New to the Amiga

[r0jaws]

Hi all,
I appear to be a bit of a minority, I NEVER had an Amiga when I was a kid, I lusted after a Atari ST, but was stuck on Speccy's back in the 80's. So am I alone in being a new convert?
After reading MicroMart's Amiga column, Browsing around a few forums, picking an old 500 up from a Car Boot Sale I'm Hooked. What a great piece of Kit. I love Retro-Electronics, and this is my favorite so far. The only downer is that I'm married, so I have to limit the amount of 'techie' stuff I can keep in the house and have had to ditch the 500 in favour of a 1200, which seems to have more potential for what I need.
I'm just about to ford ahead with getting this thing 'useful', and would like a hard disc, some rudimentary networking (basically the ability to browse t'internet) and play some of my old favorites without lugging about too much kit (extra external drives etc).
Any tips?
I've read a bit through other posts and am starting to get the gist but are there any mistakes I could profit by avoiding?
Any Howlers that someone has made and would like to kindly avoid me making the same mistake?
Thanks from a TOTAL noob,  :-D

[amigagr]

welcome aboard :-)

[Matt_H]

Welcome!

You've made a good choice with the 1200 - getting it up to spec is much easier than with a 500.

Your top priority should be getting a hard drive. Almost any 2.5" IDE drive for a laptop will work, but you'll have an easier time if it's less than 4GB in size.

Open up the case and check what's inside. If you're lucky, there'll be a metal drive tray to hold the hard drive. You can do without one, but it's safer to have it. You'll need a 44-pin IDE cable to make the data connection to the drive.

Verify the kickstart version too (2 horizontal chips near the big expansion connector). Version 39 corresponds to Release 3.0, version 40 corresponds to Release 3.1, which has bug fixes and makes further expansion easier. You'll also need the 6 OS disks to install the system to the hard drive.

Your next priority should be an accelerator. An 030 board will do, but if you're dead set on the system, you may want to wait until an 060 board turns up.

Aminet has loads of free software. Check here first for anything.
WHDLoad will allow you to install many games to hard disk.

Depending on where you're located, a variety of dealers sell most of the things you'll need.

[amigakit]

Welcome!

[InTheSand]

Hi,

Welcome to A.Org!

As for howlers:
1. Selling / ditching any Amiga hardware (!)
2. Paying over the odds on the likes of eBay

 - Ali

P.S. I'm also an  old Speccy owner/user (still have several!)

EDIT: I see you've committed both howlers already! :-)

[r0jaws]

To true! It felt like a good idea at the time, ho hum, should have posted on here first probably. Still I look forward to the next time!  :-o You live and learn.  :-)

[redfox]

Hi r0jaws,

Welcome aboard.  Enjoy yourself.  There are lots of knowledgeable people here who will be happy to give advice.

---
redfox

[Marco]

Hello there r0jaws, welcome to AOrg and to Amiga.

Definitely get yourself a 2.5" IDE HardDisk first, and if it doesn't already have them upgrade the Kickstart ROMs to 3.1 - you'll need the correspoding Workbench disks to install 3.1 on the HD.

Then an accelerator, if you want to play games, an 030 based board is apparently the better option as the later 040 and 060 chips introduced a lot of incompatability. If you want to run more modern stuff (and modern is a very loose term here) then a 1260 (060 accelerator) is a must, I'm still looking for one, never find any on the UK ebay.

Skip the 1240s though as the 040 processors produced a lot of heat (more than the 060) and aren't really suitable for the 1200 case, and if you tower it to get around the heat then really you can just go the whole hog and get a Blizzard PPC board, though these are exceedingly expensive, e.g. 1260s usually sell for several hundred £, I've seen PPC boards on ebay sell for around £400-500. This is basically just on account of the rarity.

P.S.

r0jaws wrote:
t'internet

Are you a fan of the comedic stylings of Peter Kay perhaps?

[jmbattle]

Garlic bread?

James
x

[r0jaws]

cheese...cake, cheese....cake?
Aye lad, who wouldn't be entertained by his cheeky northern frivolities?
Thanks a lot you guys, Got a bit of research to do then!
By the way which of the Amiga os's would you recommend,
3.1, 3.5, or 3.9?
I like the console version of my 1200 very much and am not ready to 'box' it yet so I won't be looking at 4.0.
I checked out my 1200 and its bog standard, no drive clips, no  extras anywhere and 3.0 Rom chips. If I have 3.1 ROMs will they boot 3.5 & 3.9 then?
Is 3.9 necessary for t'internet? or does it just make life easier?
Lastly, what security concerns should I have about unleashing the beast on the web (from behind a router firewall of course), viruses etc?
I know i'm asking a lot, but as I USED to use Win98se (now on linux) I still get a bit nervy about venturing WWW wise on anything :-D

[BinoX]

3.9 makes life real easy for internet puropese And it's the OS I would reccomend you getting...

Yeah.. 3.1 ROMs will allow you to boot WB 3.1, 3.9 AND 3.9 First thing to get should be the 3.1 ROMs IMO (I'd recommend AmigaKit.com for those.. excellent service)

Viruses.. I wouldn't worry too much... There are virus scanners out there though.. look on aminet.net for those (I think)

Oh.. er.. And welcome

[krize]

If you want to keep it in the desktop - pcmcia network card and a accelerator card (the faster the better)..

About virus on the internet, dont worry No virus/spam/whatever will work on the Amiga browsers.. So safe browsing..

You dont need os 3.9 to connect top the net, you only need a tcp/ip stack ; MiamiDX or Genesis/AmiTCP (included in OS3.9)..

Seach for these on aminet.net


Good luck, and post your progress..

[Marco]

r0jaws wrote:
I like the console version of my 1200 very much and am not ready to 'box' it yet so I won't be looking at 4.0.

Good man, too many people towering their 1200s these days, mainly so they can use a half-arsed implementation of the PCI bus that's slower than Paul Robeson on dope.

Though, I don't know if you have some confusion about OS4.0, it doesn't run on any proper Amigas yet, only on a tiny number of PPC based generic computers that were badged as Amigas and sold as Amiga1 few years ago. They don't run any native 68k Amiga apps except through emulation and are no longer available except second hand where you'll have to pay several times what they're actually worth. There's apparently a beta version of OS4.0 for 'classic' (i.e. the old 68k Amigas) as long as they have a PPC accelerator but it's only available to a select few who are betatesters.

Re: ROMs, the 3.5 and 3.9 versions of the OS never came with updated ROMs so they have to 'patch the ROMs' after booting resulting in a reboot when you turn on the Amiga, there are various bits of kit to get around this, though the most promising is definitely the custom made '3.9 ROMs' - 3.1 ROMs with all the updates added made by one of our own forum goers here at AOrg (the thread is around here somewhere - by Motorollin, I think there's a big legal argument over it but AFAIK it's all perfectly safe and legal providing you can provide proof of ownership of both 3.1 and 3.9 versions of the OS.

[Tomas]

You might also want to replace the orginal psu if you are intending to upgrade it. The orginal PSU was very weak and even the a500 PSU was stronger, though that is not really powerful enough if you want both an accelrator and a hd running.