Who else was enchanted with their A1200?

[vulture]

A1200 is a wonderful machine. Doesn't matter it's not perfect, it was perfect for me at that time and for many years on.

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by Karlos

The 1200 is the single greatest computing purchase I ever made and I'll fight anyone that says otherwise :-P

I'll fight at your side.
My A1200 was the only computer i used from 1994 to 2015.
A nice, reliable machine, fun to code on.

[demether]

I had a 1200 amiga once, and sold it. But the man who bought it was a scammer, and paid it with a stolen bank check. Long story short, 6 months later the police found him, and gave me back the amiga. I kept it, and still have it (recapped, pistormed, etc....). I will NEVER sell it again. You have to loose it to discover how this machine is magic and addictive.

[alkis21]

Count me among the enchanted. It took me a while to discover its full potential, but I got there. At first, it was just a machine that run a few AGA games that failed to impress me and many less than the A500 I had sold to get it. Then I bought a hard disk and it was awesome, so much potential. Aminet followed and then TUDE that enabled to me to run most games. And finally, the miracle that was WHDLoad. I still have the same machine I bought in 1993.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by demether

I had a 1200 amiga once, and sold it. But the man who bought it was a scammer, and paid it with a stolen bank check. Long story short, 6 months later the police found him, and gave me back the amiga. I kept it, and still have it (recapped, pistormed, etc....). I will NEVER sell it again. You have to loose it to discover how this machine is magic and addictive.

That guy have a great resume to work as manager at Commodore.

[Karlos]

Who remembers worrying that fitting their first trapdoor expansion was going to break something due to the apparent force required?

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Karlos

Who remembers worrying that fitting their first trapdoor expansion was going to break something due to the apparent force required?

I remember that. I had to take the top off the machine to get enough force onto the card.

But it wasn't as bad as worrying about whether you had the pins aligned on your A500 trapdoor expansion, and not nearly as bad as worrying about whether you would crack the motherboard on your PC.

[Karlos]

A true story. As a student, mid 90's, we got burgled. A housemate had a pretty dire 386 laptop running DOS, which was old then and not worth much. I had only just fitted the Apollo 1240 board to the A1200 and in terms of expense, was worth quite a bit more.

The scumbags stole money and various other things, including his laptop. Thankfully for me, they mustve decided the A1200 was a worthless toy, which at that point was far from true.

[Karlos]

I remember getting my fist AGA effects working. Bear in mind I'd only had an A600 for about 8 months and had only picked up 68K assembler for a month or so before getting the 1200. Seeing your first properly smooth copperlist gradient. That was really satisfying

[pipper]

I got my A1200 after using my A500 for a while. I later added a 340MB 3.5" Quantum harddrive (they _were_ alot cheaper than 2.5" drives after all) - which could fit barely with a bit of cutting of the RF shield. At a later point I fitted a half-inch height 3.5" Seagate Medalist 2GB with much less hassle. I even cut the side of the case a bit to lead the IDE cable out into a CD-ROM drive...

I remember initially being rather disappointed with the bare A1200... WB in 256 colors looked gorgeous in magazines, but was rather slow in real life. But still, the 2MB opened up productivity quite a bit. I used the machine for programming, making music, drawing, homework, printing and later Internet surfing... you name it. Later I added a Blizzard 1230IV with additional fastmem - man, what difference that made!! Frontier was now really playable!
This is when using the machine really took off for me and I was quite proud what punch it packed in such a small form factor.

I used it until around 98/99. At this time, I already had a PC with a Pentium200MMX and a Voodoo. Windows98SE made the PC really usable for (3D) gaming and it became an interesting platform to code on. My Amiga faded away... I would sometimes use it to play things like Mortal Kombat and XTreme racing with my brothers...eventually putting it away. But I never sold it. In 2017 I got the bug again... and even learned that the AB3DII source had been open sourced :-D

[TommyTomorrow]

I was enchanted by my friend's A1200 when he got her in 1993. I was jealous that it had a HDD and could install most of the games on it and stop changing disks in the FDD all the time

[demether]

I was lucky enough to have a memory extension and HDD since the beginning. As a former A500 owner, it was so great.

[DJ Mike]

I didn't get an A1200 till the end of 1996 but for me it has always been the machine I've cherished most and keep coming back to, in spite of the PC becoming my main platform from 1998 onwards (and a plethora of games consoles along the way). I find the chipset and 68k asm so fun to play around with - it scratches an itch that a career in software development has never quite managed to do.

[CCCP alert]

My £1000 486 PC with SVGA in Oct 92 couldn't display images as nice as my shiny new A1200 in 1280x512 HAM8 (think it was 16 colours max above 1024x768).

I also printed some technical diagrams via making huge page size in Dpaint 3 or 4 and printing directly 1:1 with the resolution of my Canon BJ10 printer and people kept asking me at uni how I was doing them/what PC package lol fun times.

Remember playing the 1 level coverdisk demo of Super Stardust on my 1200 connected to my hifi and 28" diamondtron TV and thinking how 'commercial quality' the Paula sounds were and wondering WTF all the bullshit arguments about 16bit DACs needed for AGA sound was compared to hissy soundblaster and plinky plonk Adlib junk audio too.

I still have mine too but it's a bit yellowed and the drive needs a full refurb/replacement but it still works (no idea if it has audio crackle as not booted any disks up).

[grond]

Originally Posted by Karlos

I remember getting my fist AGA effects working. Bear in mind I'd only had an A600 for about 8 months and had only picked up 68K assembler for a month or so before getting the 1200. Seeing your first properly smooth copperlist gradient. That was really satisfying

Haha, that was my first AGA effect, too!

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by grond

Haha, that was my first AGA effect, too!

So many shades on a two colour screen ...

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

My £1000 486 PC with SVGA in Oct 92 couldn't display images as nice as my shiny new A1200 in 1280x512 HAM8 (think it was 16 colours max above 1024x768).

That was something I remember impressing PC owning friends with. That and the whole screen drag of displays at different colour depths and resolutions simultaneously.

Remember playing the 1 level coverdisk demo of Super Stardust on my 1200 connected to my hifi and 28" diamondtron TV and thinking how 'commercial quality' the Paula sounds were and wondering WTF all the bullshit arguments about 16bit DACs needed for AGA sound was compared to hissy soundblaster and plinky plonk Adlib junk audio too.

Most PC sound was dreadful at that time. I am sure some people will want to point out how that wasn't true but even though there were 16-bit audio cards for the PC at the time, almost everyone I knew that had a PC then had ad-lib or in some cases, no sound at all because you only needed a beeper for running productivity software.

The only PC soundcard at the time that was remotely comparable to the Amiga was the Gravis Ultrasound, with dedicated multichannel playback.

As someting of a wannabe musician, for me Paula was very interesting. I've said this elsewhere but the biggest missimg feature of Paula for me was not 16-bit replay, it was programmable filters. That said, I have used Paula as a 4-oscillator wavetable synth routed through an external lowpass resonant filter, all controlled by MIDI. In this configuration, each Paula channel is playing a waveform and all of them are stacked into a monophonic patch. You would not believe how huge that can sound, especially with the external filter and effects.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Karlos

That was something I remember impressing PC owning friends with. That and the whole screen drag of displays at different colour depths and resolutions simultaneously.

Yes, screen dragging! Totally awkward from a modern usability pov but this always was when the PC crowd understood what multitasking means. Now they could SEE TWO programs running at the same time!

That said, I have used Paula as a 4-oscillator wavetable synth routed through an external lowpass resonant filter, all controlled by MIDI. In this configuration, each Paula channel is playing a waveform and all of them are stacked into a monophonic patch. You would not believe how huge that can sound, especially with the external filter and effects.

Have you got some recordings of this?

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by grond

Have you got some recordings of this?

I did but not digital. Lost on tape somewhere.

Unless... I'll have to review some old CDR / HD

[CCCP alert]

I had a Gravis Ultrasound, 1mb IIRC, which I got in 94 I think which was the first proper soundcard I remember that could be assigned to SFX and music in game setup options.

But stuff like the Roland LAPC1/MT32 were not sample based cards, you had fixed patches onboard for MIDI library, but a creative person would prefer A1200 2mb Chip RAM for samples in Pro Tracker which meant you could use 28khz samples for all of them. Hell on those crappy desktop PC speakers ALL PC owners had you can't even tell the difference between the amazing OCS friendly Zoolook 4 channel MOD and a PC playing an MP3 of the same Jarre tune.

My friend had an ST and a MIDI sound module, rather listen to Kefren's Desert Dreams/Stardust MODs etc than anything on a MIDI module myself. PC Stardust 96/Super Stardust has the tunes as unencrypted regular MODs on the floppies identical to the AGA disk game, I ripped them from there back then so I could play them on my 1200 my Hifi.

Archimedes audio was the only rival to Amiga in 92 but using all 8 channels at max sample rate used up noticeable ARM CPU time oddly on the Acorn 3000 rival to A1200.

(Zoolook MOD on youtube is not the one I am talking about with different samples/instruments btw)