Hi

[richfr]

I got this Amiga 1200 for Christmas in 1993 (I was 14 at the time) I used it a lot back then until I got I Megadrive then it was boxed up and has been stored ever since.
A year or so ago I got it from the loft and moved it into my office which has AC/dehumidifier.
It’s in the original box with all the manuals etc I have an F1 game and Trolls but I think I binned all the non-original games/discs years ago.


Yesterday I stumbled across this forum and am amazed the size of the community and how many people keep them going.
I opened it up to check the caps and they all look good (I will keep an eye on them) inside was very clean case is still fairly white. A few keys are discoloured.
Plugged into the TV and it works





Now I need to do a lot of reading on here see what I can do to add a hard drive maybe add a CF card and then get some games installed.
What upgrades would you guys recommend I do to it just to play retro games?

[SimonCD32]

Hi. That is a truly beautiful machine you have there.

I too was amazed at the size of the community!

Welcome.

[Daedalus]

Nice machine indeed The cheapest option for playing old games is to replace the floppy drive with a Gotek floppy emulator. That reads floppy images from a USB flash drive and feeds them to the computer as if they were real disks, and you can change the inserted virtual disk using buttons on the unit. Easy, and gives you an experience pretty much like the original (including loading times).

The hard drive option is a little more involved for a couple of reasons. First, installing the OS and getting your files onto it can be a little tricky when you're out of practice with Amiga things, though you can buy cards pre-loaded with all you need if you know where to look... Second, fitting a hard drive alone won't let you use a lot of games since having the drive fitted and the OS loaded takes a certain amount of memory that some games might need or assume is free, resulting in incompatibilities. WHDLoad can fix some of these, but ultimately you'll need more RAM for the best experience. Once you have the extra RAM, the WHDLoad package will let you run almost every game from the hard drive, with greatly reduced loading times and often additional features like quitting back to the OS, CD32 pad support, removed copy protection and more.

RAM expansions aren't all that cheap, but they are available. The ACA1221EC accelerator is a RAM card with a slightly faster CPU on board, and doesn't cost much more than a bare RAM board, so that's a good way to go. There's also a new RAM card that includes some additional features like a micro SD card slot and connector for a network module, but it's not available just yet.

Finally, I would think about getting the capacitors changed sooner rather than later, even if they look ok now. Being pressed back into use after a long time in storage might be enough to put them over the edge.

[richfr]

Thanks for the help and welcome guys looks a friendly place

I did think about a Gotek but would probably want an internal HDD at some point so have ordered a Workbench 3.1 CF Hard Disk Drive kit by Cloanto and a PCMCIA kit, will look at an accelerator once I have it running have been advised in another post the ACA1221EC is a good option so probably go for one of them.
I have also ordered a recap kit will get it done ASAP save any future issues with caps.

[Daedalus]

Ah, you're sorted so Get it all set up with the CF card and PCMCIA card reader, then install [http://whdload.de/]WHDLoad[/url] and either use its installer packages to install your original games, or go to WHDownload.com and grab some pre-installed packages. Not all of them will work, but turning of preloading will help at the expense of disk accesses interrupting your game. See the WHDLoad docs for details... It can be a complex package but well worth getting to know!

Once you have the RAM available, turn preloading back on and enjoy running your games entirely from RAM

[richfr]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Ah, you're sorted so Get it all set up with the CF card and PCMCIA card reader, then install [http://whdload.de/]WHDLoad[/url] and either use its installer packages to install your original games, or go to WHDownload.com and grab some pre-installed packages. Not all of them will work, but turning of preloading will help at the expense of disk accesses interrupting your game. See the WHDLoad docs for details... It can be a complex package but well worth getting to know!

Once you have the RAM available, turn preloading back on and enjoy running your games entirely from RAM

Thanks for the help, not really got any games at the moment so will have to do some reading/youtube etc learn WHDownload hopefully I can work it all out

Just found a Python 1 Joystick in the loft too thought I had one somewhere but no sign of the floppy disks I had.