My first Amiga (1200)

[SPOD]

So i've finally taken the dive in. I've got an Amiga 1200 on it's way to me. I primarily want it for sampling & sequencing in Octamed, but i'm also interested in it's 3D / 2D animation capabilities and video editing FX. If anyone has any tips on where to start with that stuff, it'd be great!

It's coming with;

Blizzard 1230 IV accelerator + 68882 floating point unit (uninstalled)
Indivision AGA Mk3 hdmi output (uninstalled)
CF Card (uninstalled)
a scan doubler
optical original mouse
power

Any tips, tricks, installation ideas or general information would be appreciated!

My only real interaction was with a friends 500 back in the 80s where we'd play firepower, bubble bobble & kings quest III after school. I've always wanted an Amiga and the bug bit a bit too hard lately, so here we are.

[SoDa7]

That's so good! With a 1230 accelerator, you can do many things on it!

Installing the CF Card would be one of the first things to do, in order to use the OS on it. I recommend you use either ClassicWB or BetterWB suites, as they're complete and ready-to-go.

For tracking, OctaMED is also great, but also ProTracker 2.3F is ideal for classic tracking.

[SPOD]

Cheers! Wondering if the CF card already has Workbench installed, guess we'll see!

Yeah, keen to go through some trackers. Got an open source sampler card coming soon too. Amazing what people are still making on them [ Show youtube player ]

Keen to run Lightwave too, Cinema 4D and any of the 3D programs. Are there solid cracks out there of these programs? I just got a 4090 in my PC for 3D work and i'm more excited about this lol.

The Blizzard card comes with some ROM chips too, dont know what they're about.

[khph_re]

Originally Posted by SPOD

Yeah, keen to go through some trackers. Got an open source sampler card coming soon too. Amazing what people are still making on them [ Show youtube player ]

Keen to run Lightwave too, Cinema 4D and any of the 3D programs. Are there solid cracks out there of these programs? I just got a 4090 in my PC for 3D work and i'm more excited about this lol.
.

if you want to 3D render, it's highly recommended to get the FPU up and running for a nice speed boost.

If you have an internal compact flash as a hard-drive, get one for the PCMCIA slot too, along with USB CF reader for your PC - makes exchanging files a doddle. You can also add Wi-fi to the A1200 fairly inexpensively.

There are various programs to set things to fast ram, as well as loading the (slow) ROM to fast ram - will make the machine feel snappy. I think there is a new icon library about as well, by Peter K - will also improve the speed of workbench.

Hope you have fun!

[SPOD]

Got it from a second hand shop, with a pretty knowledgable staff member.

As it's got a scan doubler with a VGA i'm pretty happy to run it on a VGA I already have for the time being. It's also got a gotek so I can pop whatever needed on there, which is good. Keen to try out the CF card though, see whats on there. The Blizzard apparently has ROM chips to install.

[A500]

Congrats, the A1200 is great

Do you know whether the machine has already been recapped? The original capacitors will leak corrosive liquid onto the motherboard sooner or later (likely sooner at this stage) so that's the first thing to check, absolutely!

Also, if your desk space is limited or the sight of the PCMCIA card sticking out from the side of your beautiful machine hurts your eyes, this solution is a good alternative (although it does require a tiny bit more fiddling with the physical installation - but not much):
Back plate adapter

[SPOD]

Unsure if it's been recapped, i'll have a look when it arrives.

Thanks for the backplate link, that's solid.

I was going to install FS-UAE on my mac to play around while I wait for it to arrive, but need the ROMs. Are they freely available? Its seemingly confusing to look up.

[khph_re]

They aren't, but you can probably copy them off your amiga, or look hard enough online and you'll find them. You actually own them, so downloading a copy should not be a problem.

If you set up the emulator to the same spec as your amiga, it's possible to set it all up on there, and then transfer the whole thing across to your real Amiga.

[eXeler0]

Lots of help about particular installations etc can be found on youtube, and of course plenty of threads that dive deep into various issues, including trouble-shooting.
I would recommend you get a PCMCIA CF card adapter and prepare a good UAE setup on your computer so it will be easy to transfer files (e.g. download from Aminet). Some ROMs (up to 3.1) are for sure easy to "find". but if you wanna have the latest stuff and dont mind buying OS3.2 you get those ROMs in digital form also so you could replicate your Physical setup in UAE. (Its usually a good thing to do)

[SPOD]

Ok so the Amiga arrived and it’s working really well. As suggested I set up UAE and copied it over to the CF HD and it worked great.

Got a PCMCIA CF card coming soon to make transferring easier!

Does the Blizzard IV require a special ROM to run? Just in UAE there’s a rom option for that card. Also how can I check it’s recognised and working, and if the RAM is recognised?

[SPOD]

Amazing, thank you!

Yeah it's got the Floating Point chip too, and I think 64meg of ram.

The ROMs I mean, in FS-UAE you can select a different ROM to match the Blizzard Card, but maybe it's just something the emulator needs, just wanted to check.

I'll run through the diagnostics & other links, appreciate it.

[oscillik]

I hope you have fun with it! I came back to the Amiga a few years ago, and had to unlearn a lot of PC/Mac paradigms. Glad I got back into the hardware again though!