I found this A1200 in eBay UK. Does any one here with an eye for this kinda stuff spot any caveats I might have missed?
Take a lookWell anyhoo, wether this one is good or not I will buy one soon. I want a beginners intor to what I can and can't expect from an Amiga 1200. I know they have all manner of positively radical upgrades and stick-on bits for them out there but I would, a bit at a time, like to establish a system with the following stuff:
HARD DISK - no problem initially - I am busy organising a 2.5" 2GB IDE drive. I will eventually do some jiggery pokery to get it outside or rig a pair of 50mm extraction fans over the vents in the top of the case as I hear overheating is an issue in the compact cases (not that surprising)
CD-ROM - I have a SCSI external from my Mac side of things. Is it easy to get a CD drive working on an old Amiga? anarchic_teapot says the PCMCIA Squirrel card can cause unstable OS type problems. Any thoughts? This is about my best option at the momont, my other is an IDE CD-ROM, which would be fitting an IDEFix card and some cable work (where the hell do you mount it??). Any other SCSI options for the A1200?
I should just interject at this point and say I have a 220W PC AT PSU rigged for running an Amiga already so I'm not likely to run short of power
HI-RES GFX - Initially I'll cope with TV output but eventually I want to use it on a VGA monitor at a respectable res/refres rate, about 800x600 or better really. I don't know jack **** about Amiga graphics so i need a helping hand here.
FASTER CPU - Woohoo it's got a 68020. I can only hop it makes better use of it thn the Mac LC did
I will eventually want to upgrade the CPU (hence why I wanted to get the hard disk outside but gain - where do I mount it??). Do I bother witha 68040, maybe an 060 (something us apple dude never got to play with) or is a PPC a better option? Again I'm not too hot on what the OS/software performance is like on the different CPUs (again, I hope it's better than Apple's
).
AMIGA OS 3.9 - I'm going to shoot for a 1200 with the 3.1 Disks inlcuded. But I will one day want the latest version of the OS (apart from 4.0 and that we will leave alone) so it has to be a goer. I *know* I need a CD drive and I *know* I need 3.1 ROMs but I *don't know* what CPU/GFX will do it justice, I'm guessing not a 14MHz 68020 and the original (AGA??) chip
NETWORKING - I have limited floppy handling capacity. I have a PC with a PC floppy drive and a Mac Quardra with a Mac floppy drive but I have really now way of getting anything onto the A1200 from the outside world easily. I thus need a network solution - my best idea so far being a PCMCIA NIC but that will mean internal SCSI or expanded IDE will be required as it will do away with my ability to handle the Squirrel PCMCIA card.
Well that tops it - I'm not asking for much - hahahahaha
- and consider this is a long term (over a year ands things are bound to change i nthat time right??) project as finances won't take much buying at the moment outside the A1200 and a hard disk and cable for it.
you guys are giving me great direction, my enthusiasm has only coma about from the enthusiasm I have seen in the community for these machines. My ultimate goal is to get a machine that is as good as the WinUAE emulated Amiga I had on my PC last yr, it was about the best you could expect for an emulator, running an emulate 040 with FPU, 2MB Chip 8MB Fast, 2 500MB hard disk partitions, AOS 3.1, Scalos, DOpus and a few other trimmings. Asdly I can't do it with an Amoga 600 so I guess the 1200 is a better bet.