Hi all....but not my first post - A1200 Tower Project

[LordSpunky]

I never introduced myself before I jumped right in and opening a thread in the AmigaOS 4x forum.
My first computer was a Dragon 32, followed by a C64, I dreamt of the day I could own an Amiga and got a secondhand, A500. Years later I bought an Amiga Inc A1200 from Tandy for the knock down price of £100 [after Escom went bust?]. I was dragged into the PC Windows forum in 1999.
In 2008 to spite Vista I turned Apple......and after buying my iMac I was thrilled....but I still miss that Amiga....

........so here I am, armed with my A1200 which a very small HDD, and a 8MB card I found in a skip stuck in the trapdoor. I run WorkBench 3.1 with no CDRom and my knowledge of how to do things 'Amiga' has long been drunk and smoked away.

I want to stick my A1200 in a tower, get a bigger HDD, CDROM, PCI Card, Get a voodoo in it, get it connected to my ethernet and maybe run WB 3.9 / 4.0. I want to do what I always wanted to do just before I got my first PC in 1999. When I was the last person in my college to have an Amiga and not have a PC, I want to make it powerful and cool.
I've got a CD32....I always thought you could use it as a CDROM for the A1200?
How much is all this going to cost and what is the limit?

Cheers folks

Tristan

AKA Lord Spunky .... but you can call me Spunky

[Karlos]

Hi,

If you want to heavily upgrade your A1200, be prepared to shell out some serious cash. Some stuff you can get relatively inexpensively, the case, hard drives, CD etc.

The most expensive component you are going to need is an accelerator card. You'll need one if you want to get the most out of OS3.x, moreover, if you want to run OS4 (and MorphOS), you'll need a BlizzardPPC. These things can be very expensive. If you want to use a PCI graphics card like a voodoo, you'll need a PCI bus board. The Mediator 1200 is your best bet, or, if you get a BlizzardPPC and you can find one, the GRexx (though I don't think this is supported in OS4).

For ethernet, you have several options. You can get a PCI network card for your Mediator/GRexx or if you haven't taken that route (yet), there are many old PCMCIA network cards that can be used.

My main A1200 doesn't have any sort of PCI expansion bus board fitted so I'm using a PCMCIA network card and it is perfectly adequate I find.

If you just want to experience a powerful amiga with networking, graphics card etc, right out of the box, you could just use UAE on your mac. Then you can keep your A1200 as a retrogaming machine, if you prefer.

[NovaCoder]

If you just want to experience a powerful amiga with networking, graphics card etc, right out of the box, you could just use UAE on your mac. Then you can keep your A1200 as a retrogaming machine, if you prefer.

This is good advice.

Expanding a 1200 these days is a waste of time/money (IMHO), either keep it standard with a few little updates (eg CF HD & IndivisionAGA) and use it as a games machine or get a new(er) machine and run your choice of Amiga OS flavour (or just WinUAE).

[Buzzfuzz]

Like Karlos said, it's going to cost a hell of a lot to get a Blizzard 060 PPC.
You can expect anything between 300-800 euro's, depending on how fast the PPC is and maybe Vision card included.
 
It's better to do little upgrades on the Amiga 1200, like a Blizzard 1230IV @ 50 Mhz, these will do around 150 euro's.
Get a CF card adapter and stick a 4/8GB CF in it.
CC-Reset fix is handy and it could be handy to install some small fans to cool the Blizzard a bit as there is no room for heatsink or anything.
I screwed 2 Scythe Mini Kaze LED fans in there, they are 40mm/40mm/10mm.
Give a bit of power with an ATX conversion cable and ATX power supply and you should be good.
 
I recommend upgrading an A4000 for 0S4.1 and 3.9 is do-able on A1200 with a Blizzard 1230IV.
But for OS4.1 you really need a PPC, so in the case of an A4000 a Cyberstorm 060 or PPC.
You could also forget about all of the above and go for an Amiga One X1000

[Karlos]

As far as I know, you can only run OS4.0 on classic machines, A4000 included. To run 4.1, you'll require either an A1, Micro A1, Sam, Sam Flex, Pegasos 2 or the upcoming X1000.

Classic PPC machines are a bit crippled, since even for the class of PPC processor they have, the memory interface, absence of L2 cache and generally slow performance of all the legacy buses make for a less than stellar experience.

[LordSpunky]

hmmmm like this? Buzz
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Amiga-1200-BLIZZARD-1230-IV-68030-Accellerator-8MB-/180504060672?cmd=ViewItem&pt=UK_VintageComputing_RL&hash=item2a06e16300

And also sounds really dumb question, when booted from HDD, into WB and i put a floppy in, I cant load a game, but when I ctrl A A it loads floppy?

[Karlos]

hmmmm like this? Buzz
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Amiga-1200-BLIZZARD-1230-IV-68030-Accellerator-8MB-/180504060672?cmd=ViewItem&pt=UK_VintageComputing_RL&hash=item2a06e16300

And also sounds really dumb question, when booted from HDD, into WB and i put a floppy in, I cant load a game, but when I ctrl A A it loads floppy?

Your problem there is that the game you are playing is probably designed to boot straight from floppy disk and doesn't have any HD installer.

There is a very nice system called WHDLoad which is a modular HD installer for countless such games. It basically allows you to install hundreds of old titles to your hard disk, patching them in the process such that you can (usually) exit back to workbench once you've had your fill.

-edit-

Regarding the above accelerator card, the Blizzard 1230-IV was one of the finest 68030 accelerator cards for the A1200. Excellent software compatibility and generally about 8x faster than a bare A1200 (for integer) and many times faster for floating point (with the FPU already installed) when running at 50MHz.

[LordSpunky]

One assumes, if I get the CF mod I can get WHD to the flash card? Or connect the Card to a PC and download games onto it?

[Karlos]

One assumes, if I get the CF mod I can get WHD to the flash card? Or connect the Card to a PC and download games onto it?

At the end of the day, whatever storage device you have attached to your onboard IDE counts as your hard disk, so if you are using a flash memory drive replacement, yes.

As for installation, well, the WHDload installers generally work by reading the original floppy disks, many of which had all kinds of strange layouts.

[Cammy]

Don't rush out and buy anything without thinking it through first. Just use your A1200 a bit before you decide what to do with it. With 8MB Fast RAM in your A1200, it's already quite capable of running all WHDLoad games as well as most programs and ultilities available. If I were in your position, this is the smartest thing I would do:

Keep the A1200 with 8MB RAM as your retro-gaming, classic applications machine. Take it apart and clean it if it's dirty, they can look brand new again if you use the Retr0Bright formula.

Experiment with Aros and UAE on your Mac. Go for one of the pre-installed packs like AmiKit for UAE and Icaros for Aros, which both come full of programs, utilities and games to try out, and will give you a good idea of how current the classic AmigaOS has become.

Get yourself either a G4 MacMini or a brand new Sam440/460 and install MorphOS 2.4 or AmigaOS 4.1. Either one of these computers, along with a copy of these brand new operating systems, will cost you far, far less than it would for you to upgrade an A1200 to the point where it can run earlier versions of these OSs, and both of these new machines will do the job much faster and more reliably, plus you'd be contributing back to current Amiga developers.

For your A1200, I'd recommend replacing the hard drive with a cheap IDE-CF adapter and a 4-8GB Compact Flash card, get a PCMCIA CF or SD card reader, and a PCMCIA Ethernet/Wireless card that's compatible with the Amiga. All these bits are cheap on eBay or other online shops, and with your A1200 the way it is you can still use it for a whole heap of cool things, I used mine for years like this and discovered that it's a lot more useful than many people make them out to me.

[gertsy]

Well Spunky, Welcome, and I think you've got some sound advice here. Use your A1200 to do what it was designed for. If you want anything new or faster UAE is the way to go.

Gertsy.

[LordSpunky]

Thanks guys and girls, some good advice - I think my first port of call  will be as Cammy said to get myself a IDE-CF adapter and reinstall WB3.1  or 3.9 [if i can find a copy] onto that and get myself a PCMCIA  ethernet adapter [amigakit?].
How about a CD-Rom drive? If I have used the PCMCIA port for ethernet  how does that work? There seems to be a spare IDE port on the  motherboard under the metal shield and does it have to be one for an  Amiga?

Cheers Spunky

[Karlos]

Thanks guys and girls, some good advice - I think my first port of call  will be as Cammy said to get myself a IDE-CF adapter and reinstall WB3.1  or 3.9 [if i can find a copy] onto that and get myself a PCMCIA  ethernet adapter [amigakit?].
How about a CD-Rom drive? If I have used the PCMCIA port for ethernet  how does that work? There seems to be a spare IDE port on the  motherboard under the metal shield and does it have to be one for an  Amiga?

Cheers Spunky

The motherboard IDE was designed to support a single 2.5 inch IDE hard disk on a short cable. It doesn't use any signal buffering. That said, I have used a 3.5 inch HD on mine with a 30cm 44 -> 40 way ribbon cable for over 15 years without any problems.

Theoretically you can use 2 IDE devices on there but you are starting to push your luck. There are buffered interfaces that plug onto the motherboard IDE and provide a pair of standard 40 pin headers for IDE cables.

I used to use a PCMCIA CDRom interface. A year ago or so I swapped it for a PCMCIA ethernet card. I really haven't missed it. If I need to access a CD, I just put the CD in a different machine and copy files over the network.

[LordSpunky]

Good point regarding cd files over network.....how good does the amiga network with win / mac?

[Karlos]

Good point regarding cd files over network.....how good does the amiga network with win / mac?

I use linux on my PC predominantly. I have a samba share on there which is accessible from my amiga machines using smbfs. All works fine for me.