A1200 - need to know more stuff

OK, the ball is officially rolling. I have acquired an Amiga 1200 for the princely sum of £37 inc. p&p off eBay (trusted buyer, picture, good description yadda, yadda)

One problem no Workbench disks but thats no biggy if I get o the phone to Power Computing - I have £13 left from the budget I set myself for the A1200, nevermind the initial capital of £80 I allowed fot the project.

Next problem/question is it only has 3.0 ROMs. The vast majority of the ones on eBay I looked at either had 3.0 ROMs or didn't say. I'm just wondering to my self if it's worth getting a set of 3.1 ROMs and AmigaOS 3.5, considering this is a stock 1200 we are talking about...

That aside I 'm going to get some cables, 2 cables to attach a 2.5" HD to the bus (one for my 1200 and one for my 600 - may as well), one to attach a 2.5" HD to my PC (might have to make a power cnnector adapter) which will double for attaching a 3.5" to my 1200 temporarily until I get my 2.5" hard disks.

Wish me luck, any advice is good as ever!

[Desler]

You can easily wait some time before changing the kickstart. I've been using the 3.0 and I never had any serious problems. In my opinion you should save your money and try to get your hands on atleast a memory upgrade or better yet an accelerator card instead. Lets face it: The a1200 is a great machine, the 68020 IS NOT a good cpu.
I never really understod why commodore chose the 68020 for the a1200 instead of the much more powerfull 68030. Sure it would have made the computer a bit more expensive, but the games and apps it would have been able to run...Wow. For 1992 standards it would probably be like getting a PS2/3

[Damion]

 3.1 ROM's will eventually be a must for 3.5 or better, but I wouldn't worry about that until you get an accellerator and more memory(I think 3.5 needs a few megs of fastram).

3.5 will run somewhat with 3.0 roms, but you will need 3.1 for full compatability.

OS 3.0 is actually a very usable OS for the machine you will be running it on, despite a few annoying quirks. Using less colors on the WB will help keep the speed up until you upgrade. I bought a stock 1200 in Feb. and used it with nothing more than a hard drive until just recently, and I thought it did a fabulous job considering its resourses!

[vortexau]

To install OS3.5 (or 3.9) that A1200 would need:
° A CD-ROM.
° 4 Mb Fast Ram.
° A 3.1 KS chip and
° A HDD.

A500s, A600s, and A2000s must have at least an 68020 cpu and 1Mb Chip Ram in addition to the above! (The 3.5 & 3.9 OSs come on CD)
The OS3.5 CD-ROM includes OS3.1 because THIS must be present for the 3.5 install to go ahead.

OK I have Workbench 3.1, a couple of options as far as hard disks go as I bought a 4 way buffered IDE board (I didn't mean to but I didn't pay much for the A1200 so I thought what the hell) and a good few cables.

I have a 2GB IDE Drive on the way for the internal 2.5" bay but my only spare 3.5" is a 6GB Samsung. Is there any way I can patch OS 3.1 (with 3.0 ROMs) to accept >4GB drives?

If there is not will I still be able to use the forst 4GB of the drive or will it just not be recognised?

[Damion]

Now that one's a real bugger. I have had lots of problems with bigger HD's on my 1200. If HD tool box doesn't recognize everything fully, you may need to manually modify some things. The software that came with your 4-way adapter (ELBOX EIDE) should have a fix for this (but it lamely divides up your partitions) , and 0s3.5 and up have somewhat of a mediocre fix. I also use PFS3 on some of my bigger partitions just in case.

As long as the drive is not bigger than 8gb and your partitions stay under 4gb you should be just fine.

I believe aminet has some programs to help with this, but I'm not sure on the specifics of those.

Basically, just fiddle around with it for a time or two and you'll get it!
 :-)

[miles]

3.0 does not like hard drive over 4Gb
AOS prefers partitions <= 2Gb
The IDE of the A1200 supports up to 8Gb
AFAIR powerflyer supports large hard drives.

Why:
Beyond the Four Gigabyte Barrier

How to fix it:
NSDpatch
or buy 3.5 or 3.9 (and 3.1 ROMs)

[Damion]

Yeah, but they still don't fully solve the problem. Some drives are easier to configure than others, but I had a real hard time even with 3.9 and the 'patches'. HD toolbox wouldn't report the specs and size of my drive properly, even though it worked fine on the laptops I tried it on. I had to modify the settings manually and hope for the best.

OK I looked into this and found out that the new SFS file system supports larger partitions over 4GB. I can install AOS on a smaller hard disk (512MB IIRC) and thenm format the 6GB drive as SFS. Will this only get around the software side and not the hardware side or is the lmitation only a part of AOS itself?

[Damion]

 I think it's a little bit of both.

 SFS sounds like a good way to go, I did the same thing using PFS.

After reading the aforementioned Beyond the 4gb Barrier article, I can say that this also mirrors my experience (and how many others?) and is also very sound advice.

Ahh Zehr Gut :-)

IIRC PFS is a commmercial package. I've just drained about £130 out of my account already so I'll just gi with SFS 'casue it's free :-)

OK, that solved next we move onto...

Workbench 3.1 does nt work on 3.0 Kickstart ROMs apparently, unless you do a hardware mod. Anyone know what the situation os, it's something I have never come across being a newbie.

[Damion]

 Well, the best fix is to get the 3.1 roms eventually. Do you have 3.0 to use? 3.1 isn't much different. In that case I would just wait until 3.5 or 3.9 to get the 3.1 roms.

I think I'm ready for 3.5 beers! :-)

[Gavilan]

Well..i have recently got a 1200 with 3.0 roms...and os 3.5 working perfectly!
How is possible you ask? Well, this machine has a Blizzard 1230 accelerator, and a patch program called blizzkick, which makes the machine boots twice, but at the end of the day, i see os 3.5 running here...
Im not sure if blizzkick works only if you have a blizzard accel, but maybe a research on Aminet could show you if other programs do the little thing as well.
Anyway, i would also recommend you that before you buy the 3.1 roms, go for an accelerator!!

Regards!

Sebastian :-D

Re: Blizkick I think it uses the blizzard's inbuilt RAM area to supply a RAM cache into which it can load the kickstart ROM to accelerate startups. If a patch was written to patch the KS 3.0 code to allow AOS3.5 to run it is entirely possible (although I'm not sure if it's legal without a lisence from Amiga Inc.) to boot the machine with AOS 3.5. It will only work with a Blizzard though I think, unless other fully compatible upgrade cards exist.

As for my A1200 it's sitting happlily attached to a hard disk and a CD-ROM drive via it's Eyetech EZCD-XL card. I also put 3.1 ROMs in it aswell so I could stop worrying about newer versions of AOS.

I thus have:
A1200 (still not acelerator ofr fast RAM  :-( )
2x2GB partitions on a 6GB drive
32x CD-ROM
AOS3.1 installed on HD

Thanks for your help :-)