Hello from St Helens, UK, advice please!!

[daveash18]

hi all,

i have recently purchased an amiga 1200, it is fairly bog standard in terms of hardware. I want to expand and speed up the system. Where would be the best place to start and where would be the best place to get hardware from etc, your advice will be greatly appreciated, thanks, Dave

[amigakit]

Welcome!

[weirdami]

me too!

[ferrellsl]

Get a 68030 accelerator and make sure you get at least 4MB of RAM to go with it.  A 68040 doesn't provide a noticeable performance boost and will cost a great deal more and that's if you can even find one.  Get a 2.5 inch internal IDE drive as well.  Anything over 4 GB in size will have to be partitioned into multiple logical drives as AmigaOS 3.9 and below don't support boot partitions greater than 4 GB.

SoftHut and AmigaKit are great places to deal with.  If you have extra money to burn, get a FF/SD too.  They're very rare and hard to find but well worth it if you want to use a VGA monitor.

[actung_bab]

hi helen good one you for getting a amiga 1200
well l remember getting my 1200 way back.

add fast memory either the best way with a 030 card.

or even with a ram card be best to get a card with faster cpu though.

if you want to get onto the internet a pcmcia network card a good option (u can get pc one just check with docs in cnet.device to ones that work okay.

id recomend upgrading to os 3.9 also

also email amikit and ask what they suggest for your buget be best way to go.

good luck and happy computing

[actung_bab]

opps sorry dave must been asleep.

[Magic-Merl]

Hello from Widnes.  You are a step up the ladder from me.  I don't have Amiga's anymore - but enjoy your buy.

[daveash18]

hi, ive had a look on amigakit and there are several ide hard drives for the a1200, which one would be  the best option,: 6gb, 20gb, 40gb, 60gb, 80gb and 100gb, im prepared to pay enough to get any of these just wondering which would be the best option, thanks all, dave

[Tripitaka]

After 3.1 ROMs and OS3.9 the HDD issue is more down to ide interface then anything else. On a standard A1200 you will need to partition into multiple logical drives(as said previously on this thread)with any drive over 4 Gig.
If you use a 3rd party ide interface with support for larger drive sizes (such as elbox's 4xEIDE '99) you can use disks larger then 128GB.

Are you keeping the wedge or going for a tower? that's the first question for me as it decides so many other issues, space, heat, power etc.

Anyway, your in the right place. There are some smart people on this forum, even if I don't allways agree with them.
 :lol:

[marcfrick2112]

Hi daveash18: As for the hard drive, I would say as big a HD as you can afford, but be aware that only 4 GB's or so will be useable under OS 3.1 unless you use NSD Patch, or a filesystem besides FFS....

A second vote for getting OS 3.9, for one thing no worries about hard drives bigger than 4GB. I have an 8.5GB HD on my A1200 tower, and I'm almost out of room, but I (try to) do animations, etc. which takes a lot of storage... so your mileage may vary

[daveash18]

i want to keep it as a desktop style computer, its more 'amiga-ish' to me that way, is it a good option to keep it like that, is 3.9 available on floppy as i dont have a cd rom for it yet?, thanks all

[da9000]

Hey Dave, welcome to A.org!

One upgrade path is instead of using a hard drive, to buy a CompactFlash-to-IDE converter (very cheap) and use CompactFlash cards of your liking. No heat, no moving parts, less power usage, less noise, etc. Of course the size will be smaller than the bigger hard drives, but you might not want to move your entire DivX collection to the Amiga (since it won't play without some serious acceleration anyways), so a 4-8GB CF will suffice (I assume you'll be doing mostly gaming, not video capturing, etc).

Good luck!

[golem]

Hi Dave
I recommend keeping your 1200 in the desktop case. It looks much better than a cumbersome tower kit that always seem like a bit of a bodge to me unless you go down the PowerPC route with OS4.0 and all that. But I would recommend OS3.9 which you do need a CD drive to install it from unless you install 3.1 with your hard drive in the mig and then take out the hard drive and piggy back to a PC and then you can use WinUAE to install OS3.9 with the PC CD drive but that may be a bit fiddly for an Amiga newbie.

[TjLaZer]

you should do it like this.  Get a cheap PCMCIA compact flash card adapter.  Then install AmigaOS 3.9 on a PC with WinUAE or better yet buy Amiga Forever!  Then you can copy the whole system to CF card. Install it in your 1200 and mount the CF card with a boot disk or dos driver.  Copy the system over and reboot!