Amiga 1200 rebuild, what should I do to this machine? WHDLoad?

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

I would use either a fast '020 board (like Jens') or an '030, personally, and at least 4MB of fast ram. 3.1 ROM's fix a lot of bugs in the 3.0 ones and make working with ACA accelerators specifically a lot easier. And c'mon, they can be bought new for under $20 bucks.

Indivision will allow you to use almost any modern monitor, TV, or projector with your system. Of course some people don't care about these things.

WHDLoad makes running almost any old game like... Well, like it should have been in the first place. Double-click on the icon to start the game, then press the 'quit' key to return to Workbench when you're done. Personally I would never use anything else.

Also ditch the hard drive and get a CF. Kipper2k makes a 90-degree adapter that allows you to access the CF from outside the case.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

3 - No, upgrading to 3.1 is a waste of time and money for you WHDLoad machine. If down the line you find yourself wanting a more powerful Amiga, then you can upgrade your RAM card with a CPU card and softkick 3.1.

OMG. Every single time this subject comes up you chime in with your hatred for 3.1. Softkickicking wastes precious RAM, and 3.1 ROM's cost less than $20 bucks. They contain many bugfixes over 3.0 and are required if the user wants to update, e.g., to 3.9.

Why do you hate 3.1 so much? SMDH  :p

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

and you might find upgrading to kick 3.1 introduces a bug where over 4mb you cant use the pcmcia slot

That's not a bug, that's fixing a memory conflict in the address space.  :p

Most decent accelerators won't have that problem anyway, it's only the cheapo "8MB + FPU + Clock" type boards that fit their ram into the same address space that the PCMCIA slot uses.  Thanks, Commodore!  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

For that reason I thought about going with a CompactFlash that would be accessible from the outside, like this one:

Another option that I always liked:

http://www.kipper2k.com/cfadapters.html

Keeps your knockout port free and doesn't require a long cable.  Of course you have to trim the plastic above the PCMCIA slot a bit.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

...best feeling ever . I can't even explain it. When I switched to ROM 3.1 from ROM 3.0 my world completely changed... (snip)

Omg guys.  Funny, though.  

See this link:  http://wiki.classicamiga.com/Kickstart_Roms_Explained

Scroll down to the heading "Why upgrade from Kickstart 3.0 to Kickstart 3.1?"

and this link:  http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/wb_31.html

Read the review and the .lha-compressed text file list of changes linked to at the top.

Bug-fixes and new features, all in an easy-to-install pop-out ROM package, as well as compatibility with later versions of the OS like 3.9.  Well worth the princely sum of around $20 USD, at least for me.  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

It's about having to install this, which means messing around with the mobo for no good reason at all. Just leave it be.

If that was the case, why not just stay on 1.3?  Or 1.0, for that matter?  Heck, why even use computers at all when we could be banging rocks together for fun?  :laughing:

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Sounds like a good plan, especially the part about sending it to Acill for a recap.  

You might want to take a look at the BetterWB pack, as well.  It's what I would use if I was running a lower-spec/non-3.9 Amiga:  http://lilliput.amiga-projects.net/BetterWB.htm

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

It is quite nice "patch" for AOS3.1, but I don't see change in icons? I like MagicWB icon set .

I meant "in addition to MagicWB".    I'm pretty fond of them, as well, for lower spec systems.  Ah, nostalgia!  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Then I want to get WHDLoad working, which I've never done before.  If anyone has any specific pointers or walkthroughs they can point me to please do.

WHDLoad installation is pretty much self-explanatory.  Download WHDLoad_usr_small.lha from the official site and install it, then install some games that use it.  You'll get more into the "nuts & bolts" of the thing when you need to start configuring it for a specific screenmode, or to disable certain functions (if you have an MMU, or an '040 or '060 accelerator, for example), but a lot of stuff will work right out of the box.  And for stuff that doesn't is where you'll need to go in and muck around with the tooltypes and config file options.  There's a good guide on those here:

http://whdload.de/docs/en/opt.html

Have fun!