I got lucky - my first A1200!

Aeberbach

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Joined
Feb 19, 2019
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258
Country
Australia
Region
Victoria
I live in a Slack channel with some other programmers and one of them saw me talking about picking up a Pentium II for some retro gaming. Remarked "I have an old Amiga around here, might be a 1200..." I said "wow wish I could get one of those" - and he said "it's yours!"

I just got it home. It's got a 68030/68882 in the trap door! Looks pretty good, though dust and dirty. Here are the boards in an imgur gallery.
https://imgur.com/5pRhWK1
https://imgur.com/BvSnf2p
https://imgur.com/hZxtLqz

There's a full-height 320MB disk inside. Looks pretty original. The case is in pretty good condition and so is the keyboard, not even particularly yellow. Did the floppy originally have two screws fastening it from the outside of the case? Might be a later mod by someone.

Right now I have no video to see whether it is all working but apparently it was last time it was turned on, a few years ago. Seems to have not been recapped. There was a little mouse poo in there so who knows whether it will go or not? But I'm pretty excited. The best Amiga I ever had was an A2500 with 68020, so this is an upgrade. Really need an Indivision AGA ...
 
Lucky indeed :)
The outside floppy screws are meant to be there , that's how the floppy is mounted in a A1200 (inside mounting point is a T-bracket).
You can use the TV modulator on your A1200 to get picture now and look for a long-term solution (Indivision, original old monitor, 15 Khz capable modern monitor/TV) later on. Clean it up a bit and give it a go.
 
Nice! I make sure everyone at work knows I'm an Amiga dork, including a Kickstart logo avatar in Slack, Gitlab and all the Atlassian tools.

Alas, no luck!
 
Very nice! It's getting much more rare that anyone parts with an old machine for free.
 
The state of things, a few weeks later...
The 344MB HD is almost certainly toast. I might try freezing it but it clicks, so...

Re-capped, floppy drive cleaned (surprise, it’s a Chinon FZ357A)
Workbench disks have errors :huh: One or two of the game disks I tried boot, so things seem OK.
DiagROM arrived and shows that everything is functioning. I can see things (in a blurry way) through composite out.
I have no monitors that can display 15kHZ - thought I might be lucky with one of the 6 CRTs in the shed but no. Ordered 23-pin to VGA because I’m going to find one.
Received clear case from Amiga On The Lake, one of the Kickstarter cases still in stock. Nice!
Painted the base tinware flat black to show off the signatures better and to cover fingerprints that wouldn’t polish out.
Received 4GB disk module that sits on the IDE header.
Waiting on arcade joystick parts and cable (I have no joystick!)
Waiting on Hyperion ROM/WB 3.1.4 set

...and I’m beginning PCB layout for a mechanical keyboard. I’m just making a simple matrix replacement for A1200 with Cherry MX.
 
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