Hey welcome!

You could try the Amibay web site - you may find something there. Lots of buying and selling by Amigans. You will likely find something if you are patient for less than the crazy ebatty prices.

http://www.amibay.com/content.php


Cheers!
Greg
(another crazy Canadian on the left coast)

• Get your system recapped as soon as you get one. Acill and many others here on the forums can help you with that. 20+ year old capacitors are almost certainly leaking, which can cause a host of problems (google it)
• Read the forums extensively. Pretty much any question you might have has been asked a time or six. ;)
• Get an Indivision if you plan on connecting to modern monitors
• Use a CF card instead of a hard drive
• WHDLoad is great for making old games run from hard drives
• AmigaKit and many other online sites still sell new expansion boards and other kit
• There was a recent Kickstarter campaign to make entirely new A1200 cases.  At some point in the TBD future, there may be new motherboards produced, as well
• Big Book of Amiga Hardware and Amiga Resource CX are other good sites to learn more about hardware and expansions
• Certain models of PCMCIA network cards (including WiFi) can be used with an A1200

Welcome, and have fun! :)

Also yes get one of the floppy emulators but spend the money on a well made one, not one of the Gotek junk ones. Recap is also a must, even if it doesnt look like it needs it, it does. I do them here in the US, but up in Canada I know someone did them on the East coast. Not sure if he is still out there.

For the Floppy Emulator I recommend one of these: http://amigastore.eu/en/219-sd-floppy-emulator-slim-he34.html

I even heard of a port of firefox to amiga os and that's pretty sweet for something this old (I'm running tenfourfox on my old 2004 ibook g4 and that's pretty neat too)

Timberwolf.  No longer being developed.  Again, you're going to have  to spend a heck of a lot of money to run that on a classic system:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timberwolf_(web_browser)

This is a debatable topic, again just IMHO Chris's version of NetSurf is the most advanced browser for classic systems, but it's slooow and needs a lot of memory.  Ibrowse is probably the best balance of speed & compatibility (I use that term "compatibility" pretty loosely, as you're not going to be updating your Facebook from it, or anything like that).  I've found it's mostly good for reading news sites and downloading from Aminet.  It hasn't been updated in over 10 years but occasionally a whisper comes up about some kind of update for it.

As for modern screens, I was thinking of looking around for an amiga monitor, unless they're not worth the price?

Not to me, but some people swear by 'em, especially for retro gaming.  I guess if you like using a flickery 13" screen and pretending like it's 1992 all over again, have at it.  LOL.  But if you want to run modern applications at high resolutions, they're not going to cut the mustard.  

You might want to think about this plan a bit and try to figure out which way you want to go.  Do you want a stock or mildly expanded system, with an old school monitor for retro gaming, or do you want a "pimped out" system capable of playing Quake, Timberwolf, etc.?

Also, what's your budget?  Not trying to pick on you but you mention "minimum wage" and "barely being above welfare"... a high-end classic Amiga system can easily run $1,000+, depending on the parts you chose for it.  Maybe an A500 or A600 would be cheaper for you, and with those you'll have the option of using one of the new Vampire accelerators, which give improved graphics and speeds exceeding even the 68060.  No idea when (or if) the Vampire 1200 will ever come out.

Hi there,

Many good suggestions in this thread. Thought I'd add mine too.

- An Amiga 1200 with HD some extra memory hooked up to a CRT TV with a RGB-SCART adapter provides a brilliant nostalgic setup. In my opinion, using a CRT with such an adapter makes the classic Amiga look like its meant too, much less pixelated than on those LCD screens.

But... here is a cool solution that is kind of emulation, but also not.. It's called the MIST FPGA and it is like a little Amiga computer. I own it and it is awesome. I have it connected to a CRT screen and it looks beautiful!

At Amigastore.eu (this is where I got mine), you can customize the MIST FPGA with a pre-configured Amiga environment.

http://amigastore.eu/en/318-mist-fpga-computer.html

The MIST has old-school joystick-mouse ports btw.

I'm not saying you should go for either options, but these are worth considering.

I wish you luck in your Amiga adventure. A lot of the fun is looking at different options, comparing prices, performance etc.

(I'm not sure if this is the right place to post it so if it's not then sorry!)

Hi there, my name's Sammy and I'm one of those dreaded french Canadians (although as you can note, my English is nothing to sneeze at)

I've been wanting to get an Amiga 1200 for so many years, and now that I finally have a job (video game tester, I get minimum wage but that's still three times better than welfare), I can afford to get one.

The thing though, is how much should I be expected to pay for an amiga 1200?

Basically, This is my current roadmap for now:

- Get an amiga 1200;
- yay.

I figure I should get one of those usb floppy disk emulators things I see on ebay too so I don't have to bonk my head against a wall. I know that it's the 500 model people get for all the games you can play on it but for some reason I don't really know how to explain I'm more attracted to the 1200, especially for the expansion boards you can throw into it.

Ultimately, this is gonna sound dumb but I'd like to be able to connect to the internet, and play quake on the one I'd get so...

What other things should I look for? and how much would I be realistically expected to pay for them?

I'm kinda giving up on ebay for this because everybody sells even crap stuff (think the worst of apple's 90s computers) at a premium, and since I'm Canadian, and from Quebec of all places, I doubt I'd be able to find one of these in a yard sale so where else could I look?

Quite frankly I'm certainly not gonna be going around on twitter or anything with that, just like with tenfourfox on my ibook, but it's still an option and that's fine by me.

There are high-resolution programs for amiga computers? I don't really mind CRT screens. I was pretty much born around them (1988).

Minimum wage over here is 10.75$ per hour. I work five days a week full-time so that's 40 hours. after the taxes and such are taken I have around 730 dollars left, so about 1460 dollars per month and I only pay 520 dollars for my rent (1 room appartment, electricity, heating and hot water paid for) and after food and such, I got about... 600 dollars left for miscelleanous stuff? mind you, that's 600 canadian dollars so... about 450usd, or 369gbp, or 412 euros. That's why I'm looking for a regular, unmodified unit first since that way I'll be able to do my own little mods piece by piece while keeping things affordable.

I don't know if that makes sense to any of you but I'm fine with that plan

$520 Canadian dollars for rent?
Oh hell, time to move north.
Minimum wage in Canada, with health care, doesn't sound so bad.
BTW - The iBook will run MorphOS.

OR, if you are using a PC anyway, play the PC version of Quake, which is going to work better anyway.

My thought exaclty...