Having experimented for the last few weeks on this issue I can speak with some authority.

1) Spinning rust hard drives are hot and unreliable (as are Zip Drives...well they're not hot but I swear mine could have caught fire this week as that died)
2) SD2IDE cards don't work well for 2 devices on one data bus as they default to Master and like to hog the bus. Zeb's WHDLoad image seems to bypass this to some extent but your other device will have to be slave.
3) CF2IDE Solutions are FAR the superior solution. The media is more expensive but a 8GB Industrial Grade 'Extreme' (fake SanDisk brand) seems ok for £19 on Amazon! Get a good controller with a Slave/Master jumper and you are away. I found one with both a 44pin and 40pin socket! Awsome!

Hi all,

I've always been an Amiga user and big fan. I have a number of Amiga's and had the idea of connecting one of my A1200's to install the seemingly great Amiga Game Selector distribution on the real hardware.
But..first I need to make a few decisions about where to install it onto (CF/SD/Harddisk) and how to connect those to my A1200.

1) I was thinking about buying an internal CF2IDE adapter. I currently have a 2,5" harddisk connected there, but would swap that out.
However, AGS (AGA version) requires a 32Gb CF/SD card it says. So my first question is: how will I know if the adapter I have in mind (https://gotek.nl/shop-ide-2-cf-male/) will be compatible with a particular CF card, as they're normally used with cards up to 4Gb's I understood. And also the brand/type can also matter from what I read here and there.

2) Big CF cards turn out to be quite expensive. Are there any people having good experiences with IDE2SD adapters in an A1200, and if so: which types?

3) Does the kickstart version of the Amiga 1200 matter? I have both a Commodore version (3.0 I guess) as well as an Amiga International version (3.1).

4) I was also looking at an HD alternative. I could also watch out for a cheap 2nd hand 2,5" HD with a minimum capacity of 32Gb and preferably low rotation speeds to minimize noise. I assume that I can just as easily 'write' the AGS image to an HD as I can write it to a memory card with e.g. Win32DiskImager, right?

5) I was also looking at and IDE->PCMCIA adapter, so that I can easily switch cards if required without opening the Amiga. Any pros/cons in particular compared to the internal solutions?

Quite some questions, sorry.
It's not that I haven't tried doing my homework..but so far I haven't found answers to these questions.
Would be much appreciated if you guys could share any (partial) experiences/knowledge.

Best regards!

Since the last demo reused the graphics of the previous one (with improved quality and additional effects, thanks to the extra alpha channel), the latter didn't look that good anymore, so I decided to rework it to produce a more meaningful and interesting result. I just released it, so who wants to try in on their machine can get it from https://retream.itch.io/ptdq as usual.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eBPcg1ndXY

LAYERS

Common:
 * PTDQ system
 * RGBWa color model
 * 320x256 visible dots
 * interleaved bitplanes
 * horizontal and vertical scrolling

Background:
 * 336x272 dots
 * maximum 256 colors

Foreground:
 * 672x576 dots
 * maximum 81 non-transparent colors
 * 8-bit alpha per base color

NOTES

* Both the layers reside in CHIP RAM.
* The layers use 6 bitplanes in all.
* If the foreground had not used 100% transparent dots, its maximum number of colors would have been 256.
* The foreground mode is changed by writing a whole 24-bit palette to the COLORxx registers with the CPU during the vertical blanking. The required palettes are pre-calculated at startup.
* The Copper is idle most of time (but if the staggered lines are on, it performs a wait and a write for each visible rasterline). The Blitter is idle.
* The texture is 512x512 dots and gets scaled and rotated onto a triple-buffered 128x128 dots raster.
* The raster gets rendered onto the foreground while racing the beam by means of PTDQ_DoC2P_R() when, at the end of a frame, it is found to have changed (so, at most 50 times per second, even if the fps limit is off).

PERFORMANCE

On a stock Amiga 1200, the speed is about 17.5 fps.
On an Amiga 1200 equipped with a Blizzard 1230 IV mounting a 50 MHz 68030 and 60 ns FAST RAM, the speed varies between 80 and 94 fps.
The fps fluctuation depends on the fact that the fetching of the texture dots is more of less friendly to the CPU data cache according to the scale factor and the rotation angle.

Hi.  The Bvision (Like the A4000 CVision) is a RTG only card. I take it you are using either Cybergraphx or a newer Icomp P96 (Picasso96) to display your Workbench?
I’m guessing you have a RGB to VGA for native modes?

The way I do this these days is with a Scandoubler/Flickerfixer like a Icomp AGA which clips onto the Alice chip. Then I use something called a RATTE auto monitor switcher which uses a small Piece of software in Startup-Sequence called “SwitchControl”.
The RATTE uses a clip on over a CIA to monitor Native to RTG switching.

The RATTE can be bought over on Amibay. Software from here https://www.ikod.se/ratte-auto-switch/

      To see photos and a video link of the event, go to

http://blog.retro-link.com/2026/03/commodore-amiga-at-fresno-state-science.html

          Truly,
          Robert Bernardo
          Fresno Commodore User Group - http://www.dickestel.com/fcug.htm
          Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network - http://www.portcommodore.com/sccan
          April 25-26 Commodore Los Angeles Super Show 2026 - http://www.portcommodore.com/class