My Amiga A1200 Project

[lsvleisure]

HI ALL, i'm new to the site, my name is Nick, after looking on here at all the different A1200 Desktop projects i've decided to get on the band wagon and begin my own project, i'd like to create the internal CD-ROM drive and HDD, and accellerate the system as much as poss..
I've always loved Amiga's and think that they'll break outta the darkness again and take over from PC's & MAC's.

[SteveSMS]

Hey! Welcome to A.Org!

Good luck on the 1200. I'm sure it will turn out to be a very nice machine

[Hyperspeed]

In the late nineties it became popular to rip out the innards of the A1200 desktop and put them into a tower.

It is possible to put a PowerPC and BVision GFX card into a desktop along with hard disk, USB etc. I think the classic case should be appreciated more and good ideas used to miniaturise everything you need into the small wedge case!

Please post pics when your project is complete.

:-)

[lsvleisure]

I shall post pics when completed and also in parts with my progress, no doubt i'll be asking you all for advice and help in the process heh..

[Hyperspeed]

Don't forget one of these -->

[lsvleisure]

Thanks mate, I thought I might need one or two of them lol but wasn't sure..

[lsvleisure]

This is a pic of what i'm aiming for (artistic impression)..

[Linchpin]

Looks good... seen a few black a1200's pictures before now, i prefer the colour to the White standard vanilla base, however the one thing i always think lets it down is the use of the standard white keyboard... obviosly this is a harder hurdle to overcome but I know if I was going to do this "mod" id be looking at colouring the keycaps (paint?) and adding new stick on key labels to it.... not sure how easy this would be.

[Donar]

People normally rip a CDTV Keyboard apart for getting the black Keycaps...

[Linchpin]

if you can find one...

[Hyperspeed]

Yes, the CDTV keyboard is a lovely black with white lettering. The only difference is that the blank keys (to the left of Enter and to the right of Left-Shift) are now merged to make a bigger Enter and Shift. No great loss unless someone had somehow mapped these spare keys for Euro symbols or something.

I don't know whether the CDTV keyboard can be directly replaced i.e. if it has a ribbon like on the A1200 motherboard but popping the keys off is a good excuse to have a spring clean anyway.




On a black A1200 though I think the H.Disk should be a cool solid state flash drive in the 2.5" cradle and be accompanied by a glowing blue LED!

Maybe the embossed AMIGA logo could be silver?

A black Wizard 560-dpi mouse or a PC mouse on a Cocolino would round things off nicely.

:-D

[lsvleisure]

Update and request, okay so far i've spent about £100 on this project and more to go heh, I got a perfect condition A1200, slim-line CD-ROM drive, Hard Drive.....

Now does anyone know where I can get an memory expansion card??  Either a simple RAM expansion or a Blizzard or Apollo card??

Long shot I know...

[Hyperspeed]

Try searching eBay.co.uk if you're in the UK.

I would go for an accelerator over a plain RAM board. A good starter board is the Blizzard 1230-IV but for all round multimedia capability I'd go for the Blizzard 1260.

[bilbo1968]

Just Out of interest what sort of percentage speed increase would a blizzard board make to a standard A1200 Please - Thank you in advance

[Hyperspeed]

If you take MIPS as an indicator:

1) A1200:1.33 MIPS
2) A1200 + Blizzard 1230-IV/FPU: 9.91 MIPS
3) A1200 + Blizzard 1240/T: 19 MIPS
4) A1200 + Blizzard 1260: 38.72 MIPS

1) ·
2) ··········
3) ···················
4) ·······································

These are figures I seem to remember from an old Gordon Harwood advert for the boards (possibly an AIBB test).


Many people will moan that MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second) is a pointless exercise but it does give an indicator when the same test and benchmark tool is used on the same systems (a fair experiment). However there are other ways to determine the effiency of a system and extra Fast Mem alone can double the speed of a stock A1200.

Here are SysInfo MIPS readings for:

a) DKB Cobra '030/FPU - 13.05 MIPS
b) Apollo 040/40 - 28.84 MIPS
c) Blizzard 1260/50 - 65.16 MIPS

As you can probably work out now each succesive CPU is approximately double the speed of the previous when used with a 40 to 50Mhz oscillator.

An '030 board is probably the biggest upgrade jump an A1200 owner will notice as a 14Mhz 68EC020 to a full 50Mhz 68030 is a huge 7x increase in speed when used with memory and FPU. Workbench, games and apps don't at first appear to be faster when you install an '040 or '060 board. You'll only notice these boards kicking in when you play MP3, MPG, surf the web or anything that needs horsepower.

A graphics card would have made the ideal companion upgrade for '030 accelerators but they weren't made for non big-box Amigas at the time.