Another (old) newbie !

[willbloke]

Well !

Where to start ?
I had an original A500 back in the day ( in fact I think it's still in the loft )
Was an absolute rabid Amigan , but eventually faced the inevitable and turned to Mr Gates finest whilst doing an Engineering Degree .
I did build an A1200 into a tower case many moons ago , I still have it , but I fear it probably won't startup after about 10 years of storage.

I should add that I work in a University and support about 30 PCs and 25 Macs with 5 Pro-tools equipped recording studios .
That's half the reason I started looking on the web yesterday for Amiga stuff.
Back in the day I used Music-X with various synths and a sampler to make a racket and I was wondering if it would be possible to run WinUAE with MIDI software ?

But then I started looking as to what hardware was still available .

I'm kinda stuck now as to how to proceed , I think first task is to see if my A1200 will spinup its HD and go from there .

Anyway , hello , I'm sure I will have loads of stupid questions as I'm so rusty !

Will

[trekiej]

Welcome.

[golem]

Hi. Welcome back. )
There are quite a few old Amiga users on here who have a lot of experience with music software. I've never used MusicX but I remember back in the day that was the professional software of choice. I recently tried out Bars and Pipes on WinUAE and that passes through MIDI to my PC USB MIDI interface pretty transparently. The Host/IO ports/MIDI setting in WinUAE was all I needed to alter..so..load up MusicX and let us know if it works. If you need a MIDI interface I like the Datel MIDIMaster. You can usually pick them up cheaply on eBay. Amiga soundcards? Don't bother if you've got a 1200. Paula is the best and if you need 16-bit samples then you can use MIDI and a hardware sampler. The beauty of the 500 and 1200 is that in their original cases they are silent. Stealth mode on.

Ok just seen you have a tower. So if you have a busboard you could get a Zorro soundcard (see Repulse, Delfina, Prelude, Tocatta) but all are pretty rare.

[Cammy]

Heya Will, welcome back to the Amiga community. You're right, the first thing you should do is see if the A1200 still works! If the hard drive is dead it shouldn't be too much of a problem, at least it's not too hard to get a copy of Workbench and all your old favourite software again, installed on a fresh new CF card instead of a clunky old HDD perhaps. Have a look for your A500 while you're at it, there's plenty of fun you can have with both old systems set up again.

I don't know much about music production though so I'll leave that to the other guys with more expertise in the field.

Good luck with everything, and I hope you get plenty of use and enjoyment again from your Amigas again!

[willbloke]

Right , well it's more a nostalgia trip really .
I have a Pro-tools 9 rig on a Mac Pro ( don't hurt me!) , for all my music noodleings .

I'm going up in the loft later and drag down the A1200 I put in a tower and see if it'll play ball.
It's got a MIDI interface in the case .
Now , I've found Bars and Pipes available on the net , but haven't found Music-X , I'm guessing it's still owned by someone.
I should , in theory , still have the install disc for Music-X , but I really don't know if it will still be readable .

The other thing is , I fancy having a crack at some of the old games , Carvup , SWIV , Lotus Turbo, Turrican  and 4 player Bomberman was the absolute mutts nuts !

Since posting my intro I have been mooching around the web and found the "new" Commodore 64 !?

This has got me thinking .
I still have a CDTV somewhere , I could strip the guts and install a mini-itx mobo .
I'm sure this will be considered heresy , but the CD drive doesn't work so the CDTV isn't really much use as it is .

Hmmmmm  ...

[lunithy]

Hello