I'm interested in checking out how I would best upgrade my A1200 to a 'reasonable spec', should the AmigaOnes possibly not materialise at all. I'm interested either way, but from the little investigation I have done suggests a fatter wallet is required to upgrade my A1200 than buying an AmigaOne.
My A1200 is still in its original case, has an 040/40MHz/FPU accelerator with a 64MB RAM EDO SIMM in it. It has an 850MB 2.5" IDE disk inside. I have a VGA adapter and a PCMCIA NIC that doesn't go very fast (latest PCMCIA driver off Aminet, I can get a max of ~180KB/sec out of it, I realise the PCMCIA port is of a v.old and slow standard). KS 3.1 ROMs.
What I'd like to know is how much this lot would cost, if someone would be kind enough to do some spec'ing up for me:
- replacing the 040 card with PPC
- a reasonable gfx card, say capable of 1024x768x24-bit colour
- a reasonable sound card by PC standards
- an IDE CD-ROM drive, and reasonable performance over IDE (I assume a seperate IDE card or accelerator is required for the reasonable performance part?)
On the converting to PC case side of things, I have quite a bit of experience building PCs. My soldering skills aren't good, I would say I could wire the power supply connector from the Amiga internally to an AT PSU, but that's about it.
I've seen a number of different types of accelerators, some that go through the Mediator bus board, some that go direct into the expansion port. I don't know if performance varies greatly between the Mediator and going directly into the accelerator port, but a CPU card in PCI worries me because of the lack of bus speed, but I guess you get a lot less than 33MHz through the accelerator port anyway :-)
PS: if you prefer to email me and talk through there, you can reach me through mike-amiga@legolas.com.
PPS: the CPU need only be fast enough for general applications usage, and playing mp3s at the same time :-)
