Expert: Gregory Donner - 8/2/2007

Question
Hi Greg. I've been reminising about my old Amiga 500 that gave me so much pleasure some 16 years ago. I'm toying with the idea of buying one so I can re-live my youth. I'd like to buy the A1200 but do the old A500 games work on this machine? Any other advice for buying a machine? Thanks

Answer
Hi Ben,

The oldest games (released before 1992) may not work, as many of them were written to access old hardware directly that the 1200 can't easily emulate. Game programmers were notorious for 'banging the hardware' as it became known in an effort to get the most out of the hardware, instead of writing by Commodore-Amiga's guidelines. The OS 2.x/3.x upgrade broke a lot of these games because they didn't follow the rules. After 1992 or so, many games were written specifically for the AGA chipset, so they should run fine on A1200 systems.

Probably the best place for buying any used Amiga equipment eBay, but if you're in the USA, you can also see what Software Hut has (www.softhut.com). If you're in the UK, take a look at AmigaKit (www.amigakit.com).

I hope this helps!

Greg