1200. To tower or not to tower?

[Darrin]

Pondering if its worth putting my 1200 in a tower ?

How much work and fuss is it ?
Any significant gains ? I imagine the biggest deal is that its easier to cram stuff in there.

How much money am I looking at ?

I have 2 x A1200 towers gathering dust.  To be honest, if you want easy expansion of your A1200 then get a USB controller and hook it up to your clockport.  You can hang ethernet, hard drives, DVD-RW drives, memory sticks, SD/CF card readers, sound cards, etc off that.

Now, if you want to upgrade your graphics then I would go for the tower but only if you want to add a PCI busboard (Mediator, etc), although I'd still get the USB controller too.  I stuck a no-name Virge card ripped out of an old PC into my A4000 Mediator and the speed on Workbench for opening folders, displaying icons and sliding windows around is fantastic.

[Darrin]

That's interesting - when I bought a Mediator and installed a Voodoo3 I haven't noticed any significant difference in WB speed (but it might be because before I was running it in 640x512 and now in 1680x1050 ). The most dramatic speedup in WB was when I upgraded from A3640 to a Cyberstorm 060.

I was using the Indivision4000 to give me a 1024x768 25 colour Workbench and while it is usable (the 1280x768 is too), when I tested the Virge card it was like the difference between night and day.  The net result is that I use Workbench and certain applications on an RTG graphics card (I've gone back to using my CV643D right now while I wait for Elbox to send me a Radion 9200 PCI card) for speed and then flip to a nice rock-solid native display using the Indivision for playing games.

What I'm having fun and games with at the moment is getting P96 modes to select properly.  I've always used CGX4 before and that was more or less self configuring with the CV643D.  I'm using a 24bit 1024x768 screen with the CV643D, but whenever the disk drive is accessed the graphics "flicker".  Very strange, but I'll get to the bottom of it...