New To Me Amiga 1200

[Tenorman]

Hello,

 

I've spent way too much time and money over quarantine getting together a nice Amiga 1200 setup.  I've had an A600 for a while, but not having AGA was always gnawing at me, so here we are...

 

-Bought the A1200 from a UK seller and had it shipped to the US.  Somewhat of a risk but it got here OK.  The box is hideous, and a bit beat up, but I do have it.

-Machine was re-capped a couple years ago.

-Upgraded to Amiga OS 3.1.4.  I know this will break pretty much any floppy games, but I still have the 600, and let's be honest a stock 1200 already doesn't work with at least a third of them.

-I installed one of those CF brackets that goes in the rear expansion port to let me swap out cards easily.  I am using a 16 GB Lexar card.  With 3.1.4 you don't have to do any weird partitioning, it just works.

-I am using BestWB which comes with a pretty nice assortment of the basic software you need without going too crazy.

-I added a Blizzard 1220/4 accelerator.  68020 @ 28mhz with 8 MB of RAM.  It isn't exactly super fast, but it is still very noticeable.  If you can find one they don't cost that much more than an 8 MB fast RAM card.  It does break the PCMCIA port.  If I ever get any accessories that need it, I can add a switch to disable the jumper on the ADD4 expansion to give me the option to boot up with 4 MB + PCMCIA rather than 8 MB.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Hwlngmad]

Nice pick up.  Definitely the Amiga world is quite big and I am sure that you will have a great time exploring it.  Take care and best of luck.

[Daedalus2097]

Looks nice and clean too! To be fair, 3.1.4 is more compatible with floppy games than the standard 3.0 ever was since they added a few shims for older software, but anything that ran on the A600's 2.05 should run fine on the A1200. It's really only the older games that did nasty things like directly jumping to absolute ROM addresses in 1.2 and 1.3 that break when you upgrade the Kickstart, so they wouldn't work on an A600 either. If you have an A600 game that doesn't run properly on the A1200, there are a couple of things that you can do to help that. First is disable CPU caches. This will fix any games that do funky self-modifying code that works on a cacheless '000 but falls over as soon as you add even the tiny 68020 cache. The other is to switch the chipset to emulate ECS. Both of these options are available in the early startup menu (hold down both mouse buttons while booting), which has more options on the A1200 than the 2.05 one from the A600.

 

Depending on the code, the Blizzard 1220 can increase the speed available by anything between nothing and 4x. For many games, the framerate is synced to the refresh rate, so a faster CPU just means more time waiting for the next frame. But with strategy games and 3D games, it makes a huge difference. You should try something like Frontier on your 600, then the stock A1200, and then with the Blizzard and see the difference it makes there.

 

It's nice to have large hard drive support from cold, but I still like to have a couple of small Workbench partitions at the start of the drive. That way, if you ever need to swap it to another machine, it will still boot the basics without having to swap over ROMs. And, it's easy to back up a separate partition so that if you mess up the system, you can easily copy it back.

 

If you don't already have a list of AGA titles to try, I would suggest some to start with:

 

- Banshee

- Theme Park

- Worms: Director's Cut

- Aladdin

- Gunship 2000

- Roadkill

- Tornado

- Putty Squad

- Flink

 

Some of them have ECS versions too (e.g. Theme Park, Worms), so it could make for an interesting side-by-side comparison.

[Tenorman]

For OS 3.1.4 compatibility, I was referring more to workbench.library and icon.library no longer being included in the ROM and needing to be loaded from disk.  I am planning on using this more for WHDLoad anyway.

 

I have a Furia and a 3.1 ROM in my A600.  It would be interesting to compare the speed of the two.  The Furia overall is a much nicer accelerator because it is a bit faster, has more RAM, has MAPROM, and has a utility to do stuff like disable the FPU via software.

 

Thanks for the list of AGA games.  I already tried out Aladdin.  It's better on Genesis. 

[Daedalus2097]

Ah, I get you. Well, that's not really an issue because the workbench and icon libraries are on the hard drive. If you're booting a floppy without them, the ROM is smart enough to check other mounted drives for them instead so it "just works". Try it  There are very few games that boot to Workbench though - any I can think of would also be hard drive installable.

 

Yeah, the Furia is an awesome bit of kit alright. The A1200 has a much faster chip RAM bus that would help speed it catch up with the Furia in certain use cases, but most software won't really make use of it unless it's system-friendly or AGA-specific.

[Randy]

On 5/22/2020 at 4:06 PM, Daedalus2097 said:

Looks nice and clean too! To be fair, 3.1.4 is more compatible with floppy games than the standard 3.0 ever was since they added a few shims for older software, but anything that ran on the A600's 2.05 should run fine on the A1200. It's really only the older games that did nasty things like directly jumping to absolute ROM addresses in 1.2 and 1.3 that break when you upgrade the Kickstart, so they wouldn't work on an A600 either. If you have an A600 game that doesn't run properly on the A1200, there are a couple of things that you can do to help that. First is disable CPU caches. This will fix any games that do funky self-modifying code that works on a cacheless '000 but falls over as soon as you add even the tiny 68020 cache. The other is to switch the chipset to emulate ECS. Both of these options are available in the early startup menu (hold down both mouse buttons while booting), which has more options on the A1200 than the 2.05 one from the A600.

 

Depending on the code, the Blizzard 1220 can increase the speed available by anything between nothing and 4x. For many games, the framerate is synced to the refresh rate, so a faster CPU just means more time waiting for the next frame. But with strategy games and 3D games, it makes a huge difference. You should try something like Frontier on your 600, then the stock A1200, and then with the Blizzard and see the difference it makes there.

 

It's nice to have large hard drive support from cold, but I still like to have a couple of small Workbench partitions at the start of the drive. That way, if you ever need to swap it to another machine, it will still boot the basics without having to swap over ROMs. And, it's easy to back up a separate partition so that if you mess up the system, you can easily copy it back.

 

If you don't already have a list of AGA titles to try, I would suggest some to start with:

 

- Banshee

- Theme Park

- Worms: Director's Cut

- Aladdin

- Gunship 2000

- Roadkill

- Tornado

- Putty Squad

- Flink

 

Some of them have ECS versions too (e.g. Theme Park, Worms), so it could make for an interesting side-by-side comparison.

Howdy, I just got a 1200 too and am looking at good games to run on it.  My fav games have been Frontier, Dungeon Master, Captive, and the Breach series.  Are there any AGA games along those lines?  Thanks!

[MHaensel]

Nice setup! AGA was a big step up from ECS, and an accelerator helps even more.

[Daedalus2097]

On 10/17/2020 at 2:43 AM, Randy said:

Howdy, I just got a 1200 too and am looking at good games to run on it.  My fav games have been Frontier, Dungeon Master, Captive, and the Breach series.  Are there any AGA games along those lines?  Thanks!

Well, Frontier is pretty much in its own league as a game. The follow-up was planned for AGA but ultimately ended up on the PC only due to the decline of the Amiga market. Flight sim-wise though, the AGA version of Tornado is an AGA flight sim that's well worth a look, and the HOL page shows the clear difference between it and the ECS version. The AGA version of Gunship 2000 is pretty good too.

 

As far as Dungeon Master / RPGs go, it's not really my genre, but I believe Ishtar 2 is worth checking out. Looks the part from the screenshots anyway.

 

I've never played Breach myself, but regarding turn-based strategy, Colonization is pretty nice. It's not AGA-specific, but does get a little prettier on AGA. UFO: Enemy Unknown is very good too, and that has a specific AGA version. Sabre Team is similar, and it too has a dedicated AGA version. Real-time-strategy-wise, there aren't many AGA-only ones that don't also need a graphics card, but Fields of Glory is one I've heard of (but not actually played).

 

Might be a couple to get your teeth into there