Tonyvdb

The Amiga failed because of very poor customer service in North America. Somehow they thought they did not have to service customers after the sale. There was alot of bickering within Commodore and the Amiga corporation in the direction they wanted to go during and after the A4000 (T) came out and sales were slipping. Commodore wanted to push into the business market but by that time the Amiga was really known just as a gaming machine and a great option for small TV studios. In the late 80s early 90s the Amiga was only second to the Macitosh in sales in Europe but like has been said IBM took the North American market and Commodore lost ground fast.

I may be wrong but I dont think Ive ever seen an Amiga working with a 5 1/4" drive. Even the A500 only used the 3 1/2" drives.

I agree, the Macintosh was underwhelming in so many ways after working on an Amiga 4000 for years it was a step back not forward.

The Amiga switched between PAL and NTSC with the click of both mouse buttons on boot so no need to "get a PAL version"

There are only a handful of games made for the expanded GS maybe 20 games? The Amiga did not have built in MIDI but it's audio capabilities wer better than the ST because it can do 4 channels of 8bit audio simultaneously (8channes with software like Octamed) where the ST could only do 3 channels if memory serves.

With the Apple IIGS being fairly much backward compatible with older versions of the Apple it had alot going for it. I love the games that were made for that era of Apples. The Amiga did support alot more graphics intensive games and had a large fan base. Comparing the Apple to the ST or Amiga may not be a fair comparison.

The first one yes, you also want scsi.device 43.45

Yes, thats an option or you can go to www.amigakit.com they sell new install floppy discs for OS 3.1 that has all the new files. Ideally you want to do a clean install of the OS in order to do it right. You want to patch over to Either SFS or PFS as the harddrive format as well to eliminate issues caused by using FFS. You can find many of these patches on aminet.net

It has been fixed if using the updated files that come with 3.9 BB4 and there are patches for 3.1 that also help. The biggest problem is the old file system FFS its horable at handling large files and often will cause issues. PFS and SFS file systems are much better.

I should edit my above post but can't so here is the edit: The system drive partition should be less than 800mb with the entire drive being less than 4gb unless your running OS 3.9 or the updated 3.1

How large a drive is it? anything over 4gb runs a high probability of writing over other partitions or going corrupt giving the full drive situation. The system drive should be no larger than 800mb. Transferring large files will also corrupt the drive in the older workbench OS as the transfer file size is limited. There are no good fixes other than copying the files to another drive that is formatted and partitioned properly or formatting and reinstalling everything to the existing drive.

http://www.amigakit.comwill have everything you need including the floppy workbench disks. Prices are reasonable. Ebay has DD floppies all the time so search there.

The big plus to the 4000 was the ability to run the Video Toaster Flyer that is somewhat mute at this point but if you wanted to use the full video editing capabilities of the Amiga the 4000 was it. The 2000 and the 3000 also had toaster capabilities but lacked the AGA support and thus lost a fair bit of the functionality of the Toaster in the 4000

Great advice so far, I might also point out that if you get one of these: http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=82&products_id=918 Indivision Scandoubler it will allow you to hook up any LCD monitor to your A500 and is really handy ho have.

to ship to me in Alberta Canada its $1000, thats what made me laugh.