Where can I get a tower to tower an A1200?

[x56h34]

Blakespot,

Do you particulary require a Winner/E-box 1200 tower? Have you considered a Mirrage 1200? It's the evolution of the Winner line, basically. You can get them from Vesalia, LiveWireSystems (Canada). Mr. Hardware never responds (or rarely) to e-mails. If you call him there shouldn't be any trouble.

[x56h34]

It's this one:



Well, I kind of liked the Winner design better too, however this one is more spacey for sure. Not too bad looking too.

[x56h34]

Vesalia are bad with e-mail responses, however if you actually place an order they will follow it through. The shipping charges from Germany are usually in the 30-60 EUR range, so keep that in mind. Good if you order a lot of stuff at once, however international shipping makes it bad if you wanna buy a few items only.

Why not get a used A1200 and install the motherboard in your tower? Or look on Ebay for an A1200 motherboard in working condition. Even those "newish" A1200 from Escom were actually made from Commodore leftower motherboard stock. I doubt they actually produced any from scratch.

[x56h34]

Vesalia accepts PayPal now. :-)

Those NEW motherboards are actually new old stock, which means never used from the time they were made but still old in a sense that they have been sitting in that state for years. They are certainly not freshly manufactured goods.

A1200 motherboards that came under the Escom name do not have different motherboards that require PC floppy drives, but the drives themselves were PC drives (here comes the magic word) that were CONVERTED to work in Amiga DD mode. That's all there is to it. That's why some games didn't like them, only due to the floppy drive kind. If you were to swap it with a Chinon or Panasonic make which Commodore originally used, the problems would be gone.

Escom A1200s also often (if not always) came with revision 1D1 motherboards, which are the best as they include timing fixes.

[x56h34]

A1200 motherboards suffer from a reset problem with the PCMCIA slot. I'm not sure exactly when this occurs, but I think that it does when you use a PCMCIA card (like an ethernet card for example) and as soon as you reboot the system it won't be detectable anymore unless a hardware fix is applied. There is also a software solution which works with your Blizzard card. ;-) It could be the other way around. PCMCIA cards only available at first boot and after you reset, not anymore. Anyway, not a big deal if you don't plan to use it and I suspect you won't as you plan to use a Mediator as you've mentioned earlier, which gives you an option of cheap PCI Ethernet card.

It is absolutely unknown of which board revisions/make these Vesalia A1200 motherboards are. I suspect 1D1 as SoftwareHut sell these and I know that they stock up through Vesalia, so there is a high probability.

Vesalia will take PayPal payments in Euros. If you order and get a paypal invoice that means that they have your order in stock. They will surely elaborate on what is available and what is not if a particular item of your order is missing. Basically if you place an order they will likely respond to your order related e-mails from that point. You will know that your items are available by getting a PayPal invoice. It's very bad customer treatment but those are the breaks nowadays with Amiga dealers. We simply have to take that s*it from time to time as we are limited with options. :-(

As for the floppy, I suggest a high density drive for A1200T or A4000 (they are the same product). SoftHut has them and possibly Vesalia too.