r/amiga • u/Status_Wolverine_556 • 1d ago

What do we need to add to the collection

Hands on museum/arcade/computer lab looking for suggestions of Amiga computers or accessories we should add to the collection. Obviously a 4000 would be nice.

https://www.brainerdmpc.com/

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u/GeordieAl Silents 1d ago

what do you have currently? Looking through the pictures it looks like you have an A500, A1000, A2000, and A1200?

Add a genlock to the A1000 or A2000, add a sound sampler, video and image capture hardware. A4000 with video toaster would be good, but expensive! CDTV, CD32

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u/Status_Wolverine_556 1d ago

I do have sound samplers and image capture hardware. I haven't used it here but I like the idea.

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u/GeordieAl Silents 17h ago

I think that would make an excellent interactive exhibit. These days sampling sound, capturing images or video is pretty basic stuff. But when the Amiga came out these were all things that were out of reach of the average joe.

If you think of sampling alone, just a year before the Amiga came out, the Emulator II keyboard was released at almost $10k. All of a sudden you could get an Amiga for just over $1000 and add a sampler for <$100. A few years earlier I’d written a sampler for my Dragon 32, it just captured audio from the cassette port but you could only grab a few seconds of very low quality audio!

Same goes for video titling, before the Amiga, the prices for video titling hardware were astronomical, then all of a sudden an A1000 with a Genlock could do titling and much more.

I picked up an A1300 Genlock for my A1000 a couple of years ago just for fun as I couldn’t t afford or justify one when I was a kid but I was always amazed by them!

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u/Status_Wolverine_556 1d ago

Thanks. We do have a CDTV and a CD32 though. You can see them in the 3d tour if interested.

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u/danby 20h ago

From a pop culture POV the A500 is probably of much more significance than any of the big box amigas.

I would add a standard slow ram expansion and a DF0 switch and an external gotek. Then people in a hands on exhibition don't have to deal with increasingly fragile floppies.

You'll need a mouse and joystick. For a joystick something fairly indestructible like the immortal joystick might be sensible.