Hi all....but not my first post - A1200 Tower Project

[Karlos]

Hi,

If you want to heavily upgrade your A1200, be prepared to shell out some serious cash. Some stuff you can get relatively inexpensively, the case, hard drives, CD etc.

The most expensive component you are going to need is an accelerator card. You'll need one if you want to get the most out of OS3.x, moreover, if you want to run OS4 (and MorphOS), you'll need a BlizzardPPC. These things can be very expensive. If you want to use a PCI graphics card like a voodoo, you'll need a PCI bus board. The Mediator 1200 is your best bet, or, if you get a BlizzardPPC and you can find one, the GRexx (though I don't think this is supported in OS4).

For ethernet, you have several options. You can get a PCI network card for your Mediator/GRexx or if you haven't taken that route (yet), there are many old PCMCIA network cards that can be used.

My main A1200 doesn't have any sort of PCI expansion bus board fitted so I'm using a PCMCIA network card and it is perfectly adequate I find.

If you just want to experience a powerful amiga with networking, graphics card etc, right out of the box, you could just use UAE on your mac. Then you can keep your A1200 as a retrogaming machine, if you prefer.

[Karlos]

As far as I know, you can only run OS4.0 on classic machines, A4000 included. To run 4.1, you'll require either an A1, Micro A1, Sam, Sam Flex, Pegasos 2 or the upcoming X1000.

Classic PPC machines are a bit crippled, since even for the class of PPC processor they have, the memory interface, absence of L2 cache and generally slow performance of all the legacy buses make for a less than stellar experience.

[Karlos]

hmmmm like this? Buzz
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Amiga-1200-BLIZZARD-1230-IV-68030-Accellerator-8MB-/180504060672?cmd=ViewItem&pt=UK_VintageComputing_RL&hash=item2a06e16300

And also sounds really dumb question, when booted from HDD, into WB and i put a floppy in, I cant load a game, but when I ctrl A A it loads floppy?

Your problem there is that the game you are playing is probably designed to boot straight from floppy disk and doesn't have any HD installer.

There is a very nice system called WHDLoad which is a modular HD installer for countless such games. It basically allows you to install hundreds of old titles to your hard disk, patching them in the process such that you can (usually) exit back to workbench once you've had your fill.

-edit-

Regarding the above accelerator card, the Blizzard 1230-IV was one of the finest 68030 accelerator cards for the A1200. Excellent software compatibility and generally about 8x faster than a bare A1200 (for integer) and many times faster for floating point (with the FPU already installed) when running at 50MHz.

[Karlos]

One assumes, if I get the CF mod I can get WHD to the flash card? Or connect the Card to a PC and download games onto it?

At the end of the day, whatever storage device you have attached to your onboard IDE counts as your hard disk, so if you are using a flash memory drive replacement, yes.

As for installation, well, the WHDload installers generally work by reading the original floppy disks, many of which had all kinds of strange layouts.

[Karlos]

Thanks guys and girls, some good advice - I think my first port of call  will be as Cammy said to get myself a IDE-CF adapter and reinstall WB3.1  or 3.9 [if i can find a copy] onto that and get myself a PCMCIA  ethernet adapter [amigakit?].
How about a CD-Rom drive? If I have used the PCMCIA port for ethernet  how does that work? There seems to be a spare IDE port on the  motherboard under the metal shield and does it have to be one for an  Amiga?

Cheers Spunky

The motherboard IDE was designed to support a single 2.5 inch IDE hard disk on a short cable. It doesn't use any signal buffering. That said, I have used a 3.5 inch HD on mine with a 30cm 44 -> 40 way ribbon cable for over 15 years without any problems.

Theoretically you can use 2 IDE devices on there but you are starting to push your luck. There are buffered interfaces that plug onto the motherboard IDE and provide a pair of standard 40 pin headers for IDE cables.

I used to use a PCMCIA CDRom interface. A year ago or so I swapped it for a PCMCIA ethernet card. I really haven't missed it. If I need to access a CD, I just put the CD in a different machine and copy files over the network.

[Karlos]

Good point regarding cd files over network.....how good does the amiga network with win / mac?

I use linux on my PC predominantly. I have a samba share on there which is accessible from my amiga machines using smbfs. All works fine for me.