Amiga 1200 rebuild, what should I do to this machine? WHDLoad?

[paul1981]

1 - You're correct, an A1200 with some Fast RAM (4MB or more) will make a perfectly adequate WHDLoad machine. If you use a games launcher such as Tinylauncher early in the startup-sequence to save RAM, you can have the machine boot straight into Tinylauncher. I did this on one of my machines years ago  - but holding down the left mouse button upon booting skips Tinylauncher and loads Workbench - best of both worlds. Another machine I have with an 030 loads Tinylauncher after Workbench has booted (goes straight to Tinylauncher screen not Workbench) but when I quit it the Workbench is there ready to use. My serious machine boots into Workbench and I use iGame instead.

2 - They probably bought the clock port clock before the Fast RAM card.

3 - No, upgrading to 3.1 is a waste of time and money for your WHDLoad machine. If down the line you find yourself wanting a more powerful Amiga, then you can upgrade your RAM card with a CPU card and softkick 3.1.

[paul1981]

Almost forgot:

7 - PCMCIA CF Adapter + CF card - easy transfers of data to your A1200.

@ Mike : I believe this chap is trying to do this on a budget...there's no need to buy unecessary stuff. WHDLoad runs fine on Kickstart 2.0, never mind 3.1.

@ Kremlar - If you decide you want to use the internet a bit with IBrowse I'd recommend 8MB RAM, which unless you upgrade to a PCMCIA friendly CPU card you're stuck with 4MB or 6MB (jumper switch permitting on the RAM card) or your wireless / ethernet card won't work.

[paul1981]

4 - Regarding timing fixes, refer to this page here:

http://www.ianstedman.co.uk/Amiga/amiga_hacks/A1200_Mobo_fix/a1200_mobo_fix.html

[paul1981]

OMG. Every single time this subject comes up you chime in with your hatred for 3.1. Softkickicking wastes precious RAM, and 3.1 ROM's cost less than $20 bucks. They contain many bugfixes over 3.0 and are required if the user wants to update, e.g., to 3.9.

Why do you hate 3.1 so much? SMDH  :p

Well, to be honest I like my ROM in RAM for a substantial speed boost - so 512K will be eaten anyway. If you like your ROM to be slow and not in Fast RAM, then each to their own I suppose - whatever tickles your fancy.

[paul1981]

Heh, I've run WHDLoad with an Amiga 2000 with a 68000, OS 3.1, and 4 megs of Fast RAM.

Truly,
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group
http://www.dickestel.com/fcug.htm
July 30-31 Commodore Vegas Expo v12 -
http://www.portcommodore.com/commvex

I can beat that! I've ran it with a OS 2 68000 A600 with a 2MB SRAM card, I did for about a year anyway, before getting a Kipper 4MB upgrade. Had 2MB Chip as well. A number of slaves wouldn't work with the 68000 for which the original games were designed, but I think they've been slowly fixing that.
I even ran it at first with just 2MB Chip, but 2-disk games were very slow with the loading, small games were fine. But honestly, 4MB fast and 2MB Chip is the minimum I'd run it on (along with a 68020 or above due to the slaves which weren't 68000 tested).