And so the retoventure begins...

[Sui_Generis]

A very good evening to you all.

As I explained over in the introductions sub-forum, I'm pretty green when it comes to the Amiga but have a fair bit of general computer knowledge under my belt. albeit modern.

I'm the proud owner of an A1200 Magic Pack, brought as new old stock many years ago, but I've never done anything with it. Thought about it a couple times, but never acted too much.

Set it up with a 4GB CF HDD replacement and brought a Blizzard 1230IV off eBay, along with the FPU, 64MB RAM and SCSI board with another 64MB, then learned that the original PSU was never designed to run accelerators & back the A1200 went into storage.

After some reading around the board and a little personal research, this is what I've come up with so far. Please feel free to tell me I'm being stupid at any point, because I really don't know yet!

1. First desire was to go all out and towerise it with a Black Box and Mediator, this would be a "long term" option due to the costing, plus as I understand it you really need a 060 or a PPC expansion to make the most out of such a huge upgrade?

2. Capacitor replacement. 20+ year old capacitors are going to need replacing, I'm not confident enough with a soldering iron to do that myself really, but I see Amiga Kit offers it as a service. Considering that my A1200 has probably seen less than 12 hours power on time in it's entire life, I'm taking no chances & I'll get them to do it.

3. PSU upgrade, as I mentioned at the start, I understand that original bricks aren't designed to run accelerator cards but a modern ATX PSU (with converter) isn't a very good option due to the Amiga not drawing enough current. I fell across Ian Steadman's website where he sells his converters and also tracked down a supplier for the 90w PicoPSU's. Is this the most sensible way to go?

4. AGA Scandoubler...if I'm not going the tower route, I know this is an absolute must to get output to a modern monitor. As much as I love retro-tech, I draw the line at CRT monitors!

5. Replacing the round brick mouse with the more ergonomic version and getting a laser upgrade. Semi frivolous but what the heck.

6. Replace original floppy with a Gotek emulator.

7. I'd love to get a black case & keycaps, but I seem to have missed the kickstarter this time around, I live in hope it'll be back sometime soon!

8. While I do already have a 4GB CF "HDD", I read that a better option is to buy a proper disk on module, so I'll be looking at tracking one of those down.

9. Replace the 2020 battery backup on the 1230, a 20+ year old battery can't be much good...one soldering job I might be able to do myself!

And that's my list for now...if you managed to read this far I commend your dedication, and I would really love to hear any feedback & pointers any of you Amiga guru's have to offer.

Sui

[AwoLStill]

1. This can be an easy Mod. I made my own A1200 tower using a PC case. It was not a professional job, but it worked. External keyboard was very useful, and in the days of audio CDs, DVDs, floppy disks, and multiple hard drives, the tower was more capable than the A1200 case.
Now, the difference is less clear cut. Many people store data on the internet, or on a NAS, and access it via network. You can get a NIC for the A1200 without recasing it.
You can get USB for the A1200 without recasing it.
You can get an external keyboard port without recasing it.
As for a mediator, I can only think of a few reasons for buying one. Most of those reasons are becoming irrelevant one by one as people develop expansions for the A1200.
I prefer a smaller case and an external keyboard on my desk.
Not many internal graphics cards available yet though, for those a mediator may help, though I'm sure someone will come up with something...

2. I have seen too many horror stories. As soon as I have my A1200 in my possession, it is getting a recap. I think I know someone local who is more than capable, so I am going to find out soon.

3. I have never tried an ATX psu, I did have an AT PSU which worked very well, but as it had a fan it was annoying. To use an ATX psu the general concensus of opinion is that it needs to have a small load on it (but bigger than the load of a typical accelerated A1200).
PicoPSU option is not a bad choice.

4. Not necessarily. There is a HDMI converter being worked on, or you can buy a cheap RGB to HDMI converter from Amazon for 25€ approx.

5. The later Amiga mice were quite nice, though a PC mouse on a usb or ps/2 adapter might be a good value option. Interface isn't so cheap.

6. Not a bad idea. Keep the floppy drive safe.

7. This link says March 5th:
http://amigastore.eu/en/468-brand-ne...new-molds.html

8. Solid State is better than mechanical because it uses less power is faster and typically quieter. If going for an ATX PSU then using a big hard drive might actually help increase the load on the ATX PSU, keeping it running better.
Personally, I like the idea of IDE2mSATA - there is a thread on here about that.

9. Yes.

[Sui_Generis]

Unfortunately, I'm having "big boy" PC/tech problems at the moment, so the Amiga stuff is on hold for a bit.

I seriously think I have angered the tech gremlin gods. First one of the 2TB drives in my (albeit aging) gaming machine died, resulting in me having to fly about for hours cobbling things together so I could clone the information on it to a spare (which worked, thankfully).

Then my ADSL router pooped it's pants, buying and fitting the new one wasn't even straight forward! Took me the entire day of fiddling about to finally find out the cable that runs to the router from the phone line is also iffy (truck loads of packet errors), so had to run all new cabling into the bargain!

Man...technology...

Sui

[Sui_Generis]

So, while I'm swimming in Amiga downtime, there's no time like the present to ask more questions & do more research.

Further to my mentioning about the possibility of swapping the Compact Flash card for a dedicated Disk On Module, is there any real advantage going over to flash storage over traditional 2.5" laptop drives?

I only ask this because I work in computer recycling (sadly, I have only ever seen one Amiga in the last ten years!) and have constant access to 2.5" IDE drives. Testing and wiping them is one of my charges, so I can even make sure each drive is in the best possible condition before I "liberate" it for the Amiga.

Secondly, what is the best way to add a proper external CD drive to the 1200? I do have a SCSI adapter for the Blizzard IV (think I mentioned already) but am unsure as to what caddy/cable/connector I'm going to need to make such sorcery happen.

My main reason for looking into this is because I just found out about Payback, the Amiga GTA clone. GTA is one of my most favorite game series ever (second only to Fallout). I found that that Amiga Kit are still selling Payback, new! But it comes on CD. :/

Sui

P.S. I'm now on my third failed 2TB drive for the main computer gear, 2 died of old age and 1 was killed by an iffy external enclosure. I'm so looking forward to getting to do the Amiga stuff over bleeding money on hard drives!

[ajk]

The main advantage of flash drives is that they are easy to pluck out of the Amiga and set up/transfer files to with a modern system. You can of course do this with IDE drives too, but they are not as plug and play as memory cards. In my experience there is no advantage to a disk-on-module instead of a CompactFlash card, unless there is a clear incompatibility with the particular card or adapter.

Secondarily flash drives are entirely silent and consume very little electricity (and therefore produce less heat). Of course, if going for an authentic 90s experience, the whirr and clicks of a mechanical hard drive may in fact be what you are after

[meynaf]

You do not necessarily need a PSU upgrade if you're not using a real HD, even with an accelerator board. I have an A1200 + CF-IDE + B1230-IV and it works with standard PSU (the heavy one, though).

An advantage of a real HD is that you can more or less do unlimited writes on it. So if you intend to code and save often, it might have its value. Else, the interest seems to be next to zero.

With USB mice adapters you can normally use any PC mouse. I still prefer old ones, but they can't be found in shops anymore so there is little choice when they fail.

If you have a hard drive or equivalent then there is no real need of a gotek. Just install your games on hd.

The mere fact a game comes on a CD doesn't imply you have to use one on the Amiga. You may just read it on a PC, to transfer its contents on some media you can use on the miggy (quickest way on A1200 is with a pcmcia cf adapter).

[Daedalus]

Regarding power supplies: even a "modern" (as in, built in this century) mechanical hard drive shouldn't be too taxing on the standard power supply. Amigas as standard don't use anywhere near the capacity of their power supplies, so there's a lot of overhead available for peripherals (yes, even with the lightest PSUs). If you find your PSU can't handle an 030 accelerator and a modest hard drive, there's something wrong with it. I've yet to find a standard PSU that can't run my A1200 with a 30GB mechanical hard drive, Blizzard 1230 + 32MB and a CD-ROM drive, and I've tried many - light and heavy, switched and linear, potted and open.

That said, the PSUs are getting old and it is possible to find some that can't regulate as they used to due to old age of the capacitors, which means they have problems with high loads. Replacing those capacitors should restore them to fully working. PicoPSUs are nice indeed, but unless you were looking to fit them somewhere tight like inside the Amiga itself, I would be inclined to go the Meanwell modular supply route instead. The PT-65B is a popular option for this job. These are bigger, but don't need a separate power brick and ultimately give an excellent result for less money. They mostly still fit inside the original Amiga PSU case, so your setup can look pretty stock.

As others have said, you don't necessarily need the CD to play Payback (or most other CD games). You can copy the files across and install it that way, or mount an ISO of the disc in Workbench using DiskImage. The main advantage of having a CD-ROM drive is for the in-game music (and it's excellent on Payback). However, with an A1200 you'd need some sort of additional audio mixing to get game sound and soundtrack, so that's possibly not a runner anyway...

If AmigaKit have it in stock, snap it up! Physical copies of the game are hard to come by these days and have been listed as out of stock in most shops for many years now.

[MigaTech]

Towered Amiga 1200 would be a good move, ONLY!! < if you want and have a need for a powerful customised Amiga system?

I can help you in regards to the Customised tower unit as I have a lot of fabrication and build knowledge in regards to this. Having fabricated many tower units for all the wedged Amiga systems. Specially the 1200 in which I redesigned and fabricated a modern Custom Mediator set-up for that system.

The PPC side of this venture is going to be the most expensive part, as those original Phase 5 Blizzard PPC 1 units from 1997, demand massive money! Not to mention the rareness of them.

Nevertheless all that stated they are still about. They take some setting up and libs have to be installed along with lots of other software. The same is to be said with the Mediator. The software has to be installed in order and correctly for that to respond correctly. Then it begins again with the RTG system set-up. It is a procedure that requires lots of patience and time spared to get the set-up running smoothly. Again I can help you with this, as I think many other members could also.

If you are not bothered too much about Original hardware you could consider waiting for the PPC 2 unit and/or Vampire 1200?

The ATX PSU does have to be chosen carefully as I have found that my 603e PPC doesn't like certain units. It took a while for me to find one that it would accept. Now I know this sound crazy, as electricity is the same from all PSU's, well it is and it isn't. Stable power is pinnacle here.

Being the magic pack I am assuming it to be a Late 1D4 or 2B Escom model? If so it won't be marked up All Rights Reserved Commodore and it should have the PC drive conversion. Which is useful and not, depending on what you want.

Remember: You can run up to OS 3.9 on the 1200 as long as Fast ram is in place. Another area to consider is Fast ATA as this would improved the Amiga's IDE access by as much as 16.3MB/s from about 3.3MB/s. It all helps to improve speed. If you want to run OS 4x you would have to opt for PPC power.

Towered Amiga 1200's have a massive advantage over the wedged Amiga units, in many different ways. < Please Note: Not intended to upset any Original A1200 users.

If you decide to go with the tower set-up, you could go for the Elbox or a custom built tower, or even have a go at building your own. Although from experience getting it all to fit correctly when thinking of a mediator system, can be quite an ordeal. If you do not feel confident enough, let someone else with experience, build you the custom tower.

In the end, it has only to do with what you feel your needs are, in regards to an Amiga set-up.