Small hello, and a question

[Marco]

Been lurking on Amiga.org for ages now, signed up a little while ago when I had a problem with figuring out HDtools on my A1200 and then never posted as I figured out the problem shortly after anyway.

I first used an Amiga back in, er, Christmas '87 it must have been, my brother got an A500 for Christmas/Birthday that year and we've still got it (currently yellow, but going brown) with the extra 512k of RAM, though the RF modulator is rusted through.

We recently became nostalgic for the "good ol' days" and got an A1200 off ebay, it's great and all but it's kinda useless for much more than Turrican II at the moment, though this is probably the first time I've used Workbench ever, 1.3 on the A500 was comically bad even then. As a result I know shockingly little about how stuff works on an Amiga.

I also wanted to ask a Windoze related question (ducks flaming arrow barrage). Ironically it's related to adding a partition to my disk. Unlike the Amiga, I can't seem to figure out how to 'shrink' the space taken up by my main partition so that I can add a new one.

C drive currently takes up the whole 150Gb and the disk manager P.O.S. only allows you to add a partition on un-allocated space, but with all the space allocated to C: and no way to reduce it I can't make any partitions.

I know that'll sound like a stupid question to the more tech-savvy out there but can anyone help me free up the excess space on my HD? I just want to make a partition of about 70Gb to shunt all my files over to (to safeguard them incase Windows goes t*ts-up at some point), and then carve out a small chunk of space to try and put some distro of Linux on (probably a risky idea to try using Linux given that I can't even partition the damned drive :roll:).

P.S. Nice to see so many people using Amiga in these bleak modern times :-)

[Marco]

Thanks for the welcome blobrana - about assimilation- do I get a cool red rangin-laser like Picard got on Star Trek? ;-)

I don't have PartitionMagic, I downloaded a trial of the last version, but it wouldn't let me do anything, I could make any changes I want, but when I tried to apply them it just said buy the program. I checked Norton's site - it costs as near as makes no difference $70, is there perchance a non-capitalist-pig alternative? I.e. a free program that does the same job?

InTheSand - completely stock, it came with a 163Mb Harddisk, I've got it in 2 partitions, 20Mb for the system stuff and the other 143Mb for anything I can find to install, which at the moment amounts to FinalWriter 8 (came with some update disks), and DeluxePaint IV AGA.

It's got no expansion (i.e. a puny 68EC020@14MHz and no fast mem) and the 3.0 ROMs, I'm gonna get the 3.1 ROMs from Amigakit, but they make you pay through the nose to get the Workbench disks that go with them. The guy who sold us the 1200 sent 3.1 install disks amongst other stuff, but they're copies so I dunno if they're genuine or not. 'Spose I'll find out when I get the ROMs and try and install 3.1

[Marco]

Thanks Tomas, I was kinda joking about the Turrican thing, obviously a lot of games don't work because they banged the OCS chips which are not there on the 1200, but, what few games I liked that I managed to salvage from the cardboard boxes in the loft seem to work fine, (we moved house a few years ago and I suspect many disks didn't make the journey with us) Lotus I-III, Turrican II, Civilisation, The Killing Game Show works with relokick, there's a few others too.

Re: upgrading I'm definetly thinking of getting the 3.1, ROMs a bigger HD and an accelerator from Amigakit. I understand though that there are some heat issues with accelerators and the 1200 case. I don't want everything melting on me. I've read the 040 has chronic overheating problems so I'll be avoiding that one, the 030 doesn't seem like enough of an upgrade to what I've got to be honest. And the 060 boards are comically expensive - I think Amigakit sell them for over £200! :cry:

My brother also bought an A1200 in a tower that had the BPPC card in it, he did something that means it won't boot anymore - I suspect it's something to do with the harddisk since he was trying to reinstall workbench when it all went horribly wrong. I think the card is an 060/50 and PPC/240, would it be feasable to use this in a desktop 1200? Or is it more hassle than it's worth. Am I just better off getting a simple 060 card and being happy with that?

Again thanks to all for the really quick replies to my questions, you guys are great. :-)

[Marco]

Yep, yep, I already knew that 'trick', but it hasn't worked on any of the games I've tried, it made Blood Money's intro work, which was great just to hear the cool music (including a sample from the Loadsamoney! skethces, which I only found out about recently). As I said in a previous post relokick made a few more games work, that's the best option for now as I don't have that many games left anyway (as I mentioned earlier, many disks were lost on the lengthy and arduous 'voyage' to the next town over when we moved house a few years ago, haven't seen them since.

[Marco]

Ah, I see, so the 030 would be better for games, but not for much more than that, I've read of a port of UAE to AOS, I've had great success using that on my x86, if it's usable then I'd rather just get an 060 for more productivity uses and use UAE to emulate an OCS Miggy for the oldskool games. And if that fails then I'll just dig out the 500 and use that, it deserves to be pulled out of retirement.

Last question for now, again it's about the Blizzard PPC boards, I asked a few posts back, but no harm in saying again - will these run in 1200 desktop without melting a hole in the case and frying everything from overheating?

P.S. I just got a link 3.1 ROMs and disks for 20 squid off eBay. 'Yay' is an appropriate response to this I feel... Going by the pictures they have massive Eyetech stickers on them, I'm guessing these were manufactured after the ignominious death of C=... Though I wouldn't have thought the manufacturing facilities would have existed after C= disappeared, I thought they manufactured pretty much everything themselves, 'cept for the 68k processors.

[Marco]

Cheers, thanks for clearing up the PPC question, as for the ROMs, I've seen ones with stickers on them before, can't recall where... I think 'twas in the gallery of this site actually.

They clearly say Eyetech on them, I'm guessing Eyetech must have had them for sale at some point years back and stuck their own stickers on them when they sent them out.

The pics of the disks looked like the real deal, had the right picture with all the diamonds on the label.

[Marco]

Not 3.1 though did it? So while copied 3.0 disks would be perfectly fine the update, however minor is not the same product. I have pirated disks anyway, they came with the 1200, have no idea why the previous owner thought I'd want them, but the ROMs & disks I got off ebay were still cheaper together than just buying the ROM chips from Amigakit so it's all good.