 Mark is an Amiga user, who is a Team Member of the AmiBench site.
Contact Sites:
You Can contact Mark for anything to do with this article at his email address . I would be interested to know what you think of my views, and what you'd like to see discussed here.
The views that are discussed here are those of Mark Wilson, and are nothing to do with the views of Amiga Universe, or The AmiBench Group. Copyright (©) 1998 Mark Wilson. Amiga is ® Gateway Inc. All other Trademarks belong to their owners. |
Is there a future for the "Classic Amiga", This is what everyone has, and should ask themselfs. It should'nt be to hard to answer, depending on a few things of course, like, how much have you in vested in you Amiga. Does it do what you want, and are you happy with the level of software releases and support that you get on the Amiga platform today. If you think that the Amiga has a future, Like I do, then listen on, and I'll try to explain, why I think we all should buy a PC as well. Try looking at it from this point of view, You have £600 pounds sitting in your bank, and you want to upgrade that 1200 of yours, you want a Graphics Card, Modem, Ram, All of which you know you can get for you computer. But, and this is where it gets messy, you look at the price of having to first, Get a tower for you beloved A1200, so you have to invest at least £149.99 (RRP of the Power Computing Power Tower), then you need to buy an accerator £269.99 RRP of the Apollo 060 Card from Power Computing). Then you have to think about getting a Graphics card, Hmm, a little bit of choice here, but for the sate of an argument, lets use the CyberVison64/3D, which is £159.95 (RRP From Power Computing). Damn, you think, I'm going to need a Zorro BackBoard, Ouch, another £149.99. Great, We more or less have everything we need (I excluded a monitor, because for the sake of this articale you have a multisync monitor), So lets look at what we have,
Now, to me that seems way way over the odds to upgrade your Amiga, So what about taking the other route, "What other Route?" I hear you ask. Its simple really, Buy a pc, No, dont look at me like that, read on before you flame me .... Buy a PC, total cost (Items quoted from local PC dealer)
Out of your £600 pounds it leaves you £230.02, And with whats left you should be able to buy the now famous Inside out ("Amiga on a PCI Card") This gives you a *real* AGA Amiga, complete with 060/040 CPU (this is according to Woa speech's, and information from Magazines). But, it begs the question, is it an Amiga, and the answer is, "of course it is!". It looks like an Amiga, it boots, it has AGA, it has roms, Its an Amiga. Utitmatly it'll be the fasted Amiga todate, Because it will use the "host" machine (in our case the pc we built) for Harddrive, Ram, Grapics, Sound, and networking. What I'm trying to tell you is that, it makes sence to move over to the pc platform, even more so if you have and need to use a PC for work, The bonus is that you get a platform, that if we're honest with our selfs has alot of software support, and speed, as well as a true Amiga. All in one box, pretty nifty huh? If I was looking at upgrading my system, I would think about going the pc route, not because I want a pc, but because its cheaper. And its alot cheaper at that. All that software that you brought for your lowly 1200 will still work as well, even those AGA demos that you downloaded, It makes sence to at least think about it. Go on, you know you want to. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||