help please..!!

[George]

Hello there.
Firstly, your in the UK, so a couple of handy websites;
Amibench
Pretty much the best place to find 2nd hand amiga bits for sale.
Also,
Eyetech
Are one of the best places to get new Amiga bits  :-)

Okay then. As others have said, the easiest thing to do is buy a second hand laptop hardrive. These use a smaller, 2.5", IDE connector, whilst CD-ROM drives and ordinary PC hard drives use a larger 3.5" connector, which you can still use in your a1200, but you'll need an adpter, and probably to modify your case so that it'll fit :-) Finally ,you really want a hard drive thats 4gb or les, as the built in filesystem can't handle bigger drives, so you'd have to sort that out. You can always add a bigger harddrive later and copy over your install and ad a new FS.

EDIT: Damn, 2 people beat me to it! :-P

RIghty then. Next, as others have said, an accelerator. The built in CPU is to frank ,rubbish nowdays.
Amigas use Motorola processors numbered 680x0. the built in one is a 68020 with no maths processor. I'd recommend at least a board with a 68030 and an FPU (maths processor) and that it has or you get hold of at least 16mb RAM for the board. Although a 68040 with built in FPU would be better. Still at least 16mb RAM though.

For getting on the net, you need a PCMIA modem that works with the amiga.
The site mentioned above, Aminet
is the biggest source for amiga shareware, freeware, drivers, etc so i'd look there to see what cards work.
Oh, this isn't meant to put you off, but go to Sabrina Online
click 'Archive' and look at the oldest comic going to see what your up against trying to get on the net ^_^  :-D
I'm sure it's easier than that lets on though, and there's people here to help as well  :-)

Well, hopefully this will help a bit :-)

[George]

Aah, indeed, good point!

Welcome to the board :-)

Getting a modem may not be the easiest. If it's only little bits you need to transfer, Amiga can read 720K PC disks :-)
Hooking up a CD-ROM drive and using CD-R (or RW's if amiga can read them, I think it can) may be easier on the short term :-)
Somebody else here though could tell you which should be the route to go down though

And the amiga is definately still kicking!
It will survive!  :-D

[George]

Before you do buy a CD-ROM drive, you will still need to transfer over by some other method a CD filesystem, which can be got from Aminet. However, this is small enough to fit on a 720K floppy disk if I remember right, so it'll be the only time you have to do it.
And any PC CD-ROM drive wil work pretty much.
I'd wait for some other members to confirm what i'm saying as well, been a while since I messed with my amiga

[George]

Heh, geting started is the complicated bit. Once the first couple of things are in place (hard drive and CD-ROM), it all becomes not so bad after that.

I think http://www.aminet.net/disk/cdrom/amicdfs240.lha
is the filesystem you want, but can someone tell me if I got this right or not? Cheers ^_^