Who was really pleased with their A1200?

[vulture]

that would be amazing too!

[Mathesar]

I had an A1200 with a harddisk, Blizzard 1230IV and 16MB fast RAM.
It was a huge step up from the A500, especially with an accelerator installed. The ability to run higher resolution productivity screens (flicker-free!), more colors and a much faster CPU was incredible. Also, the case felt much more robust, the A500 always flexed a bit when picked up. The A1200 in comparison was very sturdy.
Software wise, OS3.0/3.1 was a huge improvement to OS1.2/1.3, where most users were coming from. As mentioned before, CrossDOS was standard meaning it was far easier to exchange files with Windows users. And with a 50MHz 030 and Shapeshifter, the A1200 made for a very capable Macintosh too. Always fun to drag down your workbench screen and show an Apple user what real multitasking is like. The A1200 helped me through my education that way running Maple for example.

I think the A1200 was maybe the best Amiga ever. Even though I traded it later for an A3000 that I always lusted for.... :-)

[jotd]

The expansion capabilities of the A1200 were as good as other "professional" Amigas.

I had Pixel 64 card, CD-writer, HDDs, PC keyboard, 060 accelerator & extra ram, I could do a lot of "professional" things on it. Development, music composing, PDF reading, CD audio/.mp3 burning, Mac emulation to write reports as a student...

Now most of this extra hardware has failed and is obsolete, and for more stability (I was always struggling to boot the machine for some reasons, had a complex boot sequence that involved to reboot once so the pixel 64 worked, else it locked up...) I've degraded the A1200 to a desktop case with CF IDE, KTRL joypads, 060 + memory (that I didn't sell!) and only use it to run whdload games or test stuff on real hardware. And it boots instantly and works great. I never recapped either, which seems strange when I hear all the horrors about not recapping...

Also got a spare A1200 board just in case

[Retro-Nerd]

I never recapped either, which seems strange when I hear all the horrors about not recapping...

They leak. It's unavoidable. Maybe you had luck so far and nothing important was destroyed yet.

[BSzili]

I also used to be in the "why recap when works fine" camp, until it didn't. One day the Paula audio went away, and it turned out that one of these buggers leaked, and started eating away the traces on the PCB. Fortunately I caught it early and it didn't need a lot of bodges to fix.

[jotd]

You're right. I've contacted "Steel Alive" in France. Better safe than sorry with original hardware.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by jotd

You're right. I've contacted "Steel Alive" in France. Better safe than sorry with original hardware.

Especially you with everything that you're doing !

[Havie]

I love the positivity!

And well done for going for a recap - mine was recapped a good few years ago and still goiong strong although the keyboard is a bit dodgy and it's yellowed a bit. Time to get a new membrane and either new case/keys or have a go at retrobrighting (when the summer comes).

The more people write, the more I realise how much I forgot - Workbench 3.0 - a much more professional looking OS and it was better than 1.3. Cross Dos - forgot about this too - used it quite a lot back in the day (did it work on the 500 - can't remember). Mac emulation - we all had a go at this - Duke 3D was pretty good fun!

And how could I forget Star Trek 25th Anniversay. Still have the original Amiga game.

Keep them coming.

[morten.dynamite]

I loved my A1200 the integrated HDD, AGA and faster CPU, more memory than the A500, I also got a Blizzard 1230 III with 8MB RAM, I even bought the 3.1 upgrade in the 90s, I have now a Apollo Icedrake and have put it in Checkmate A1500+ case, I have recapped and did the timing fix, I still have my A500 that I am going to recap someday.
I used it even for doing homework for school, still have the MPS 1500C printer on a shelf.

[cv643d]

I was (and still is) very happy with the A1200, it was faster than an A500 and had more memory. Not having to get a separate HDD controller was a great advantage BITD.

Still my main Amiga and I just added a secondary in case something happens with it.

[sokolovic]

Upping this thread up because I was more than pleased with my Amiga 1200 (and still am) and because of the depressing and supposedly objective other thread.

[eXeler0]

Well I was dissapointed with the A1200 all the way until I got my first accelerator, then everything changed. The computer became so much more useful. It was a Blizzard 1220 (28Mhz 4MB ram). Suddenly i could do productivity stuff, games like Frontier /Gunship 2000 became enjoyable etc. From then on I loved my A1200 and I still do to this day. But they really should have sold bundles with the 1220 + HDD included. ;-)

[sokolovic]

Frontier was enjoyable even on a stock A600. I wasn't very aware of FPS by that time (nor were my friends that enjoyed this game as much as me). I'm pretty sure that on a stock A1200 it was as much enjoyable.

[drHirudo]

Every Amiga 500 owner that I knew, once (s)he saw the A1200, felt in love in it. I know the A500 with 1 MB RAM and the Amiga 500+ with whole 1 MB of Chip RAM and 2.0 OS was the de-facto standard for the Amiga, since it is the most sold model, but the A1200 is what anyone wanted for more serious Amiga stuff.

Like in the PC world, backwards compatibility was very important. Well, probably not as important as for the PC world, where it was main selling factor, since many companies invested thousands in software and hardware, that was of utter importance to work with any new revision of the Operating System and Hardware.

And the Amiga 1200 had it to some degree - there was the two mouse buttons combination in the beginning for switching to OCS/ECS emulation, also Relokick 1.3 was very often used since it took some memory, but old games didn't need more than 1 MB anyway.

The Amiga 1200 also became the standard demo machine after year 1994, where OCS/ECS was still strong for demo watching, but the new AGA demos were getting more and more impressive.

A1200 main positives - 2 MB Chip RAM, AGA, Easy HDD add-on, very easy to move around, practically noiseless work (if you don't have Hard Drive).

[Havie]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Well I was dissapointed with the A1200 all the way until I got my first accelerator, then everything changed. The computer became so much more useful. It was a Blizzard 1220 (28Mhz 4MB ram). Suddenly i could do productivity stuff, games like Frontier /Gunship 2000 became enjoyable etc. From then on I loved my A1200 and I still do to this day. But they really should have sold bundles with the 1220 + HDD included. ;-)

I had one too and loved it as well - really nice bit of kit. You are so right, made a huge difference and wasn't too expensive at the time. Probably should have been the base 1200 spec.

[Cris1997XX]

Originally Posted by Havie

I had one too and loved it as well - really nice bit of kit. You are so right, made a huge difference and wasn't too expensive at the time. Probably should have been the base 1200 spec.

Selling the A1200 with 1MB fastRAM would've made it much more competitive

[sokolovic]

The A1200 was officially sold with an HDD. But please, don't make that thread going to another "What if ?" for whoever sake.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Cris1997XX

Selling the A1200 with 1MB fastRAM would've made it much more competitive

With 2MB ChipRAM it was already pretty competitive, as well as more compatible. But with some FastRAM added it really flew.

I wanted to bundle a cheap good quality FastRAM board with the A1200 in my shop, so when Alfadata released the AlfaRAM 1200 with 1MB onboard I bought 50 of them. Unfortunately I discovered they had a subtle fault that sometimes caused memory corruption, so I had to send them all back. The repaired units worked fine, but I sometimes wonder how many bad ones (if any) are still out there.

I have a spare A1200 motherboard that I am thinking of plugging a RAM board into to experience the A1200 as it was typically configured in the mid 90's. A friend of mine had that combo and it worked very well. We spent many hours on it playing games like Dune 2 and The Settlers. He also ran his business on it using EasyLedgers, which worked way better than typical DOS accounting packages of the day.

[grond]

I loved my A1200. Even though I am active in the other thread, I never was disappointed with the A1200. It was a very big step up from the A600 that died on me. I had been lusting for being able to switch on floor and ceiling textures in Ambermoon which was only available on 020+. The 2MB of chipmem meant that a lot of problems you might run into with previous Amiga models disappeared. HAM8 was amazing and I could never go back to graphics with just 4 bits per colour channel without thinking how limited that really looked. I had some program that generated procedural landscapes and I remember rendering those in HAM8 in a sunset lighting scheme and just getting a lot of pleasure from looking at the results.

My A1200 got a harddisk and an accelerator with fastmem within weeks of purchase and then was an amazing computer that stood its place even with regard to processor speed. It felt lightning fast when all you had been used to was floppy-based. PCs didn't come close to it with regard to usability and elegance for several years anyway. But even the DX2-66s seemed to suck at everything except raw computing power in games. Some time after Win95 got introduced, the PCs became superior if you could stand using Microsoft stuff. I couldn't and moved to Linux with the purchase of my first PC in 1997. I could use a lot of software I was used from the UNIX workstations we had at university (including display redirection through a modem connection!) which was very useful for me. That's when the A1200 went into storage. It wasn't useful any more (even though it might have been enjoyable, I just focused on other stuff like university and work).

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Frontier was enjoyable even on a stock A600. I wasn't very aware of FPS by that time (nor were my friends that enjoyed this game as much as me). I'm pretty sure that on a stock A1200 it was as much enjoyable.

While framerate wasn't the immense number-comparisons game back then that it is now, there are plenty of situations where Frontier on the A600 slowed down to the point of affecting gameplay. Relieving those issues somewhat by playing on an A1200 made a huge difference to the playability for me, and therefore the enjoyment. I could never play it on an A500/600 once I'd played it on an A1200 (and adding an accelerator made a similar jump in the game's enjoyability too - it's difficult to go back to playing it on a stock A1200 after playing it on an '030).