I just bought an A1200!!!!

Yipeee!!!

It only cost me £15 as well.  It looks like brand new, and works perfectly.

So, now I need to tower the thing up in a cheap ATX case, and start adding bits to it for fun.

Where do I start?

[patrik]

You could always skip the tower part and try to fit as much as possible in the standard A1200 case . In the old days towered A1200s were very unusual, nowadays A1200s in their original cases are the unusual ones .


/Patrik

[mauma]

You could start with a nice tower and a power-supply

The original power supply can't provide enough power to expansions.

Do you already have a HardDrive and a CD-ROM drive?

[Vincent]

Get the important things first - hard drive, cd-rom and most of all, an accelerator.  Oh, and some ram aswell :-)

The hd and cd drives can comfortably sit outside the original A1200 desktop case with the help of an ide interface (which you should get with the cd drive anyway).  I had mine like that for years, until I got a tower in January :-D

[Jiffy]

Are you sure to tower it up? I prefer the standard A1200 casing, together with a SCSI-tower for the external drives. I find it the 'prettier' solution.

Important things to upgrade:
- turbocard with extra ram;
- reasonably sized harddisk;
- cdromdrive.

Make a choice between IDE and SCSI to hook up external drives before you buy a turbocard. Some turbocard come with SCSI as standard, some have it optional, some don't have it at all.

There are many more things which you can buy for your A1200, but that depends on the amount of money you want to invest: I/O-cards, soundcards, networkcard, PCI- or Zorroboards, etc.

I want IDE as it's cheaper.

I have ATAPI CDRW and DVD-ROM drives and an UDMA33 hard drive that can go in it.  

-edit
I remember from my last a1200 ten years ago, that I had to use a 2.5in to 3.5in IDE adaptor.  Is this the best choice now, or can I by a UDMA IDE IO card? (A PCI card to put in a mediator maybe?)
-end of edit

What accelerator would be best? an 060+PPC I would assume, but which one?  Do these cards take SIMMS or DIMMS?

How do I modify an ATX case to fit it all in?

My commodore multisync that could display pal and vga signals blew up years ago (it was a 1960 i think).  To run it off a vga monitor i presume i'd need an SD and FF.  Again which one to choose?

Or If I want a gfx instead of the SD/FF combo, would it be better to buy a mediator and a cheap pci gfx card?  Again which one?

Is there anything i've forgot?

How about ethernet?  Is PCMCIA best, or PCI NE2K on a mediator?

[Jaruzel]

I've been re-casing my A1200 over thep ast 2 months, bit by bit as time allows.

I decided that a Mediator wasn't worth the money what with the impending A1 boards, and as long as I got a Scan Doubler, I'd be ok in the short term.

So, not wanting a Mediator, meant I could put it into a desktop case, and I had an old Sun Sparc20 case lying around that would do the job.  I can safely say that it HAS done the job and looks absolutley spiffing. :-)

You'll definately need another PSU though, and this is where I had my most major hurdle, because I was using a deskop case, the PSU is outboard, and PC PSUs arn't really that safe un boxed, So I ended up completely stripping down a PC PSU, and reboxing it using the existing Amiga Power cables and switch! It looks OK, but not what I had originally planned.

Good luck with your rebuild, I've really enjoyed mine, I hope you enjoy yours.

-Jar.

Jaruzel wrote:
I've been re-casing my A1200 over thep ast 2 months, bit by bit as time allows.

I decided that a Mediator wasn't worth the money what with the impending A1 boards, and as long as I got a Scan Doubler, I'd be ok in the short term.

So, not wanting a Mediator, meant I could put it into a desktop case, and I had an old Sun Sparc20 case lying around that would do the job.  I can safely say that it HAS done the job and looks absolutley spiffing. :-)

You'll definately need another PSU though, and this is where I had my most major hurdle, because I was using a deskop case, the PSU is outboard, and PC PSUs arn't really that safe un boxed, So I ended up completely stripping down a PC PSU, and reboxing it using the existing Amiga Power cables and switch! It looks OK, but not what I had originally planned.

Good luck with your rebuild, I've really enjoyed mine, I hope you enjoy yours.

-Jar.

I'm getting a Pegasos 2 so I'm intersted in running AOS4 on the 1200.  Should I get a 060+CSPPC?

[lorddef]

So, not wanting a Mediator, meant I could put it into a desktop case, and I had an old Sun Sparc20 case lying around that would do the job. I can safely say that it HAS done the job and looks absolutley spiffing.

Be nice to see some pics of that  :-)

[amigamad]

£15 pound i only paid 30 pound for an unused 8 month old machine that has a mint condition and  boxed not even the mouse had been used that was about 2 years ago. last year i got an a1200 that worked it was fitted with a 100mb 3.5 inch hd with the lead to do 44 to 40 pin clock pins had been cut off though it came in a large box with books 2 psu,s an external cd rom but no scsi connector a b+w hand scanner some amiga cds some dodgy discs they had copyright stuff on a citizen printer color dot matrix plus a load of other junk and it cost me only £5 pound from a car boot .

[Jaruzel]

@amigamad
I think £15 is a bloody good deal for a working A1200. Anything upto £30 is worth paying, especially if it's got a HDD in it (the bracket and cable, are worth the extra cash alone I think).

@mdma
I think AOS4 is only PPC based, Legacy 68k cpus are out of luck.

@lorddef
I've been taking pics as I go along, and I hope to get to a point shortly where I can display the whole project,  start to finish.

-Jar.

@mdma
I think AOS4 is only PPC based, Legacy 68k cpus are out of luck.

Hence my asking about CSPPC.

[amigamad]

get a tower case power tower is a nice looking case compared to my old eyetech full tower ppc cards are expensive one just sold on ebay for 175 pound with blizzard graphics card it was th 160 mhz with an 040.
buffered ide interface from eyetech or power computing is the best way to connect drive should cost around 15 to 20 pound from eyetech dont trust there prices on there site as in my total amiga magazine most of the prices are cheaper.you could get os 3.5 buy it now off of ebay inclusive of postage comes from germany  for 9.99 link here os 3.5

Ive had a cd of of them and they are very quick to deliver it seems to be from these people www.schatztruhe.de  famous german amiga software seller :-D

[amigamad]

@Jaruzel

yeah true but i had a working a1200 for £5 pound with 3.5 hard drive  fitted plus abox load of other stuff. ;-)  :-D

[MarkTime]

@mdma

I'm confused...don't you mean bppc (Blizzard)
cyberstorm won't work with an A1200, afaik, that requires an A4000

no one knows, definatively, right now whether the ppc expansion for the A1200 will be supported by AOS4, we've gone to 99% sure to they are evaluating the idea now, using an e-mail survey.  But its only for current owners...not people like you and me with A1200's that were going to add ppc support later.