My Amiga A1200 Project

[Hyperspeed]

In the late nineties it became popular to rip out the innards of the A1200 desktop and put them into a tower.

It is possible to put a PowerPC and BVision GFX card into a desktop along with hard disk, USB etc. I think the classic case should be appreciated more and good ideas used to miniaturise everything you need into the small wedge case!

Please post pics when your project is complete.

:-)

[Hyperspeed]

Don't forget one of these -->

[Hyperspeed]

Yes, the CDTV keyboard is a lovely black with white lettering. The only difference is that the blank keys (to the left of Enter and to the right of Left-Shift) are now merged to make a bigger Enter and Shift. No great loss unless someone had somehow mapped these spare keys for Euro symbols or something.

I don't know whether the CDTV keyboard can be directly replaced i.e. if it has a ribbon like on the A1200 motherboard but popping the keys off is a good excuse to have a spring clean anyway.




On a black A1200 though I think the H.Disk should be a cool solid state flash drive in the 2.5" cradle and be accompanied by a glowing blue LED!

Maybe the embossed AMIGA logo could be silver?

A black Wizard 560-dpi mouse or a PC mouse on a Cocolino would round things off nicely.

:-D

[Hyperspeed]

Try searching eBay.co.uk if you're in the UK.

I would go for an accelerator over a plain RAM board. A good starter board is the Blizzard 1230-IV but for all round multimedia capability I'd go for the Blizzard 1260.

[Hyperspeed]

If you take MIPS as an indicator:

1) A1200:1.33 MIPS
2) A1200 + Blizzard 1230-IV/FPU: 9.91 MIPS
3) A1200 + Blizzard 1240/T: 19 MIPS
4) A1200 + Blizzard 1260: 38.72 MIPS

1) ·
2) ··········
3) ···················
4) ·······································

These are figures I seem to remember from an old Gordon Harwood advert for the boards (possibly an AIBB test).


Many people will moan that MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second) is a pointless exercise but it does give an indicator when the same test and benchmark tool is used on the same systems (a fair experiment). However there are other ways to determine the effiency of a system and extra Fast Mem alone can double the speed of a stock A1200.

Here are SysInfo MIPS readings for:

a) DKB Cobra '030/FPU - 13.05 MIPS
b) Apollo 040/40 - 28.84 MIPS
c) Blizzard 1260/50 - 65.16 MIPS

As you can probably work out now each succesive CPU is approximately double the speed of the previous when used with a 40 to 50Mhz oscillator.

An '030 board is probably the biggest upgrade jump an A1200 owner will notice as a 14Mhz 68EC020 to a full 50Mhz 68030 is a huge 7x increase in speed when used with memory and FPU. Workbench, games and apps don't at first appear to be faster when you install an '040 or '060 board. You'll only notice these boards kicking in when you play MP3, MPG, surf the web or anything that needs horsepower.

A graphics card would have made the ideal companion upgrade for '030 accelerators but they weren't made for non big-box Amigas at the time.

[Hyperspeed]

Did it have an FPU? £77 GBP isn't too bad but these cards get a lot of attention on eBay!

:-)