General A1200 Questions

[tomv1to]

Hi, I just registered with the forum as a result of discovering all of my old Amiga peripherals in the cupboard. I've decided that I'd quite like to get another A1200 to play with as I miss quite a few of the games (mainly Project X and Apidya,) and to generally play around with on the internet.
 
I stumbled across the Amigakit webshop that sell Amiga 1200's and I've just got a few nooby questions to ask. I apologise if any of my q's seem a bit stupid but I haven't used an Amiga in absoloutly years and its hard to find anything online describing the hardware in terms that a caveman would understand.
 
What is the difference between the Kickstar 3.0 and 3.1 boards?
 
Whilst I realise I would require an ethernet port to go online would it also be recommended that I picked up an accelerator card? Amigakit stock the e-matrix accelerator is that one any good? I seem to read a lot about the blizzard one being the one to look for.
 
What is the benefit of getting a scandoubler? Would including the Indivision AGA 1200 Scandoubler offer any increase in performance or functionallity or is it solely just to allow users to connect to a monitor via VGA?
 
How would I go about connecting a CD drive up to the amiga? Would I be able to use any PC drive with an IDE connection?
 
Is Amiga OS 3.1 the same thing as workbench 3.1? And which would be the best, most compatible OS for gaming on an amiga?
 
Thanks in advance for you help and again I apologise about any stupid questions.

[tomv1to]

Hi thanks for your reply.

The accelerator card is the E-Matrix 1230/40Mhz Accelerator. Is that one OK? I can't get the link that you posted above to work sorry. I quite like the idea of using tis accelerator as I would like to use new old stock where possible and can get one of these unused.

I still have my old Philips monitor from my old A600 days and I assume it still works I still have the power cables and everything for it so I suppose the Indivision AGA would be a bit of frivilous overkill.

With regards to the CD drive I may just leave that out for now and the possibly upgrade to a tower at a later date if I really wanted to go much further. However I was looking at having a HDD in the amiga as opposed to the CF cards. Would using the IDE-Fix Express Buffered IDE help the access speeds of the HDD?

If I were to look at a tower I'd also be interested in looking at the graphics cards. Do they offer any huge gains in terms of performance? Or again is it just allowing the convenience of being to plug into an LCD? Would using a GPU cause in incompatibility issues?

And which graphics card would be best to use? I see most places citing the Voodoo cards being the best but I can't actually find any of those anywhere. Are there any other cards that would be compatible with the MEDIATOR PCI 1200 TX?

Would using the Mediator conflict with using the E-Matrix 1230/40Mhz?

EDIT: Thank you tension I don't think I will I've been scrolling through the forum most of the morning!

[tomv1to]

I remember really, really wanting an Amiga 4000T years ago. It just seemed like something to upgrade to as I had an Amiga 600 at the time. I didn't know much about the hardware because I was only young but I just remember seeing them in the backs of magazines and thinking wow, its got 4000 in the title, that must be so much better than mine.
 
I think what I'll do for now is spec an Amiga 1200 with the ethernet, e-matrix card and a HDD and maybe the IDE-Fix Express Buffered IDE (would Amigakit fit this for me?) if that helps performance with the HDD any and then if I really get bitten by the bug buy some parts to try and construct my own all singing and dancing Amiga 4000 at a later date. That way I'd have a professionally built system that works and then another one that would probably be unreliable but a lot of fun to tinker with.
 
The card reader also seems like a good choice as well so I might pop one of those in. With regards to the PS2 adaptor I think I'll leave that for now. I still have my old mouse and whenever I click with it the sound sends shivers of nostalgia racing through my brain. The indivision aga as well isn't so crucial because I do have my old monitor still from when I had the Amiga 600 (complete with Ninja of the Nth Dimension, Zool sticker set stuck all over it which has now saddly begun to fade.) I have a whole host of joysticks as well, but I think only one of the Quick Joy's work. I used to love the Cheetahs but I think I went through four of those and they all broke and my parents refused to be any more.
 
I'll also leave the CD drive for now as well.

[tomv1to]

Is OS 3.9 compatible with all games? Initially I am mainly concerned about playing some of the older games and would OS 3.9 be the best OS for that? Or would it be better going for one of the older versions of workbench like 3.0 or 3.1?

I have the G Skill falcon SSD for my PC. Its awesome. Think it might be a bit OTT for an Amiga though.

[tomv1to]

Does that include games that are installed to the HDD?

[tomv1to]

Keep in mind that HD installable games are a very small %.

Is it not possible to copy all of the games from the disks onto the system? I do remember a friend of mine years ago at university putting a HDD from on old Toshiba laptop into his A1200 and then copying the games directly onto the hard drive because he had found that quite a few of his disks had degraded and would no longer run.

How easy is it to fit an accelerator card? Is it just a case of putting it into a slot like putting a PCI-E card into a X86 motherboard?

If you intend on using OS3.9 i would really recomend a Scandoubler as the older 1084 and Philips monitors do not support any decent resolutions without horrible interlace.

Yeah I think the monitor I have only goes as high as 800x600 or something like that :lol: I'll probably stick to 3.1 just for now but how easy is it to fit a scan doubler if I wanted to do that myself at a later date? I'm really paranoid that there i'll have to do some soldering or something.

Alternatively if I were to go down a tower route in the future and was looking at adding a MEDIATOR 1200TX PCI BUSBOARD could I use a GPU instead of a scan doubler? And is it only the older Voodoo cards that would be compatible with the busboard?

[tomv1to]

Cheers for the advice guys.

I rang up Amigakit today and placed an order for a 1200 with 3.1 roms, 4gb internal flash, OS 3.1 and I also got the CF card reader. I kept it pretty basic because I just wanted to keep things fairly simple for now as christmas is coming up. But I can see me upping the ante after christmas.

With regards to buying a couple of games, have people here used retrogames.co.uk? Any good?

My old Amiga mad friend used to buy games from ebay and he'd sometimes have to buy as many copies as there were disks because he couldn't find a complete version where all the disks worked. I can't even trust ebay for 360/PS3 games so i'm not a huge fan of buying from software from there.