Help me set up an A1200? :)

So I used to have an A1200 up until 2005, when I sold it for poor-college-student purposes. She was a sweet buddy, with a Microbotics 1230XA, 16MB ram, OS 3.1 (Magic Pack Machine), 260MB Hard drive... etc...

Well, I was bitten by the bug again. I realize there are few chicas in the Amiga community (evidenced by the choices of background for nearly all the "show your real WB"), so I thought I'd pitch in and up the total . But seriously, I bought an A1200 with DKB1202 w/8MB (Need to find a copy of MagicMem), 3.1 Roms, 500MB HD (not CF card), WB 3.1 installed, etc...

I also purchased an Orinoco Gold Wireless card (has drivers on Aminet), a super-duper-high-quality composite cable (I'm in the USA, so using NTSC and a TV) to get almost acceptable display quality, and a 3.5" DD USB drive for transferring stuff between my PC and Amiga.

So, I'll be picking up the 1200 from the Post Office on Monday, and wanted to get it ready for full-fledged use.

First, assuming I transfer by floppy a TCP/IP stack and, say, Lynx for browsing, is there any way to install ClassicWB just by downloading it straight to the Amiga? I don't want to do the whole CF card/interface thingy. I like keeping it old school with a 2.5" drive .

Also, does MagicTV work with Cammy's super palette? I need to use 640x400 (or 700x440....whatever I can get with overscan once I set it up) since I want to make this a "1999 reality" machine, complete with a Canon BJC printer, productivity Apps, etc... I don't really game much though I'm sure I'll get the WHDLoad thing eventually... mainly so I can play golf games and CinemaWare.

Also also, is there a way to get IBrowse 2.4 or is it in some sort of eternal limbo? I guess I can live with AWeb (as I did in the past), but my brief trial with UAE indicated quite a bit of instability.

Also, any other thing you can recommend to get me to the point where I can boot and do anything I want (albeit slowly) would be much appreciated! For example, if there is an alternate audio format to mp3s that will play at decent speed on the A1200, that would be great (Since 16kbps @ 8000 khz probably sounds terrible and is my guess for max useful playback on a FastRam A1200).

Thanks!

[Cammy]

Heya, Kristin, is it? Nice to meet you, and welcome back to the community!

Nice choice of RAM card, I have one myself and I've been spending all month setting up a fresh new Workbench on a 4GB CF in the A1200 I have it installed in. I hope you have two 4MB SIMMs and not just one 8MB one, since that's the combination MagicMem needs to get the 5.5MB in PCMCIA-compatibility mode. I'll attach MagicMem to this post for you.

Rebel's 16 colour palette was designed with MagicTV in mind as well as a bunch of other things, so it's definitely compatible. It already has lower-contrast shades which helps reduce interlace flicker, so with MagicTV running as well it'll be pretty usable. I'd recommend trying out a LCD TV at some point if you can, many of them remove the flicker for a really solid Workbench display.

As for the TCP/IP stack, I have both AmiTCP 3.0b and MiamiDX both installed on my A1200 and use one or the other depending on what I need to do. Some programs and games won't work through AmiTCP, like TwinVNC and Dynamite, but for everything else like web browsing, IRC, MSN and email, AmiTCP is fine and uses less RAM. There's a helpful guide to help get you through the annoying installation process of AmiTCP 3.0b here: http://www.wiwi.uni-frankfurt.de/~an...itcp/index.htm Installing and configuring MiamiDX is pretty straight-forward in comparison.

Depending on the release of AWeb you use, it can be alright and less compatible or crashy and slightly more compatible with some sites. I haven't looked too much into which version is the best one to use yet, but I know the one which Bloodwych included in ClassicWB runs pretty nicely on my A1200 with the DKB 1202. I still prefer IBrowse though, but as you suspect it's still in limbo regarding whether it will ever be for sale or in development again, but it's still worth using a half hour at a time if you can't get a key for it. I think you can still buy a legal copy of it if you buy AmigaOS 4 for classics, I think an unrestricted OEM version of IBrowse 2.4 is bundled with the OS. You can also get the final version of IBrowse 1.22 on AminetCD 24 (these CDs included great bonus programs and games that were never uploaded to Aminet or given away free anywhere else). It's also in The Zone here on EAB at the moment.

With today's cheap mass storage, I don't worry so much about filling a few SD cards with uncompressed music files which play beautifully on my Amiga, I use a cheap PCMCIA card reader and just swap between the albums I want. You can convert MP3s or rip CDs to WAV or Amiga's IFF/8SVX format and play them with a variety of programs which play spooling samples. I use SongPlayer myself, it has a nicely configurable MUI interface and supports a few different formats, as well as having the ability to output in a special 14bit output for the best possible quality (not that I notice much personally, but audiophiles probably appreciate the difference in clarity). You can also use Play16, HippoPlayer or EaglePlayer.

Here are some links anyway:

AmiTCP 3.0b - http://www.wiwi.uni-frankfurt.de/~an...P-bin-30b2.lha
MiamiDX Main - http://aminet.net/package/comm/tcp/MiamiDx10cmain
MiamiDX GUI - http://aminet.net/package/comm/tcp/MiamiDx10c-MUI
MiamiDX Keys - http://www.fatcat.vispa.com/keyring/...iamiDXKeys.lha
IBrowse Demo - http://www.ibrowse-dev.net/resources...se2.4-020+.lha

MagicMem - http://home.exetel.com.au/~amiga/MagicMem

Good luck!

Yes, I do have 2 4MB Simms! So I can get the max 5.5 FastRam even when connected to wireless internets.

Thanks very much for all the links. I'll get on them right away or at least soonish.

I'm also guessing from the silence that one cannot just download ClassicWB and install it over an existing 3.1 install. Since that is the case and the machine I bought doesn't come with a set of 3.1 disks, is there still a way for me to install ClassicWB? I was reading the classicWB faq and I couldn't tell if I needed a whole install set or if I could make a boot disk from my current install and it would suffice or what?

[_ThEcRoW]

If you have a pc lying around, you can put the amiga hd in it and format and install classicwb from there(using winuae, an amiga emulator). It's the route i take when preparing my classic hard drives. Just be sure, that it isn't w98 the pc you put the drive on, as w98 will overwrite the rdb and trash the hard drive. On xp it should be ok, at least i never had problems under it.

[Cammy]

ClassicWB can be a little tricky to set up at first, and you need to use WinUAE. It's worth the effort though, because it comes bundled with heaps of good software. I'd recommend setting up two bootable partitions and installing ClassicWB on one and your own Workbench setup on the other, and then building it up yourself, choosing to boot into ClassicWB or your own setup at bootup time. I have uploaded a fully installed Workbench 3.1 archive to The Zone here on EAB if you'd like to download and quickly extract it to your drive.

I've also just uploaded my current setup from the A1200 I just started setting up with the DKB1202, it's a pretty big uncompressed LHA archive (for quick extraction on a real Amiga) so I've further Zipped it up. So download the Zip file onto a PC or something fast, extract the big LHA file from it and transfer it to your Amiga's hard drive somehow. Then just use LHA to extract the file to the root of the partition you wish to install it to with these commands, assuming the file is on "CF0:" (so change that to whichever partition you have the LHA file on, be it a Windows virtual partition or a hardfile, or sitting on a CF/SD card in the PCMCIA slot, or perhaps just on your internal Amiga drive once it's been transferred via TCP or something). Open a Shell and change the directory to the partition you wish to extract to. Then type this:

Lha -xa x CF0:Workbench3.1 (or DreamscapeNTSC depending on which of the two LHA files you're trying out)

Since the archive is uncompressed it should extract as fast as the files can be written to the drive. If you're interested in trying out this setup I'm working on, which is far from complete (I still intend on replacing and adding several programs and replacing all the icons once Rebel has finished the iconset) but totally usable and already optimized for your system, you can download it here: http://www..com/?ol29t5j4ezlsn11

I've already installed Links: The Challenge of Golf and the two extra courses that were released for the Amiga in the Games drawer on there for you. It was designed for OCS Amigas, so if you run it and the graphics are all garbled you'll need to boot up in Enhanced mode by selecting it in the Display Options in the Early Startup Control menu. This is the updated v.1.53 of Links which fixes a few things from the original release and adds joystick control, which is quite nice to use with a control pad. I've also put the updated and patched version of Sim City 2000 with the extra cities in there if you'd like to try it. I have compressed it before running it, so you will be asked to choose a screenmode and enter your name the first time you play it, as if you had freshly installed it yourself.

There's still more that needs to be done, but if you like the setup I can send you updates as we do them, we actually plan on releasing the whole thing as a new pack, like ClassicWB and AmigaSYS eventually, hopefully even by the end of the year, but we need testers and user input too.

Anyway, good luck and I hope you can get the files onto your Amiga's hard drive somehow.

[Graham Humphrey]

Originally Posted by Cammy

I have uploaded a fully installed Workbench 3.1 archive to The Zone here on EAB if you'd like to download and quickly extract it to your drive.

Sorry, but I had no choice but to delete this (and the Install upload) as (for the benefit of board newcomers who maybe haven't read the rules yet) it's in breach of EAB rules.

[Cammy]

I expected as much.

Good luck to you Kristin, you're on your own now.