I’ve been spending a fair amount of time messing around with the Amiga 1200 that I recovered from the loft a few weeks ago.  It has been a little frustrating, I’d forgotten a lot about the Amiga and its idiosyncrasies and progress has been slow for several reasons that I’ll get in to below.

One of the main challenges I’ve found with retrocomputing is transferring files to and from your retro systems.  With the Amiga 1200 this isn’t really an issue due to its PCMCIA slot which will happily read and write to standard compact flash cards with the appropriate adapter.  A PCMCIA to CF adapter was therefore my first purchase (I later discovered I already had one grrrr.)

My next purchases were an IDE to CF adapter and some Kickstart 3.1 roms.  Installing the latter was pretty easy although it’s important to note the manner in which the original chips are installed as there are more sockets than there are pins on the chips.

I then pulled out the original Seagate IDE hard disk, plugged in the IDE to CF adapter and added a SanDisk Extreme III 4GB CF card.  I booted the system with my Workbench 3.1 floppy and set up the newly installed CF card.

I divided the card into a 200MB partition for Workbench and the rest as one large partition for games and data.  After formatting the partitions (some considerable time) I made a fresh install of Workbench 3.1 and booted the system from the new CF drive. This whole process was a little tortuous as the Amiga kept crashing at various stages.  At first I assumed the CF card was incompatible but I soon realised the 128MB SIM I’d installed was causing the problems.  I swapped it out for a 4MB stick and the machine become much more stable.

The next challenge was installing AmigaOS 3.9 which is supplied on CD and at the time I didn’t have a compatible drive for the Amiga.  Using a Mac I copied the contents of the CD onto a compact flash card in a drawer name AmigaOS3.9 and inserted it into the Amiga.  I then fired up shell and entered the following command – ASSIGN AmigaOS3.9: cf0:AmigaOS3.9 and was then able to run the installer with the CF card mimicking the CD.  However I ran into a number of problems with the installation and have since learnt that using a non-Amiga system to copy files or open archives destined for the Amiga can mess up the file permissions when you then try to use those files.  After much fiddling I finally got a semi working installation of Amiga OS3.9.

I seem to have stopped using my Amiga just at the point that CD rom drives became quite widely used with the system, I personally never had one but wanted to add one now so I could install the OS properly.  I ordered a buffered IDE interface and dug out an old Plextor external USB drive.

I opened up the back of the drive and disconnected the USB interface from the IDE connector on the drive and ran an IDE cable out of the box and into the Amiga.  I had to make some changes to the Tooltypes of the CD driver that had been installed by OS3.9 to get it working:-

DEVICE=atapi.device
UNIT=2
ACTIVATE=1
TAB=8
LASTCHANGE=5

I now had a working CD ROM drive and was able to successfully install OS3.9 without problems and also install the Boing Bag 2 update.  My next ambitions are to replace the external drive with an internal one, I already have a slim drive from an old Cubit box, whether I have the courage to cut a slot out of my 1200’s case is another matter, and Internet access.  For now some Frontier Elite II.

I decided to have a dig around in the loft as I couldn’t remember exactly what was up there computer wise, I knew there was an Amiga 1200 and a CD32 but I was also surprised to find an Amiga 500 and a barely used Sony Playstation.  I retrieved the A1200 and the A500, the first is in great shape, in fact it looks like new and it works, the hard drive even booting into Workbench on initial power up.  The A500 is pretty grubby, very yellow and not working, giving only a flashing power LED and green screen.  There was also an A590 external hard disk unit with it, I’d forgotten I had that.

The A1200 cost me a small fortune back in 1993, I ordered it with an 80mb drive and a Microbotics MX1230A accelerator board featuring a 68030 CPU, 68882 FPU and 4 Mb of additional RAM.  It was and still is a gorgeous system, probably my second favourite retro system, pipped to the post only by the C64.

Thinking back to how much I used to dream about upgrading the RAM which was devilishly expensive in those days, it was odd to find a 128 Mbyte SIM in one of my piles of junk and simply plug it in.  For some reason, in my mind, the A1200 still seems really powerful.

There were a couple of games on the drive, Sim City 2000 and Frontier, Elite II.  Many, many hours were spent playing the latter which is one of my all time favourite games, despite the bugs.  On researching the game I noticed you can download an OpenGL version here and play the game in high resolution under Windows or Linux which is pretty cool.

I also discovered there’s still a thriving community surrounding the A1200 with much ‘pimping’ of the original machines still going on.  The most common upgrade seems to be a compact flash internal drive which I’m hoping to attempt.  Others have added USB ports and even internal CD ROM drives.

During my Amiga years I still had delusions of becoming a digital graphic artist, I used to dream of ending up at somewhere like Pixar.  With the 1200 I found a box of disks including Sculpt 3D and 4D and Deluxe Paint III and IV.  I managed to recover some saved files from DPaint but no luck so far with the Sculpt files.

Dpaint produced .lbm bitmap files and after hunting around I found this site that allowed me to convert them to GIF’s.  The second image was copied from a 1985 Tolkien calendar and the first from a book lent to me by Urbancamo called Space Wars, Worlds and Weapons.  Very odd to see these again after all those years.