REALITY CHECK: Buying an Amiga computer today.

and please don't ever ask people to "like and subscribe" we all know how and if we don't telling us to won't teach them. It's SO annoying. I appreciate that you don't don't do that.

Great advice. Anyone who buys an Amiga, you need to have the logic board cleaned (ultrasonic cleaning) and either re-cap it yourself or pay someone who knows what they're doing to re-cap it for you. These things are OLD AF and need maintenance. You need a new power supply or have the power supply you have re-capped. You have to do maintenance on the floppy drive(s), i.e. clean it and lubricate it. Run Amiga Test Kit on it after you've had all that done and run it on a burn in for 48 hours. After that it's still gonna crash occasionally from software issues. This is what to do and expect. You'll also want to upgrade it, most likely, to do what you want. You'll need to spend another $1000.00 or more to make it work right. Also a re-cap job is only as good as the person who's done your re-cap job. I recommend new ROMs too. Most of you should download WinUAE or FS-UAE and run virtual Amiga. These are the facts.

I love that you are being honest, but this is not normal! I have had my Amiga since 1993 (spring) A1200 with CF and MBX card. I have had it recapped once it SELDOM crashes. (knock on wood)I can use it for hours and hours doing lots of stuff so it is remarkable stable. So you might scare people away with this video which is abit sad.

Omg. A friend gave me a 2000 and it worked for about an hour. Next thing you know I spent months off and on trying to repair it. It was Amiga 101 for me and now I’m a seasoned vet. I knew nothing about Amigas. This thing had a corroded clock batt a bad CIA chip. A bad MegaChip (I may have fried in the process of repair unfortunately and then I had to source an original Agnus) one of the hard drives was bad. It took many many hours cleaning corrosion, adding bodge wires, pouring over schematics and scoping with the oscilloscope. And then once it worked again I had to learn how to get it to boot without any software. I bought a greeseweezle to initially create my workbench disks and get going. It turned out the computer is a Video Toaster maxxed out with accelerator card, synth cards etc etc. I now have a gotek and an SD card drive on it and I’ve got all of the software for all of the cards working (including the Toaster itself. Thanks to Q by the way!).

I love this machine now and it purrs 😻. It’s become a labor of love.

Recently repaired my old Atari ST that I had back in the day as my first Macintosh (customized to run system 6) haha and now that I am familiar with both, the Amiga really does blow the ST away in all categories. But both are fun…

** Also I learn a TON on this channel and from personal help from Q on how to use Lightwave, ADTPro, etc etc. thank you so much for all your help!

This week I finished soldering together a new Amiga 500 remake/replica board. Don't have those sort of issues with all the new caps and so on. I did have one issue of a solder bridge on two legs of the paula chip which showed weird problems like software failure until I found it. Point is that a lot of these problems can be solved by maintenance on the motherboard like new caps and checking solder joints haven't cracked. Also a lot of the newer addons like accelerators and IDE cards are made by people who don't always have a lot of experience and can make mistakes. Troubleshooting hardware is your friend.

That's a lot of Guru. If you don't want buyers regret then be careful of Ebay bargains. You could just add easily end up with an Amiga 500++ with a rev 5 board and half the board scraped away to clear up battery damage.

The Amiga's memory layout lends itself to corruption pretty easily if one or more running programs doesn't behave well. So crashes aren't entirely uncommon. But no, a properly function Amiga shouldn't just randomly experience a Guru Meditation. I don't entirely disagree with some of what you say. People definitely should not spend a lot of money on Amigas unless they know what they're getting into. Start off with an A500 mini, a Mister, a Raspberry Pi, or WinUAE. When you finally know what you're doing, it shouldn't be too hard to get an Amiga that runs stable and does what it was designed to do without very much trouble. The real problems start when you try to make the Amiga do crazy stuff it wasn't ever intended to do. I'll give you an example. Most of my Amigas are all pretty stable, but recently I put an Indivision ECS v3 in my Amiga 2000. For the most part, I'm happy with it, but I can tell you from personal experience that the FPGA based Super Denise replacement is not 100% compatible with a real chip, and I can replicate crashes by doing a carefully planned series of things involving a combination of things. Knowing that, would I recommend that upgrade to everyone? Maybe, but not necessarily unless you're an experienced Amiga user that absolutely needs a de-interlaced display and don't want to try other options. Another example I can think of involves a combination of an AtBus 2008 with 8 megs of ram and a 28mhz 68000 upgrade. The CPU has a memory cache but it won't snoop into the upper 4 megabytes of Fast Ram, meaning it is possible for applications that use a lot of ram to get corrupted data with the SuperTurbo cache enabled. Not normally a problem, but it can be. So I have to choose, use all 8 megs of fast ram or use the memory cache, but it isn't always safe to use both. My point is that most users just picking up a basic Amiga to play some games aren't going to experience these kinds of problems. It's the users that really like to push the Amiga to its limits that are going get exactly what they're looking for; Limits.

I prefer emulation

1) If you have patched the OS with any of the thousands of small "fix-it" programs on Aminet, have unstable connections between components, or failing components on your boards (such as capacitors), you will see Gurus and crashes. SnoopDOS is there to help with the software (not fix, but help locate the issue), and Chris Edwards is there to help with the hardware by showing you how to do the repairs needed to keep these machines running.
2) Final Writer is a true WYSIWYG word processor -- unlike Word. I used it so much, that I even have the Windows 95 version

Being a long time Amiga owner I know there are some frustrating moments trying to solve a problem either with hardware or software. I am glad a there is the web because I usually can find some help online. But flaky hardware is tough to resolve no doubt. I think us Amiga user are tinkerers and that leads to more issues than if we just set it up to use it as is. I am always installing new utilities and patches (hacks) and then about a dozen of them down the line you start having issues and hav no idea what you did by then. Bu the tinkering and the endless pursuit to push our machines to the limit is what keeps this community and awesome machine alive 30 years later!!!

I gave away my A2000 years ago, and would dearly love to have it (or its equivalent) back, but after a bit of research ultimately decided against buying one. The prices at this point are ridiculous, and I don't especially trust what a random eBay seller might tell me about the history and condition of the system.

Oh well. Fortunately there are a lot of Amiga emulation options these days.

I like the way you present this channel,i don't need fluff or filler or obnoxious music,just good information. you show it like it is. This is old hardware,but its not the end of the world,its like anything,it needs some love to get it back to health. Some software failures can be as simple as you installed something with a bad installer that overwrote a lib with a old/bad version. Amiga is a tough machine to live with sometimes if you are not a long time user and have been thru what software is stable and what hardware is least buggy. I think the biggest mistake most people made is selling their stuff back in the day and now when they try and revisit the prices have sky rocketed. Machine stability is not a myth it can be done. I quit fixing battery damaged stuff years ago because it migrates into layers sometimes and rears its ugly head 6months down the road,a year,who knows.

snoopdos/dostrace etc is your friend. Always run installers with the log file,it can be valuable to backtrack bad software installs. :D Consider 3.2.2 rom/amiga os experimental :) Hang in there Q we are rooting for you!

Had to sub after watching this. We all have a computer that acts like that.

That is pretty damning against the operating system and/or the software developers and is a result of the system lacking any sort of memory protection. Any program can clobber the OS / hardware and bring the system to its knees. Unfortunately Commodore never got to the point of fixing their architecture to support and use memory protection before going the way of the dodo bird.

The first place to look is the software. Here you are at the very least running an OS revision that has yet to stand the test of time in general, running on a configuration it likely hasn't been tested extensively with in particular, which I also think you are unlikely to get out of the box in your flea market or even ebay finds. I'm just going to assume that like most of us nerds, in addition to this you are likely running a bunch of commodities and patches, increasing the surface area for conflicts.

What I mean to say is that it is very likely a somewhat self-inflicted problem.

The best way if this kind of headache is not up someone's alley is to get something tried and tested. Say, KS 3.0 in a 1200 with a Blizzard 1230 or just a (significantly cheaper and probably more compatible) plain 8 MB fast RAM expansion. Well-known, simple configuration, no tricked-out desktop with fancy icons held together by spit and gum, no Workbench replacements, no ClassicWB/AIAB/Amikit. Then you can gradually introduce QoL improvements when you have a known-good base state.

Great vid as always Sir! I have 3 A500s, 2 A600s 3 A1200s and a CD32 locked away in boxes, when I get some time I will unbox them and start using them again. My original Amiga was an A600 from 1991, it got boxed up in 1995 along with my disks and has sat closed away every since, the others I purchased over the last 5 years.

Talk to the hand!
I gave mine away ages ago. I regret that,but i'm not gonna buy one now. FSUAE does it.

Spot on. That’s why I dumped my 3000T fully loaded with good things possible. I could not do any work on it. Did not help installing patch after patch to do cool things. Now have a pistorm in a 500 and that has been a joy. All that memory eases things, though my 3000 had 128Mb on board the cpu card. Best thing is to avoid OS patches and keep the libraries and devices etc ruthlessly managed by as far as possible not using installers to avoid trashing files with old junk.

Totally agree with the sentiment of this video. I have an A1200 that I've owned since 2003 and I think the caps are getting pretty tired in it. Sometimes it will power up with the accelerator connected, sometimes it won't. Sometimes it will boot off the CF card HDD, sometimes it wont. I do have a new PSU for it as I don't trust a nearly 30 year old unit.

Have had a lot of guru issues in the past.. Then worked out I picked up a Virus off Aminet, specifically “Happy New Year ‘96”. Worth getting VirusZ and the latest xvs.library. Scan your volumes 👍🏻

This is actually really good advice, you can sink a ton of money into this and who knows how good those old machines will run.
I haven't started my A-1000 and A-4000 since 1992 and 1997 out of fear, I could damage it because I am sure, they need repair before.
WinUAE is my fix for this but maily THIS channel! 👍
Thank you very much!

You have problems with that machine. Crashes are not so usual in my experience.

Thank you, I needed to hear this I almost boyght a 500+ for a 100gbp but now i dont think i will, will probaly get something refurbished from retropassion

my favorite line that people say is ...... "well, it was working yesterday". But really, for any failure or fault, there must be a point in time when it actually occurs, so the fact that it was working yesterday and it's broken today really only tells you that time exists.

And what with these machines now being 30 to 38 years old chances are if you buy one off eBay you will have to send off the logic board and get it re-capped because those old caps may or probably will be starting to leak. Hope people who spent £300 to £500 on an Amiga 1200 realise that they may have to spend another £100 to £200 for re-capping. Also another £500 ish on a 68060 accerator board to give it an extra speed boost. This is an expensive hobby to get into. Cheaper to buy an Amiga Mini if you want to play some old games.

How do you afford to get an Amiga in the first place?

buy an old amiga, second mortgage to make it a 500hp beast, faster you go the more troubles you invite, nice 030 should satisify most needs

Not sure how I’ve managed to miss your channel previously, but have now subscribed. I’m keen to find out how you’ve got to the bottom of your crashing woes.

maybe you should buy an Xbox. I never had any of your so called 'problems' that weren't fixable.

My 4000 is one day stable as a rock. Next day, it gurus all the time. Most of the time there is a reason for it. And you know what? That is a part of the experience to find the problem. My simmslots are the problem. I just need to replace them. Like you need to take care of your old vintage car. But expecting a perfect machine? 25 years late :)

I NEVER have problems or "failures" with any of my Amiga 2000 computers. Once in awhile I will have a problem with an Amiga 500. I am always having problems with my Amiga 1200 and 4000 computers. They are poorly designed and are extremely low quality, especially the Amiga 1200. The Amiga 1200 and 4000 computers are pure garbage. I am actually thinking about selling them and then using the money to buy more Amiga 2000 computers. The Amiga 2000 is clearly the best designed and highest quality Amiga that Commodore ever produced. And yet, it is the least favorite Amiga model. Keep in mind that the Amiga 1200 and 4000 are NOT real Amiga computers, they are Amiga clones. Commodore got the idea to produce clone computers from Apple.

That "crap" only happens when a person does all the stupid "upgrades" that are not needed. Most Amiga software runs great on Kickstart / Workbench 1.3. Most Amiga software runs great on a stock Amiga 2000 or 500 computer, with 512K of chip memory and 512K of fast memory. When you start installing all of the 3rd party crap, that is not needed, that is when you start having problems. I NEVER have any problems with any of my Amiga 2000 computers. So, if you do not want to have any more problems with your Amiga computer, STOP buying Gotek drives, new Kickstart ROMs and Workbenches, PiStorm, and the rest of the stupid 3rd party crap. These companies are laughing at you stupid Amiga fanatics all the way to the BANK! They really do not care about you or the Amiga. They only care about making that money off of you stupid people. STOP IT! It is people like you that are ruining the Amiga computer hobby.

What a confusing narrator, is there a point to your prattle.. I thought I would get information on a NEW AMIGA... ...bye

The more upgrades you perform the more crashes you get. There are far too many variables to diagnose major issues unless you are a member of a user group.

Hello, I enjoyed the channel, I worked for Digital Creations and Play when we merged with the folks from NewTek. I wrote the fish animation tutorial for Brilliance, I joined Digital Creations just before we launched DCTV. Greg Bahlhorn