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Amiga Prices

xp0nentz

xp0nentz

Veteran Member
Joined
Sep 1, 2025
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Hello, so I've been wanting to purchase an amiga for quite a while now, but prices are so high! Why is this?
 
Scarcity. Most Amiga have already moved to people who care. The ones left are in good demand.
 
I hope you have used Amgia Forever to test out the Amiga scene before going for the real hardware. Sometimes, an affordable Amiga will sneak through the auction sites but all the interesting add-ons can become very expensive. Find out that you will like Amiga a lot before really opening the wallet.
 
krebizfan said:
I hope you have used Amgia Forever to test out the Amiga scene before going for the real hardware. Sometimes, an affordable Amiga will sneak through the auction sites but all the interesting add-ons can become very expensive. Find out that you will like Amiga a lot before really opening the wallet.
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Alrighty. I'm focused on my homebrew project as of now, but whenever march rolls around, I'll be purchasing another computer. Good to know!
 
Like everything else supply and demand. I snagged most of my Amiga stuff in the early 2000's when the die-hard users finally dumped it and went to the PC or mac. Back then you could get free C64s everywhere you looked and many people were giving away 68K Macs on freecycle, but Amigas commanded some money (maybe $50 for an A2000 was considered a good deal).

The A3000 and A4000 models came out when Commodore was circling the drain, so they didn't sell that many. The A500 was probably the most common and best for gaming which is what most people snag them for these days. A1200 supports AGA which not that many games support and is nice to have and people like the expansion and form factor (the A4000 is also AGA but expensive).

Battery leaks killed a few motherboards and, static killed many chips which are proprietary. Also, the monitors are hard to find and expensive when working. Keyboards for the desktop models are also pain to source, same with working mice.
 
Unknown_K said:
Like everything else supply and demand. I snagged most of my Amiga stuff in the early 2000's when the die-hard users finally dumped it and went to the PC or mac. Back then you could get free C64s everywhere you looked and many people were giving away 68K Macs on freecycle, but Amigas commanded some money (maybe $50 for an A2000 was considered a good deal).

The A3000 and A4000 models came out when Commodore was circling the drain, so they didn't sell that many. The A500 was probably the most common and best for gaming which is what most people snag them for these days. A1200 supports AGA which not that many games support and is nice to have and people like the expansion and form factor (the A4000 is also AGA but expensive).

Battery leaks killed a few motherboards and, static killed many chips which are proprietary. Also, the monitors are hard to find and expensive when working. Keyboards for the desktop models are also pain to source, same with working mice.
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Ah alrighty.
 
It heavily depends on your location. In Europe, common Amiga models are not that expensive (other models are, of course). In the US, things are very different, as the Amiga did not do that well there back in the day and is way more rare with higher demand now.

I'm trying to sell an A500 for weeks now for around 100 bucks and no one wants it.
 
I sold my A1200 in 1999 for about $200, which I regret even though I needed the money. But I like the A4000T I have now, though I've probably sunk about $2K into it acquiring it and its components. I have a couple A500s and an A3000 but I don't use these much.
 
Timo W. said:
It heavily depends on your location. In Europe, common Amiga models are not that expensive (other models are, of course). In the US, things are very different, as the Amiga did not do that well there back in the day and is way more rare with higher demand now.

I'm trying to sell an A500 for weeks now for around 100 bucks and no one wants it.
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TBH it kind of surprises me that people who travel between the US and Europe don't tend to bring this type of stuff with them if the prices differ greatly?
Like put an eBay or Craigslist ad stating that the computer is only for pick up at a specific hotel or airport at a very specific time span.
 
MiaM said:
TBH it kind of surprises me that people who travel between the US and Europe don't tend to bring this type of stuff with them if the prices differ greatly?
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I don't see how this would work. Unlike in e.g. Japan, where you can simply buy retro stuff in store chains like HARD OFF, there is nothing like that in Europe. And timing a flight to Europe with an ebay purchase probably isn't going to work either. Also, Amigas are not small. Even the A600 takes quite some space in your baggage.

On the other hand, "expensive" always is in the eye of the beholder. I think even in the US you can get an A500 for a good price. It gets really expensive if you start to upgrade or want an A3000 or A4000. The A1200 is a bit crazy currently as well, people pay 400+ bucks even for broken ones. But then again, people pay 200-350 bucks for an Atari STE 1040. So...
 
The first A500 I found on eBay with bids on it (5 days left, $338.33 current bid) has a Commodore 2002 monitor, external Commodore 1011 floppy, 1MB RAM, Gotek floppy emulator and mouse.

The first sold one I found on eBay in the US was $262 for a basic as-is untested A500 with mouse and power brick (with the power cable cut).

The problem with buying Amigas in Europe is you need to find a US power brick plus convert it from PAL to NTSC.

The Atari STE is the model with some upgrades from the original along with 4 SIMM slots for an easy 4MB RAM upgrade, not as common as the normal ST's. I have a 1040 STf with both Atari monitors (color and mono) and its nice for gaming.

My A1200 was far less than $200 but I probably have that in it after purchasing a Blizzard 1230 IV 68030 50mhz + FPU plus SCSI module from Canada (back when their money was worth about 60% of a dollar and shipping was dirt cheap by truck).
 
Timo W. said:
It heavily depends on your location. In Europe, common Amiga models are not that expensive (other models are, of course). In the US, things are very different, as the Amiga did not do that well there back in the day and is way more rare with higher demand now.

I'm trying to sell an A500 for weeks now for around 100 bucks and no one wants it.
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If you can put it on eBay I might be able to purhcase it. What's the condition?
 
The Amiga scene is weird. There's a lot of new faces in there and a lot of newer products such as replacement motherboards, FPGA-based chip replacements and copious* upgrade cards but I've always fallen back on that Amiga hardware is expensive because the community is insane. In one hand they will tout new emulators and hardware solutions while in the other hand demanding you pay 79 euros for MorphOS, which only runs on a select number of obsolete Post-Amiga machines, is nodelocked and after the trial period ends kneecaps your performance until you pony up.
Only Amiga Makes it Necessary.
On one side of the marketplace you have the base-model 500 machines you can't move because nobody wants to pay the premium to make it "a decent system*", meanwhile if you look at a lot of Amiga systems on ebay you might notice sellers will strip systems and sell the parts separately, or it's a machine that may of just sold a few weeks earlier and it's back, albeit with one or two things missing and no change on the price. You can go so far as to take this guy on Amibay where you start looking at an amiga less as a system ready to go and more a host for multiple brainslug accelerators that don't actually touch the hardware for much beyond sound or graphics and to add icing to this cake buddy is a Friends and Family tax dodge.

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This is not a neat hack to use a network card as a PowerPC accelerator. This is insane. I thought the people buying the x86 bridge boards so they could use Realtek NIC's in Zorro slot Amigas were loopy. At that price you can commission someone to spin a proper accelerator. But you wouldn't because even though the community has proven there are quite a few very tech savvy people at play, it would dilute the market and devalue your own hardware.
Everything comes across as seedy, sleazy and "pay me and I'll show you just how awesome the Amiga still is*" when the topic of why the Amiga is so expensive. With so many new parts, FPGA's, emulators and even entire systems being made it's absolutely not scarcity, it's extortion.

For what people want for an Amiga now, I'd take Timo up on his offer as even with shipping it will probably be the cheapest Amiga you'll find. I own a 500, a 2000 and a 3000 and they've been left to rot in storage because even 16 years ago the community was not welcoming to the new and the inexperienced who wasn't interested in immediately buying upgrades and parts, so my suggestion is simply do not engage with them.
 
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krebizfan said:
I hope you have used Amgia Forever to test out the Amiga scene before going for the real hardware. Sometimes, an affordable Amiga will sneak through the auction sites but all the interesting add-ons can become very expensive. Find out that you will like Amiga a lot before really opening the wallet.
Click to expand...

Plus one to this. A few years ago a chance at a free (if in need of TLC) Amiga 1000 crossed my path and I took it because I never had a chance to play with one much back in the 80's. (They were never that popular in the US, there was this one mom-and-pop computer shop in town that carried them and of course the demos looked cool, but, nope, ended up firmly in the PC wagon.) I spent the time to get it running, mucked with it for a while, and... I'm uncomfortable using the phrase "never meet your heroes" because I never exactly idolized them (and in fact I've actually been making fairly mean sport of Amiga die-hards since the late 90's because of just how delusional they were getting in that twilight era where they kept trying to use them as "real computers" and insisting they could somehow still outperform Pentium IIs at... something), but it does sum it up, honestly. Maybe I'll go with "you had to be there". There's a lot of neat ideas, the hardware was way ahead of its time... but its time was 1985.

(I mean, I think I get it, if I *had* had one when they were new I'm sure it would have been a huge nostalgia blast, but as an outsider I found myself judging it a lot more harshly. The multitasking OS is technically neat but the GUI is butt ugly, interlaced mode at 15khz gives me a huge headache, the games I had to try are "fine", but honestly I didn't think most of them played any better than Atari 800 games (which is no doubt deeply unfair because I *did* have an Atari 800 and harbor a *huge* level of nostalgia for that)... I dunno, it just kind of all comes out "meh". A couple years after the Amiga I ended up getting a Tandy 1000-family computer and I love the beejeezus out of that, but, again, I also have first hand nostalgia for DOS that I don't have for the Amiga so it's a lot easier for me to forgive the clunky-ugly-lousy parts of the experience.)

So yeah, at least try before you buy.

NeXT said:
I own a 500, a 2000 and a 3000 and they've been left to rot in storage because even 16 years ago the community was not welcoming to the new and the inexperienced who wasn't interested in immediately buying upgrades and parts, so my suggestion is simply do not engage with them.
Click to expand...

And yes, this, really. It seems like to be a *true* Amiga user it's not enough to be interested in experiencing what the machine is actually capable on its own terms, it's all about pushing the thing way beyond its limits with objectively stupid upgrades.
 
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I never purchased any upgrades above the 68030 level for my Amigas because I mostly use them for gaming and that was the sweet spot for upgrades. Generally, if you like old school DOS gaming you will like Amiga gaming as well. Plenty of shooters and scrollers around plus nicer looking CGA era DOS games using better sound on the Amiga. When the PC went into VGA and 16 bit sound and MIDI Amiga games fell behind, especially when you didn't have a HD and had to swap a stack of floppies.

As far as PPC upgrades go, spending a grand or more to upgrade an Amiga (back in the early 2000's) so it could play Quake when PCs of the time found on the curb could play it better was insane to me back then. That is what happens when people stick to a dead platform. If Apple died before switching to PPC the hard-core users would probably be doing the same thing.
 
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