What to do with a barebone A1200?
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:
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.
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:
To be continued…
:cool:
Fellow Amigans apear unexpectedly, anywhere. Got a A4000/68060/50/140MB/OS3.5+ myself that I still use as my main machine on a daily basis. I am a big Ibrowse fan but unluckily it does not support Wordpress properly. Maybe in the next version.
I also use a Mac with OS8.6 + 9 occasionally. And I do have an A1200 68030/50 + a A2000 lying around.
Next new hardware will be something that is non-PC (again) and silent. Probably a minimac running Ubuntu.
If you need software/hints for your A1200, let me know
:cool:
August 15th, 2006 | #
You better look out for support at Amiga.org , my Amiga is an A1200 040/25mhz + 603/210mhz 32MB ram and so on, and i’ve had most intermediate configurations between
this and the basic vanilla model, if you want to save precious chip ram pay attention to not
have unused (like from installed software tried but later discarded) prefs in Envarc directory,
keep the color depth and resolution low, i actually did use MUI with hd-furnished unexpanded Amiga, you should give it a try too. Adding any turbocard from Phase5 would make your day,
i would suggest a blizzard 030/50 mhz and a little fast ram and you’re done.
P.S.: I currently use a Pegasos with Morphos on it ;).
August 20th, 2006 | #