, Inc. Shady Lea, Rhode Island "Casta est quam nemo rogavit." - Ovid

On Thu, 2002-04-11 at 07:14, Doc Shipley wrote: I spent $25 for my A2500 (no keyboard, mouse, or monitor), so I think its a reasonable price. You can chuck any SCSI drive into it so that's not a problem. I found someone on the net who sold me an amiga keyboard for $30, but $65 seems to be the going price. I have no idea on mice, I happened to have one. Brian

I'm glad you asked, as I just picked up bits and pieces to one yesterday in Topeka. Here goes: $30 isn't bad, but the keyboard is the tough item to get; they go for $50 when available. The keyboard for an A3000 will also work. The telltale on Amiga keyboards is that they only have 10 function keys, and the cursor keys sit all by themselves . You can get an in-line keyboard adapter for about the same, and use a PC keyboard in place of it (another few bucks). Mice are also different, but you can get new ones from Software Hut or merlancia for about $15 give or take. The bad thinkg about them is that they are made with crappy switches that don't last very long, about a year under normal use. You have Kickstart 1.3 (DOS version), and that has been pretty much superceeded by 3.1. To upgrade to that you have to replace the ROM chip and get the latest software either on disk, or CD (around 50). That has CD-ROM support and most internet software needs 3.1. The floppy drive is a standard DSDD, and you can use HD disks, but they'll only format to 880k. The SCSI interface is SCSI-2 compliant. The monitor is using the composite video output, which is only black & white output (no color). The Amiga will drive either analog or digital (CGA) monitors, but the analog is preferred for best results. As CGA is limited to 16 colors, you can't see the whole pallete that is possible. The specific Commodore monitor used with it are the 1080 and 1084 series. Phillips/Magnavox made some as well of vaarious styles. If you have a multisync monitor you can also use that, but it has to be able to sync down to 15 kHz (NTSC) scan rates. I have a Sony CDP1302 for that exact purpose. FYI, the A2500 is nothing more than a stock A2000 with a 68030 @ 25 mHz accelerator card (A2630). This should be the card right in the middle of the machine. Over on the side are the amiga/PC slots. The PC slots don't work without a bridgeboard, which is nothing but a PC-XT or AT on a card that shares a memory window for graphic display and I/O ports. You should also have an A2091 SCSI controller card with the HD attached. The common sizes were the older Quantum ProDrive series, in 52, 105, or 240 mB sizes. The 5 mB you mention is probably incorrect. I'd reccomend a minimum of 105 mB, 240 is good for most uses. Keep in mind software packages are small compared to Microslop code bloat. Large programs might run a meg or more. Software is available off of Aminet.org. You can get just about anything from soup to nuts for it, as either freeware or shareware at a nominal fee. If you decide not to get it going, I'm sure any of us would like a shot at it. I'm up to four of them right now, 9 Amigas total. If you have any other questions, plese reply off-list with questions and I'll get you going in the right direction. Gary Hildebrand St. Joseph, MO Doc Shipley wrote:

--- Doc Shipley <doc(a)mdrconsult.com> wrote: Sounds like an early one, but pretty standard. Hmm... needs a boot floppy, then. The disk controller might be an ancient A2090 (not A2090A w/autoboot) - 5MB sounds like an MFM drive; I don't think there were any embedded SCSI drives under 20MB. It might have a bridge card - an A2088, most likely, perhaps an A2286. If you can look inside, see if the hard disk is attached to a Zorro card or an ISA card. One dead-giveaway is a 5.25" floppy in the front. That usually means "bridge card". Yes. If you have piles of Amiga parts, not really. Maybe a bit high. It depends if he'll come down in price or just trash it if it's too cheap. I haven't bought an Amiga in a few years (got plenty) so I don't know what the going rate is these days. Certainly not *over* $30 unless it has some special cards (8MB Zorro RAM, A2091, A2065 ethernet...) The keyboard, absolutely not. It's a standard IBM-XT keyboard. I'm not sure what model mouse the Colt takes. The Amiga needs a raw quadrature input mouse with two buttons (at least). It is electrically compatible with the Microsoft Bus Mouse (different connector), not a serial or PS/2 mouse. There is no microprocessor in an Amiga mouse, just some optical hardware (interrupter wheel and some IR LEDs/phototransistors). Commodore made several flavors of mice - Amiga mice, C-64 mice (with the "Mickey" chip to let you hang a mouse off of a joystick port) and I'm pretty sure they made serial mice for later PeeCees. I'm just not sure what the Colt takes (and I _have_ a Colt - my 8-bit-ISA interface to my UP600A device programmer is in it, along with an NE1000 to feed data to it). If nobody else has a good answer on the mouse, I can probably evenually dig up the docs on it. The keyboard is going to be a problem, though. There are designs on Aminet for building a keyboard protocol converter for an AT keyboard. I have a commercial one I think cost me $30 (maybe $50). The monitor is another problem - Amigas use 15KHz natively. You can use a composite monitor on the mono port, or a NEC Multisync 3D with a 23pin-15-pin adapter if you can't find a 2002 or 1084, etc. An ordinary PeeCee multisync monitor won't go below 31KHz. More modern Amiga chips and OSes will give you VGA-friendly modes, but that only works once the OS is up. It's a pain to diagnose boot problems. -ethan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - online filing with TurboTax http://taxes.yahoo.com/