Roger Merchberger wrote: Merch, what are yo looking for, early or late Amiga?? I will have an extra A2000 after I do an equipment shuffle here. If you want an AGA Amiga, good luck, they are few and far between. Gary Hildebrand St. Joseph, MO

--- Roger Merchberger <zmerch(a)30below.com> wrote: I may have an A3000 I could free up. Not sure what they are worth these days, though. I can make sure it has Ethernet, if that's important. I don't have a second set of 3.0 ROMs to include with it, if that matter; it'll be runnning KS 2.04. High-density floppies are somewhat rare with Amigas. Most used "720K" floppies at 880KB, formatted (80 tracks, double-sided, 11 sectors of 512 bytes per track (22 per cyl), IIRC) The high-density floppies spin at 1/2 speed to keep the bit rate the same, if you didn't know. The A4000 and A1200 had a newer, higher performance custom chip set called AGA for "Advanced Graphic Architecture" (AFAIK). More colors, more bit-planes, more flexible video modes. There are lots of games and whatnot that require AGA. Prior to that, the predominant chipset was "ECS" for "Enhanced Chip Set", enhanced over what came out with the original A1000. Of the boxes you'll probably want to play with, the A2000 and A3000 are ECS, the A4000 and A1200 are AGA. The A4000 and A1200 are natively IDE (4GB limit with older ROMs), the A3000 has SCSI built-in, and the A2000 routinely had a drop-in SCSI controller. The A1200 has a PCMCIA slot for networking; the other boxes have Zorro slots and ISA slots, so you can go with an A2065 Ethernet card, a more modern Zorro-interface NIC, or a GG2 Bus+ with ISA NIC. Not sure about options for the A1200 PCMCIA, but essentially, nearly all the Ethernet solutions for the Amiga are 10mbps. There may be a few 100mbps interfaces, but they are uncommon. Are you getting an Amiga just to get one, or is there some compelling task? If you want to play with a Toaster, I'd recommend an A2000 with accelerator card if you can't find an A4000 - more room for goodies. -ethan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? LAUNCH - Your Yahoo! Music Experience http://launch.yahoo.com

--- Gary Hildebrand &lt;ghldbrd(a)ccp.com&gt; wrote: Thank you. ISTR back in the old days, the issue was the diskchange signal. It appears on a couple of pins (2? 34?) and _can_ be jumpered for different controllers, but AFAIK, not *all* "720K" drives have those jumpers nor bring diskchange out to the connector. I thought the IC in the external drives was to permit the OS to see a unique pattern on one of the lines to ident what the drive size/density was. The click is caused by the OS moving the drive a track to trigger the diskchange logic in the drive. I don't recall what the "no click" fix was that people tended to use, but perhaps it was a "seek backwards while on track 00" - which on *most drives* was harmless. The drive already knew that it was on 00 and wouldn't engage the motor, but _would_ set/reset the diskchange flip-flop. Some drives still clicked. It was advised not to run "no click" software on them. Ones not approved by C=? I'd love to hear which ones. I have a couple of the "right" ones that I paid about $100 for, new. Probably cost me about $1 per floppy I read. :-( OTOH, at least a few of those floppies were probably worth the entire expense. I pick up 44pin<->40pin adapaters for $5 at hamfests, etc. Is there something odd about the A1200 interface that I don't know about? The A4K has a standard 40-pin IDE interface. My A4000 has a pair of IDE drives (120MB and 340MB - *huge* at the time). I was just happy to get an A4K (I got mine in NZ and converted the PSU by replacing the guts, when I got home). Not in my experience. It's an off-the-shelf item at the guy I buy my SCSI cables and cable adapters from at the Dayton Computerfest. I don't think it's more than a few bucks. I've even gotten them at the crappy shows at the fairgrounds. (I needed two to make an pin swabber for my iOpener). I'd recommend that, too, if you aren't AGA-dependent. I never got a video card for my A3000, so I lived with 1985-era graphics, well into the 90s. If you can get a newer SCSI chip (rev 8 33C93), all the better. There's issues with the stock chip and some devices, especially when disconnects are enabled (to allow slow peripherals like tape to take their sweet time without hogging the bus). There's no room inside the A3000 for a CD-ROM, so you'll want to locate an external SCSI one. I have put two hard disks inside the case, but it's a tight fit with the plastic push-rod power switch going over the right-most drive bay (I forget why I couldn't put the HD in front of the other one, in the left-front bay). I got one with my A1960 monitor. It's trivial to make a replica, but finding the 23-pin connectors is a problem these days. Except the static-column 1M ZIP DRAMs... best to get a machine with 18MB total memory (2MB chip, 16MB fast). There were SIMM adapters, but all you can find in SIMMs is Fast Page (FPM). That's true. Better hope you find that A4K with a 2MB CHIP RAM SIMM. I don't see 2MB SIMMs very often, loose in the wild. 4 x 4MB SIMMs for FAST RAM are no big deal. Shame they never supported 4 x 16MB. The only tricky thing about RAM and the A4K is that if you want to use the lower Zorro slot, you have to use low-profile SIMMs. Either way, A3K or A4K, if you need Ethernet and you don't get it in the one, NE2000 in the other ("big box" Amigas have native 100-pin Zorro slots and a few ISA slots for Bridge Cards. The GG2 Bus+ maps the ISA bus into 68K-memory space; works great on the A3K, less well with certain '060 cards in an A4K due to them trying to cache the space that the GG2 Bus+ lives in. Got plenty in stock, *new*). -ethan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? LAUNCH - Your Yahoo! Music Experience http://launch.yahoo.com