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Daishi · 08 February 2018, 06:32

I was lucky enough to get an A1200 before official release (I knew a guy) by 2 weeks. When I got it home my excitement took a rather bad downturn as my friends A500 with an A5000 accelerator was faster. it's not that the A1200 was a bad computer it just wasn't a great one out of the box. When I bought mine I was disappointed compared to my friends upgraded A500 (68020 @16 Mhz but on a 16-bit bus) the A1200 with a 68020 @ 14Mhz (32-Bit bus) didn't feel any faster. I ordered a memory expansion card and that made a big speed difference. That got me on the upgrade path Next a 68020 @28 Mhz followed by a 68030 @ 40Mhz then 50Mhz then a 68040 @25Mhz and finally a 68060 it was a beast for applications but games rarely took advantage of that power.
A quick story - I worked in the IT dept at a school in London we had BBC B, Archimedes, Macs and PC's. I would bring my Amiga in (68030 @50 at the time) and run emulators of all the systems on the Amiga (except Arch that machine was a beast in its own right) and while the PC emulation was slow it was usable for what I was doing. However, the other emulators were as fast if not faster than the systems being emulated and that included the Mac. The IT director was a huge Mac fan and one day saw me using my Amiga and asked what I was doing, so I explained that it was easier for me to use the emulators to create work across the systems. I then showed her running Shapeshifter and doing all the same work we used them for. Then without quitting I jumped to the BBC emulator and ran a program I had done, while the program was running I jumped to the PC emulator and ran a game (just some adventure game we used at school) and just for giggles I jumped back to the Amiga loaded a MOD to play, formatted a floppy and while it was doing all that, jumped back to the Mac and proceeded to use Pagemaker and an Art package (I think it was Photoshop) the look on her face was priceless she didn't know what to say, she just flubbered someting and left.
The Amiga was (is) a special system from a time when other systems just couldn't do those things.

08 February 2018, 06:32	#21
Daishi Registered User Join Date: Apr 2017 Location: Auburndale, Florida Posts: 60	I was lucky enough to get an A1200 before official release (I knew a guy) by 2 weeks. When I got it home my excitement took a rather bad downturn as my friends A500 with an A5000 accelerator was faster. it's not that the A1200 was a bad computer it just wasn't a great one out of the box. When I bought mine I was disappointed compared to my friends upgraded A500 (68020 @16 Mhz but on a 16-bit bus) the A1200 with a 68020 @ 14Mhz (32-Bit bus) didn't feel any faster. I ordered a memory expansion card and that made a big speed difference. That got me on the upgrade path Next a 68020 @28 Mhz followed by a 68030 @ 40Mhz then 50Mhz then a 68040 @25Mhz and finally a 68060 it was a beast for applications but games rarely took advantage of that power. A quick story - I worked in the IT dept at a school in London we had BBC B, Archimedes, Macs and PC's. I would bring my Amiga in (68030 @50 at the time) and run emulators of all the systems on the Amiga (except Arch that machine was a beast in its own right) and while the PC emulation was slow it was usable for what I was doing. However, the other emulators were as fast if not faster than the systems being emulated and that included the Mac. The IT director was a huge Mac fan and one day saw me using my Amiga and asked what I was doing, so I explained that it was easier for me to use the emulators to create work across the systems. I then showed her running Shapeshifter and doing all the same work we used them for. Then without quitting I jumped to the BBC emulator and ran a program I had done, while the program was running I jumped to the PC emulator and ran a game (just some adventure game we used at school) and just for giggles I jumped back to the Amiga loaded a MOD to play, formatted a floppy and while it was doing all that, jumped back to the Mac and proceeded to use Pagemaker and an Art package (I think it was Photoshop) the look on her face was priceless she didn't know what to say, she just flubbered someting and left. The Amiga was (is) a special system from a time when other systems just couldn't do those things.