New to the Amiga

[Marco]

Hello there r0jaws, welcome to AOrg and to Amiga.

Definitely get yourself a 2.5" IDE HardDisk first, and if it doesn't already have them upgrade the Kickstart ROMs to 3.1 - you'll need the correspoding Workbench disks to install 3.1 on the HD.

Then an accelerator, if you want to play games, an 030 based board is apparently the better option as the later 040 and 060 chips introduced a lot of incompatability. If you want to run more modern stuff (and modern is a very loose term here) then a 1260 (060 accelerator) is a must, I'm still looking for one, never find any on the UK ebay.

Skip the 1240s though as the 040 processors produced a lot of heat (more than the 060) and aren't really suitable for the 1200 case, and if you tower it to get around the heat then really you can just go the whole hog and get a Blizzard PPC board, though these are exceedingly expensive, e.g. 1260s usually sell for several hundred £, I've seen PPC boards on ebay sell for around £400-500. This is basically just on account of the rarity.

P.S.

r0jaws wrote:
t'internet

Are you a fan of the comedic stylings of Peter Kay perhaps?

[Marco]

r0jaws wrote:
I like the console version of my 1200 very much and am not ready to 'box' it yet so I won't be looking at 4.0.

Good man, too many people towering their 1200s these days, mainly so they can use a half-arsed implementation of the PCI bus that's slower than Paul Robeson on dope.

Though, I don't know if you have some confusion about OS4.0, it doesn't run on any proper Amigas yet, only on a tiny number of PPC based generic computers that were badged as Amigas and sold as Amiga1 few years ago. They don't run any native 68k Amiga apps except through emulation and are no longer available except second hand where you'll have to pay several times what they're actually worth. There's apparently a beta version of OS4.0 for 'classic' (i.e. the old 68k Amigas) as long as they have a PPC accelerator but it's only available to a select few who are betatesters.

Re: ROMs, the 3.5 and 3.9 versions of the OS never came with updated ROMs so they have to 'patch the ROMs' after booting resulting in a reboot when you turn on the Amiga, there are various bits of kit to get around this, though the most promising is definitely the custom made '3.9 ROMs' - 3.1 ROMs with all the updates added made by one of our own forum goers here at AOrg (the thread is around here somewhere - by Motorollin, I think there's a big legal argument over it but AFAIK it's all perfectly safe and legal providing you can provide proof of ownership of both 3.1 and 3.9 versions of the OS.