Bought an A1200 again... but struggling..

[Plaz]

The floppy drives in Amigas that have many miles on them go bad regularly. I've had to replace them in 2 1200's a 4000 2 3000's and a 2000. If your good disk read consistantly, then maybe you did just get unluck with a stack of bad disks. If on the other hand even the "good" disk don't load all the time, then it may be time look for a good replacement floppy drive. Someone or some shop over the internet is probably going to be your source for a replacement if needed.

And welcome aboard!

Plaz

[amigakit]

Brand new Amiga 1200/600 floppy disk drive:

http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=294

In stock now- although order won't get processed until Monday as this weekend we attending Amiwest 2006 show.

[iamaboringperson]

A lot of new people post things like this in the 'New User Introductions' section.

[Tomas]

I hope to fit a hard drive at some point however reading the docs for WHDload has left me a little confused. I presume this is a program for the amiga however how do I get that program onto the amiga? I thought that pc formatted discs were incompatible to amiga floppies due to size.

An Amiga with WB 2.1 or higher can read 720k dos formatted floppies. It just does not work the other way around. Do you have the WB set?

I also wonder if all these amiga games is infact designed to run on an a1200? Some early games from the a500 era does not run on a a1200 without some tweaks. Some games will run if you go into early boot menu and selecting the emulate OCS option from the menu. Most a500 games do however work just fine with whdload though. I personally use whdload for nearly all games, as not only does more games work, but you never need to swap a disk again and the games load in just seconds. And i dont think you need an accelrator for anything but newer games. You might have some use for a tad more memory, but i believe most a500 games work just fine.

[InTheSand]

Tomas wrote:
Some early games from the a500 era does not run on a a1200 without some tweaks.

@ukbill: it might be worth taking a look at the likes of TUDE, which tries its best to make your A1200 pretend it's an A500.

Once you get a bit more familiar with transferring stuff from other machines to the Amiga, you can grab this and give it a go...

Or perhaps someone in the UK could create a TUDE boot disk and snailmail it to you? I'd do it, but shipping from NZ takes ages!

 - Ali

[ukbill]

Thanks for all the advice.

I'm pretty sure its not incompatibility issues as I can remember playing SWOS on my old A1200 (I think!) and Sim City is A1200/4000 only.  Maybe the case with Lure Of The Temptress - I seem to recall this was incompatible but could be wrong.  I won't throw the non-loading games out tho - at some point I'll buy an A600 or 500 as well and if they load on that then I'll know its the floppy drive I guess.

I've taken a 4Gb hard drive out of my old laptop today and ordered an ide cable.  Took the A1200 apart last night and gave it a good clean in preparation for the install later this week.

I also ordered the set of manuals so that I can learn how to use the machine for more than games again!

If the hdd install and format is successful I'll take a look at WHDload and get my head around that.

Once again thanks to all of you who've given me help and advice this week - much appreciated.

Bill

[jj]

@ukbill

where in south wales are you from?

I live in south wales, and if you not too far away might be able to give you some help

[ukbill]

Thanks to JJ for some off forum help I'm now looking into installing a HDD.

I've now pretty much sorted the games into work and don't work piles.  I tried to copy the SWOS disks using xcopy to see if the copies would work and the first disc came up with a virus (lamer?).  Its my guess at the moment that perhaps this is the reason why others don't work but I havn't had the chance to test this yet.

At present I've got stuck in the worlds of Frontier Elite II but if i'm honest that was probably my intention when I bought it at the car boot sale!

It's brought back great memories playing on the amiga again and thanks to everyone who's posted helpful comments here.

Bill

[Andeda]

"how do I get that program onto the amiga?"

One way to transfer files from your PC to Your Amiga harddisk is using Aexplorer and a NULL modem cable.
you get more information about Aexplorer on www.amigaforever.com

good luck.