OS Choice

[jimbro1000]

I know this isn't necessarily the best forum to ask this in, but what the heck....

I've just acquired my replacement Amiga (600HD went belly up a few weeks back) in the form of an A1200 (sans HD) sporting the 3.1 roms.

No problem in itself and from what I understand this is an ideal platform to upgrade from. The downside is that this amiga came without any (useful) disks. While I have the A600 install disk set this is of course WB2 and I would prefer to use WB3+.

I have a couple of 2.5"HDDs, one of which is just 1.3Gb (now installed in the A1200) while the other is a 4.1Gb unit.

The odds are that I'm not going to be using the machine all that much (mostly the occasional bit of coding, transferring disks and some retro gaming for the disks that are untransferable).

I could go out and buy OS3.5/OS3.9 but this seems a little extreme under the circumstances. If I want to use the 4.1Gb drive I believe I have to use at least WB3.1 and I'm pretty sure that the WB2 system would have trouble even with the 1.3Gb drive and certainily wouldn't take advantage of the improvements in the 3.1 roms.

So what do I do folks?

[oldpx]

You may try to find 3.1 system disks as adfs, transfer them to your amiga and write them to floppies. You may achieve this under os2.0 and then install 3.1 from these disks.

read the FAQs if you need asssistance on how to transfer files:
http://www.abime.net/eab/showthread.php?s=&threadid=3239

[jimbro1000]

I've been playing around with winuae for about 6 years now so I think I know how to use ADFs....on the other hand it's been a long time since I built a disk setup for communicating between PC and Amiga directly (time to go FAQ reading I guess:sleep) having a HD based setup was just so much easier....

What I was really asking is "should I use WB3.1?" or is it worth going for the more recent OS?

[fiath]

Depends on what you want to use it for really. You can get nearly to OS3.9 with freeware utils - however your machine may not be quite so stable.

I have an ethernet card, so having OS3.9 was worth the upgrade as it was cheaper than buying a TCP/IP stack on it's own!

If you just want a nice wb, it may may not be worth it. It is only a little money however...

[jimbro1000]

OK - I expect to have the initial OS problem solved by tomorrow (don't have time to tackle this now). I should have a fully working Wb3.1 installation in fairly short order.

I've tested the machine with Wb2 to check that everything does indeed work - which it does (much to my relief).

Assuming I don't really want to do all that much with it I guess that is as far as it would ever need to go. On the other hand if I was to expand the unit is there a recommended expansion path?

I'm certainly not interested in blowing serious money (racecar has to come first) but I should be able to spare a few £s here and there.

I'm guessing but the later OSs seem a little hamstrung on a stock A1200 and much as I would like a pretty WB it isn't first on foremost on my list of must-haves...