Recently i got meself my childhood dream. Amiga A1200! It has a smaller form factor than a500 but you can even fit a 2.5 harddrive inside. Actually some people did fit a laptop cdrom in there (Amiga 1200 Internal CDROM). Anyway, I carried it home, opened the case, put it together, switched it on. Aaaaand, now what? What do you do with a barebone A1200? By barebone I mean:
A1200 classic case
Standart 2 meg chip ram, no fast ram
800mb 2.5'' HD
Unluckily Kickstart 3.0 ROM :(
I learned that I needed kickstart 3.1 to run OS 3.5 or OS 3.9. They are modern operating systems for amiga. But they also need a fast cpu and tons of ram anyway. But Workbench 3.1 runs fine. MagicWB is out the question because it needs some fast ram, but MUI programs work fine.
CD-ROM
I also connected a cdrom to my amiga using a 2.5 => 3.5 ide cable. You also need a iso-9660 cd filesystem for amiga. I used AmiCDROM-1.15 from aminet. It worked fine. It mounts the cdrom as CD0: and you can access it just like any other device. Drive access speed is pretty good. You can also play whdload games and demos directly from cdrom. Which takes us to the subject of
WHDLOAD
Whdload is a harddisk installer system for trackloader games and demos that naturally dont have harddisk installers. It really is a breeze playing moonstone from the harddrive without all those long loading delays. Almost all A500 games work with whdload. Even the ones that exclusively need kick 1.3 work with internal kickstart emulation. If you get a not enough memory error, try booting with no startup-sequence. Of course no luck with AGA games and demos because almost every one of them needs all 2mb of chip ram and some of it is used by the operating system and whdload.
You can download it here: WHDLoad @ WHDLoad Website
KingCON
This is a replacement for CON, which the console driver of your amiga. Amiga's default console is nice but it's a bit dated. And when you see nice features of modern shells like tab completion and scrollback buffer you cant help but want them on your amiga. This software does it all:
Filename-completion (TAB-expansion)
Scrollback buffer
Jump-scroll. (FAAST output!)
Cursor-positioning using the mouse
and more…
You can get it here: KingCON 1.3 @ Aminet
To be continued…
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