If you could design the best Amiga from existing Amiga models and third party hardware what specification would it be? Including Amiga model, expansion cards, OS, and any other hardware.
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I always wanted an A1200 with a decent sized HDD, an external drive (maybe a couple) a CD-ROM drive and a decent, sizable monitor to play on. I wasn't really too fussed about accelerator cards, I knew very little about them.

Easily pleased
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You guys need to see what Zetro, Smiley and Dambuster have done for the Amiga, such as fitting DVD-ROM drives to them and booting from Compact Flash cards, take a look on the English Amiga Board and Oldskool UK for what I am talking about, I nearly have all the parts to build my own A1200 Plus machine.

Merlin
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We had a discussion a while back regarding using flash cards instead of an HD, and I think it was Teho who is using such a method on the A600. From what I have read though there are a few downsides to using a flash card compared to a real HD on the Amiga. Things such as compatibility with some software and games and the transfer speed.

I've always wanted to do a major A1200 to tower conversion project myself, upgrading the system with PPC and PCI/Zorro breakout board, but as time has gone on I now find myself mainly using Amiga software via emulation and leaving the actual hardware behind. Don't get me wrong, I do still love the actual Amiga hardware, but compared to emulation it is now more fiddly to get the variety of software running on the Amiga compared to just changing the settings in emulation.

Maybe if the new PPC Amiga actually reaches production I may once again take a direct interest in building a really good PPC Amiga.
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Heresy!

I cannot believe that you would rather muck about with WinUAE than get your hands on the real deal....admittedly, it is easier to run setups you could never afford under WinUAE (I could never afford an A1200 at the time, let alone the upgrades), however, the scene is still alive with Amiga people, otherwise this board would not exist and we would all be slaves to boards created by Cloanto and the like.

I returned to the scene because of Amiga Forever by Cloanto and it made me want to get involved again, not because of rose-tinted glasses, but because I am a bit sick of Windows wanting to do everything for me, I missed the old days of writing startup-sequences and getting my hands dirty in the CLI.

Besides, there are some cracking games on the Miggy that just don't run too well in WinUAE, even on my 3.2 Ghz, 1 Gig memory PC.

There, that's my tuppence worth.

Merlin
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True, but also there's a significant proportion who remember the games and just want to give them a go again.

There's a few ones that are hard to configure, and a few with only bad cracks but nearly everything I wanted to play again, and everything I wanted to try has worked. WinUAE can shorten the loading time, makes disk swapping easier etc. Sure it's great to fire up the miggy every now and again, have a go at a few games on it with the real disk drive noises, proper anticipation while it loads etc. for nostalgia but I find that really WinUAE does the job better for actually playing the games.
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Pretty much got mine.
Just need PPC really.
Was hoping to get the Shark, or PowerVixen, but can't see it happening now.
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You can even activate the floppy sound in WinUAE, hilarious
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It's not perfect though, it just clicks when the number goes up or down.
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Points taken, I just think there's something "wrong" in using a 64-bit, Gigahertz PC to run software from a 7Mhz, 16 bit machine (14 Mhz and 32-bit if you count the A1200).

I'm not a total nostalgia freak, I am not going to lovingly polish the plastic of my Amiga and keep it in a vacuum so as not to ruin it, I intend to mod my A1200 with a 4Mb trapdoor expansion, a 2Mb SRAM card, a buffered IDE interface and a laptop DVD-ROM, and load games to a 1.4Gb hard drive that didn't exist back then...I don't want to think about what some of these expansions cost back then.

My old 2Mb A600 had a 40 Mb laptop hard drive in it that was near the cutting edge back when I had it in the early 90s. Yes, I want to play games on it once it's finished, but that doesn't mean I have to wait ages and swap loads of floppies, now that WHDload is around.

The Amiga had a huge following and just because some of us are older now, that doesn't mean we gave up on it....

Virtual floppy clicks? Nah, give me the real thing any day......

Merlin
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