Small hello, and a question

[Marco]

Been lurking on Amiga.org for ages now, signed up a little while ago when I had a problem with figuring out HDtools on my A1200 and then never posted as I figured out the problem shortly after anyway.

I first used an Amiga back in, er, Christmas '87 it must have been, my brother got an A500 for Christmas/Birthday that year and we've still got it (currently yellow, but going brown) with the extra 512k of RAM, though the RF modulator is rusted through.

We recently became nostalgic for the "good ol' days" and got an A1200 off ebay, it's great and all but it's kinda useless for much more than Turrican II at the moment, though this is probably the first time I've used Workbench ever, 1.3 on the A500 was comically bad even then. As a result I know shockingly little about how stuff works on an Amiga.

I also wanted to ask a Windoze related question (ducks flaming arrow barrage). Ironically it's related to adding a partition to my disk. Unlike the Amiga, I can't seem to figure out how to 'shrink' the space taken up by my main partition so that I can add a new one.

C drive currently takes up the whole 150Gb and the disk manager P.O.S. only allows you to add a partition on un-allocated space, but with all the space allocated to C: and no way to reduce it I can't make any partitions.

I know that'll sound like a stupid question to the more tech-savvy out there but can anyone help me free up the excess space on my HD? I just want to make a partition of about 70Gb to shunt all my files over to (to safeguard them incase Windows goes t*ts-up at some point), and then carve out a small chunk of space to try and put some distro of Linux on (probably a risky idea to try using Linux given that I can't even partition the damned drive :roll:).

P.S. Nice to see so many people using Amiga in these bleak modern times :-)

[blobrana]

 Welcome aboard,

You now have been officially assimilated by the A.org.

BTW, for the Windoze Problem use `Partition magic`, or forget about it until you end up having to install windows again... (then split it up into two partitions - or wait just a bit longer and get another HD)

[InTheSand]

Welcome to A.Org!

Does your A1200 have a hard drive or any other form of expansion, or is it a base model? You can still use it for things other than Turrican!!!

As for the PC - Mandrake Linux 9.1 contains utilities to resize NTFS partitions, as do recent versions of Knoppix. However if you're not familiar with the command line, Partition Magic would be the safest (but most expensive) route to go.

 - Ali

[Marco]

Thanks for the welcome blobrana - about assimilation- do I get a cool red rangin-laser like Picard got on Star Trek? ;-)

I don't have PartitionMagic, I downloaded a trial of the last version, but it wouldn't let me do anything, I could make any changes I want, but when I tried to apply them it just said buy the program. I checked Norton's site - it costs as near as makes no difference $70, is there perchance a non-capitalist-pig alternative? I.e. a free program that does the same job?

InTheSand - completely stock, it came with a 163Mb Harddisk, I've got it in 2 partitions, 20Mb for the system stuff and the other 143Mb for anything I can find to install, which at the moment amounts to FinalWriter 8 (came with some update disks), and DeluxePaint IV AGA.

It's got no expansion (i.e. a puny 68EC020@14MHz and no fast mem) and the 3.0 ROMs, I'm gonna get the 3.1 ROMs from Amigakit, but they make you pay through the nose to get the Workbench disks that go with them. The guy who sold us the 1200 sent 3.1 install disks amongst other stuff, but they're copies so I dunno if they're genuine or not. 'Spose I'll find out when I get the ROMs and try and install 3.1

[Tomas]

There is one application i would like to recommend: http://www.whdload.de/
Whdload lets you install standard floppy based games onto the hard disk, so you can play all your favorite games on your 1200 without any disk swapping and basicly no load times.
WHDload will also work with many of the old a500 floppy based games that did not orginally work on the a1200 as well.
I am sure there are more games than just turrican  :-P

If you want to invest in some upgrades, then i will recommend that you get a cdrom drive and a 68030 or higher accelrator, as this will in my opinion make the amiga much more capable and enjoyable to work with.

Welcome to Amiga.org by the way.

[Marco]

Thanks Tomas, I was kinda joking about the Turrican thing, obviously a lot of games don't work because they banged the OCS chips which are not there on the 1200, but, what few games I liked that I managed to salvage from the cardboard boxes in the loft seem to work fine, (we moved house a few years ago and I suspect many disks didn't make the journey with us) Lotus I-III, Turrican II, Civilisation, The Killing Game Show works with relokick, there's a few others too.

Re: upgrading I'm definetly thinking of getting the 3.1, ROMs a bigger HD and an accelerator from Amigakit. I understand though that there are some heat issues with accelerators and the 1200 case. I don't want everything melting on me. I've read the 040 has chronic overheating problems so I'll be avoiding that one, the 030 doesn't seem like enough of an upgrade to what I've got to be honest. And the 060 boards are comically expensive - I think Amigakit sell them for over £200! :cry:

My brother also bought an A1200 in a tower that had the BPPC card in it, he did something that means it won't boot anymore - I suspect it's something to do with the harddisk since he was trying to reinstall workbench when it all went horribly wrong. I think the card is an 060/50 and PPC/240, would it be feasable to use this in a desktop 1200? Or is it more hassle than it's worth. Am I just better off getting a simple 060 card and being happy with that?

Again thanks to all for the really quick replies to my questions, you guys are great. :-)

[Morax]

Hello Marco, and welcome.

I've been reading your posts,  but did you already know you can boot the A1200 using OCS/ECS? If you didn't, this is the way to:
Reboot the machine, hold in both mouse buttons, and you'll get in the Early-Startup screen.
Next click on "Display Opions" and you get a screen where you can set various options, like NTSC/PAL, but also the chipset type (Original - OCS, and Enhanced - ECS), choose whether you like and click "Use", back on the main screen select "Boot". Or you can also go to the Boot Options menu and disable CPU caches. If you do this, you have a better chance of old games working. Still not everything, but it's better than nothing.

And I would also like to add that I also recommend a CD-ROM-drive. I got myself one a few years ago together with a Squirrel-SCSI, which connects to the PCMCIA, was a bit expensive though, but in the end I'm happy I did spend it . :-)

[Marco]

Yep, yep, I already knew that 'trick', but it hasn't worked on any of the games I've tried, it made Blood Money's intro work, which was great just to hear the cool music (including a sample from the Loadsamoney! skethces, which I only found out about recently). As I said in a previous post relokick made a few more games work, that's the best option for now as I don't have that many games left anyway (as I mentioned earlier, many disks were lost on the lengthy and arduous 'voyage' to the next town over when we moved house a few years ago, haven't seen them since.

[InTheSand]

Hi,

Marco wrote:
I've read the 040 has chronic overheating problems so I'll be avoiding that one, the 030 doesn't seem like enough of an upgrade to what I've got to be honest. And the 060 boards are comically expensive - I think Amigakit sell them for over £200! :cry:

...

Am I just better off getting a simple 060 card and being happy with that?

Depending on what you're going to be using your Amiga for, the '030 or '060 are definitely the best choices if you wish to keep yours in its original case.

If you're into the games, an '030-based accelerator is your best bet, and that plus a bit of RAM and WHDLoad will mean you can say goodbye to tonnes of floppy-swapping efforts when you want to load something.

On the other hand, if you're after more speed and perhaps want to use the Amiga for something other than games, the '060 is probably a better choice as it's a hell of a lot faster (but more expensive as you've noted - and AmigaKit's prices are sometimes excelled by the accelerators seen on eBay!  :-o )

IMHO, the '060 breaks too much compatibility for game use, as I found out when I upgraded my A1200 a few years ago.

 - Ali

[amigakit]

Hello and welcome!

[Marco]

Ah, I see, so the 030 would be better for games, but not for much more than that, I've read of a port of UAE to AOS, I've had great success using that on my x86, if it's usable then I'd rather just get an 060 for more productivity uses and use UAE to emulate an OCS Miggy for the oldskool games. And if that fails then I'll just dig out the 500 and use that, it deserves to be pulled out of retirement.

Last question for now, again it's about the Blizzard PPC boards, I asked a few posts back, but no harm in saying again - will these run in 1200 desktop without melting a hole in the case and frying everything from overheating?

P.S. I just got a link 3.1 ROMs and disks for 20 squid off eBay. 'Yay' is an appropriate response to this I feel... Going by the pictures they have massive Eyetech stickers on them, I'm guessing these were manufactured after the ignominious death of C=... Though I wouldn't have thought the manufacturing facilities would have existed after C= disappeared, I thought they manufactured pretty much everything themselves, 'cept for the 68k processors.

[amigakit]

Hi!

BlizzardPPC's give off a lot of heat and take a lot of power so an A1200 Tower system is necessary to run such a device.  Theoretically, if you put it in a desktop, you will need a lot of cooling and noisy fans.  You will also need an external powerful power supply such as the old Goliath/Powerbox variety.  To be honest I wouldn't recommend the desktop option.

Official Amiga A1200 Kickstart 3.1 ROMs don't have stickers on them - may be EEPROMs.  Make sure the AmigaOS 3.1 disks are originals.

[Marco]

Cheers, thanks for clearing up the PPC question, as for the ROMs, I've seen ones with stickers on them before, can't recall where... I think 'twas in the gallery of this site actually.

They clearly say Eyetech on them, I'm guessing Eyetech must have had them for sale at some point years back and stuck their own stickers on them when they sent them out.

The pics of the disks looked like the real deal, had the right picture with all the diamonds on the label.

[odin]

TBH what does it matter if you get pirated WB disks or originals. Every A1200 shipped with WB disks anyway, so if you get a systemdisk-less A1200 you would have a license for the disks anyway. Wouldn't you?

[Marco]

Not 3.1 though did it? So while copied 3.0 disks would be perfectly fine the update, however minor is not the same product. I have pirated disks anyway, they came with the 1200, have no idea why the previous owner thought I'd want them, but the ROMs & disks I got off ebay were still cheaper together than just buying the ROM chips from Amigakit so it's all good.