My A1200

[retromax]

I’m not that new to the Amiga scene as I did own an Amiga 1200 years ago which did end up very discoloured and I sold it on an arcade gaming forum I used to be a moderator on years ago after replacing it with another I’d picked up pretty cheap at the time. My interest in the Amiga has been started again recently though as I was given an Amiga 500 the other week which turned out to be faulty so it’s back in the box for now, but seeing as I had been given the 500 I decided to get my 1200 out and have a mess around with it. My original 1200 never had a hard drive or anything like that but the other one I got did and I’d never really had a look at it. So yesterday I managed to create a new drive for it using WinUAE and surprisingly the new drive worked! (The old one seems to be having issues reading parts of the disc but it is old).
Anyway I’ll be installing stuff on the new drive and having a play around with it as it does seem that hard to do but we’ll see.
As I opened the trapdoor on the bottom though I did notice that it had a card installed (attached picture) I don’t want to sound stupid but what exactly does that card do that makes it different?
As I said I’ve been having fun with this and I’m wanting to learn more about my Amiga and what I can do with it.

[redblade]

You have a 68881 FPU @ 20MHZ accelerator and it also looks like it has FAST RAM, I can't tell hell much, try sysinfo or type "avail" in shell and see what the max available FAST RAM is.

[retromax]

Originally Posted by redblade

You have a 68881 FPU @ 20MHZ accelerator and it also looks like it has FAST RAM, I can't tell hell much, try sysinfo or type "avail" in shell and see what the max available FAST RAM is.

Thanks for the reply I’m not sure what that all means though

[musashi5150]

So you've got a Floating Point Unit in there, which is a processor that accelerates math operations in some software that supports it - like 3D rendering. Most likely though, you'll never use it for anything.

And you've got some extra memory in there too, although we don't know how much at this point. And as a nice bonus, it means that your A1200 is about 2x the speed of a stock one when it's using that which makes it feel quite a bit snappier when using Workbench

As redblade said, if you bootup Workbench, open a Shell and type avail it will show how much extra memory is on your card (fast ram)

[retromax]

Originally Posted by musashi5150

So you've got a Floating Point Unit in there, which is a processor that accelerates math operations in some software that supports it - like 3D rendering. Most likely though, you'll never use it for anything.

And you've got some extra memory in there too, although we don't know how much at this point. And as a nice bonus, it means that your A1200 is about 2x the speed of a stock one when it's using that which makes it feel quite a bit snappier when using Workbench

As redblade said, if you bootup Workbench, open a Shell and type avail it will show how much extra memory is on your card (fast ram)

Thanks for that a little bit easier to understand, I’ll have a look in the morning when the other half is at work

[musashi5150]

Originally Posted by retromax

I’ll have a look in the morning when the other half is at work

I am certainly familiar with that feeling

[XPD]

Basically you have a faster than stock A1200

[redblade]

A google search brings up this thread

https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=93348

A photo of the other side would be nice and if you license your photos BSD, GPL, PD so they can be used on bboah and amigaresource.cx

[jotd]

if you don't have a harddisk, get a compact flash card & IDE 2"5 reader in any shop, a CD32-compatible joypad, install whdload and game packs and play all games from your hard drive!

[retromax]

Originally Posted by jotd

if you don't have a harddisk, get a compact flash card & IDE 2"5 reader in any shop, a CD32-compatible joypad, install whdload and game packs and play all games from your hard drive!

Thanks I’ve got plenty of old hard drives but I did look at the compact flash drive and may go down that route one day at the moment I’m just seeing what I can do, currently playing around with WHDLoad and so far I have that working.

Oh and I’m currently using my old Competition Pro joystick on the Amiga and the more modern usb version on WinUAE

[retromax]

Originally Posted by musashi5150

So you've got a Floating Point Unit in there, which is a processor that accelerates math operations in some software that supports it - like 3D rendering. Most likely though, you'll never use it for anything.

And you've got some extra memory in there too, although we don't know how much at this point. And as a nice bonus, it means that your A1200 is about 2x the speed of a stock one when it's using that which makes it feel quite a bit snappier when using Workbench

As redblade said, if you bootup Workbench, open a Shell and type avail it will show how much extra memory is on your card (fast ram)

So after a quick google I did that
So what’s that all mean then? (Picture attached)

[musashi5150]

It means in addition to the 2MB standard RAM, you've got an additional 8MB on that card - which is nice. So it'd be quite useful for WHDLoad games

[retromax]

Originally Posted by musashi5150

It means in addition to the 2MB standard RAM, you've got an additional 8MB on that card - which is nice. So it'd be quite useful for WHDLoad games

Oh that’s great then!
I can’t remember how long ago it was I bought this A1200 (maybe 10 years ago or more) but I paid £30 for it and it also came with an external floppy drive too

[retromax]

I’ve copied a load of WHDLOAD games over to the hard drive to have a play around with and I’m currently cloning the drive I’ve created in case something goes wrong

[jotd]

30£ that was a good bargain

[retromax]

So as I was waiting for my hard drive cloning I decided to get my Amiga600 out, I was given the 600 years ago by a workmate and I’d never even switched it on so didn’t even know if it worked.
I’d been reading recently that the 600 came with the hard drive mount installed so wondered if I could do anything with it (if it worked), anyway I plugged it in and all was good and the floppy drive had no problem loading a game I’d put on floppy with my greaseweasle so things were looking good.
When I was looking through old ide drives the other day I noticed one had an Amiga ribbon cable attached that I must have acquired years ago so I thought I’d have a go with installing a hard drive.
I started a new A600 config in WinUAE and installed Workbench 2 to my drive and then popped it into the Amiga and all seems good, not sure what I’ll do with it but it’s good to see it’s working and I’ve been learning quite a bit about this stuff lately.
The A600 is very yellow and the trapdoor is missing but the tank mouse isn’t too bad just slightly discoloured on one side.
There’s no expansions or anything in the A600 but I’m glad to have it running, all this started because I was given a faulty Amiga500 the other week and through trial and error with WinUAE and various YouTube videos over the last couple of days I think I’ve come pretty far

[retromax]

It seems my A600 is missing the metal shielding bit that sits around the motherboard and goes around the rear sockets, strange why that would be missing unless someone once had it in bits and realised when it was all back together

[retromax]

I was a bit disappointed that the trapdoor was missing on the 600 and having a look on eBay didn’t fancy paying those prices for a bit of plastic for an old yellow Amiga600 so I thought I’d have a go at making one myself. I don’t have a 3D printer or anything like that so I thought I’d use an old VHS cassette case, after carefully cutting it from a black case (which I didn’t think was ideal anyway) the part I needed to bend I heated up with my little dremel blow torch….. which soon melted the plastic I wasn’t happy with the black plastic anyway plus it was all scratched as I tried sanding out the melted bits so I started again this time using a white VHS case and a hair dryer to heat up the plastic.
I don’t think it turned out too bad it’s better than nothing and fits perfectly!

[jotd]

With that machine, you can enjoy a few games, including some 512k chip ones using CD32load (IDE mode), ex Silkworm or small ones using files.

[ScottC2010]

I have one of these:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/224982222...cAAOSwTAJhBADl

Works really great and the various modes are useful such as cd32, mouse - it even worked with my remote playstation 2 controllers