Who was really pleased with their A1200?

[itsmedoofer]

I moved from a Spectrum + to an A600, out grew that and got an A1200 HDD bundle less than a year later, sometime in the early 90s.

For me it was the perfect form factor and could use my TV, saving a massive amount of space in a small room. Un-expanded it lasted about a year, when college work needed more from final writer I upgraded with a Microbotics MBX1230 and 16Mb, that was sufficient for the rest of my college days.

When PPC boards came along and ppl were selling thier 060s I picked up a Blizzard 060 for pennies, with the money I saved on a new one I got the SCSI module to go with it...

Still have it all today, before retro went mad I got a second A1200 at a boot fair for next to nothing, that with a 8Mb expansion is my daily driver to be fair, the Blizzard is great but for Sunday best...

[oscar_ates]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Did you even read the thread title? Probably not

Just mentioned the purpose of the other thread. Let's put my positive vibes here. After I got my Blizzard 1230 IV card with 8mb ram and hdd I was very happy with my A1200. Used it until 1998. Played with some Lightwave 3d stuff as well beside the games.

[Karlos]

So, fellow A1200 fans....

For those that are still fortunate enough to own one, who's excited for the PiStorm32 ?

No matter how much better the A1200 "could've been" in the day, today in 2023, it's going to be awesome.

[vulture]

Oh, I'm so excited for the pistorm32! I'm gonna have mine next month hopefully.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by vulture

Oh, I'm so excited for the pistorm32! I'm gonna have mine next month hopefully.

I am going to have to get on that bandwagon. I actually want to develop for it. Not just for the Amiga/68K but for the actual device itself. The unused processing capacity of the additional cores. I spent quite some time working on a software synthesis framework recently. As a musician it would be fun to have that built in.

[nikosidis]

I have Pistorm32
My A1200 got a new life with it. For now it is best to use Pi3 as Pi4 is quite buggy with it. That could change quite fast though.

[vulture]

@Karlos

That would be very interesting. Any ideas of what you could do with the spare cores?

[drHirudo]

I have joined only later with my own A1200, after having A500 and A600 before. Compared to the A500 which had only 512 KB Chip RAM and the A600 with 1 MB Chip RAM, the A1200 had whole 2 MB of Chip RAM, which was allowing for better resolutions and more colors, plus full palette of 16 million colors, instead of 4,096 of the OCS/ECS machines.

I have used A1200 at friends since 1994, but my own one came in 1999, after buying it from Vesalia. It was ESCOM Magic pack with books and games. I knew the stock A1200 is not much useful, so it came with Blizzard 1220. The Blizzard had 4 MB of Fast RAM, so I had 6 MB of total RAM. Very good for putting many OCS and even AGA games in the RAM drive and playing them from there at amazing (faster than hard drive speed). Luckily for me, or it was this way, Vesalia forgot to remove the IDE hard drive cable, so I just borrowed laptop 2.5 inch 2 GB hard drive and was able to attach it and used it for 2 years, downloading music, software and pictures from the Internet. Later I bought FPU chip and attached it to the Blizzard 1220 and this speeded some software and scene demos. Not much, but for me the A1200 was much more easy to upgrade than the A500 and A600.

After the 2 GB hard drive suddenly stopped working forever, I decided to not rely on them anymore and bought bigger 3.5 inch hard drive, attaching it from outside. Meanwhile I also had PCMCIA CD interface and was buying Aminet CDs for mods and games and had even bigger software collection. (This was before the fast Internet era, my Internet connection at the time was with phone and modem at 56 Kbps). Later I even received some Aminet CDs for free and even magazines for uploading software to Aminet. CDs were main storage medium at the time (very cheap compared to others), so I had CD burner.

Positives of the A1200 over the A500 and A600 that I had before:

Smaller case than the A500, full numerical keypad (compared to the A600), easier to upgrade, more space inside, making it easier to cool. The PSU was also smaller, so it was much more portable than the A500.

No need to mix the channels out of the computer - insert only one jack and it automatically mixes both outputs to mono.

Faster speed - full 28 MHz with the Blizzard 1220 and then Viper 1230 with 8MB Fast RAM (unfortunately overlapping the address space of the PCMCIA, rendering the CD drive useless).

Even without any expansion (with only 2 MB Chip RAM) it was still useful. I used to have a floppy drive, that mounted the CD drive and connected to the Internet with only 2 MB Chip RAM.

CrossDOS and CrossMAC came as standard, making it easier to transfer files from PC and MAC. I used them on the A600 before and on the A500, before I sold it's 2.0 ROMs that I had. I went to a PC Show in 1997, connected to the Internet from some PC machine, downloaded bunch of demos in lha archives, wrote them to 720 KB floppies, then later transferred all the files to my Amigas thanks to CrossDOS. Then spread these new products around.

Some very nice games like Aladdin, Virocop, Skeleton Crew, Pinball Illusions, Slam Tilt were AGA only, so these alone for me were worth the upgrade to A1200.

Music - with the more power, I was able to listen and edit .xm files with the help of DigiBooster. Octamed had some nice 8-channel songs, but .xm format and later s3m players on the A1200 opened lots more possibility for listening music.

Internet - it needed memory, so the A1200 was the better machine for surfing, FTP-ing and IRC-ing back in the late 1990-ies and early 2000-ies.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Remember that the A1200 was only in production for 18 months before Commodore folded, it sold at least 800,000 units in that time which is pretty impressive

That would be impressive, if it were true - the real number is closer to less than 400k units.
In Germany, the biggest market, it were 95k confirmed sales.

800k would have been more than enough to rescue Commodore even without the CD32.

Sorry - now back to the good vibe.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by vulture

@Karlos

That would be very interesting. Any ideas of what you could do with the spare cores?

I don't know yet and I think I'd have to ask michalsc how it might be achieved given the bare metal implementation of Emu68k. But it's a sorely tempting idea.

As I said, one thing I have in mind is a software synth framework. One that I wrote for writing PHP demos (of all things) but have already ported almost entirely to C++, with all the obvious performance benefits that brings. It wouldn't need more than one core in its current incarnation. It may just be a pipedream for all kinds of technical reasons. In case it wasn't obvious what I am proposing is that it's arm native code, exposed to the Amiga as a virtual midi instrument of some kind.

I'm already working on adding it to my MC64K virtual machine project so it's not lost either way.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Cyprian

is there a difference in that matter between A1000 and A1200?

Imagine listening to a copied audio tape of a copy that your mate had recorded off an AM radio. Then compare to a CD. It was that good. As has been mentioned, the A1000 had an audio filter that couldn't be disabled.

I now have a PiStorm32 in my A1200 with a Pi4 attached. "Incredible" doesn't do it justice.

[utri007]

Originally Posted by Havie

Everytime I log on - the disappointed with the A1200 thread pops up. As lots of us were not disappointed with out 1200s, I thought it was time to redress the balance. So what made the 1200 great and a brilliant upgrade from a 500?

So disappointed not - pleased a lot. Balance redressed!

Don't bother. That thread is full of endless argument about a nonsense. I'm just happy that they have their own thread, that way they doesn't pollute every other threads.

I was pleased to my Amiga 1200 and I'm still am.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Did you even read the thread title? Probably not

Presumably being an 'incremental update' and 'not competitive to the same as contemporary PCs and consoles' were things he liked about it.

I certainly did. The A4000 had an 040 CPU so I would be worried about compatibility. Not so much for the 'incremental' A1200, though it was a pretty big 'increment'.

Being different from contemporary PCs and consoles was definitely a plus too. It was worth it just for the case alone. KS3.0 was wonderful compared to the PC's crappy DOS and Windows 3.x, and even more wonderful compared with what you didn't get on a console (OS, disk drive, keyboard, mouse, RAM...). Having a 68020 instead of a crappy x86 or bastardized 6502 was a big plus too, along with the ability to write code for it on the actual machine. Nothing beat the Amiga's multitasking for development work.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by acidbottle

See, I'm with Havie here. The word disappointed, whenever I see it, tells me "could be better than it was". Plain and simple.

Definition of disappointed

sad or displeased because someone or something has failed to fulfil one's hopes or expectations.

Not just 'could be better', but 'not as good as expected or hoped'.

I'm struggling to think of anything about the A1200 that didn't meet my expectations.

[stevelord]

The only thing disappointing me at the time was keeping the Paula chip as-is. I'd hoped to have seen a 16-bit sound chip in the A1200 but it wasn't to be.

In hindsight, some fast RAM as standard would've been amazing (as the A1200 really comes into it's own with it) but I know that would've pushed prices up too high. It was another world compared to my A500, and another massive jump when I put in an 030/50 and 8mb of RAM.

[nikosidis]

Originally Posted by stevelord

The only thing disappointing me at the time was keeping the Paula chip as-is. I'd hoped to have seen a 16-bit sound chip in the A1200 but it wasn't to be.

In hindsight, some fast RAM as standard would've been amazing (as the A1200 really comes into it's own with it) but I know that would've pushed prices up too high. It was another world compared to my A500, and another massive jump when I put in an 030/50 and 8mb of RAM.

I felt exactly the same and got exactly the same upgrade


It was basicly the reason I went to A4000. Bought Delfina soundcard.

[nikosidis]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Presumably being an 'incremental update' and 'not competitive to the same as contemporary PCs and consoles' were things he liked about it.

I certainly did. The A4000 had an 040 CPU so I would be worried about compatibility. Not so much for the 'incremental' A1200, though it was a pretty big 'increment'.

Being different from contemporary PCs and consoles was definitely a plus too. It was worth it just for the case alone. KS3.0 was wonderful compared to the PC's crappy DOS and Windows 3.x, and even more wonderful compared with what you didn't get on a console (OS, disk drive, keyboard, mouse, RAM...). Having a 68020 instead of a crappy x86 or bastardized 6502 was a big plus too, along with the ability to write code for it on the actual machine. Nothing beat the Amiga's multitasking for development work.

Spot on!

Even today I love AmigaOS more than any other operative system.

[jotd]

020 + chip ram wasn't that slow. The problem arose only when connecting a Phase5 060 board with games using chipmem. But that wasn't really the fault of the 1200, rather lazy devs that would assemble games at absolute location $400.

[vulture]

@Karlos

Hmmmm....here's another idea, a bit similar, obviously I, too, have no clue if it's even remotely possible:

Run fluidsynth and/or munt and interface it via a virtual serial port and camd with the amiga side.

Again, just a thought - not trying to steer your hand here.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by vulture

@Karlos

Hmmmm....here's another idea, a bit similar, obviously I, too, have no clue if it's even remotely possible:

Run fluidsynth and/or munt and interface it via a virtual serial port and camd with the amiga side.

Again, just a thought - not trying to steer your hand here.

It's all good. I thought about the synth primarily because implementing it has been fun. I have no idea how achievable it is to just run something native on another core in the Emu68K host side environment.

If it's possible at all, you could use native side emulation of other classic sound chips that you might be able to provide a means of talking to from the Amiga side. An array of SID and a few additional Paula style channels would be awesome