retroputing

[Ice Breaker]

If you're looking into getting an Amiga to play games, you need to ask yourself some questions:

1) Do I want to play older bought games (1985-1991 era)? If so, get an Amiga 500 for cheap. The Kickstart 1.2 or 1.3 that comes with it should be plenty to use most games. Make sure that it has 1MB of ChipRAM for maximum compatiblity.

2) Do I want to play older games that I got from the Internet? In this case, you'll need to get yourself an Amiga that has a hard drive (to make life easier), minium 1MB of RAM (2MB preferred), Kickstart 2.04 or higher, PC2AM (available from aminet.net for free), and a parallel Laplink cable that's available from Office Depot or anywhere else. Using this program and the cable, you can copy the ADF files to the Amiga, and using ADF2BLITZ make real disks from them. I did this for awhile. Here, you can use any Amiga, but if it's just strictly for older games, an Amiga 500 or 2000 will work fine.

3) I want to play everything that the Amiga has to offer, 1985 through present. Get an Amiga 1200 or 4000 but ensure that it has an 030 or better processor, 4MB minimum RAM, and a hard drive. The Amiga 1200 and 4000 have different graphics modes than the older 500/2000/3000 series, and a lot of games use this. The downfall is that a lot of older games are incompatible with the 1200/4000 series "out of the box". However, a program is out that allows you to install "disk only" games to the hard drive called WHDLOAD (whdload.de) and makes these games compatible. The bad thing is much of it requires an 020 processor better, and 4MB of RAM to be fully usable. Finding an Amiga 1200 shouldn't be hard with these specifications. The nice thing with the 1200 is that you can get an older PCMCIA Ethernet card for it so you don't need the above cable, and you can put it on your network and download files straight from the internet using FTP or through a browser.