wow guys, thats some good advice. I have a bid going on an A1200 on ebay at the mo so ill have to wait and see if im successful - if not ill check out amiga kit (already added to my favourites on the broswer).
On that note - how much do you think is a fair price for an A1200? I have seen them go anywhere between £45 and £90. Say it was a base spec with a few games and no aftermarket upgrades?
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A basic A1200 with no upgrades or extras is worth roughly £40-50. If it comes in the original box with manuals and workbench disks then maybe slightly more.

With upgrades they can go for a lot more. A good spec for an A1200 is to get one with an HD of at least 1GB and a 68030 accelerator with some fast ram installed (8MB or more). Having an HD and 030 installed will be a huge difference to the system, as does some fast ram, and make it very nice to use. Such a system with those specs would sell for around £100 or more if there is interest.

One important thing to look for when buying an A1200 is the kickstart rom version. Make sure you get one with the 3.1 kickstart and not the 3.0. As this will allow you to run the newer version of Workbench (3.1, 3.5 and 3.9). If it only has 3.0 then you cannot run these.

And with the A1200 expansion is unlimited in terms of what you can add. You can even buy a tower conversion kit such as the Dbox 1200 and then have the ability to add PCI/zorro breakout boards, graphics cards, network cards, cd writers and whatever else you can think of.
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Jeezo - and i thought the thing died back in the late 90's! Damn it - you have me thinking now and those thoughts involve spending money...
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Again, as I mentioned earlier, make sure you have a sufficient power supply before you start adding all these neat things. I've blown quite a few power supplies over the past years, and in some cases that can take out your hardware as well
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It's definitely far from dead, and expansion is only really limited by your budget.

And a lot of Amiga fans don't realise that the Amiga is still being developed in many ways. Workbench is still being developed with the current PPC only Amiga OS 4.0, and different companies are all working on ideas for future development of the Amiga One, but currently this is held back by court room disputes over who actually has the legal rights to develop and produce the hardware.
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This is very true. The original A500 came with a 60W PSU and that was strong enough for most things, but Commodore cut costs with the A1200 and it only comes with a 22W PSU as standard. You can buy larger external replacement PSUs for the A1200 such as the Goliath PSU I bought years ago for my A1200 that is a PC PSU in an external metal enclosure.

Using an A500 PSU with the A1200 is also another option.
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Especially as A500s are fairly easy to find, and cheap as chips on fleaBay.
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There is still a fair bit of software for 3.9 and below being developed if you wanted to use your machine for something other than games.
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You mention using the amiga apart from games - what sort of things? I use my PC for 3D, image editing and CAD - is there anything like this?
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Yes
Image editing software is still being developed at the moment by various people.
Image FX is supposed to be very good.
I have 1.5 but I think it's up to 4.5 now.

Not sure how up to date the CAD stuff is.
A search on Aminet should help with this and any other software you maybe interested in.

I use mine for the internet, email, chatting, radio, shopping etc.
Use it to listen to mp3 and have photos stored as well.
I have a fair few demos I like to watch as well.
Gaming also.
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