How much is an A1200 really worth?

[scumble]

It has been a while since I last dug out my old Amiga 500 Plus, and now I am looking at A1200 systems again. I've been a bit cautious with this as these machines seem to go for upwards of 50 quid, especially if they have accelerators installed.

I suppose the question is, what can particular specs of A1200s do? If you have, say, something like this which I guess is at the top end of what you can get into the standard case, what are you going to be able to run on it?

Most likely I'll be happy with a basic A1200 for a spot of gaming and working with tracker files, and I can use an old 2.5" HD from a dead laptop with it.

I suppose another thing I'd like to know from those with experience is, how usable are the VGA modes? I've tried them on the A500 Plus and they are a bit of a joke to be honest. Can the A1200 do it much better? Can it do, say, 640x480 as fast as the A500 does 640x256?

I think some answers in some of these areas might help me decide whether I want to put 60 odd quid aside to purchase a 15-year old computer...

[McVenco]

If you only want to play games and do some tracker stuff, you could do very well with a standard A1200 with 4MB Fast RAM and a harddrive. If you don't mind a bit of yellowing you should be able to grab one on Ebay for under 50 Euro.

If you don't want the hassle of playing games from floppydisks, you should consider adding a 68030 turboboard and install WHDLoad. The best card you can get is the Blizzard 1230 Mk.IV, but they tend to be rather expensive. Look for an Apollo or GVP card with an 68030 at some 25 to 30 MHz, those will do the trick just as well and are a lot cheaper usually.

[Theoryboy]

Just been down this road,

I paid €32 for my A1200 with a squirrel pcmcia scsi adapter and a cdrom. Not too yellow but I got a white a1200 case for €1.50 and I am keeping an eye out for a white keyboard.

I then wanted to run WB 3.1 and above so I needed to get KS 3.1 (about €20 inc delivery)

And I got a 030 50Mhz Blizzard for about €100 with 32MB ram

WinUAE proved very useful in setting up my HD with WB3.1 and other software. Just got to do a few other things like whdload and find my old stash of octamed files.

[Kronos]

scumble wrote:
 Can it do, say, 640x480 as fast as the A500 does 640x256?

Sure, as long as you stay with 4Bit (16 colors).

8Bit (256 colors) should still be faster than an A500 doing ECS-modes in 2Bit, but you'll feel the difference between 4 and 8 bit.

[scumble]

If you don't want the hassle of playing games from floppydisks, you should consider adding a 68030 turboboard and install WHDLoad.

For A500 games I seem to be doing ok running WHDLoad on the A500. The Alfa interface has 4MB of fast RAM installed, which probably helps. I was glad to get a HD copy of Turrican 2 because since I physically destroyed my original floppy, I haven't been able to get it in a form to play from the Amiga itself. I don't know how other games will perform though.

Is this maybe more of an issue with some of the later AGA games?

[murple]

After overpaying for an A1200 on ebay, my advice is to order one from AmigaKit.com for $150-200 depending on extras. Skip the power supply as you can use your 500's (and save a bit of money on the order). Also skip the hard drive, buy a 4gig on ebay for $5. Look on their site for "built to order refurbished" Amiga 1200s.

[motrucker]

Believe it or not, with the '060 it isn't going to be a very good game machine. You're better off with an '030 card.
It all depends on what software you want to run however. If you want to do graphics work, and run Image FX, paint prgs, etc. Then the '060 is needed, and a graphics card (not easy in a desktop A1200).
For games, a besic system with an '030 and 16Mb of RAM will give you eons of fun...

[scumble]

murple wrote:
After overpaying for an A1200 on ebay, my advice is to order one from AmigaKit.com for $150-200 depending on extras. Skip the power supply as you can use your 500's (and save a bit of money on the order). Also skip the hard drive, buy a 4gig on ebay for $5. Look on their site for "built to order refurbished" Amiga 1200s.

Yes, I noticed the banner ads. I have a 6 gig drive from a dead laptop which will do the trick for storage, so that's covered. The only other thing I'd be interested in is a wireless network card.

[leirbag28]

@scumble

I suppose another thing I'd like to know from those with experience is, how usable are the VGA modes? I've tried them on the A500 Plus and they are a bit of a joke to be honest. Can the A1200 do it much better? Can it do, say, 640x480 as fast as the A500 does 640x256?
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YES!  pretty much........I would especially recommend DblNTSC mode or DblPAL if your in UK. These are 2 of the most coolest screen modes Commodore ever invented............its basically exactly NTSC or PAL dimensions Scan Doubled to VGA............which means your gfx wont look funny or out of shape in accordance to your regular Amiga interlaced screen modes (640x400 NTSC or 640 x 512 PAL)

You can also run 640 x 480 VGA/Productivity/Multiscan modes and it will run very well in 64 or 128 colrs if you have a 68030 50Mhz processor.

Get ToolsDaemon (Amiga's START menu) and Magic menu (Makes Tools Daemon look good) and your off to executing files immediately without having to open drawers and look for programs.

[amigean]

how much is *anything* really worth:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand