New Amiga user

[SamuraiCrow]

The driver support on AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS are not great since there are many more expansion cards that would work in them than there are people to write drivers for them all.  Remember that the original hardware manufacturers only write Windows drivers for their products and everybody else is on their own for the most part.

I've got an A1200 of my own that I bought back in 1993 and I am still going to use it with the PowerVixxen accelerator when/if it comes out.  Note that the native Amiga graphics chips are well supported by AmigaOS 4 unlike the classic Amiga version of MorphOS.  (Or at least that's what the beta testers claim. :-) )

[colinstu]

Thank you for all the replies!

Does the 1200 come w/ a PCMCIA slot? Is this not compatible w/ some PCMCIA cards?

Would it be compatible with the DELL photo printer 720? (actually a lexmark z6xx)? Are there any USB adapters/hacks for this?

Can OS 3.9 do PNP?

[Matt_H]

Truth is, Amiga printer support is absolutely awful. The program TurboPrint is your only hope of getting any modern printer operational.

All 1200s have a PCMCIA slot, but be aware that it's only 16Bit, whereas laptops these days have 32Bit ports. As such, make sure your network card is both 16Bit and supported by either the 3com or cnet driver packages (see Aminet).

USB is possible through the Subway board.

PNP? PlugAndPlay? The Amiga practically INVENTED PlugAndPlay! Except we call it AutoConfig(TM). Virtually all Amiga peripherals are automatically detected and mapped into the memory space. In most cases, you need to install a very simple driver - usually a single file you can copy manually - in stark contrast to Windows' driver system.