Starting Up....

[Loadinc]

Hi Everyone,

Thought i would drop you a line.
I hope these questions have not been asked one times too many. I just got my hands on an A1200 on ebay, received it, it works, i am happy. Had that "back to the drawing board feeling" many times as the last time I touched an amiga must of been about 10+ years ago.

Anyway, the beast lives.
I have read arround about many accelerators, memory expansions, kickstart switchers, etc...
I have also heard about whdload (?) and that it could replace kickswitches.
Now, the questions are:
Is this stuff that i have seen on some pages (like vessalia as example) new, or just refurbished stuff? Is hardware for them amigas still being produced?
How about joysticks, can these still be bought new?
What is the best place to start when thinking of upgrading an amiga?
My ks are v. 3.0, if I understand right, i should upgrade them if i am thinking of connecting large hard drives?

And last... what should i be looking for? (I know this is might sound stupid, but i AM sorta lost with this all).

Thanks for your time in advance,

Load

[doctorq]

First of all, welcome to Amiga.org and welcome back to the Amiga.

The stuff Vesalia sells are brand new, at least the stuff I have bought from them. Haven't had any trouble with my purchases, so it's recommendable.

Regarding the joysticks; check Vesalias site. If they have them, the answer is yes.

The best way to upgrade your A1200 is to get an accelerator for it. If you just want to play some of the old games, and maybe use some of the programs available for Amiga, then you should go for a 68030 accelerator. It will give your Amiga a noticable speed boost (aprrox. 4 times faster) than normal A1200's. As I'm a Phase5 fan, I would recommend the Blizzard 1230, as you can install ram on it (up to 128 MB) and also a SCSI controller if you want it. Furthermore it's a well build card.

If you want to run OS4 on your A1200 you would need to get an Blizzard PPC accelerator board instead.

Second item on the list of upgrading is Kickstart3.1 so you would be able to run OS3.5 or OS3.9.

Third item on the list would of course be to get OS3.5 or OS3.9 :-) When upgrading to newer version of Workbench, you will have support for harddrives bigger than 4 GB.

Hope this helps you out.

[PMC]

Hi Loadinc,

Welcome back....!

As for upgrading your machine, there are several options depending on your budget and how you use your machine.  If you mostly play retro games then a decent HDD and a mid range accelerator card will suffice.  If you're more into maxing your machine out with graphics cards etc then you'll be looking at more expense and upgrades.

If you want to use hard drives larger than 4Gb then you can either buy an IDE buffer complete with IDE Fix software or you could upgrade your kickstart ROMs to version 3.1 and your OS to version 3.9.

The minimum requirements for 3.9 are 6Mb RAM (IIRC), 68020+ and a CD ROM drive.  There is a new version of the Amiga's file system that is capable of addressing drives over 4Gb in capacity.

If you're adventurous you might consider towering your machine and adding a PCI bus which allows connection of Voodoo graphics cards, soundcards, network etc.  Not surprisingly you'll need a decent accelerator and plenty of memory, but the added responsiveness to your system is welcome too.  

[Effy]

I do have got a RBM A1200 tower working with ONLY a 1220/4 68020 turboboard with ONLY 4 Mb Fast Ram and OS 3.9, so if you say 6 Mb is needed then I assume you mean 2+4 Mb

>4 Gb harddrives ... there is a patch on Aminet to use bigger harddrives, even on OS3.0 with kickstart 3.0 ...

Turboboards ... take a look at the Belgian Amiga Club site where I often keep track of several Amiga products being sold on Ebay, including turboboards, so it will give you a somewhat objective idea about what things may cost ...

[Loadinc]

And talking about budget, what is the price of a blizzard ppc these days? As OS 4 is comming i might just bite the bullet and give it a wirl... depening on the price of one
Would i need to tower the a1200 because of the ppc? It's just that i really like the 1200 case.

Thanks for your replies btw,

Load

[Lando]

Loadinc wrote:
And talking about budget, what is the price of a blizzard ppc these days? As OS 4 is comming i might just bite the bullet and give it a wirl... depening on the price of one
Would i need to tower the a1200 because of the ppc? It's just that i really like the 1200 case.

Thanks for your replies btw,

Load

If you go to German Ebay you can probably get a lower-end BPPC for about £100.

You can put it in a desktop case (in fact the BPPC manual has installation pictures showing being installed in the desktop case) but you'd probably need extra cooling (drill some holes in the trapdoor cover, or leave it off entirely and get some new "feet" for your A1200 to raise it of the desk a bit to allow air to flow underneath)

[HopperJF]

has anyone got a desktop A1200 running the os4 beta? i would like to see some pictures of that  :-)