I never bought an accelerator or RAM card for my A1200

[ImmortalA1000]

Mostly because the 030 was such a crap CPU bang for buck vs 020 as far as gaming goes and the excellent Blizzard 1220 came out around the time Commodore went under anyway, April/May 1994 in Germany.

For £219.99 you got 4mb of RAM (which alone cost £149.99 EXTRA for their 1230-II 40mhz 030 accelerator) and a 28mhz 020 which is close enough to the speed of a 25mhz 030 card and roughly £150 less than a 25mhz 030 + 4mb A1200 accelerator. You also got the option of a 68882 @33mhz which is a hell of a lot more useful for 3D rendering than spending too much on a 50mhz 030. Not bad for late Summer 1994.

Would have been nice, regret not getting one now. Makes no sense to buy one on ebay now that there are Pi based accelerators for the Amiga I think.

Commodore rumours suggested by Xmas 1994 some sort of 28mhz 4mb Amiga 1200 may have been around so it would effectively have been Commodore's answer to High Street 100mhz 486/75mhz Pentium 'Family PC' options. Sales of PC laptops were going well so prices of bare 2.5" IDE drives were starting to come down by 1994 too.

1200 with Chip + Fast RAM, 28mhz 020 and a hard drive is probably a nice setup to use. I used to have a 48mb Supra Wordsync hard card and extra Fast RAM for my Fat Agnus A2000 with KS 1.3 I was given in 1990 and that was a nice system to use.

[Weasel Fierce]

About 25 mhz and a bit of fast RAM is honestly all you needed for most classic stuff.
My first card was an 030/25 with 8 MB RAM and the experience between that and the stock 1200 was night and day.

[QuikSanz]

An old Blizzard should have DMA at least, maybe even an HD controller.
Depending on what you run an 030 is compatible with most software and way faster on some if what you run is not to old, it shouldn't be old unless non AGA. 16Meg is better.


I have an old 030/40 W/HD on my a2000. everything I have ever tried has worked.


Chris

[QuikSanz]

By the way, the Terrible Fire only has FPU on the 4Meg model, don't know if they Bussmaster or DMA.

Chris

[oscar_ates]

I had a blizzard 030/50MHz with 16 Meg ram then
Too bad I sold it to buy a ps1 since no good games were coming to a1200 in 1998

[ImmortalA1000]

Yeah, the time frame does get a bit blurry for me too around 1994/95.

I don't know if the Blizzard 1220 allowed it but some accelerators let you run Kickstart from the 32bit Fast RAM for even better response on busy Workbench screens. This may have been more of an OCS/ECS Amiga accelerator thing, can't remember.

I didn't really do anything serious like word processing etc at home on any computer so in 1996 when I finished my degree and sold my Pentium PC I used the money to buy carpet for my enormous living room and had no x86 PC until 2001 (internet!!). If I had been optimistic about ESCOM's plans for Amiga I probably would have picked up the 1220, probably as cheap as £175 by then.

[sneeker]

Im the other way, Ive never used an A1200 of my own without an accelerator.
I didnt get An A1200 until 2009, and that came with a dkb cobra 030/28, then I got an ACA1232/40 then my Current apollo 1240, with plans of putting an 060 in it but have never got round to it.
A friend had a 1200 back in the day, and all he did was put a hdd in it, so I think all we did with that was the few games he had installed, I think Skidmarks was one, but even he bought a pc in around 1996.

[ImmortalA1000]

I bought a 486 PC around the same time I got my launch day A1200 but that was really for my university course. Obviously I had friends who were even more prolific PC pirates than any Amiga owner lol so you name it I played it, including stuff like Gauntlet II for DOS etc. I later sold that 486 and got a Pentium PC for my final year. Once my course was over in 1996 I had no use for Windows so I sold it and only had Amigas (stock A1200, A2000 with 48mb HDD and 5mb RAM) until the whole internet thing happened around 2000/2001. I got Windows XP with my next PC anyway and it was an Athlon XP2000 CPU I think.

As there wasn't much support for accelerated games, Frontier for Amiga doesn't have the texture map mode at all like the PC DOS release for example and I think F1GP is frame locked without modding, I always held back on getting one. I did want the HDD equipped A1200 but none were available in the stores (was a massive problem back then early on IIRC, 95% of A1200s shipped were not HDD equipped but stores wanted them and so did customers).

The Blizzard 1220/4 was a bargain though for the price. An A1200 with 28mhz 020 and Fast RAM would run Dredd really nice I bet. Unlike PC owners back then with their little SVGA monitors you could have played an Amiga FPS on a huge 28" CRT TV with decent speakers

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

I bought a 486 PC around the same time I got my launch day A1200... I did want the HDD equipped A1200 but none were available in the stores (was a massive problem back then early on IIRC, 95% of A1200s shipped were not HDD equipped but stores wanted them and so did customers).

Supply of all A1200s was limited at first. But adding a hard drive wasn't difficult.

RAM and accelerator boards took a bit longer to be developed, so you would have to wait for them. Which was good because it gave you time to save up, and in the mean time you got a good feel for how well a stock A1200 ran (much better than an A500!). If you only wanted to play games a stock machine was fine, but a RAM board made it even better.

Once my course was over in 1996 I had no use for Windows so I sold it and only had Amigas (stock A1200, A2000 with 48mb HDD and 5mb RAM) until the whole internet thing happened around 2000/2001.

By 1996 there was plenty of expansion stuff available for the A1200. Accelerator card prices were dropping dramatically, partly because the manufacturers knew they had to sell them before the market collapsed. That was the right time to get one.

Hard drives were getting cheaper too, simply because like all PC stuff they continuously got cheaper. I looked out for bargains as suppliers got rid of old stock that PC customers didn't want because the drive capacity was now too low for them (but fine for the Amiga!).

[trixster]

I bought a Blizzard 1220/4 (28mhz 020 plus 4MB), it was one of the best computer upgrades I ever made.

[Daedalus]

Indeed, it was one of the selling points of the A600 and A1200 that it took industry-standard hard drives internally. It was around then that I bought a 1.4GB hard drive for my A1200, which felt *enormous*... Until I got the internet and promptly filled it with MP3s. At that stage though 8GB drives were available so I upgraded to that.

[lmimmfn]

I bought a Blizzard 030/50 with 4Meg RAM in Glasgow in '94(could have been 95 but 99% sure it was 94). It cost an insane amount of money(for me at the time ). I paid about £440 for it, buy I absolutely loved it. Still have it in a box, only not used because I gor a V2 but it served me very well bitd, especially when I got a HD in '95

[Weasel Fierce]

Looking at a random issue of Amiga Format from 94 it looks like you could get:

4 MB RAM expansion and clock for 180 pounds.

40 or 50 mhz 030 with 4 megs of RAM for about 440-500.

[ImmortalA1000]

I got a launch day A1200 in the UK at 9am in the morning, by the time the 12 month warranty was over we are talking just before Xmas 1993 even for me. There was no way I was going to void the C= warranty for some corner shop warranty to have a drive fitted. You couldn't open up the A1200 to fit the drive without destroying the warranty seal so that was a huge problem and I never did that either.

I would have paid the extra £100 just to get a HDD equipped 20mb model but nobody had them, don't know anybody who found a HDD equipped A1200 in the stores either back then. More of a warranty thing than a price of drives thing.

By 1996 when I sold my PC as Commodore were dead I just added a Japanese Saturn in Xmas 1996 (Sega Rally and VF2!) to go with my launch day PS1 I already had. The rest of my money went on the new fangled mortgage and between work and PS1/Saturn gaming I didn't really have time for things like Desktop Video on Amiga by then anyway so all I did was a bit of gaming on them and some doodles on Dpaint etc which the stock A1200 was fine for. My VLAB Y/C card was in my A2000 anyway which had 5mb and 48mb Supra hardcard.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

I got a launch day A1200 in the UK at 9am in the morning,

This is what you get for being impatient. I got a 'launch day' A600 and then had to pay extra for a ROM that supported hard drives. No big deal though, I had lots of fun on it before that (never had an A500 so it was a new experience for me).

There was no way I was going to void the C= warranty for some corner shop warranty to have a drive fitted.

I don't know about the UK, but in New Zealand all shops selling Amigas dealt direct with Commodore and were authorized to do upgrades. At the same time PC clone suppliers only offered a 3 month wholesale warranty, so us retailers had to suck up failures during the next 9 months or more (depending on how long it took to sell the machine).

Personally, the very first thing I did after getting a new computer home was grab a screwdriver and take it apart to ogle the innards. 'Wot, the warranty seal's broken? How did that happen?".

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

PC clone suppliers only offered a 3 month wholesale warranty, so us retailers had to suck up failures during the next 9 months or more (depending on how long it took to sell the machine).

That wasn't the worst though. I special-ordered a database addon called 'Crystal Reports' from a leading 'professional' IT wholesaler, specifically for a business customer who needed it. Turns out the latest version of their database didn't work with it - but of course they didn't find this out until opening the software package, and the supplier wouldn't take it back or provide an upgrade. Another $1000 that I had to suck up!

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by trixster

I bought a Blizzard 1220/4 (28mhz 020 plus 4MB), it was one of the best computer upgrades I ever made.

Agree. I bought it from a mate who had just bought a Blizzard 1230 Mk IV and though he definitely had the more powerful machine, it made my A1200 last all the way through the 90s. It is faster than the A3000 on every non-FPU benchmark and you can do a lot within 4 MB of fast RAM + 2 MB chip.

I only replaced it this month when I bought an ACA 1230/56 for a steal.

[Zak]

I met quite some Amiga users which didn't want any expansion in their Amiga 500 or 1200, because to them it didn't feel original or pure. Not even a harddisk in the A1200. In the early years like 1987/88 you could get a lot of PD games and also some commercial games that didn't need a slow memory expansion. Same with A1200, when it came out, you could get a lot of stuff for chip memory only. I also met people that refuse to play games on their CD³² that weren't originally published on CD for it. They won't use A1200 or A500 games to burn for it, no matter if they would work fine. This is some type of collector's fetish, I think you could say.

[Karlos]

In 1995 I was all poised to get the Blizzard Mk IV 50MHz. And just as I was about to, the Apollo 1240 came out. I took the bait. It was a very first revision (the EEPROM was socketed) and had a lot of issues. A lot of stuff ended up in chip ram that should've been relocated to fast, slowing the performance. But it was still breathtaking compared to stock. In a couple of months I had patches that fixed all those early relocation issues, had installed 040 math libraries and the system was a joy to use. It did get temperamental in the end.
I should've gone 060 after that but ended up on BlizzPPC with the same spec 68040.

The only other upgrade that delivered anything like the same productivity boost was the BVision. After years of an autoscrolling 16 colour interlaced WB (with magic TV), switching to a 19 inch CRT with up to 1600x1200@75Hz was amazing.

[Karlos]

These days, if you had never had an accelerator, I'd be thinking something raspberry pi based. If the emulation accuracy is good enough, the price/performance ratio looks hard to beat.