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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Thu Nov 16, 2017 10:26 am

So... not trying to start any controversy here or anything. This is just my personal opinion (and I recognize every Amiga owner and user is different and has their own way of doing things).

Caveat:
I am not modeling or rendering anything in 3D.
I am not doing any video production.

For me, I've never had a need to go beyond 40Mhz with what I use my Amiga(s) for. I have absolutely no desire to "modernize" my machines. I will never try (or want) to run an MP4 video file on my Amigas. To me they are near-perfect time capsules.

7Mhz works perfectly fine for ~90% of all use cases that I will ever touch. 14Mhz (like the 1200) hits another 5% or so. When I get to 25-40Mhz (my 2000 is 40) I frankly have no need to go beyond this. Ever. Does that mean it's wrong to make one go faster? No, of course not. But will most people ever touch any of that power? I'm willing to bet money on a solid "No." In that card on Ebay linked above, will anyone ever scratch the surface of that 128MB of RAM? Nope!

Unless the idea is to try and put a more 'modern' version of WB on your machine, which ultimately starts to crap out on earlier software made for Amiga, it's a race to nowhere. That's been my personal experience.

Now - does that mean that geeking on hardware is a bad idea? Not if you find pure enjoyment out of installing hardware just to see what it can do. But once you're done doing all of that you may find you almost never need it.

I've personally experienced this first hand. When I first got into Amigas I focused SO much attention on making it faster and whatnot. It wasn't until over a year later that I truly realized my personal dream machine hardware upgrades.

In this order:
  1. Hard drive: 4GB is PLENTY. Hell, 400 MB is fine, too. The larger your drive, the longer your machine will take to boot up. too. Don't go crazy. Most software isn't that big.
  2. RAM: At least 2MB Fast RAM. I have more (16MB) but seriously never touch it. I think somewhere between 2.5 - 4 MB is way more than most will ever need for a retrocomputing machine that does 99.9% of all you'll ever need to enjoy it. 8-16MB is gluttonous. (I'm a glutton.) Over 64MB (which I have on my 1200, which I don't even use these days) is unnecessary for nearly everyone. There might be 1 guy somewhere, but it's really rare. It's not a requirement. If you do a ton of file transfers from PC to Amiga (again, most don't) you don't need to go crazy here. No games that I'm aware of (that matter) ever tap into more than 1.5MB of RAM.
  3. Processor: As I mentioned before, most games were aimed at 7Mhz and work just fine. I have personally found some games do play better (in my opinion) with a faster processor. 14Mhz - 40Mhz range is it. And 14Mhz is just about right for 95% of the titles out there. In a few very rare cases, I believe 40Mhz feels awesome. But it still feels good enough at lower rates.
Before you jump on the highly addictive upgrade train, I'd highly recommend just getting the machine to work. Once that's behind you and you have a good storage solution in place and running, I'd just use it first. The stock 4000 is F*ing amazing! You very well may not need to upgrade anything. I'm serious.

Just my 2 cents. I do enjoy playing with hardware. And I admit it is very addicting. But it's not necessary to do what you probably want to do: play games. They just don't need that much power. And the 4000 is sick by default.

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mattsoft

Posted Thu Nov 16, 2017 10:32 pm

Well said intric8!

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LambdaCalculus
New Jersey, USA

Posted Sat Nov 18, 2017 9:11 am

Very well put, intric8! I admire your views and outlook on what you look for in an Amiga, and your opinions and views are absolutely valid.

In fact, what anyone looks for in a computer, be it Amiga, Mac, PC, whatever... it's ALL valid!

The beauty of Amigas is that you can make them yours. You can run them stock and no one will think any the lesser of you. You can pimp them to the absolute max and that's cool, too. My A500, aside from the Wicher's faster 68000 (20 MHz) and added RAM, is going to remain otherwise stock. The IDE connector is beneficial to at least keep a Workbench setup on it. The faster CPU will be a benefit to games like Starflight, which, as intric8 had pointed out, did run a bit slow on only a 7 MHz 68000. While most games don't really use more than 1MB RAM, and that's absolutely true, you may come across those extremely rare moments where a game may benefit from a little more, so having that extra RAM would be handy for that.

The Amiga 4000, on the other hand, is my dream machine. I would love to take that to the limit. I found cover disks on the Internet Archive, one of which has the full version of Cinema 4D on it, which I want to try out (I have some ideas in video work I want to work with on the Amiga; something I carried for years). That's going to need some serious beefy power to work. Games that use the AGA chipset, as well as CD32 games, do need at least 2MB Chip RAM to work; some maybe even more (I know Gloom, an AGA game, benefits from extra RAM). I have both WHDLoad games and disk games, and will play a fair balance of both, because there is still that experience of playing Amiga games on an A500 that can simply never be beaten!

But I digress. We all love our Amigas. They are personalized by us. They carry bits of us with them. We pour our hearts and souls into our Amigas; our Amigas reflect back. I feel that the A4000 is something of a personal project as well: I absolutely intend to have it set up and working, but it's also the filling in of a void that I've had since I was a kid. It's the machine I've always dreamed of owning, and it practically plopped right into my lap now! So it's going to get the love and customization I would've given it had I received one as a kid.

But that's my way of doing things, of course. And everyone does things differently. That's perfectly fine. Whether you keep it mostly stock or drive it to the max, the whole idea at the end of the day is that it's yours; you customized it to the way you want it to be. And that's a beautiful thing.

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LambdaCalculus
New Jersey, USA

Posted Wed Jan 31, 2018 7:24 am

Been a while since I posted about my 4000, hasn't it?

So, an update: I'm going to have all of the boards recapped; motherboard, Zorro daughterboard, and CPU card are all going to get pulled and brought to someone local first, and if I can't get the job done locally, they're going to Acill for recapping. I know I'll have to wait a few months, as Acill's got himself quite a queue lined up, but I'll be patient if it means my 4000 will be in working order!

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McTrinsic

Posted Wed Jan 31, 2018 1:13 pm

Patience is a virtue ;) .
I agree that in order to preserve these wonderful machines an action like recapping is the right thing to do.
It's probably not like they are urgently required to work with :) .





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