Noob Workbench setup

[gurthuk]

After a long hiatus and looking back at Amiga memories through rose tinted glasses I have decide to resurrect my machine(s). I have 2 Amiga's:

A500 Kickstart 1.3 + Action Replay MKIII
A1200 Kickstart 3.0 + Compact Flash IDE (4Gb) + Compact Flash PCMICA reader + 4Mb Fast Ram

I see all these flash Workbench screenshots with colourful icons and hires backgrounds and I'm wondering how I can have the same on my A1200. If I purchase a Kickstart 3.1 ROM will that help me get started?

[gurthuk]

ah worked it out, I need to start with ClassicWB.

[gurthuk]

Many thanks to you all. Lots for me to think about and investigate. AmigaSYS looks interesting although I'm not afraid to put the time in and roll my own... I quite like tinkering and my long term goal is to get ASM-One stood up so I can write code for the A500 1.3 - that's where my fondness for the Amiga come from. Might be a little different from the daily PHP + JavaScript I do at work!

[gurthuk]

Okay day 3... This has been a little more difficult to complete than I originally started but I'm getting there. After much messing around with my A1200 copying over ADF images and trying to create disks with (what I now know) a faulty drive I have switched to setting up the CF in UAE first.

I'm trying AmigaSYS for now as I see it comes with AmiPro Assembler already installed so I'll see how I go. After running AmigaSYS in an emulator with my A1200 specs I was a little disappointed with the speed but I'm not sure how much is the fact I'm running it on an old MacBook and have the CF hanging off USB - time will tell. BetterWB sounds like a plan B and a good starting place to tinker from.

Signed up for Amibay yesterday so I'll be introducing myself over there soon with the intention of putting my name down for a 8Mb / IDE card if one pops up.

Thank you all.

(found this video helpful for setting up the max transfer rate on the hard drive partitions)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd42RsKHm5Y