Who else was enchanted with their A1200?

[Karlos]

So, I'm not going to lie. The A1200 was not, in hindsight, the perfect machine. However, for me, in 1992, it was amazing

I'd joined the party late with the A600 that same year having b en out of the home computer scene for a number of years following the death of my speccy (this is why you get trying to build your own expansion). The 600 turned out to be a gateway drug, especially Protracker and DPaint. I remembered the glory days mostly from schoolfriends that had A500 in the late 80s.

I saved the rest of the year and got the 1200 for Xmas. My God, that was an exciting AF morning. Firing up Protracker and seeing all that chip ram!

I got the coding bug mostly thanks to the 1200, getting the 68020PM in hardback from the local library and a copy of devpac. Later, I got a HD and eventually the Apollo 1240. And later another machine and the BlizzPPC, then the BVision.

Without a single doubt, the A1200 was the most inspirational machine I've ever owned. I built PCs for other people in the 90s, and watched as the technology grew better and better, it they were still totally uninteresting compared to what I already had.

It wasn't until end 2007/start 2008 that I built my own PC for myself. Hardware wise, it had to run Crysis. Which it did. Despite which I spent way more time in Linux. I learned Nvidia's CUDA and GPGPU in general on that machine but I still did more on and for my 1200 right up to 2013, when life laid down the ultimatum of marriage and a family.

So yeah, the 1200 was a disappointment thread can kiss my ass. The 1200 is the single greatest computing purchase I ever made and I'll fight anyone that says otherwise :-P

[alkis]

Yeah, I am right there with you. Best amiga I've ever owned.
Got it with a 60MB hard disk. My previous Amiga was A500+ with two floppy drives. Within one year I got 68030@25Mhz with 4 (or was it 6...can't remember) MB Fast ram. It was the perfect machine for me back then.

Always wanted to get an A4000, but it was too darn expensive.
Your last line applies to me also 100%

[chip]

Amiga rulez !

[Phantasm]

I bought mine as soon as you could get one with a hd in. I thought AGA was a nice upgrade from my a500 that I got in late 89/early 90 but I think looking at it as an upgrade from the first OCS machines that came out in 85 it wasn't so ground breaking but it seemed ok to be at the time 2 years or so after getting my a500.

[Karlos]

Straight out of the box, you could feel the difference. Sure the 020 wasn't running at it's full potential but when I plugged in my parallel port sampler and saw the little realtime spectrum analyser display running an easy 2-3x faster than it did on the A600 it was evident the machine had potential.

The first upgrade was a hard drive. I got a then huge 1.28GB slimline Seagate medallist 3.5 inch that didn't require cutting the case. For a time, I had loan of a 4MB memory expansion and things were great.

I was all set to get a Blizzard 1230-IV in summer 1995, but out of nowhere, the Apollo 1240 appeared for not much more. Next thing you know, I was installing one. The speed increase was phenomenal. There were a couple of performance issues with it being so new, but various hacks and patches got the VBR, kickstart and a few key early libraries into fast ram and that was like getting another accelerator again!

By then, I was a regular user of OctaMED SoundStudio and being able to use 20 channels of samples without any sweat was amazing.

Between then and the BlizzPPC the DB50XG project appeared and I built it. Except mine was fitted internally and tapped the /KBRESET as well as the secondary reset button that I fitted to the right hand side of the case.

I ended up towering up the whole thing after the BlizzPPC in anticipation of going RTG. The BlizzardPPC allowed me to upgrade to 256MB of 60ns memory, which allowed me to just use a RAD for the system. Choose a compressed archive on initial boot, creates the RAD, decompressed the image to it and rebooted. That's how I rolled for the next few years.

Most fun I've had with a computer. Sure,modern devices are capable of so much more but somehow we do so much less with them.

[Karlos]

As soon as 3.5 came out I got that and the Dev CD and started spending more time with C and C++. Good times.

[Karlos]

As soon as life responsibilities cut me some slack, that old girl is getting a recap and a PiStorm.

[alexh]

Karlos you won't regret it. If you can afford it get a Pistorm32 lite + CM4 adapter they are a much better fit both for cooling and connectivity

[Karlos]

I have a feeling that they'll be unobtainable by the time I'm in a position

[Samurai_Crow]

My first Amiga was a 1200 with an undersized 40 meg hard drive. It got a lot of use on my desk. Getting programmers to support AGA was like pulling teeth, partly due to lack of documentation and more due to Commodore going belly-up in '94. I bought my A1200 in '93 so that wasn't much of a window for improvement. Ultimately, AGA was "Osbourned" by the promised AAA chipset that never came.

[swoslover]

I was late to the party as we got one in around 97. I loved that machine but don't seem to have used it as productively as you guys! I did spend hours on games and hours of Wordsworth which was my main word processor even at uni in the early 2000s. There was so much I wanted to do with that machine but we didn't have much money and by the time I was working part time at school my money went on less productive teenage pursuits. I used to love flicking through CU Amiga and Amiga Format dreaming of building an A1200 tower. Unfortunately my mum threw that 1200 out so no longer have it. Starting again with a couple of 500s as 1200 prices are crazy right now. Spent most of the golden years of the Amiga with an STE which must have been in a clearance sale. So yeah basically spent the 90s with computers for which nobody was releasing new games on, well apart from Big Red Adventure and Virtual Karting

[Daedalus]

I loved my A1200 when I got it, and still do. It was a toss-up between that and an A600, and I went for a 2nd-hand A1200. There was a significant difference speed-wise with many games that I liked - Frontier and Birds of Prey are the big ones, but also the likes of Theme Park and Dune 2. And the extra memory and speed was most welcome for coding, which was probably my main use case. I was so glad I didn't go for the A600 or an A500, and still am.

[Old_Bob]

Yep. I can't tell you the amount of hours I spent sat in front of mine. I got mine in '94 not long before C= finally went under. But, definitely my golden Amiga years, for sure.



B

[Cris1997XX]

Did Hammer appear in this thread already? I hope he'll show up to spew some more random "facts"

[Karlos]

Negativity for the original thread please. Let's face it, there's more than enough to go around there.

[Karlos]

At one point, I had my second A1200 up with extra RAM just to run OctaMED as a midi sequencer. I had long since replaced the DB50XG with an MU100R and the "big" A1200 with the 256MB was running MidiIn as a dedicated 14-bit sampler controlled over MIDI. Paula's output then got fed through the MU100R's A/D inputs where they could be mixed with the builtin sounds and be routed through the effects bus. This really was an epic way of working at the time. MidiIn was, at that time, a much better 16-bit sampler than OctaMED itself for live performance, at least.

[Karlos]

I think the most transformational upgrades for me were

1. Hard Disk
2. Accelerator (040, 8, later 32 MB)
3. BlizzPPC, though only for PPC enabled software. If anything the 040 felt a bit slower than the Apollo 1240 it replaced.
4. BVision / CGX 4.
5. Cheap as chips PCMCIA ethernet.

I never knew how badly I needed 5... Until I had it. Suddenly I had no need for removable media. I just had a share on the PC and could put anything there.

[CCCP alert]

I thought the 1200 was a nice machine but most AGA games were not developed to the same chipset busting quality as the best OCS games so once I had a PC (P120) that could match it on Super Stardust at 50/60fps and a PS1 I really left the computer games scene.

Maybe if something as cool and cheap as Digi-view I got in 87 had come out by 93 but then again I had a mortgage to pay by then so there was very little time for desktop video hobby and I just spent what spare time I had playing games.

[Dunny]

Got mine in ... 1995? Yeah I think so. Upgraded from an old beat up A1000 so it was like night and day. So much more I could do with it.

HDD - ordered a 250MB and got a 2.5" 360MB by mistake - in 1997, Blizzard 1230/IV with 4MB Fast in 98. Then a year or so later I swapped it for a PC, and that was it until a couple years back when I bought a friend's 1200 and stuffed a pistorm in it.

Always loved the 1200, always will.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Karlos

So, I'm not going to lie. The A1200 was not, in hindsight, the perfect machine. However, for me, in 1992, it was amazing

Same for me, especially after getting a Blizzard 1230. Was my main system until around 2004/2005.