My first Amiga - a 1200

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Perhaps a little bit of an explanation first: the Amiga was not really well known here in Belgium - no-one I knew owned one and even the Commodore 64 was a rare machine. In 1993 my father bought a PC and at the end of the year I started reading PC games magazines imported from the UK. One of those was the first issue of PC Gamer back in December 1993.

As some of you may know, PC Gamer was founded by mostly ex Amiga Power staff and as such the Amiga was often mentioned and with great love which always peaked my interest considering it was unknown to me at the time. That was pretty much my only contact with the Amiga until much later.

Many many years later, I discovered the Amiga Forever project and by then I knew that many of the late 80's and early 90's games I loved had better ports for the Amiga or were Amiga games to begin with so curiosity made me buy AF and I fell in love with it. Due to lack of space, I had to stick to emulation however (plus my hobby was collecting big box PC games - Amiga games would take up even more space! Not to mention another monitor ...)

Since then I discovered many modern updates that do away with the need for specialised monitors, constant disk swapping, unreliable hard drives, etc. so I decided to finally buy one for myself.

Long story short:

After looking around for a year, I finally found an Amiga I wanted to buy: a A1200 in good condition (almost no yellowing or damage) with the Indivision AGA Mk2 pre-installed, a CF hard drive and a PCMCIA slot. No accelerator sadly (the seller removed the Blizzard to sell it seperately) and as such, not enough memory to run most WHDLoad games.

So as a new Amiga owner, I'm still quite a bit out of my depth so I could use help from experienced owners.

It comes with Kickstart rom 3.0 and Workbench 3.0 which are not the latest official versions I'm aware. Ideally I'd like to upgrade to 3.1.4 because I heard it fixes many problems and also includes large drive support which is handy for the CF hard drive.

Since it has no accelerator, I'm also stuck without any extra memory. My main question is this: for someone who is interested in just gaming (A500 games as well), what would the most "economic" solution be that still gives me a few extra options? I know a classic 8MB Fast RAM card would be the cheapest but that has nothing extra but stuff like RTC, MMU, etc. is very handy. I'm not really in need of great speed improvements - it's mostly just retro gaming.

I also read that for non-WHDLoad A500 games, it's good to downgrade to Kickstart 1.3 (there's floppies that do that it seems) - what are your thoughts about that?

Thanks in advance for any comments, suggestions!

[chip]

I don't use real hardware, only emulation, so i can't help you


Anyway, welcome to the forum

[musojon74]

I would mostly stick to whdload games. As you say a ram card would boost you up so you could use whdload but I would try and source an 030 accelerator which benefits certain games ( Elite 2 Frontier really likes acceleration ). Welcome to EAB. Have fun :-)

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Originally Posted by musojon74

I would mostly stick to whdload games. As you say a ram card would boost you up so you could use whdload but I would try and source an 030 accelerator which benefits certain games ( Elite 2 Frontier really likes acceleration ). Welcome to EAB. Have fun :-)

Thanks that's what I thought but it seems most accelerators are made for the 500 and 600 - anyone know what the most affordable accelerator is? Second hand is OK too because none of the stores I went to seem to have any accelerators in stock ...