Getting back into Amiga - What way to go?

[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by crazyc

Generally Pcmcia is used for
A) networking
B) cf cards but not as boot drives, rather for transferring files from pc to amiga etc
C) some ram expansions that are slower and not great.

As a starting configuration see my second a1200 in my signature. Plays most games except doom stuff.

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When you say Doom stuff what do you mean? All FPS like Gloom for example or the heavy duty ones like Breathless?


Also for some reason signatures are not appearing for me in fire fox so I can't see that configuration of A1200.


My plan was to install A CF that was accessible from the back. Would this eliminate the need for pcmcia for swapping between my pc?

[crazyc]

Originally Posted by rabidgerry

When you say Doom stuff what do you mean? All FPS like Gloom for example or the heavy duty ones like Breathless?





Also for some reason signatures are not appearing for me in fire fox so I can't see that configuration of A1200.





My plan was to install A CF that was accessible from the back. Would this eliminate the need for pcmcia for swapping between my pc?

Ok, I would do the cf install from the back using the back plate from amigakit. You can then use winuae to set up the cf card and dont need the pcmcia to transfer files. Sometimes it's easier though as you can copy files directly without going via winuae, but not necessary.
My second miggy is a recapped a1200 with cf hard drive out the back with an aca 1221 card.

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[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by crazyc

Ok, I would do the cf install from the back using the back plate from amigakit. You can then use winuae to set up the cf card and dont need the pcmcia to transfer files. Sometimes it's easier though as you can copy files directly without going via winuae, but not necessary.
My second miggy is a recapped a1200 with cf hard drive out the back with an aca 1221 card.

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Yeah I have my sights on that kit, it looks like the best option. I haven't ordered it just yet though. I have ordered Rom 3.1 and the new cap set from Amiga kit though.

I was initially just going to buy a 8mb ram card for the trap door because the lack of accelerators is depressing, is this a pointless upgrade? Is that card useless for the FPS style games? All the modern ACA12** cards seem snapped up and I can't find any alternatives at the moment. I was hoping to get perhaps the ACA1233 or something like that at some point.

Basically I'm doing this for all the games I played on the 500 and all the games I didn't play on the 1200.


Thanks for the help btw.

[crazyc]

Even with a decent 030 accelerator you are going to struggle with the fps games I think. If those are the focus you are going to need to spend a lot.
To my mind the best a1200 setup (for the money) is a CF hard drive, blizzard 1230 mk iv, and maybe an Indivision mk2 (depends on what you are going to display the amiga on).
That setup will deal with everything apart from really the fps games. It will even run WB 3.9 if you want it.

I started by first getting the ram upgrade but traded up within a month or two. But if nothing else is available it will let you start. There are various ram upgrades to be bought from resellers (not auctions) for around £70 I think.

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[rabidgerry]

Could an aca1233 handle FPS? Surely the likes of gloom can run on those accelerators ok. Can't believe they came out with a load of games for the amiga 1200 back then that were only suitable for accelerated machines. So Alien Breed 3d and Breathless aren't do able either I guess ?

There are brand new 8mb cards I can buy for the same money. I would expect re-sellers to be selling their 8gb cards cheaper now. You can get this one for under £70.

https://amigastore.eu/698-amiga-1200...expansion.html

And
https://www.amedia-computer.com/en/a...miga-1200.html

[crazyc]

Sorry mate I have only dabbled with quake and doom not the others so couldn't really comment. I thought you needed an 040 or 060 accelerator to make quake etc even fairly playable.
Others will be better placed to comment.

Yeah those were the ram things I was thinking of.

Prices for amiga kit doesn't always follow logic, there are lots of issues with demand and supply and also if you are lucky with who is selling what.

In my experience it is very dangerous to surf the amibay forum late at night. That is how I ended up with my blizzard 1260 card...

Although I picked up a basically unused tower case the other day on ebay for 99p. Of course now I have to start a new project to put my pride and joy a1200 in that tower, and add an rtg graphics card so I can play quake etc properly! I have a thread running on amibay about all that.

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[crazyc]

Having just looked up.some reviews on lemon amiga it seems people are able to get good results with just extra ram and perhaps a lightly accelerated 020, on alien breed and breathless

Perhaps I was being pessimistic.

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[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by crazyc

Having just looked up.some reviews on lemon amiga it seems people are able to get good results with just extra ram and perhaps a lightly accelerated 020, on alien breed and breathless

Perhaps I was being pessimistic.

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It's funny you mention that, I also looked up spec for playing those sort of games and it did seem possible to get decent results at not essentially insanely accelerated speeds.

You just looked at the reviews on Lemon amiga for each of those games then?

Hmmmm I dunno whether or not to go for a ram upgrade now. Their are some accelerators on ebay at the moment but one is possibly broken and the other two don't provide much ram. We're talking about within the price range of £100 - £150 (which is kind of my budget for an accelerator).

[crazyc]

I think you need to decide where you are going to go with this. It can be an addictive hobby and its often better to bite the bullet up front.

I only wanted to partly relive my youth which only involved my best mate's dad having an a500 I think and then look at what happened.

http://www.amibay.com/entry.php?36-And-so-it-began

Many of us began the same way - with hindsight I should have gone straight for the Blizzard 1230 MKIV and stuck with that. Add a CF hard drive and maybe Indy mk2 and its a cracking setup.

Although I would not now trade out my Blizzard 1260 or the IDE-FIX express (even though actually the latter is slightly superfluous now)

Having said all that if the ram expansion allows you to play most things whilst you wait and watch for a suitable accelerator then.......

Too many decisions!

[crazyc]

Just popped out to the mancave and ran Breathless on my lower spec a1200. It runs fine on the lowest settings, and even if you increase them a little. Obviously as you up the resolution it slows down but I reckon the games is well playable.

[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by crazyc

I think you need to decide where you are going to go with this. It can be an addictive hobby and its often better to bite the bullet up front.

I only wanted to partly relive my youth which only involved my best mate's dad having an a500 I think and then look at what happened.

http://www.amibay.com/entry.php?36-And-so-it-began

Well I'm the exact same as you (if you go back to the beginning of this thread). I'm reliving the youth, but it's partly the new hardware developments that have inspired me to get an actual machine than living on the emulator. And as can be traced back on this very thread, the A1200 seemed the best option if I wanted to get playing 500 stuff I had when I was a kid and the 1200 stuff I never got a chance to play (namely the FPS and some other cool games).

Originally Posted by crazyc

Many of us began the same way - with hindsight I should have gone straight for the Blizzard 1230 MKIV and stuck with that. Add a CF hard drive and maybe Indy mk2 and its a cracking setup.

Although I would not now trade out my Blizzard 1260 or the IDE-FIX express (even though actually the latter is slightly superfluous now)

Having said all that if the ram expansion allows you to play most things whilst you wait and watch for a suitable accelerator then.......

Too many decisions!

Well this is why I decided to go the CF route. I see them for sale on ebay all loaded up and ready to go. I think for the money they are going for VS the price of a decent 8gb-16gb card I may as well cheat and just buy a pre setup card. Originally I was going to start from scratch, and I figured save myself the head ache and spending the extra to get it all ready to go

Originally Posted by crazyc

Just popped out to the mancave and ran Breathless on my lower spec a1200. It runs fine on the lowest settings, and even if you increase them a little. Obviously as you up the resolution it slows down but I reckon the games is well playable.

I attempted to run it on the Amiga Emulator with as standard a setup as possible and it also seemed sort of ok. For some reason the controls where messed up and I could not fire my weapon though so didn't get far at all. It was the same with Gloom actually, switching to Keyboard should allow me to fire and side step, and for some reason firing my weapon doesn't work if I use the keyboard. If I go back to joypad it works fine to fire, but then I lose sidestep ability unless I get a two button joystick/pad. Anyways it was encouraging that they were playable, so I figure small upgrades to begin with might enhance play a bit more. Thanks for testing the game out at your end as well, I appreciate the time to do that


With and accelerator can I choose speeds at which it can operate at? Or are the fixed? Also how much is a Blizzard 1230 going for these days?

I read your post BTW on amibay, that's very cool! Guess I will have to get my ass over to that board as well. Pay day in a few weeks so might be time to fish for an accelerator. Mind you house insurance is also due at the end of the month

[Daedalus]

Releasing games that required an expansion should have been more common and earlier. It might have encouraged more people to upgrade earlier, and resulted in more games to take advantage of the extra grunt. It might seem bad that they were releasing A1200 games that needed extra RAM and an accelerator to get the best from, but I see it the other way: it was terrible that games were still being released based on the A500/A600 spec and not taking advantage of the extra power offered by the A1200.

Amiga-specific FPS games will be highly optimised for the native Amiga graphics setup, whereas games for other platforms like Doom and Quake, are not. As a result, you'll get much better performance from the Amiga-specific games on a given hardware setup, and so they'll be playable on lower level hardware. But more power will of course help.

Accelerators are generally a fixed speed. Nice and all as the 68K CPUs are, they don't have adaptive clocking, power management or any of those things taken for granted in modern CPUs. By and large they run at a frequency set by a crystal and that's it. The design of the accelerator however has a further impact on performance by affecting things like fast RAM speed and chipset access (including chip RAM) speed. Certain ACA accelerators are the only current boards that have adjustable clocks, which might be useful for overclocking purposes or heat management.

[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Releasing games that required an expansion should have been more common and earlier. It might have encouraged more people to upgrade earlier, and resulted in more games to take advantage of the extra grunt. It might seem bad that they were releasing A1200 games that needed extra RAM and an accelerator to get the best from, but I see it the other way: it was terrible that games were still being released based on the A500/A600 spec and not taking advantage of the extra power offered by the A1200.

Amiga-specific FPS games will be highly optimised for the native Amiga graphics setup, whereas games for other platforms like Doom and Quake, are not. As a result, you'll get much better performance from the Amiga-specific games on a given hardware setup, and so they'll be playable on lower level hardware. But more power will of course help.

Accelerators are generally a fixed speed. Nice and all as the 68K CPUs are, they don't have adaptive clocking, power management or any of those things taken for granted in modern CPUs. By and large they run at a frequency set by a crystal and that's it. The design of the accelerator however has a further impact on performance by affecting things like fast RAM speed and chipset access (including chip RAM) speed. Certain ACA accelerators are the only current boards that have adjustable clocks, which might be useful for overclocking purposes or heat management.

Well the accelerator thing was probably money related. And may be even because people started jumping ship to PC or different games consoles who knows. Can't be changed now.

Thanks for the added extra info on accelerators. I just need to find me one now. I fancy a ACA - 1233n.

If you have an accelerator, say that runs at 50mhz does that mean some games might run too fast? I realise some games may not even be affected BTW. I just wondering how the likes of F1GP and Frontier and all the cool 3D games would get affected and what are the best speeds for them to be run at?

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by rabidgerry

Well the accelerator thing was probably money related. And may be even because people started jumping ship to PC or different games consoles who knows. Can't be changed now.

Yeah, there's a giant thread of what-ifs elsewhere on the forum for discussing all that

Thanks for the added extra info on accelerators. I just need to find me one now. I fancy a ACA - 1233n.

Nice cards!

If you have an accelerator, say that runs at 50mhz does that mean some games might run too fast? I realise some games may not even be affected BTW. I just wondering how the likes of F1GP and Frontier and all the cool 3D games would get affected and what are the best speeds for them to be run at?

It would be rare for a game to run too fast as many Amiga games are frame-locked to keep the graphics synced, smooth and tear-free. In these cases, the CPU just spends more time per frame doing nothing and the game will run as it always did. If you do find a game that runs too fast though, WHDLoad will almost certainly fix it for you.

But many games use all the horsepower you can throw at them. Frontier will be a new game on a 68030, as will most 3D type games with variable framerates, like flight sims. You'll get a much higher framerate than on a stock A1200, and it will become much more playable as a result.

Some 3D games are still frame-locked and need to be patched to take advantage of the extra speed - F1GP is one such game, which is locked at something like 10FPS until you patch it with F1GP-Ed.

Other, non-3D games where a lot can happen at once will also benefit, such as Syndicate, Theme Park, Settlers, Dune 2 and so on, where the framerate won't suffer as much when the action heats up.

[rabidgerry]

All sounds good!! Now where do I get an accelerator?

It seems I've gotten into this just as all the new stuff being produced has dried up and everyone is now waiting round for the A1200 vampire which is pretty much not using anything of anyones Amiga other than their power supply and keyboard.

Are Individual ever going to produce anymore gear I wonder?

I shall have to bag a deal somewhere, perhaps Amibay. Could be waiting a long time.

[crazyc]

Put a wanted thread on amibay and keep an eye on the for sale threads. Something will come up. The vampires are cool but not to my taste as I want a little more original hardware.
But there is no right or wrong on that it's just a matter of taste.

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[Solo Kazuki]

As for Vampire there is as You mention, even standalone version is in plans.

But good thing about vampire is that some people exchange cards for Vampire and sold them. So should be batch of turbo cards for sale.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by rabidgerry

All sounds good!! Now where do I get an accelerator?

It seems I've gotten into this just as all the new stuff being produced has dried up and everyone is now waiting round for the A1200 vampire which is pretty much not using anything of anyones Amiga other than their power supply and keyboard.

Are Individual ever going to produce anymore gear I wonder?

The ACA 1221 is currently available from Individual Computers' website. It's a low-end accelerator, but still gives a speed boost over a RAM-only expansion, and isn't that much more expensive than an old 8MB RAM card. It's worth considering anyway, and it should hold its value well if you ever want to upgrade or decide you don't need it any more...

Edit: Actually, it appears that Individual are also taking preorders on their 68030 accelerators, which they say will be available in August. Might be worth waiting for!

[daxb]

Some days ago I've read that new ACA cards (030 55MHz) are in "production", but I would ask Individual Computers.

[Solo Kazuki]

Indeed, all line of ACA12xx accelerators is planned. They are available to preorder already.