So little love for the 1200?
With the humble 1200, you get:
AGA (you can use various tricks to run old software on your 1200, but nothing will get an AGA title to run on an ECS machine)
2 megs chip RAM built in.
A wealth of reasonably priced upgrade options for processors and RAM today.
Hard drive interface already in the machine
PCMCIA interface, making for extremely easy file transfers and networking.
On top of that, back in the day, the 1200 was quite affordable, even on a budget. Sure, a 3000 or 4000 was great but you'd pay through the nose.
the 1200 is a cut down machine with a ton of bottlenecks,bad psu stock,silly clock port and unbuffered ide. you got what you paid for.It was intended to be a simple machine without much expansion.
I own many amiga's and love them all BUT..the 4000 is a better value from the get go because you got a 040,could expand to 16MB ram,150watt psu,room for a cdrom,and Zorro3(room for a gfx card etc),easily switched pal or ntsc defualt with a jumper. Its simply a matter of you get what you pay for. The 1200 even with a mediator has a tiny 8Mb window(bottleneck) compared to the 3000/4000 mediator which is 256/512 window.the pcmcia is handy however!. Even a fully expanded 1200 is about half the speed of a 4000 expanded and there is no real options for gfx cards other than the bvision which needed a ppc or a mediator(read : slow).The most max expanded 1200 is still slower than a max expanded 4000.By the time you expand a 1200 to 4000 specs you have spent a good deal of money and usually have a not so reliable machine with many dongles(because it doesn't have a proper expansion bus). It all comes down to what you intend to do with it of course.
Someone mentioned the buster on the 4000 was not finished,but this applied to the 3000 also,they use the same buster. Many 3000's came with buster 7 which meant no working zorro3. changing to buster 9 or 11 solved this.The 3000 was a great machine(other than slow ecs),zip ram,case and the old now tarnishing sockets. The 3000T and 4000T are really great machines. The only upgrade a 3000T could of used is a engine and wheels to move it :rofl:
