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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: KatManDEW on January 26, 2009, 03:31:20 AM
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I want to start building a good A1200 system. Would it be OK to get a used A1200 if I can find one cheap, and build it up from there?
I want a tower case of course, but what are the other "gotta have" add-on's?
MEDIATOR 1200TX PCI BUSBOARD & MMCD ?
What graphics card?
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Mediator + Voodoo 3 3000 + Ethernet card
68060 card with 32MB or more of ram.
Flickerfixer
Giant hard drive
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A1200
Blizzard 1230 MK IV (32mb RAM minimum) @ 50mhz
IDE CD/DVD drive
EIDE'99 Buffered Interface
External floppy drive
4GB HD or CF card
Tower case
Indivision AGA 1200
LCD Monitor
And thats it ... Nothing fancy :-)
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Thanks for the feedback. I'm retro-drooling :-D
Why the two video options - Indivision AGA 1200 and Voodoo 3?
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you need indivision for native video applications (demos, games) voodoo3 for workbench/RTG friendly applications.
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You said you wanted the ULITIMATE A1200.
All ultimate A1200 owners have a gfx card for gfx card games such as Quake. And they have a flickerfixer (Indivision) for AGA games.
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This is mine
A1200T
Blizzard 603+ PPC 175mhz.
68060 50mhz 256mb RAM.
16GB SCSI CF.
20GB IDE HDD.
IDE CDRW.
OS3.9 BB1+2.
Mediator.
Voodoo 3 P96.
PCI Ethernet.
SB128.
TV Card.
Indivision 1200 AGA SD/FF
Playing Quake (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao7haFa2iQk)
Emulating Mac (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=e_ElgKvKFuY)
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depends what you want to do.
you can try to max it out with PCI slots and the like, but if you want retro gaming nailed, then as previously suggested, forget bulky towering and trying to compete with PC's and just go for what its good at.
.base A1200
.030 accelerator with a decent amount of ram (16Mb plus) that doesn't block the pcmcia port
.pcmcia ethernet or compactflash card adapter to transfer data
.compactflash+ide adapter as hard disk
.registered WHDLoad package and games
.3.1roms? meh. either or on this one
for extra you may consider each of the following...
.indivision scan doubler for vga output of all amiga screen modes to flatscreen TV or monitor
.040/060/PPC accelerator
.PC tower rehousing
.mediator to botch PCI onto the A1200 for GFX/sound/ethernet/TV/USB card
.pc keyboard adapter
.ide port accelerator
.ide dvd/cdrw
.clock port USB
depends what you want to do. after faffing about with PPC accelerators, and graphics cards etc, and got a blown ide fix-express and nano-itx psu. i just want a machine that works, and plays games. to be honest, my A500 has been getting switched on more than most recently. :-)
i think the main thing, is, how deep is your love/wallet? :-D
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>>KatManDEW
Maybe this one?
http://www.loriano.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
and then click on modified Amiga 1200.
This was my ultimate A1200 machine.
Blizzard PPC 266MHz with 68060 60MHz
256 MB Fast Ram + 2MB Chip Ram
Mediator 4 PCI expansion card
Soundblaster
Ethernet 10/100
Voodoo 5 64Mb
Voodoo 3
BVision
SCSI connector
80Gb 7200 rpm IDE hard drive
CD-RW hooked to a FAST ATA adapter
Scandoubler with Flicker Fixer
TV Card (not in picture)
DVD-RW (not in picture)
OS3.9
Lots of fans controlled by front switches.
Mirror black 450w ATX PSU with cool blue led.
I miss that machine :-)
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My old baby:
http://www.amiga.org/gallery/photo.php?lid=995&cid=10
sold this on ebay to some guy in oz IIRC, he paid the £80 postage!
Not massive specs:
16mb
25MHz 040
internal CD drive
internal 1.3GB HD
internal flicker fixer/scandoubler
internal midi interface
But:
Wedged in an A500 case :-)
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ultimate A1200 has a 060 BPPC and a G-Rex1200 :-D
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ok, let's see:
A good sturdy tower, hand-crafted to fit the A1200 and its gadgets
A1200 mobbo with all the required fixes
custom-burned 3.1 kickstart roms to include as many fixes and speedups possible
BPPC 060@80 , 603e@300 (not overclocked, replaced cpu) , scsi , 256MB 50 ns RAM
BVision PPC
Mediator TX with Voodoo 3 3000 16mb, TV tuner, Fast Ethernet, Radeon 9200 128mb, Spider USB, Soundblaster 5.1
Quaddraport with Subway USB, Delfina lite, fast parallel and fast serial port
Indivision AGA
Fastata MK 3
Lyra keyboard adapter
MAS MP3 player
A Wacom penpartner gfx tablet
Coccolino mouse adapter
Wifi PCMCIA card
2 playstation to amiga adapters
mouse/joystick switch
a good digital monitor switch for voodoo/radeon/bvision/aga
A good 300W ATX PSU
A couple of fans blowing in and out of the tower to prevent everything from melting down :)
ps
It's not that I have all these (in fact, many of these I do), but I wish I had!
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the real trick, is fitting everything you want in a standard A1200 case ;-)
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Wow! lots of great info. Looks like there's lots of interest in the A12000.
Where might someone obtain some of them there custom-burned 3.1 kickstart roms?
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@KatManDEW
To me there are two routes, you either stay with AGA and use a flickerfixer (or TV of course) and are still available to play games and programs tied to the chipset... the other route (which I want to go when I have enough £) is to get a tower, mediator, graphics card etc... atm I have a blizzard 060 w/ 64mb ram, a wifi card etc, I need to get a tower and mediator one day.
It all depends on what you want to do of course, if you're interested in games it's probably best to get a flickerfixer like the indivision. To me i'm more interested in using my Amiga as a "real" computer so i'm more interested in getting a tower, mediator, sound card, usb, ps2 etc
Although some would say thats stupid and i'd be best of using WinUAE... ;-) but real is allways better IMHO.
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ultimate! You need to start form scratch and solder it all by hand! Use no chips, design them form scratch!
Just kidding, go to amikit and order a 1200 then add and accelerator with a ppc and install os4 or something like that.
I don't care form the Frankenstein a1200 towers, if you want a tower get a 3000 t or 4000 t.
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My A1200 is the ultimate A1200.
(http://jungle.net/tone/a1200b.jpg)
With its big CF hard drive, Blizzard 1260, and Indivision, it is unstoppable and stylish!
...oh, and the keyboard is no longer German. I should take a new picture.
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WICKED!
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@KatManDEW
You should maybe think twice about towering you 1200. For me, building a tower out of my A1200 was not as cool as it sounds. It was very expensive for all the components (BPPC, mediator, BVision, etc) and I soon realized that a Nextgen Amiga (Peg or SAM, etc) could do the same job much much better. So I now have my standard 1260 as well as a Peg2/Morph OS and it feels right! :-)
My worthless opinion is that the maximum expansion a A1200 should see is a 060 accelerator. But I know many will disagree :-)
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Ultimate use of an A1200 is for AGA demos. :) 80MHz Apollo 1260, IDE-Fix Express, Indivision, and Prelude 1200 here. Definitely my favorite Amiga by far.
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-D- wrote:
Ultimate use of an A1200 is for AGA demos. :) 80MHz Apollo 1260, IDE-Fix Express, Indivision, and Prelude 1200 here. Definitely my favorite Amiga by far.
I would really love to add a Prelude to my Amiga, I think that would make 100% for me. Do you know if anywhere's selling the Prelude still?
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Definitely a 1200 in original case with a 1260 and Indivision inside.
Wireless for t'internet and PCMCIA CF adapter for quick file swaps.
4Gb CF Card on IDE adapter for silent computing.
All powered by an original 500 Brick.
Classic zero footprint, AGA & Demo playing beauty. :-D
Quite simply the best for me.
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The A1200 in my signature ;-)
PCMCIA-CF for file transfer OR PCMCIA netcard, maybe wireless.
It's up to you, but start with a standard A1200, and take it from there, it is the most fun :-)
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DBAlex wrote:
@KatManDEW
To me there are two routes, you either stay with AGA and use a flickerfixer (or TV of course) and are still available to play games and programs tied to the chipset... the other route (which I want to go when I have enough £) is to get a tower, mediator, graphics card etc... atm I have a blizzard 060 w/ 64mb ram, a wifi card etc, I need to get a tower and mediator one day.
It all depends on what you want to do of course, if you're interested in games it's probably best to get a flickerfixer like the indivision. To me i'm more interested in using my Amiga as a "real" computer so i'm more interested in getting a tower, mediator, sound card, usb, ps2 etc
Although some would say thats stupid and i'd be best of using WinUAE... ;-) but real is allways better IMHO.
So we can't have our cake and eat it too? If we use a Mediator and a Voodoo card, we can't Indivision and play AGA games?
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amiga4ever wrote:
@KatManDEW
You should maybe think twice about towering you 1200. For me, building a tower out of my A1200 was not as cool as it sounds. It was very expensive for all the components (BPPC, mediator, BVision, etc) and I soon realized that a Nextgen Amiga (Peg or SAM, etc) could do the same job much much better. So I now have my standard 1260 as well as a Peg2/Morph OS and it feels right! :-)
My worthless opinion is that the maximum expansion a A1200 should see is a 060 accelerator. But I know many will disagree :-)
What's Peg2 and Morph OS?
My tupid :-D
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Some crap that tries to be like Amiga.
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Standard case:
Indy + 030 or 060 (if you have the cash) with a CF HD and you've got yourself a very nice classic Amiga which can play loads of WHDLOAD games.
Once you start going the tower route you might as well buy a SAM and run OS 4.1 (IMHO).
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I just snagged an A1200 on EBay with 10 gig HDD, 1 - CF Card of 32MB (Kodak Picture Card) + PCMCIA Card adapter
1 - IBM Microdrive of 1GB + PCMCIA Card Adapter.
That should hopefully make a good starter system.
Whoo hoo!
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@ Kat
How many Amiga configurations do you own now?
I tend to agree with others here. If you already have a tricked out A2000 with native (ECS) and retargetable graphics, adding an AGA machine with an Indivision would cover all the classic bases. I think it's expensive to move a 1200 up to RTG. Some solutions look better before you invest in the reality.
The only thing left after that is OS4.x on new hardware.
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Tenacious wrote:
@ Kat
How many Amiga configurations do you own now?
I tend to agree with others here. If you already have a tricked out A2000 with native (ECS) and retargetable graphics, adding an AGA machine with an Indivision would cover all the classic bases. I think it's expensive to move a 1200 up to RTG. Some solutions look better before you invest in the reality.
The only thing left after that is OS4.x on new hardware.
That makes sense. I currently have a A1000, a A2000 with GVP 040, and the A1200 that I just got on EBay.
But I'm kind of s sentimental old SOB, so I might digress further in the future, with another A1200 in a tower. And I may investigate an A3000 and/or A4000 in the future. I never kept up with Miggy stuff in the later days, and I can't remember the skinny on the 1200 vs 3000 vs 4000?
I have every Timex/Sinclair ever made, from the ZX80 through the QL, including a TS1500. I'm actually not a real big game buff, but there was a game I played on my TS2068 that I really liked, and I would like to find something similar to it for the Amiga. I'll have to dig out my TS2068 and see what that game was. My TS2068 is of course tricked out about as much as the TS1000 in my stage lighting controller :-D
(http://www.katmandew.com/images/Misc/TS2068.jpg)
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What's Peg2 and Morph OS?
Pegasos 2 is the ultimate machine and MorphOS is the smoothest and faster operating system you will notice around, that is my opinion and now lets see some standard points: Pegasos 2 CPU is based on PPC technology, there are G3 and G4 models up to 1Ghz with memory able to be expanded up to 1 giga. It is faster than Sam 440. You can add standard PC hardware to a Pegasos and there are certain series of graphic, TV and sound cards supported.
MorphOS has its root on AmigaOS. It can run natively, smoothly and fast almost every 68k Amiga software –so you do not have to drop your old Amiga 2000 stuff away-, but unfortunately it can not run games in native mode as they make use of the Amiga chipset which is not supported by Pegasos2. But the issue of games is solved as well as there is an UAE emulator available for MorphOS that allows you to run the entire of Amiga software. If you re a fun of gaming there is also a Multiple arcades Machine Emulator –MAME- available for MorphOS, letting you play all your favorite old coin ops.
MorphOS rules.
Click here to see a pic of my desktop in order to take an idea:
http://i254.photobucket.com/albums/hh109/CountRaven80/Grabjpg.jpg
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This is THE Ultimate Amiga :-o :-o :-o
http://www.a1k.org/forum/showthread.php?t=14516
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:-o !!!!!!!!! :-o
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CountRaven wrote:
What's Peg2 and Morph OS?
Pegasos 2 is the ultimate machine and MorphOS is the smoothest and faster operating system you will notice around, that is my opinion and now lets see some standard points: Pegasos 2 CPU is based on PPC technology, there are G3 and G4 models up to 1Ghz with memory able to be expanded up to 1 giga. It is faster than Sam 440. You can add standard PC hardware to a Pegasos and there are certain series of graphic, TV and sound cards supported.
MorphOS has its root on AmigaOS. It can run natively, smoothly and fast almost every 68k Amiga software –so you do not have to drop your old Amiga 2000 stuff away-, but unfortunately it can not run games in native mode as they make use of the Amiga chipset which is not supported by Pegasos2. But the issue of games is solved as well as there is an UAE emulator available for MorphOS that allows you to run the entire of Amiga software. If you re a fun of gaming there is also a Multiple arcades Machine Emulator –MAME- available for MorphOS, letting you play all your favorite old coin ops.
MorphOS rules.
Click here to see a pic of my desktop in order to take an idea:
http://i254.photobucket.com/albums/hh109/CountRaven80/Grabjpg.jpg
That's a sweet looking desktop!
An Amiga emulator for the Amiga? I've heard it all now :-D
I'll have to look into MorphOS.
My EBay A1200 shipped today! The stuff I ordered for my A2000 did not :boohoo: I'm having a flashback of how long it took to receive Amiga hardware that I have ordered :boohoo: