Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Marketplace => Topic started by: bendavis22 on January 01, 2007, 07:43:18 PM
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Being a "computer guy," people tend to give me old stuff they don't want anymore. One of those things is an Amiga 1200. I had a C64 back in the day and then next computer was an Amstrad PC and now I just use Windows and Unix based stuff. I never used an Amiga, so I'm not sure how to use this thing. I have turned it on and verified it does come to an OS, however, I don't know how to do anything in that OS. This Amiga was used as a home business computer for a friend of my parents. It has a lot of business software with it. I see titles like Pro Write, Brilliance, Opus, Quarterback Tools, Final Copy II, Deluxepaint IV AGA, and Professional Calc. I at least know there exists this enthusiast community who would hate for me to put this out at the curb, so if you pay for shipping and packaging of the monitor, it's yours. I am located in Danville, IL. I have some pics which I can post here if someone shows interest.
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If I lived anywhere near IL, I'd be on your doorstep this very moment.
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Yeah, I'm not much closer :-(
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Were they using it up until recently for their business? That's pretty cool.
(I can't get it, but you're in IL, there's loads of Amiga types in IL. At least, I know, Eric Schwartz (famous Amiga guy) lives up in the Champaign/Urbana aroundabouts.)
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show us pictures....
________
Interacial (http://www.fucktube.com/categories/25/interracial/videos/1)
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youve got PMAIL
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Sorry I haven't responded to anyone's posts or private messages. I expected I would get email notification from this forum for all of that, but apparently I don't have that feature turned on.
I've got 7 PMs with people wanting this! I had no idea a 20 year old computer could be this popular! What can you do with this thing that so many people would want it?!?! I thought it was going to be hard to get rid of this thing, but I guess not! With all this interest, I might have to start taking bids since I don't know who to choose.
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Well to be honest, to say that you're going to give it away for free and then retract the offer is a bit of a moral obligation issue.
Having said that, whoever private messaged/emailed you first should be the one who gets it.
If you wanted to find out if it had value or not why didn't you stick it on ebay with no reserve?
Also if anyone has got any donations for www.retrogameplay.com eg Commodore 64 books, magazines, Amiga stuff please contact admin@retrogameplay.com any donations would be greatly appreciated and would be all to happy to put on my web site that you have in fact donated to it.
Cheers
Retrogamer
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if you're going to give it away for free then do so.
PS. just give it away, its only worth $10.
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He should give it away to one of the following:
A: The first person.
or
B: The closest person.
or
C: The person who needs it the most.
(Which is of course, me :-D )
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bendavis22 wrote:
With all this interest, I might have to start taking bids since I don't know who to choose.
If there's a guy right close to you who pmailed you and can come pick it up, then they should probably get preference. Otherwise, the first person that pmailed you should get it. Don't go changing the rules.
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bendavis22 wrote:
Being a "computer guy," people tend to give me old stuff they don't want anymore. One of those things is an Amiga 1200. I had a C64 back in the day and then next computer was an Amstrad PC and now I just use Windows and Unix based stuff. I never used an Amiga, so I'm not sure how to use this thing. I have turned it on and verified it does come to an OS, however, I don't know how to do anything in that OS. This Amiga was used as a home business computer for a friend of my parents. It has a lot of business software with it. I see titles like Pro Write, Brilliance, Opus, Quarterback Tools, Final Copy II, Deluxepaint IV AGA, and Professional Calc. I at least know there exists this enthusiast community who would hate for me to put this out at the curb, so if you pay for shipping and packaging of the monitor, it's yours. I am located in Danville, IL. I have some pics which I can post here if someone shows interest.
I couldn't find a private email address listed
for you but I'm interested. I'm not far from Danville.
Bob Reising
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I'll need to get a box for the monitor and packing material, so that will be part of the cost of shipping as I said before.
The first person who responded and is willing to cover the shipping cost should get it, unless someone decides to offer a bid.
I find no moral problem taking offers for those who may want to pay a little for it. Imagine being in a crowd of people and offering an item for free. 10 people come up and really want it. One of the people REALLY wants it, so he offers a dollar amount to take it. Someone else also REALLY wants it, so they make another bid. If someone really wants it that wants to offer dollars for an item marked as free, then fine. Unless this it is some sort of charity event where someone who really needs the item should get it for free, I see no problem with it.
And in reality, I am going probably to make a couple of dollars because when I estimate shipping, I am going to be conservative and add a few dollars to make sure I cover my costs in case the shipping amount is a little higher than my guestimation. It probably won't amount to more than $5, but I doubt it will exactly cover the shipping costs.
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I don't know how I got this thing to bootup before, but I can't get anything to show up on the screen. I try to let it bootup via the hard drive by not putting any floppies in it. That does not work. I try several floppies marked as boot floppies that seem to load for a minute, but then stop. It stops at this state where it seems to look for a floppy disk in one of the drives (it has two external - I've tried with them and without them connected) every 2 seconds. If I put another one in one of the drives, it seems again to work on loading something, but nothing ever shows on screen and it goes back to checking the floppy drives every 2 seconds. I even tried the Commodore Install Disk Version 3.0 and it also does the same thing, seems to try to boot and then fails.
I have NO experience with Amigas. I am a systems engineer at a company with Windows systems and have experience with *nix, DOS, and my first computer was a Commodore 64, but zero Amiga experience.
Sorry to turn this into a support thread. :cry:
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It is your choice to give or sell it to whomever you want, don't pay any attention to anyone that says you now have an obligation to anyone because you started a thread about giving it away.
Amigas are often sold on eBay, so you could check recent prices from there.
You might want to keep it to learn something about a system that you are not familiar with, then decide to give away or sell if you have no further interest in this unique platform that has been able to garner such fanatic interest after over 20 years since its inception.
Good luck and I hope you take the time to learn more about OUR favorite computer system. :-)
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bendavis22 wrote:
I don't know how I got this thing to bootup before, but I can't get anything to show up on the screen. I try to let it bootup via the hard drive by not putting any floppies in it. That does not work. I try several floppies marked as boot floppies that seem to load for a minute, but then stop. It stops at this state where it seems to look for a floppy disk in one of the drives (it has two external - I've tried with them and without them connected) every 2 seconds. If I put another one in one of the drives, it seems again to work on loading something, but nothing ever shows on screen and it goes back to checking the floppy drives every 2 seconds. I even tried the Commodore Install Disk Version 3.0 and it also does the same thing, seems to try to boot and then fails.
I think it is likely that there is some kind of a problem with the monitor. You can verify that the Amiga works by holding down the two mouse buttons while turing on the Amiga, which should display the Early Startup Menu. While the ESM is displayed, there won't be any disk activity, as the system will not continue autobooting.
Fiddle with the monitor until you get it to work. If it is a Commodore 108x it probably has a few switches on front and back that toggle between RGB/Composite and Analogue/Digital modes. Make sure that you haven't accidentally switched them to a different position. What you need is Analogue/RGB mode, otherwise you get a black screen.
Do not hotplug the monitor as that could fry a couple of on-board resistors connected to the AGA chipset which will prevent the RGB output from working.
If everything else fails, you can try connecting a TV through the composite port and see if you get a picture that way.
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If your monitor is a genuine Commodore monitor, I remember that there were problems with some of them losing their picture after a while of use. If your A1200 is an NTSC model then you should be able to hook it up to a television the same way that you may have done with your C64 years ago. Alternatively, you could use the composite connectors to hook it up like a VCR. If you don't have stereo sound just hook it up to one of the sound jacks and the computer will auto sense mono audio for you.
Also, try holding down both mouse buttons when you start it. If the screenmode is incompatible with PAL or NTSC then holding down both mouse buttons will let you get to the early-startup menu. If it has a flickery screen it may be in PAL mode. If so press space to get it into NTSC mode.
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Thanks for the info. This is a Magnavox RGB Display 80. I didn't take the opportunity to look down far enough under the front panel to find this button. It was on the wrong mode. However, I still cannot get it to work. If I switch it from CVBS to RGB, for a couple of seconds I can make out some screen while the monitor is failing at syncing with the vertical hold. I had played with the horizontal and veritcal controls on the back to no avail. I will try a TV.
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I forgot to mention that the mouse almost always plugs into mouse port 0. Port 1 is for the joystick.
It sounds to me like it's booting to an incompatible video mode. Doing the early-startup screen from the TV-set may be enlightening.
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I felt really dirty doing this, but it plugged into my 32" widescreen LCD HDTV and voila - it works! Looks like the monitor may be toast or there is a monkey trying to operate it.
I forgot to mention I have the original box and styrofoam for the unit. Even the pink plastic the unit was covered with inside the box.
Thanks for the advice!
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Great to hear that it works. I still have my A1200HD/40 and will be using it for my undergraduate research project on coroutines at the Minnesota State University: Mankato. :-D I'm glad we can keep another one working. Are you still planning on posting those pictures?
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This is just wrong :-D
(http://bendavis22.home.insightbb.com/amigaonhdtv.JPG)
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It's beautiful! :-D
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Pictures I just took are here:
http://bendavis22.home.insightbb.com/100_1949.JPG (http://bendavis22.home.insightbb.com/100_1949.JPG)
To see the others, just increment the picture number in the URL. The pics end at 1962.
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In this picture (http://bendavis22.home.insightbb.com/100_1954.JPG) it looks like it's got an external high-density 1.76 megabyte floppy drive under the other one! Those are a gem to find, to be certain considering how difficult it is to find medium density 880k (720k PC formatted) floppies nowadays.
-edit- This one (http://bendavis22.home.insightbb.com/100_1955.JPG) is a bit clearer.
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It is weird that it is showing up the boot screen considering there is a hard drive installed. Either the HDD does not work or there might be some other problem with it... I notice the HDD LED is always lit.
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It might have taken too long to spin up since it doesn't have Kickstart 3.1 and the delay time on Kickstart 3.0 isn't as long. It's possible that the hard drive may have crapped out on it, though, since it doesn't show up on the picture with the install screen on it. (The last picture.)
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Dang, I joined this forum a little too late. =(
Not that I live close or anything, but for a 1200 i'd would of hitchhiked to get it. =)
Selling my 1200 years ago was one of a bunch of stupid things I did back then.
Well, I hope whomever ends up with it treats it with the respect it deserves.
=)
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Yes, the other drive does say 1.76MB on it. It will boot to that drive (as well as all the drives) so it does work. Not sure how to verify the functioning of the hard drive though.
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Amiga is sold! Thanks to everyone for their advice on testing it!