Thinking about trading

[drewz21]

Best of luck to you irishmike.  I wish my spare A1200 wasn't a PAL so I could help you out.  

[irishmike]

@drewz21

Thanks my friend.  I appreciate it.

[MASACREWILL]

..so what is the core meaning of your project? What are You going to use your 2 miggies for?  :getmad:  :-)

[irishmike]

@MASACREWILL

My core project requires one of the two miggies.  I am going to run a BBS for nostalgia and as an educational venue for the generations that have *heard* of a BBS, but never experienced one.  I chose Amiga for the platform even though I ran a RemoteAccess 2.x bbs through 1993 and co-sysop'd another RA board through 1996.  The A1200 I am seeking is for this purpose.  

My current A3000 is for my own "day to day" use and to play the old games I missed (like Kings Quest and Space Quest) on... the original idea was (mainly due to space) to obtain 2 A1200's in place of my one A3000 or whether or not to just buy a second machine...(the original intent of this thread).

Hope that clears it up a bit.  Can use support for this project which is going to incorporate both my old BBS's one on PC and one on AMI.  

Thanks for asking :-D

[icbrkr]

I currently run a BBS and have been looking for the DLG software for Amiga to run on one of my miggys but sadly I cannot find it.

I'm curious though - what are the specs on that 3000?  What specs are you looking for on the A1200?  I know someone who might be interested (and we all live fairly close to you).

[irishmike]

@icbrkr

I decided to run CNET since it is apparently still fully supported.  It was the defacto BBS software in this area back in the day... in doing research, I found that all the BBS's here ran it... including the C64 or C128 based boards.

The specs on the machine are:

16 MHZ processor
40 MB SCSI hard drive
1 floppy
factory specs the rest of the way

You may pmail me with more details on the person here in KC.

[dnelsonfl]

This is for your BBS project, right? I thought common wisdom used to be that a big-box Amiga (2000, 3000, 4000) was the ideal for a BBS. 2000's were the most common. They're good workhorses and shouldn't be underestimated.

-David

[CLS2086]

Hi,
If you get a PAL model, take a look there at the bottom :
http://wonkity.com/~wblock/a1200/a1200.html
connecting pin 41 of the Alice custom chip to ground causes the A1200 to default to NTSC, while pulling this pin high (disconnecting it from the motherboard and connecting it to +5V through a 4.7k resistor) will make the default power-up state PAL. I would point out that making a modification like this on a surface-mount chip is difficult at best, and you may end up needing an expensive motherboard replacement, or, at worst, a dead A1200 that needs an expensive replacement motherboard available. In most cases, using the boot menu (obtained by pressing both mouse buttons on power-up or reset) to switch to PAL is sufficient. However, with some games, the hardware patch will be necessary to insure proper timing (changing to PAL via the boot menu might make a 50 Hz game run at 60 Hz timing, or vice versa).

 :idea:

I also suggest you A2000 that could have cheaper HDD.

[vk3heg]

irishmike wrote:
I have not made up my mind fully yet, but I have semi decided that I should go with 2 A1200's instead of my A3000.

Even with the A3000 being at 16mhz, it has better expansion. (ie: the zoro slots.) You will need a highspeed serial card to run a BBS. The A3k can take the punishment far better than a A1200 can/will.

When I ran my two line bbs on the amiga (before I switched to PC and Ezycomm) the standard serial port's couldn't keep up. The asdg serial card was a great peice of hardware. The system got expanded over about a two-three year period to be one beefed up Amiga 2000. (I think it had 8 or 16mb of ram, a GVP '030 combo card, three or four harddrives, a 4cd stacker and other things I can't rember)

You should think hard about running a bbs on a phone line. The internet has taken it all away from the bbs's and unless you got heaps of calls it'd be better making it accessable from the net.

[irishmike]

@vk3heg

That may be true and that is actually why I bought the A3000 in the first place.  The main issue is that I want to dedicate a machine to the BBS and therefore need another (second) Amiga for my games and such.  I would prefer to have another A3000, however, I will have to solve a space issue to use another 2000 or 3000 and I would entertain a A2500 as well to dedicate.

@dnelsonfl

I believe that I will be able to make the BBS net accessible, though the project is to preserve the original experience which means dial up, but the plan has always been to have one line for dial up and several nodes for Telnet.  I am sure that we can tweak the CNET software for Telnet and I also understand that this is being built in to their next version.  I have not ruled out an A2500 box for the BBS.

[adolescent]

I ran a CNet/3 BBS on my A3000 for several years.  Honestly though, if you're going to run more than 2-3 lines you're going to need more than an 030/16MHz.  (I had an 040/35MHz with 40MB of Fast RAM and even that choked when things got busy.

If I were to run an Amiga BBS today, I'd just run it on WinUAE.  It's faster, and saves the wear and tear on your old valuable hardware.

[irishmike]

@adolescent

Yes, you could run it on UAE or Cloanto AF, however that would not be the scope of the project.  Heck you could set up a DOS emulator on a PC and run RA too.  THis is not what my project is to entail.

Sure I will probably do the whole config in Cloanto, but I plan to then transfer the whole BBS to the machine.

The education part of my project requires showing the Sys-Op end as it would have been "old school" style, this is why the other BBS has to be a 486/66 or max Pentium 100 mhz... the RA machine is also going ot be "old school".

[adolescent]

@irishmike

Ok, fair enough.  I still think the 030/16MHz will be a limiting factor.  Especially since you're talking about telnet ports.  (Make sure to reduce the color depth to 4 colors to increase the speed a bit...)

Good luck with your project.  

[dnelsonfl]

@irishmike,

If you're not in a hurry due to money being tight and don't mind piecing it together little by little, here's a few thoughts to consider. The 3000 is a very decent Amiga, and it has the slim case design. You could stack two 3000's on top of each other and use a small 2 or 4 port KVM switch to use a single keyboard/mouse/monitor with the two Amigas. This is kind of what I did with my gear. I bought a sturdy metal closet storage rack thingy at Lowes and put it in the closet. I put the PCs and Amigas on each shelf and connected them to the KVM. I use one monitor, one keyboard, and one mouse to control all seven. Now everything is out of sight and nicely stacked up taking up a tiny fraction of the space it used to. Makes my wife happy and keeps her from complaining about my insane hobbies.

Just food for thought. I think if your projects are very ambitious, you might be better off with the big box Amiga.
-David

[irishmike]

@dnelsonfl

That doesn't sound too bad.  Not sure how the Miggies will like the Flat Panel monitor I am ordering though.  Was keeping my Dell 17" CRT for use with them ;-)

Keeping the hobbies out of sight is a great diplomatic tool with the wife :-)

Thanks for the suggestion!

[dnelsonfl]

@irishmike,

The Amigas don't mind flat panels so long as you're using a display mode that the monitor can synch to. With the 3000's built-in flicker-fixer, that's never a problem. Another plus for the 3000.  
-David