How much is an A1200 really worth?

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It has been a while since I last dug out my old Amiga 500 Plus, and now I am looking at A1200 systems again. I've been a bit cautious with this as these machines seem to go for upwards of 50 quid, especially if they have accelerators installed.

I suppose the question is, what can particular specs of A1200s do? If you have, say, something like this which I guess is at the top end of what you can get into the standard case, what are you going to be able to run on it?

Most likely I'll be happy with a basic A1200 for a spot of gaming and working with tracker files, and I can use an old 2.5" HD from a dead laptop with it.

I suppose another thing I'd like to know from those with experience is, how usable are the VGA modes? I've tried them on the A500 Plus and they are a bit of a joke to be honest. Can the A1200 do it much better? Can it do, say, 640x480 as fast as the A500 does 640x256?

I think some answers in some of these areas might help me decide whether I want to put 60 odd quid aside to purchase a 15-year old computer...

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If you don't want the hassle of playing games from floppydisks, you should consider adding a 68030 turboboard and install WHDLoad.

For A500 games I seem to be doing ok running WHDLoad on the A500. The Alfa interface has 4MB of fast RAM installed, which probably helps. I was glad to get a HD copy of Turrican 2 because since I physically destroyed my original floppy, I haven't been able to get it in a form to play from the Amiga itself. I don't know how other games will perform though.

Is this maybe more of an issue with some of the later AGA games?

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murple wrote:
After overpaying for an A1200 on ebay, my advice is to order one from AmigaKit.com for $150-200 depending on extras. Skip the power supply as you can use your 500's (and save a bit of money on the order). Also skip the hard drive, buy a 4gig on ebay for $5. Look on their site for "built to order refurbished" Amiga 1200s.

Yes, I noticed the banner ads. I have a 6 gig drive from a dead laptop which will do the trick for storage, so that's covered. The only other thing I'd be interested in is a wireless network card.