Woohoo, my "new" accelerator arrived finally :)

[fishy_fiz]

Sure, this probably doesnt really warrant starting a thread about, but Im a happy man right now and wanted to share my excitement with other amiga people  
As some regulars here may be aware Ive been awaiting the arrival of a "new" apollo 1240 '040 accelerator for a few weeks now. Well today the parcel finally arrived  
Not only am I happy to get it, but I also discovered it's a 40mhz version, as opposed to the 28mhz version I expected it to be   Mach131 chip as well, so I'll do the '060 upgrade sometimes soonish (after I find a few other bits and pieces I want).
I didnt even have a working a1200 at the start of the year, and then was using a stock a1200 for a month or so, so Im more than a little happy to now have the '040 card  
Looking forward to setting up some software now (my current setup is very minimal, awaiting the arrival of the accelerator), and playing some of the old classic amiga games I didnt play much back in the day, as well as making a nice Workbench setup, not to mention all the other benefits an accelerator and extra ram offers vs. a stock a1200  

Expect excessive classic amiga talk from me for a while now, at least until the novelty wears off  

[fishy_fiz]

Thanks people  
Having a few problems transferring files at the moment (long story, but essentially Im restricted to using 720KB pc floppies at the moment to transfer stuff), so for now Ive just tried a few things I had installed or on floppies. I gave Frontier a try and it runs very nicely, massive improvement over a stock a1200  

Oh well, time to get serious and start the tedious job of reinstalling the system and all the extras bits and pieces, etc. Once that's out of the way I'm gonna start having fun checking out some amiga fps and other games that will take advantage of a faster amiga  

[fishy_fiz]

Yeah, unfortunately it's only 32 or 64. 32 by default, but its possible to add a second simm slot allowing for another 32.

[fishy_fiz]

...and of course, the biggest thrill of all: it actually *worked* when you plugged in!  Always a bit of a nervous game when paying a lot of money for used stuff.

Heh, true.
The whole thing had me a bit nervous really. After a week of absolutely no response by the seller, besides a few regarding his near insistance that I pay via direct bank deposit (to a point where he gave me a few different bank account details), and him not responding to mails afterwards I was getting a bit nervous. After nearly 2 weeks he responded basically saying that he'll do it when he gets around to it, and that he doesnt do things the normal ebay way I was bracing myself to the fact I may have been ripped off. Even now the item is still marked as me needing to pay for it  

Finally when it arrived I discovered that I'd paid $20 postage for $5.80 worth of postage, which irked me a little, but I was just happy that it arrived. I must admit though, the item itself is in very good condition. That said though I was nervous as all heck the 1st time I flicked the power switch  

[fishy_fiz]

Well really I got nothing extra out of him. I'd only assumed it was going to be a 28mhz version, I didnt know for sure. The item I received is what I bid on. Just turns out that the item I bid on was better than I thought  
Really though, Im just happy to have gotten it at all  
Unfortunately my 1st day with my new toy hasnt gone exactly to plan. Turns out my internal floppy drive is partially dead (can only read, not write/delete), and my external drive is now completely cactus too. I have no way to transfer files to my amiga apart from using 720KB pc floppies, and no way to write disk images to disks.
Went through the tedious/labourous task of firstly archiving some software in a big file, then making that file a 10 part archive in 703KB chunks. Had to build a pc out of spare parts to get a pc with a floppy drive, made a boot iso, copied the 10 part archive to cd, copied one part to a floppy, transfered to the amiga, copied another part, transfered to the amiga (for all 10 parts).
Once that was done I rejoined all parts to one big archive then extracted it. Then I used unadf to extract the contents of the adf images, then made assigns so the extracted images paths matched what they expect, then ran the installers of the software.
This all lead to absolutely nothing as none of the software I did this for works. The theory is fine, but for whatever reason I had no luck with the software I tried. I get as far as the intro for AlienBreed3d2, but then it quits to Workbench. Alienbreed3d just crashes the system.

So for all my effort today I ended up being able to play a little Frontier and nothing else  

Little disappointed, but it's not like my amiga is going anywhere, there's always tomorrow  

[fishy_fiz]

Odd thing is until last summer when I discovered the net and these forums I assumed no-one would be using floppies in this day and age.

For at least the past 10 years now I only use HDs/ CDs /DVDs and SDCards/Memorysticks on my Amigas (took over 4000 floppies to the dump about 6 years ago)...

But from reading folks posts here there still seems to be a lot of people still using floppies, I could never go back to them, the best solution to me to transfer stuff between a PC and an Amiga or even for just storage is either CDs/ DVDs or a USB card reader for SD cards or memory sticks...

After a CPU/RAM upgrade the best investment you can make is one of the above and wave goodbye to floppy disks forever...

Sure, Im far from happy about my need to use floppies and Id not used them in about 10 years or so myself, but the simple fact is its my only option right now. I happened to have about 500 amiga discs still in storage when I got my a1200 recently. I actually had to put together an old pc to even access a floppy drive to help with transferring data. My Amiga is still a w.i.p, Amiga paid for about a month ago, accelerator a few weeks ago, various bits and pieces next. My last Amiga had a pci busboard (ergo pci networking, pci scsi card + scsi hdd and dvd drive) so unfortunately I cant use them anymore (my grex1200 is dead).

It's a freaking pain in the butt to use at the moment, so unless I find a better (cheap) way to transfer data I'll just leave it alone until I have the money for a few expansions to make it usable or I'll end up either breaking it or selling it.