Hi guys,
I am somewhat of an Amiga n00b here, so please be kind with your responses -- the last time I used an Amiga was our trusty A2000 with Workbench 2.05 many moons ago!
I am not 100% sure, but I *think* my uncle has an Amiga 1200, and I was thinking of taking it off his hands and tinker around with it. I say I think because I most definitely remember him having it on his desk, and although my uncle isn't the type of man that really throws anything away, I am not 100% sure that he has it still, or it could be in storage somewhere. Anyway, I digress...
I have some questions about the A1200. I have never used an A1200 before, and as I said earlier the latest Amiga I used (before I moved onto PCs -- yeah I know, sucks doesn't it) was an A2000 with WB2.05. I am quite sure things had changed by the time the A1200 came out on the market. I have read some info on the A1200, however I still have some questions about the machine, which the major ones are:
1) Does the A1200 have a VGA port? I saw through the gallery that some people made dongles/adapters from the 23-pin DIN to a 15-pin VGA DIN, yet some other A1200s have VGA ports built in them or something. Is VGA capability something that an add-on graphics card can only achieve, or is it easier (and cheaper) to just go the adapter route? Can AGA drive a VGA signal? I am planning on using my LCD screen to connect to the Amiga (it has both VGA and DVI connectors, in which my MacBook Pro connects to, and the monitor has a handy button on the front to switch between the two), how would this work with the PAL and Super-HiRes settings in Preferences? Where can I find schematics for an adapter? I'm quite handy with a soldering iron ;-)
2) What options are available for me to get the Meeg connected to a network? I would like to get the machine onto the net and browse websites, go on IRC and the like. I know that there is no Amiga Firefox port as of date, are there any decent web browsers that are open source that I could use? Do these web browsers use rendering engines like KHTML or Mozilla? I remember back in the day of my A2000 and even with my older A1000 that the serial port on the Amigas couldn't handle some higher speeds of bps, surely this problem doesn't exist with networks/ethernet on the A1200? So my 1500kbps DSL link should be fine, right?
3) How can I go about connecting a CD-ROM drive to the machine? CD-ROM would probably be all that I need -- no need to write discs or use DVDs. I don't mind it being an external drive.
4) USB -- I know I'm asking a lot here, but I know that it can be done -- I came across the SUBWAY doodad that gives USB capabilities to an A1200. Does this give USB2.0 capability, or will I be stuck at the slow speed of USB1.1? If it's USB2.0, will it cope with the data speeds an external CD-ROM drive connected to the machine will exhibit? Anything special needed for the A1200 to see for example a USB flash drive? I would probably need something like CrossDOS to see a FAT32-formatted USB flash drive, right?
5) Would all of the above additions fit in the machine? Maybe things like connecting a CD-ROM and a network card aren't possible at the same time, since they might need PCMCIA, in which the A1200 has only one or something. Any gotchas that people can think of?
6) Last but not least -- should I even bother?! Emulation is looking mighty pretty all of the sudden.
By the way, I was an Amiga fanatic from way back, had an A1000 with the extra 256Kb expansion running WB1.3, and then upgraded to an ECS A2000 with 1Mb Fat Angus, which we expanded the hell out of. At one stage, the machine had a 2.1GB IBM SCSI-2 drive, 40MB GVP Hard Drive on a Card, a 14MHz CPU speed upgrade with FPU, 2x SCSI CD-ROM drive, A530 for digitising images, and of course the trusty 1084S monitor ;-) It's a real shame that the Amiga isn't really around much anymore (yeah, I know about OS4!), I really miss my OS booting in 5 seconds! I guess OS X (my primary OS) is the closest I can get to the good ol' Amiga days.
Cheers guys, apologies for the long post, and I anticipate your responses!
-- George
