My First A 1200 :-)

Hi guys.

I just bought my first Amiga 1200

Back in the 90`s I had an amiga 500, and loved it....but I left it at a friends house one day, and never saw it again.....the 486 DX2 was "in" at the time....
I had only ever seen one Amiga 1200 at my friends friend house, and actually did not know what is was at the time.....we all took turns at playing "Hostage" I remeber......turns where quite quick, as the game was VERY difficult

2 moths ago, I bought 2 Amiga 500`s in a package deal. The guy said one was not working, but the other was fine. Turned out is was only the floppy drive that needed cleaning :-) Awesome machines. I installed a gotek floppy emulator in one of them, and its great. I bought my third one last week, because it was so inexpensive....could not resist

Anyway, I want to see what the Amiga 1200 is about.
I see lots of pictures of it running workbench with all sorts of programs. On the Amiga 500 I always thought workbench was useless......as I was only playing games, and it seemed very basic and limited when loaded up.

But the Amiga 1200 has a CF card "hard drive", and has twice the ram and cpu MHZ, so I thought it would be fun to try

I bought this one from a guy that buys and sells restored systems for a hobby. He said it had been recapped, and ready for use. So I ordered it, and it came in today :-)

I must say that I have seen videos showing that if you want to run WHDload games, then you need more RAM. So I actually ordered the ACA1221EC 28Mhz accelarator with ram on it so I could play these games, and it will be a bit faster than stock. The card came in yesterday.

I wanted to see what I had bought, so I opened it up to inspect my new 1200. It looks quite good. If it has been recapped, the guy did a great job on it, as it looks a little too well done.....so I am a little unsure as to if it has been recapped....maybe you guys can tell ?

I also removed the board completley to see if the 4 capacitors that Indivision says that need to be removed for better signal quality and stability where present.....but they where removed, or not installed. So that is great.

The RF shield is a little black from corrosion some places, but its just surface. So no big deal. The motherboard looks nice. Its a 2B revision board.

I assembled it again, and booted it up without the accelerator in it to see if it works.

And I was supprised to see that it was completley full of software and stuff on it already.

I am a total noob when it comes to the A1200.
It seems to have a boot selector when it starts up....unless you have a floppy in it. I can select 2 game lists, workbench, a command promt, and a file manager. Pretty nice actually. I had no idea that it could be setup like that.

Loading the workbench, is full of programs....nothing like I have tried on the amiga 500 workbench. Are all of these thing included when you install it ? Or has the user before me fill it up with stuff ? Anyway, I like what I see.

But I tried to play a few games, and like the videos that I have seen, it runs out of memory, and fails to launch the games I tried.

So I slipped in the accelerator card, and it worked great. Wow, the speed jump was immense from the 28Mhz card. I had only messed around with the stock A1200 for 30 minutes, but already now I could see it was "modern" quick Really pleased. Now all the games work again. The previous owner must have had more ram or a accelerator card in it too.

The cpu on the accelerator card gets a little too hot for my liking at stock speed, so I will be installing a very low profile heat sink on it.

But first impressions are really good.
I really need to learn allot about the amiga workbench. This is quite different from what Im used to. Im 100% sure that I could not set it up as good as the previous owner has. I think I will try from scratch on a new CF card, just to learn about installing stuff....really basic :-) I have ordered a PCMCIA card reader so I can transfer files into the A1200


some pic of todays experiance

The ACA1221EC and a video of it loading wingcommander :-)


[ Show youtube player ]

[DanyPPC]

Congratulations for your first A1200 !
This is my prefered Amiga.

[MageMaster]

I have the same accelerator and I like it. Connecting it has been a little tricky, have to pull it out just a hair for better connection I guess or I get some weirdly striped screens and then no signal (rgb)
I got the software for it installed, and I do believe a firmware update was just recently released.

I still need to install my updated 3.1 roms. But I have learned how to start from scratch to install WB.. still working on the large disk support, but I'm getting there and having fun doing it!

[jotd]

not even yellowed! superb. Congratulations.

[Peter]

Beautiful - an awesome beast. I miss having one.

Thanks guys :-)

Magemaster, I did not have any trouble with mine.
When I had the motherboard out, I cleaned the connector with alcohol.

[obitus1990]

DEFINITELY recapped. Those are all organic polymer caps. They'll never leak again.

[Valken]

Beautiful and congrats!

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by kirk_m

Those are all organic polymer caps. They'll never leak again.

Are you sure? I can't make out the series numbers on them in the photos.

But yes, it's definitely recapped with high quality capacitors, even if not organic polymer.

@OP
That is a very lovely machine, looks mint. Nice find!

Thanks guys, that is good to know

Is there supposed to be a blue led flashing on the MB when it reads from the CF card/ide controler ? I onlt saw it last evening when it was dark. I have not really noticed it in any videos. Its a tiny SMD LED the size of those tiny resistors.


Some goodies arrived from Amigastore.eu today :-)
The PCMCIA card reader and card aand software.


And a picture of the collection so far

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by SJN

Is there supposed to be a blue led flashing on the MB when it reads from the CF card/ide controler ? I onlt saw it last evening when it was dark. I have not really noticed it in any videos. Its a tiny SMD LED the size of those tiny resistors.

Yeah, some CF adaptors include small LEDs on the board to indicate activity, others don't. There aren't any LEDs on the motherboard itself so it looks like it's just your adaptor. Nothing to worry about