Planning new A1200 purchase, any must have upgrades?

[pkupcik]

Hi,

I'm going to be buying A1200 primarily to use for games. Are there any  must have, or recommended upgrades that I should consider. I already  settled on the Indivision AGA scan doubler, but have not yet decided on  anything else. Please provide your opinion on what do you think makes  sense for gaming, possibly to support decent performance in workbench  when using high resolutions and the Indivision AGA scan doubler.

Here are some of the items I can think of, but am not really sure and  would appreciate your opinion, advice. Whatever upgrade I do I want to  make sure that games still play correctly and I don't have any ugly  components hanging out the back of the Amiga.

CPU Upgrade - is this easy, how would I benefit from it.
GPU Upgrade - is it possible, easy, what is it good for.
Memory Upgrade - why, how much more memory
Flash Storage - This one is probably a must have. What's the recommended  solution here that's user friendly and makes it easy to load games,  applications from PC onto Flash and easily load the games into the  memory. I'm not interested in HDD solutions.

Anything else I'm missing. The only reason I would upgrade to anything  is, because it can offer some tangible speed, feature benefits, or  simply because it's cheap enough to do and I better do it now than in  the future when parts may no longer be available. I'm hoping not to  spend more than $500 for upgrades.

If there are some good articles that already talk about it, please post  them and I'll do my reading.

I will be probably ordering everything from AmigaKit, so if they stock  some of these parts the better.

Thank you.

[pan1k]

Get the 030 board, Indivision, and a PCMCIA-> CF Card.. and perhaps a flash-based HD solution.

The PCMCIA -> CF card makes it easy to transfer games, and the flash -based HD will let you run WHDLOAD games.. no more floppies! the 030 isn't essential to games though, it is nice to have!

[amigakit]

Here are some of the items we stock:

EasyADF PCMCIA Transfer Kit (we offer 128MB or 4096MB compatible CF card options)

4Gb CF IDE hard disk (Sandisk brand)

We also have 68030 accelerators in stock and Competition Pro joysticks

In the past we have installed Subway USB ports in a desktop case:

[pkupcik]

We also have 68030 accelerators in stock

Amigakit,
can you please point me to the specific 68030 accelerator on your website. I found "E-Matrix 1230/40Mhz Accelerator ", but that looks like it goes into the PCMCI socket, which means I wouldn't be able to use the Flash PCMI adaptor, correct. Unless I simply plug, unplug them as needed. Is there maybe some other accelerator, CPU upgrade I missed. Is there maybe such a thing as simply replacing the CPU on the motherboard? I found 68040 on your site, can that be used? Forgive my confusion about this.

Thank you.

[voyager]

No that one is going into the trapdoor, it is PCMCIA friendly meaning you can still use the PCMCIA slot.

[pkupcik]

No that one is going into the trapdoor, it is PCMCIA friendly meaning you can still use the PCMCIA slot.

Got it. I think I got confused when I read that it's PCMCI compatible, it meant I can still use PCMCI and not that it uses PCMI.

[runequester]

An 030 or similar will help with some app's and a few games, like alien breed 3D

Other than that, for games, you wont need a lot. A lot of people swear by WHDload, so a hard drive and RAM expansion will be worth it for that.

If you go with floppies for games, get an external disk drive

[Cammy]

Just as others have mentioned here, the best things to add to an A1200 are:

8MB RAM/FPU/RTC card or 020/030 accelerator with at least 8MB RAM
4GB CF card on a CF-IDE adapter formatted with Workbench 3.1 on it
PCMCIA card reader, either SD or CF (remember SD cards are limited to 2GB each as SDHC isn't supported yet, but are cheaper than CF)
PCMCIA network card, either wireless or ethernet
CD32-compatible control pad or at least a Sega MasterSystem or MegaDrive/Genesis pad (which the Amiga uses as a 2-button pad)
Subway USB card
USB Missile Launcher
USB card reader

There's not much else you really need to add after that. There are no GPU upgrades unless you buy an expensive PCI expansion bus board with a PCI graphics card, but this requires you to put the A1200 inside a tower case and relocate everything, essentially turning the A1200 into a PC. No games will use the GPU on the card, nothing will really. It'll just give more colours in Workbench and let you run RTG software which honestly runs a hundred times faster on an emulated system anyway.

[Karlos]

If you are going for an 020/030 accelerator card you might as well shove as much RAM on it as you can manage within your budget.

Though you might not need it for retrogaming , you'll invariably find a use for it, especially if you start to play with music / graphics software.

[Cammy]

Yeah, with RAM being so cheap these days it's not a bad idea just to get the maximum the board supports. With 32MB RAM, there is only one time it ever runs low, when I'm using my Ram Disk for buffering 24bit images I'm processing in Image Studio and I go through too many images without flushing the buffer every now and then. Of course Image Studio can use the HDD for buffering too, but I just like the speed of the Ram Disk.

Those E-Matrix cards support a maximum of 32MB, so that should be fine. I'd definitely get the 32 over the 16 that comes with it.

[Karlos]

I did originally think I'd overdone it when I put 256MB in my A1200, but one use I have for that is having my OS in RAD. I have several OS "snapshots" that I can choose from on cold boot, then all subsequent warm resets run from a 32MB RAD. It's quite nippy.

Not many amiga applications can make heavy use, though photogenics is one. Ports of old PC games can be quite memory hungry though.

Will be interesting to see what people do with these new ZorRAM jobs in their big box machines.

[Cammy]

Hey, that RAD disk idea is pretty rad, if I ever upgrade to 64 or 128MB in my A1200 I'll give that a go.

I just remembered, anyone getting an accelerator must definitely get 32MB minimum if they want to play Total Chaos AGA! That's got to be one of the biggest Amiga-only games, and it's definitely worth the upgrade to give it a go.

[Karlos]

I mostly did it to speed up rebooting. I did tend to crash the system a fair bit when testing some of my more unusual ideas

[whiteb]

I mostly did it to speed up rebooting. I did tend to crash the system a fair bit when testing some of my more unusual ideas

Does RAD: have a Higher priority than the HDD at boot ? Or did you have to have the Mount List for the RAD: device defining a higher priority than devices on SCSI.device ?

My A1200 has a 64MB simm on my DKB Cobra. (and a 4GB CF card).

[drewz21]

In my sig, you will see my A1200 upgrades.  I have purchased these items from both AmigaKit.com and Softhut.com.