Hi guys,
Amiga was my first love back in the day. I started with an Amiga 1000 and then upgraded to a 1200. When commodore went bankrupt I felt like the blocky megabyte eating dinosaur PC's won.
Im really glad the Amiga community is still alive in 2019. Cheers to everyone. You guys are champs.
I recently bought a no frills 1200 with a mere 2 megs ram and no hard drive. My goal is to pimp it out over a long period of time. The problem is.....I have no idea what I'm doing. My only experience of the Amiga was when I was young and I feel like I have a lot.of learning to do. Thats why I have joined this site. Hopefully I can get the advice I need to help me on my journey.
So if anyone has any hints and tips feel free to let me know!
They couldn't eat more than 640K without extra help.
I'd approach this differently. I'd say you'd be best off starting from the bottom up in a gradual learning process. Obtain an old used 2.5" 40 PIN IDE hard drive and a short 2.5" hard drive cable...erm I think they're about 2" long to reach the drive in the caddy. You'll need some screws to secure the drive. The older hard drives (I think around 2 gig and under) have the screw holes in the correct place to match the caddy, larger drives (as in newer) have their holes in completely the wrong place, in this case I'd use velcro to secure the drive to the caddy. I have a few old laptop drives hanging around so to me they are easily obtainable, and they're not expensive to buy second hand.
Other people will say buy a CF card instead of a 2.5" hard drive, as it's lighter, probably more reliable, and generates much less heat - but personally I prefer to keep things original if at all possible. Oh, you'll also need a IDE > CF card adapter if going down that route so that you can connect it to the IDE port. Anyway, get Workbench 3.0 or 3.1 fully installed on the hard drive and start learning about your new machine by installing software from floppy disks, and from aminet if you have a pc or similar with a floppy drive with internet connection. The best source of software for me was the CD-ROM. I had a Squirrel SCSI with a CD-ROM drive and some Amiga Format and CU Amiga discs and some others and had a brill time with them in the mid 90's. Each CD was like a gold mine back then. Also had fun ripping audio cd's with it. So I'd just buy a hard drive first and learn about all that.
2MB RAM isn't much and you will probably want more later down the line. An RTC (battery-backed clock) is nice, so you will want a RAM card with an RTC or some other accellerator with an RTC (they all have them). You can buy a seperate RTC which you can plug into the clockport on the motherboard or onto one of those ACA12xx series cards from Individual Computers. A simple RAM card fitted to the A1200 trapdoor gives you an instant doubling of speed which is nice, but an ACA12xx or similar will be even nicer, but not required for general 'Amiga computing'. I think the higher clocked 68020 cards are better value for money than the 68030 cards, but as always if you can afford better, why not buy better?
The Vampire is of course a ready made heavily pimped out A1200 in a card, but where's the fun in that?
