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Looking to buy an Amiga. Recommendations?

Depends on what you want to do with it

Yes, I can recommend buying an Amiga.

And pick one done by Commodore. That’s the real shit.

Due to nostalgia, I would always recommend owning an A500

britelite: get into programming, general dickings-around.

WinUAE. Once you can decide for a chipset and config get a real one with network adapter, IDE storage and some extra RAM.

Amiga 3000 for Red Baron and System V Unix

If you're looking to native programming, brace yourself to dig deep and pimp up a 1200 to high end status (060, 64MB Fast and a gfx board, Ethernet). Other than that only use the real thing for testing and generally watching demos, e.g. your target model of development.

buy whatever model suits you, just be sure it's recapped or you have skills to do it. You'll end up watching some stuff on it, maybe playing some games to figure out that it's actually much easier to launch fpga or raspberry based incarnation.

I use my MIST more frequently than the real A1200 that is getting dust again. But there is countless level of nostalgia driven satisfaction to own Amiga again, after years. Even if it just gets dust on your desk. But it's on your desk.

1200 or 500 ..

A grey one

With a floppy drive

If you go for an A500 you can most likely ignore the recapping as well. They last longer and are much less likely to destroy your machine than in the case of a1200 / a600.
(But if you go with an A500+ you'll want to make sure it's not batterleaked to hell)

Anyway, what the other guys said about using winuae for developing stuff. The real hw is mainly useful for that warm fuzzy feeling when watching existing stuff + testing to make sure your code actually works.

Do not try to fix your disks using DiskDoctor.
And I second everything above.

I do a lot of pixels and a little bit of fugly "coding" on the real deal and depending on what the target machine is, you certainly don't need 060, RTG and ethernet. I mostly use an Amiga 1200 with 4 megs of fastmem which is a very smooth experience when the target platform is Amiga 500. It's also a great machine for WHDLoad demo watching.

For any kind of serious demo coding though, a proper emulator toolchain is probably your best bet.

I recommend buying an Atari. It's the best Amiga.

If you want to go the OCS/ECS way (the only one! ;) I have good experience with an A600. It was a "failure" when it was new because its launch was too late and the AGA Amigas were already in place but from a retro perspective theres nothing wrong with it (its PCMCIA cardslot is pretty nice).
Also consider getting a memory expansion and a compact flash or ide2sd adapter to use flash-cards as harddisk.

Uh, from my experience A600's incompatibility problems with demos and other programs made for Amiga 500 are huge.

Pretty much everything released before, say, 1992, requires 512k slowfast, which the A600 cannot provide. "Modern" OCS releases will usually work with 1 meg of chip though, so YMMV.

For pure oldschool/OCS demowatching, an A500 with kick 1.3 and a 512k expansion is what you want, but it's a nightmare getting demos onto it without an ACA500 or a Gotek.

If you want a PCMCIA-capable machine (which is a real plus IMHO, for use with a CF->PCMCIA adapter to transfer files), the A1200 is the way to go. Much easier to find the needed RAM expansions for it that'll make WHDLoad ports work, plus you can watch lots of neat low-end AGA stuff without an 060.

The Amiga 600 is a great machine for demoparties, though. It's the smallest and lightest of them and as long as you know what you're doing, you can still create a respectable and highly enjoyable demo library for it.

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone! (I'll probably grab one with Ethernet so I can probably figure out a way to push/pull files to/from it. RAM expansion is a bit of a given, as a lot of people probably have them on their machines and they code on said machines.)

I've heard there's a CPU expander that allows you to put in an x86, instead of a PPC/68k/6502? Is this true?

(Also do cpu expanders add a second CPU, replace the first, or does it depend on the expander?)

You've misunderstood. Different CPU architectures are generally incompatible. Classic Amiga only runs on 68k, although a small amount of software can use PPC as a co-processor.

Actually, there were these crazy bridgeboards, e.g. from Commodore or from Vortex that allowed you to have up to a 486 in the same case as the Amiga. But we are talking late 80s / early 90s here and this is leading you nowhere today.

Might be neat to dualboot Win9x or DOS, if that's possible on those.

Yay, get into the real 256 byte size-coding then. Enjoy