Be Excellent To Each Other

Eager spec-chums will remember that just before Christmas I added this to my stock Amiga 1200:



It's a compact flash card and came pre-installed with lots of (PD games - Ed). Very wonderful it was as well except the poor old Amiga was clearly struggling. Because you have to boot Workbench (OSX for the Acid House generation), it meant you didn't really have enough RAM to run most of the (legitimate pieces of software - Ed) included as they had been altered to work from hard disk.

Also, clearly the Amiga couldn't keep up with the speed of the card. Although loading was fast often things would come to a crashing halt while the Amiga got its knickers in a twist . So for example games that had music during loading would have the music stuttering and the screen flashing while the poor thing tried to keep up.

Second hand accelerator cards are expensive. But luckily those nice people at Amigakit came up with this, the ACA 1230/28 accelerator:

http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=1002

It's a brand new accelerator card for the Amiga that boosts the CPU to 28MHz and the memory to a huge 64 meg of RAM. The cost is £86 but this is considerably cheaper than a second hand board from the mid 90's that comes with no guarantee. This board also has modern, faster, RAM on it. More of that later.....

So I duly ordered one up. There's quite a demand so mine took 2 weeks to arrive.



Best part of an hour to slot it in. I have a very early A1200 (an early UK made model) that requires part of the metal tray that covers the main board to be bent back slightly as it restricts the expansion port. I also had issues with the fit being so tight I had to file away a part of the inside of the case. Newer 1200's won't have this problem.

Eventually after much coaxing and having to take the whole case off twice, I got the card in properly. The bad news is that it still doesn't sit quite flat but it does appear to work fine. Nothing is being strained, it's just the card refuses to sit flat.



Bad news is the door won't go back on the expansion port due to the slight angle the card is sitting at. I have contacted the retailer to ask for help. It is known that the bay door will need modifying for all installations, but mine is protruding by more than it should.

So, what's the result? Well the Amiga is all round faster, I can run Workbench in more than 4 colours and all the games load. The dreaded stuttering also appears to have vanished. But most surprising of all the machine clocks in much faster than an A3000 with the same processor thanks to the modern RAM and the clever engineering employed on the card.



And here's a shot of all that lovely free memory:



Word to the wise though. The card comes with a floppy disk that you have to install before Workbench can see the extra memory. This involves altering the Amiga startup file. Fairly simple once I worked it out (it's just one command).

It's not the biggest upgrade in the world, but it makes the Amiga superbly usable with a CF hard drive. You can run whatever software you want and the machine feels far snappier. I've also noticed that my LCD screen is happy running interlaced screen modes in Workbench so you can go as high as 1280x512 which feels really odd on a computer from 1992!

In all, a really good addition to my Amiga without breaking the bank. A faster (and more expensive) version is available and the same people have produced an A600 accelerator as well.

Not a final score because I've only had it working for a few hours, but I give it a provisional 985 Bananas, even if it was a pig to install. Anyone who doesn't have one of the initial 1992 batch of A1200's should have a much easier time.

Have you got Gravity Power on it? If so, can I play?

Wow, that's amazing! I never considered there would be 'modern' mig upgrades, even though there are loads for the '64. Maybe I'll have to drag my old machine out of retirement.

Definitely inspiring Chinny; almost makes me want to dig my ole' A1200 out.

EDIT: Ever thought of fitting an internal DVD drive?

http://deliriumbbs.freehostia.com/The_A ... proach.bbs

Great post chinny I still have real soft spot for my A1200, so much so that I'll be damned if MrsAE is ever getting me to chuck it out or eBay it!

Admittedly I haven't turned it on for years, but it's sat nicely in its box with zillions of floppies and an external disk drive

The Amiga was the machine that so nearly made it, in so many ways, but the last gasp they had (the A600 IMO) not only did they not give it a hard drive by default, they made a CD-ROM an immensely expensive (and thus largely unsupported) add-on - at which point the PC, which was already faster in CPU terms, pretty much had a CD-ROM emerging as standard, and was massively improving in terms of graphics (SVGA by then I believe) and sound (the original SoundBlasters), promptly stomped it into the ground.

I think I totally gave up on the Amiga when I got my first 486 DX2-66 PC, the PC had been looking good for years already (the likes of Railroad Tycoon and Colonization ran sooooo much better even on a modestly specced 386 PC), but it still hurt to desert my old friend.

WinUAE has filled in the gaps for all the classic Amiga stuff I just had to see again, Jesus on Es and DOC demos, anyone?

Not A1200 specific, but still, AMIGAAAA!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7PX3JAF_5Q

And my fav DOC demo, god I feel old and happy at the same time

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sJFhK2c8Zc

Running this setup is totally different to emulation. It's just hassle free as everything works, it feels authentic and it's also fast. Really worth doing. The CF HD was cheap and it convinced me that I needed to go the extra step to get more memory and a faster processor to really take advantage. I now have a machine that boots in seconds and I have have a game up in less time that it takes to boot he Xbox and sign in to Live.

I have the TV connected via a Amiga RGB to SCART lead I bought from a "specialist" cable retailer. However I had to modify the cable myself due to distortion on the image. I think I documented that elsewhere though. But in short Amiga's may play merry hell with LCD's unless you mod the SCART lead. Sadly the people I got my lead from used the excuse that LCD's didn't work well with the Amiga. They are actually fine but some of the outputs are a tad high which a resister can sort (I think it was the sync line that was high).

Doing all of this literally breaths new life into the machine. It's just so much nicer not to faff around with floppies.

Aside from the 3D stuff, I was very disappointed with my first 486 PC. The 2D games had poor graphics (remember bog standard VGA has less vertical resolution than the Amiga, 320x200 v 320x256) and the sound sucked even though you had to pay over £100 for a soundcard.

Now I have some more memory and CPU grunt I've been looking at some of the Amiga 3D efforts that I missed as I bowed out in late '94. Alien Breed 3D, Gloom, etc. Never played any of them, until today.......

Oh fucking dear. What were they thinking? All of them are totally shocking, the only passable 3D game I appear to have is a direct port of Doom that runs rather well. The rest just looks like when they ported Streetfighter 2 to the Speccy. Yes it's SF2, yes its a technical achievement, but you can't bloody play it!

The cool Amiga suddenly looks like the middle aged balding uncle trying to dance at a party.

Gloom was awful, I had an A1200 at the time and it was shocking compared to Doom on the PC.

A mate of mine had a pretty uber Amiga (030 or even an 040 maybe, with what was for the time something awesome like 4MB of RAM and a hard drive), the Alien Breed 3D game was also awful, anyone left in any doubt, definitely decided they wanted a PC.

The problem the Amiga always had was the base-spec (i.e. what all the developers wrote to) was crap, the A500 suffered from 512K of RAM and no external drive assumed (how many games still needed disc swapping?....), the A1200 desperately needed a hard drive as standard, and even with the AGA chipset in the A1200, didn't they nobble it in some horrible way to save cash IIRC? And then Commodore chucked the A600 into the mix, which was a real cheap-ass piece of shit which didn't even have a fucking numpad and therefore broke quite a few games and applications (not to mention new Workbenches that kept breaking things).

The Amiga was great in a lot of ways, but overall, I'm happier with my PC.

This is making me wish more than ever that I hadn't sold my A1200. I loved that damn computer.

We had an a1200 when I was a kid.

Still got an a1200 in the loft. I had an accelerator board in there for a while, coupled with a 6gig hard drive (it was the smallest I could find) but I sold the board for a tidy profit and the Amiga fell into disuse.

Those new ones seem like an excellent idea though. I hope they do well and send me one for free.

*plays shufflepuck cafe in head*

Great post Chinny.. it's making me tempted to order a similar upgrade for my A1200 now. I've got a 4gb internal drive on it, but it's lacking the memory to really make use of the hard drive installable games.

Goddamn, I'm surprised they're still making modern accelerators. Impressive stuff.

Shouldn't have sold my A1200T. Got rid of it in 2003 for about £400, and have regretted it ever since. I spent far too much money on that bloody machine - 68060/50 Mhz, 128MB of RAM, Voodoo3 graphics card, SoundBlaster sound and a PCI network card...

... all so that I could run the piece-of-shit that was Alien Breed 3D II in something vaguely approaching the resolution it was designed for

I think mine is still in my parents attic, with my one legit game (which was Wing Commander) and external floppy drive!

lovely post, for my amiga needws i use my cd32 most of the time with one of those lovely collection discs, was kinda dissapointed with amiga emulation on my new lovely macbook.. not better than on my g4..

WinUAE is pretty good these days and is what I use when I'm hankerin' for some Amigarin'.

Obviously owning the actual hardware would be better, but there you go.

My actual A1200 from back in the day was unmodified except for a 400MB hard drive plugged in to the PCMCIA card slot. Unfortunately, using a hard drive in this way required a PCMCIA driver to be run during Workbench's Startup-Sequence, which would use up a tiny bit of memory on launch, thus making the running of many AGA games a tad problematic. I stripped the Startup-Sequence on mine to within an inch of it's life to squeeze as much RAM out of it as possible - my Amiga launched nothing if it wasn't totally essential to the running of The Clue or UFO AGA or Star Trek 25th Anniversary or whatever the hell else I used to run on it.

I sold it to a mate of mine for peanuts after my parents bought our first PC and I've regretted it ever since.

Also, I have no clue what you could be doing with a gigabyte or more of HDD space on an Amiga. That 400MB jobbie of mine was still only 50% full with virtually every game and application I could get my grubby mitts on installed to it and even a bunch of WAV files of music I liked in lieu of the invention of MP3.

I never used Workbench on mine, I ended up creating a highly customised Shell that ran on start-up and had copious amounts of aliases set up to do whatever I needed.

This used to confuse all of the Apple/Windows users I knew at school/college, amusingly.

My A1200T has some weird bastard graphics card, what was the standard from before PCI? Well for some reason someone made a bus board for that, with drivers for one obscure graphics card (Pixel64?) and err, nothing else.

Here we go, it was "Ateo". http://www.bboah.com/index.php?action=a ... artlang=en

Why the hell did I buy that? It was cheap I suppose.

Anyway, with a Blizzard 060 card and plenty of memory, an SCSI drive and that, I had a pretty decent machine, quite happy on the internet, but couldn't play any games other than ones that ran on Workbench, and were happy with the Pixel64's immense resolution setting.

I had a 1200 for about 6 months, my parents bought it me for my birthday. It was longed for, and I really liked it, however, after 3 replacements for the gfx card dying and therefore being green screen, I got my money back and put it towards a PC. A 33 486SX which cost at least 3 times the amiga.

Not trying hard enough. My 4gb CF came 90% full and still has notable omissions. For anyone planning to do it, find a pre-prepared card on Ebay that has stuff installed for "testing" rather than buying a blank.

This is fixed now due to something called WHDload. I can run everything on the card from WB. This is the benefit of a pre-prepared card.

They still don't run in WB though, so your RTG card is useless, and if you were using a PC monitor with it, it doesn't support PAL so you were SOL.
IYSWIM.

However if I resurrect it, it'll be connected to my big Samsung telly, where I could actually plug both outputs into it (the native one and the RTG card) and switch back to the Amiga output for games.

I used to love my A1200, I had one of those hard drives that plugged into the PCMCIA slot (Overdrive?), that was a massive 420 meg.
At some point the interface card broke, and I took it apart to discover it was just an ordinary hard drive mounted to a board, so I took the A1200 apart and crammed it in there. It was only designed to have a 2.5" drive in there, so the lid never closed properly, and I had to splice power from the floppy drive power cable.
I later added a old cd rom drive from a pc (just an internal one, not in any sort of case), which could sit next to the A1200. This meant I needed a new IDE cable, as the one I had only had one connector. I'm sure it would have been possible to buy another cable, but instead I took a standard IDE cable, cut one end off and connected every individual wire to the plug that would fit in the amiga.

Shortly after all this, I gave up and got a PC, I'm not even sure I've still got the A1200.

Is this where you discovered your interest in electronics?

Quite possibly, I was apparently a resourceful teenager.
I forgot to mention the addition of an A4 sheet of paper to keep the drive off the metal shielding.

Joans: that was it - that's exactly what I had: a 420MB Overdrive! Yeah, it was just a 3.5" hdd in a PCMCIA caddy. If memory serves, this was because 3.5" drives were cheaper than 2.5" equivalents and didn't need pissing about to install them internally. An internal drive would've been a lot better though as you wouldn't need to run the PCMCIA driver.

Heh, yes, I had a 3.5" drive crammed in as well before I towerised it, needed an expensive IDE adaptor cable as well as a hacked power cable. The drives were far bigger and cheaper than the 2.5" ones though.
The lid did close though, amazingly.

You know, I think getting rid of the Amiga spelled the last time I really, truly gave an actual shit about the nuts and bolts of computing. I tinkered and tinkered with my 1200 until I had it setup to something approaching perfection (for me at least), but I've never bothered so much with the Windows computers since. My stint as a Mac owner was probably the closest I've ever come since to getting really involved in playing around with my computer.

Why would you need to, they just work?

I tried running a Linux-only system for a few years, but eventually gave up and returned to Windows (first 98, then Vista) when I realised that I had better things to do then sort out RPM conflicts or recompile a DVD player for the umpteenth time. I liked playing with KDE, though.

Heh. My first Mac ran Mac OS 9. Let me assure you that the one thing that tended not to do was 'just work'.

OS X has always been solid, but it runs on a FreeBSD-based core. What computer geek isn't going to want to have a little tinker with that? The beauty of the OS X is that tinkering is never needed unless you need to do something really obscure and specific on it, but the option to have a play is there if you want it.

Bearing in mind that I'm a fully paid up Windows man these days and haven't had a dedicated Mac (well, I still own a Powerbook G4, but it's seen better days) for three years, I still think OS X is the best consumer operating system out there at the moment. It does things differently to Windows, which takes getting used to, but overall it provides a far better user experience than Microsoft have ever managed, or ever could without significantly redesigning virtually all of Windows and breaking all of it's backwards compatibility.

Yeah, some things that wouldn't run from the hard drive due to lack of memory, worked after it was installed as an internal drive.

Being married and having children would seriously change that though.

I was mad about computers for many years. My first computer (other than a totally unmodded A500 and 520STFM) was a Samsung unit based around the SX25 286. I paid bugger all for it but it gave me a change to break myself in using DOS and other stuff. Then a mate of mine got a Pentium 60 (the very first Pentium) and I got his 486 DX4100. And that was it, I was hooked. Mostly because that one needed to be built and at the time AT cases were quite scarce unless you went to computer fairs.

From there it was tinker tinker tinker. My next machine was a Pentium 166 (god it all happened so bloody fast !) and then 200MMX.. The rest was history until I met the ex wife and didn't have the time (nor allowed money) to carry on with my hobby. Then when that all ended and life became a lot simpler I picked it all back up, but I am determined now to just use the shit out of my new one and not bugger with it. So far I have been doing really good. Five weeks have passed and I have not taken the side off nor felt the motivation to. I think by getting the I7 950 with triple channel 1600mhz ram I have gotten it to a level so good that I couldn't justify spending another penny.

The problem is that computers eat time. Whether it's sitting there on the floor/at a bench for hours figuring out the best way to run the wires or even tinkering with software it eats up time. Time that when you have a mound of responsibilities on your plate doesn't exist. And if it does you feel an air of guilt or keep getting interrupted, stopping you from going to the zone.



My first mac (a performa all in one that I got free) ran OS 7. I got a free OS 8 disc from work (we bought a pile of junk from a bankrupt business) and then I was hooked on macs too

Then I waited for what seemed like forever for the Carbon Imac DV or whatever it was called to come out, dropped £1400 on that

Then dumped £2500 on a droolworthy G4 Powerbook (black one, forget the codename for it now, think it was an American city or something?) and then I sold it all before going to the USA. I did have a carbon DV I got free in about 2005 from a mate, but that was the last mac I owned.

It worked a damned sight better for over a year in the 9.2.2 - 10.0 transitional period. Nightmarish working in pre-press around then.

The Amiga is 20 years old today.

well Amiga Power is, which might be the same,

in a month time it's 20 yeat=rs ago i got an amiga though, still in the loft..

You are now officially even more wrong than Mr Chris.

You are also as wrong as Mr Chris. Amiga Power's birthday won't be until May.

YOU LOT. STOP GETTING THE AMIGA WRONG!

I wrote Amiga Power.
What the fuck happened?

30, surely?

//edit: Never mind. Tab open longer than necessary.

I WROTE AMIGA POWER!

I'd speak to the forum Admin if I were you.

You did the write thing

Most normal people assume a magazines life is from the first publication date to the last issue.

Well the MIGHTY BEINGS at Amiga Power are not normal people so they can get away with it.