Hello from Northampton UK!
 

Hi there!

Long time Amiga fan, long time lurker here too :)

I was very privaledged when I was ten years old to be given an A600 for Christmas.

Later in life i picked up a 1200 on fleabay for about 50 quid and got a bargain on a Blizzard 1260 with 32mb ram (paid £130 in 2007 iirc) its a first edition, so runs a bit warm (blazing hot before I did a casemod, more on that later) but never had problems with it.

Recently I decided it was time to bring out the beast and it's now permanently set up with it's own desk and LCD TV in our "snug" room :)

On christmas day I bought a WHDLoad license (thanks to Bert for sending my keys on Boxing Day!!!)

In the last month i spent a a ton or two with Amikit.co.uk and added a FastATA Mk IV, and a CF card with adapter along with buying a new mouse and joypad. I'm also in the process of sourcing a better laptop cd drive to ide adapter with a proper master/slave switch, as the one from Maplins does NOT (despite it's description) have it :(

currently mods to the original desktop case are as follows:
Slot cut on rear (pcmcia side) for slot loading DVD drive. It's fitted and is powered but need the ide adapter.
Slot cut under floppy drive for CF drive swapping, it's quite well hidden :)
trap door around 1260 has a hole cut to fit a modified heat sink that sits flush with the base of the case... front bottom and top rear vents sealed so a cpu fan placed in middle inside can suck air out the top and in through the bottom where the 1260 heatsink is.... this works a treat and the early 1260 model has gone from too hot to touch to luke warm ;)

bought some extra rubber feet and stuck them on the original feet to raise the unit off the table another 5mm for increased air flow to the 1260.

have converted a 250w atx psu to amiga by using a square connector of my old broken A600 psu. Need to rig a switch to the "shield" wire as i've got that hooked to the power on signal line of the psu, so atm i need to unlug the square connector to turn things off. the psu has no switch and i hate having to bend down under the desk anyway, always hated that about the amiga psu too!

oh i've re routed some power supply wiring inside too so the floppy power isn't in use (would never power the dvd drive and floppy at once anyway)

Future upgrades/planned mods:
Indivision AGA as soon as amikit recieve new stock (have money saved ready)
Usb.


I've tried to keep all mods as descrete as possible... the only giveaway that it's a monster, is the cpu fan noise when glanced at and even then it's pretty quiet.

I'd love an 060 PPC to get AOS4 running but having seen how expensive they are these days, i'd have better luck holding out for the Dragon Coldfire.... wait, whatever happened to that anyway? :blased



when i can be bothered or need to open her up again i'll take some piccies of her internals, and i'll take some pics of the outside and some benchmarks for those interested :)


Greetings!

Hello from another Northamptonian, and welcome to EAB! :)

small world!

awesome, and thanks :)

I'm currently typing this from my trusty 1200 using Aweb :D

Aweb is total pants though and i can't get Ibrowse to work. Just fails at launch :(


Will do some more digging from my windows machine!

well i got iBrowse working, it's much better :) may have to go ahead and register it at some point too

the font is a but too large for my tastes on the webpages and some of the formatting doesn't come through properly but it's tolerable!

now to sort out the other programs that dont seem to work properly. Amisys4 AGA seems to have a few bugs but i'm working through them one by one :)

Hi & welcome to EAB, PM on the way about IBrowse registration ;)

Thanks! and err, ok! ;)

Hi Diablo, and welcome to EAB! :great

When you make statements like that, please describe how you got it working for other forum users (that is, if you know what actually did the trick, of course ;)).

BTW, I hope you'll be posting in the Hardware mods or Hardware pics forum when you have those internal piccies to hand.

Well to be honest all i did was download and reinstall iBrowse over the current installation so I didn't really think it worth mentioning.

It seems alot of things have been broken by the AmigaSYS installation. Either that or i cocked something up! hehe


RE: Photos, Of course! :)


I'm thinking about attempting an AmiKit installation on another partition. Wonder if the 060 with only 32mb fastram would keep up with it though? i also wonder if it'll look gash in 256 colours. food for thought!

Sometimes that's all it takes to fix a problem. :nuts However, it's still worth mentioning so that users aren't left wondering.

Please, report any problems you've had with AmigaSYS installation in the AmigaSYS forum. It may be a while before you get a response, but it will help both you and AmigaSYS to put things right.

That's the spirit! :great

AmiKit is for high-end systems, of course, and your 060 fits the bill, but 32MB memory is pushing it a bit. Add 64MB, 128MB or even 256MB memory to your wish list soon. ;)

Finally, I know your introduction thread got of to a slow start, but thanks for sticking with it. :) It's developing nicely now, but so many new members come here and post just once and then disappear for good when they don't get an instant reply. :rolleyes

typing on my miggy in iBrowse so CBA replying and quoting in the nice and sensible fashion you have :P

RE: AmiSYS - will do if I can recreate the problem, there is however the issue of my FastATA mk IV that is causing me a serious headache but I'll put a thread in the relevant slot for that ;)

RE: Amigakit RAM - would love to find a single sided sodimm (or should that be simm?) that will fit! I've got a double sided in right now and it's a squeeze... although I have already asked Amikit.co.uk for a quote to stick a riser on it :D my soldering skills are sketchy at the best of times so I daren't risk soldering on my pride and joy!

RE: Welcome post and replies - I thought i'd make the effort to make it look like i'm sticking around :D like I said in my first post, i've been a long time lurker. Now i have this baby up and running properly (and permanently) and plan on spending a small fortune getting her up to modern specs i figured i'd need a lil help. so I figured I'd better register to announce my interest :)

You'll be getting many more questions from me over the course of a few weeks/months! and hopefully one day I will know enough to give back!

I have ideas i'm putting on digital paper for a game targetted at 060's and FPGA based equivalents (NatAmi). i'm a 2d & 3d graphics artist, designer and coordinator by trade in my IT career history, so my coding skills are basic. I can read code, just have no idea where to start from scratch! so it'll no doubt be a struggle... perhaps if i can put enough down, with road marks, mind maps and bouncing ideas around i could garner enough interest from a coder to join in. it'd be great to spur interest in an open source collaborative effort. I have no plans to commercialise it, but wait for me to get all my thoughts down first and we'll see what happens :)


D2

Yep, that should be SIMM (SODIMMs are small modules for laptops).

Wow! That sounds like a great idea for a collaborative project! :great I'm already looking forward to hearing more about that when you have it all mapped out. :spin

thanks! hearing enthusiasm from just one person is encouraging :)

the idea is a game similar looking to Robinson's Requiem on Amiga, ie the voxel waves for terrain but with the addition that it's deformable (ie you can dig and drop dirt to change it) survival and resource gathering similar to Stranded II for PC (ie not as complex as RR cos it was darned hard!), and if it's not too much effort to host a server and get multiplayer going, then make it a community based persistant world we can all share, like the way the Wurm Online world is totally player built. basically a sandbox where everything is created by the players, and random terrain generator with survival mode for single player. and No! not a Minecraft like game! there'll be no (or at least alot fewer given the hardware target) cubes in this game! lol - play Wurm Online and you'll know what i mean! haha! :D

having never coded a game before, i realise thats a leap right into the pits of the underworld let alone the deep end! lol. hence why i'll need to either spend years teaching myself Blitz/Assembly or just open it up for people with the skills to chip in where they want/can.

Would be great to see another Amiga game being released, we only see a few each year.

I, of course would never be able to run it, I don't have a spare £150+ lying around, but it would be nice to see what you could come up with. :D

I personally have no coding experience at all on the Amiga, and only moderate knowledge of making apps/games for Windows PC's.

And of course the purpose of this thread, Welcome. :)

thanks! :)

there's always UAE. never had any trouble emulating the 060 with FPU even with a netbook. The reasoning behind the high sys requirements was so it's not so limited as with like ECS and 020 AGA games. with OS4 gaining popularity and PPC becoming the norm i think its a fairer target. I wonder how well the m68k emulation is getting on with OS4 and whether it's up to 060 speeds yet. I haven't followed it as i've not a single ppc in my possession.

Hey, steady on! We're still a long way from PPC becoming 'the norm', you know. And there's no PPC Amiga emulation on the horizon yet, either.

LOL ! NOoooooo-no-no-no, i meant emulating the 68k inside OS4. i note that if you code something a certain way, OS4 will run it natively, while non native stuff like demos etc need an emulator? so i'm basically catering for the poor souls running a ppc only system on that front.

and that's also why i chose the 060 as a target, for emulation reasons as there's likely more people without an 060 than with, but modern pc's can emulate the 060 no problem. so basically i'm aiming at everyone, OS4 users, genuine 60'ers, and UAE users if they haven't got that. but with the maximum possible grunt to allow for something, er, larger than normal heh :crazy

Aha! That makes sense. :great Now I understand what you meant. :o :D

Phew! I do talk gibberish alot... glad i finally made sense! :D

Well, I am thrilled at any new Amiga games... and I have an '060 Amiga... :D