A1200 pimping reccomendations

[mqark]

Hi, I'm a looooong time out of the scene. I've had an A500, 1200 with HDD, CDTV and a CD32 in my time. I used to know what I was doing (although I'm very rusty!).

I never had much money back in the day for accelerating, these machines weren't all owned one at a time.

Now I have money, what should my first steps be in using an A1200 these days? I'll be into bitmap art and gaming. it'd be nice to see what modern computing tasks I can get it doing.

Cheers,
Mark.

 

[ad-rs1600i]

You're in good hands here, I only just about 6 months ago got back into the Amiga scene

I'm sure others will have better advice, or more complete, but if it was my A1200 I would buy,

- Solid state compact flash card to use as a hard disk
- ACA1200 accelerator, maybe the cheaper £86 until I got properly hooked again (http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=43&products_id=1002)
- Maybe if I wanted to push the boat out a Indivision Flicker Fixer so I could output the video to a modern monitor.

Then play!!!

Adrian

PS- I have brought all the bits to bring my A600 into the 21st century, haven't actually had time to put it together yet but I too intend to play around with some bitmap images on my A600 so keep me posted what packages you discover, new or old

 

[AndyLandy]

Adrian's right on the money there:

• First off, get a 2.5 IDE to CF adapter and a suitably sized CF card (4GB is probably more than you'll ever need) and fit that to your A1200.
• If you only have Kickstart 3.0, it's probably worth upgrading to 3.1 ROMs. They give you some bugfixes and allow you to run the latest releases of Workbench if that's your thing.
• Then there's the almighty accelerator. Right now is the perfect time since some new ones have just been manufactured. Jens Schoenfeld's Individual Computers have released the new ACA 1230 in 28MHz and 56MHz flavours. Check out www.amigakit.com or www.vesalia.de to purchase yourself one of those! Alternatively, if you want to go all the way, you'll want to track down an Apollo or Blizzard 1260, or even a BlizzardPPC. For those, I'd post a Wanted ad on here. Stachu100 on here has done some wonderful things overclocking the Blizzard cards if you really want the best of the best.
• Finally, if you can get one, the Indivision AGA will allow you to use your A1200 on your modern monitors, unless you prefer the full retro experience with a telly or classic CRT monitor.

From there, the next step is to buy all the other Amiga models and fill your house to the point where you can't get in the door because of all the computers in the way... Or is that just me?

 

[Cammy]

For a much cheaper and currently available option to get a flicker-free output onto a LCD monitor, try an RGB-S-Video adapter and a LCD TV, it's what I've been using on my A1200 and A600 for a few years now. You can get them here - www.amigamaniac.com

 

[mqark]

The 2.5 IDE to CF adaptor has already been purchased even prior to having a A1200 to use it on - I knew I'd want to had some reasonable storage in there.

As for accelerators, really, what would be the benefit of going PPC? would it be an either / or arrangement when I switch to PPC for super desktop stuff (where compatible) and switch back for close to the metal games?

A scan doubler does sound good. I saw in another thread someone using an internal graphics module to get HD res output. Is this a daughter module to a accelerator or a sepetate expansion, or something that piggybacks the origional graphics chip?

 

[rkauer]

The 2.5 IDE to CF adaptor has already been purchased even prior to having a A1200 to use it on - I knew I'd want to had some reasonable storage in there.

Well done!

As for accelerators, really, what would be the benefit of going PPC? would it be an either / or arrangement when I switch to PPC for super desktop stuff (where compatible) and switch back for close to the metal games?

Benefit for PPC: hard to justify if you are into retr0 games, only useful for more modern-day tasks, as browsing & DVD stuff.

A scan doubler does sound good. I saw in another thread someone using an internal graphics module to get HD res output. Is this a daughter module to a accelerator or a sepetate expansion, or something that piggybacks the original graphics chip?

There are both available for Amiga, on the A1200 case you can have:

- an external unit, where you only can use original screen modes and little more;

- old internal units which clips over Lisa and do the same as above;

- the Indivision AGA which can have a few more graphic modes, even 1024x768 using HiGFX (a screenmode maker/promoter);

- Some video boards*, where the Amiga turns into a real blazing fast render machine.

*this subject is extensive, but you use BVision on Blizzard PPC cards and busboard add-on then a real PCI graphics card on towered Amigas.