Hello there! New Amiga 1200 Owner

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craig_read

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Berkshire
I wanted to introduce myself here!

So I'm Craig, from Berkshire / Reading. I remember when I was younger, my brother and I used to go to a friends place and use their Amiga 500. It was pretty amazing to us, I also had another mate who had one, we had to make do with our BBC Micro at the time.

Anyway, after a year or so of 'missing out' we finally got an Amiga for Christmas. We got ourselves the Dynamite Pack, Amiga 1200. At first we thought there was something wrong with it till we noticed the little switch next to the video out, which cleared everything up! Anyway we spent many years enjoying this thing. Eventually we got ourselves a 40MB HDD for it, taking it to bits and fitting it was a bit nerve wracking at that age too.

I was thinking back to where my revival interest in 'retro computing' came about, and I think it was the Raspberry Pi that sparked it off, and BeebEm, wanting to play all those old games and also turning the Pi into an Archimedes using RISCOS. I had a friend with one of those too, loved that thing.

Anyway basically this got me watching youtube videos on the subject and sure enough the Amiga popped up in searches. So I started watching those, and I just got more and more drawn in. Watching Dan Wood, Nostalgia Nerd and Modern Vintage Gamer to name a few. Anyway their videos caught my imagination and before I knew it I was trawling ebay looking for a A1200. I found a few, bidded on a couple but not seriously, but I got to a point where 'home command' (as I like to call her) said "well.. you clearly want one.. why not get one?".. which was obviously the green light and that evening I found a great deal on buy it now and bought it!

While waiting for it I dug out a CF card (8GB) and bought Amiga Forever. I actually found the interface on that a bit too limiting so soon started using WinUAE with the Kickstart Roms from Amiga Forever. Using this and the licensed Workbench etc.. and my CF interface I was able to configure my CF for the Amiga before it even arrived. Using this I installed WHDLoad, a bunch of games, utilities etc.. and took an image. This I now use to test things out on.

The computer arrived, clearly owned by a smoker. So job number 1 was to clean it up and 'de-smell' it. A few hours of cleaning, with bleach in some cases, the machine was fresh and to my surprise quite white in colour. I installed the CF card and have given a few games a whirl.

The machine is an Amiga 1200, with the 1D board. It was stock apart from a clock fitted to the clock port, whose battery is now long flat. It also came with an extra floppy drive, mouse, joystick and from what I can tell an A500 PSU. It came with a complete set of WB3.0 disks, along with a couple of other utils and games.

Plans? Well.. I think from the advice I've been getting I'm looking into recapping the thing first. Then I'll move onto an accelerator and AGA card for DVI out (I'm finding the screen downstairs although working on scart is shifted to the left, and isn't adjustable). I'd like DVI / HDMI out to my AVR downstairs for easy integration in the future! I'll also be sourcing some 3.5" disks for it, and I've got a PCMCIA 16bit network card on the way. I am hoping I can FTP things on and off of it for the most part. I might also invest in a PCMCIA CF card reader and transfer some files that way as well.

Well I think that's all for now!
Thanks

Craig

- - - Updated - - -

Recommendation of re-capping services, that are local to Berkshire / Reading would be appreciated, if anyone knows of any please let me know.

Thank you

Craig
 
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Hello and welcome! This Amiga bug can become addictive quite quickly but you are in the right place to feed your new habit!

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk
 
Hi and welcome to the site.

Regarding the DVI out, I presume you're talking about the Indivision (AGA MkII)? I'd suggest you rather look at OSSC:
https://www.videogameperfection.com/products/open-source-converter/

While it is slightly more expensive, OSSC will give you a much better picture quality with good scanline emulation, smooth 50 Hz motion with no latency so it is very nice for gaming as well as WB stuff and since it is external, you can use it with any other Amiga or other RGB-equipped retro machine that you might have. And when people get their first Amiga it usually doesn't take long until they want a few more of them. :)

Also, the firmware on OSSC is still being improved regularly while Indivision hasn't seen any updates in years and probably never will again.

Only downside to OSSC is that it will not work with various custom modes like HighGfx and Xtreme which can provide higher resolutions but is made for PAL and NTSC signals.
 
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