Amiga HD additions

[toomanymikes]

Hi, im new to this forum so I need some catch up advice from regulars. I have been reading a few messages and I was wondering what advantages installing a hard drive to the Amiga has? Is this a difficult operation or can any old fool with a screwdriver (me) do it?

[AlexJ]

Amongst the main advantages are you can have a customised Workbench with no concern about the limited space of the floppy disk, and you can install some multi-disk games onto it so you don't need to swap disks during play.

[Sharingan]

You'll never want to go back to Workbench-on-floppy-disk once you've tried a HD-installed version. It's a night and day difference.

As for installing a HD, it kind of depends on which model Amiga you have. If it's an A600 or A1200, they do have an internal 44-pin ATA interface that supports a 2.5 inch drive. The problem is finding an actual drive that still works.

I've opened up my Amigas quite a few times, and it's not very complicated at all if you've also done some PC installations - same principle.

[toomanymikes]

Really? I might look into it then - are the drives really that hard to find or is there modern drives that are compatable?

[Sharingan]

Modern drives would likely blow the crap out of a standard A600/A1200's power supply - I think they're only rated at 20-something Watts :thumbs:

I'm pretty sure you could still find a compatible drive somewhere. Maybe Harrison can help you out - he's the resident Amiga guru around here.

[Submeg]

And if not, an SD card or equivalent idea could be used...

[Harrison]

The thing to take into account on the older Amigas is that they have an HD limitation of 4GB. You can stick a larger HD into them but they won't (as standard) be able to see or use more than the first 4GB.

But you can get third party file systems to then be able to use the rest of a larger disk. Or even better, with an Amiga A1200 if you upgraded to Workbench 3.9 it can use larger HDs as standard.

If you are thinking about adding an HD to an A1200 then the UK store Amiga Kit have lots of products you may be interested in.

Here is a 40GB HD for the A1200 with WB 3.5 pre-installed.

http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=24&products_id=175

They also have reconditioned A1200's if you don't currently have one and were interested in getting one.

[Demon Cleaner]

I recently bought a reconditioned A1200 from AmigaKit, and I have to say, it's pretty good, did not look very used, as they also refurbish them. Did get it with a 260MB HDD.

[Stephen Coates]

The thing to take into account on the older Amigas is that they have an HD limitation of 4GB. You can stick a larger HD into them but they won't (as standard) be able to see or use more than the first 4GB.

Am I right in thinking that a disk above 4GB can be partitioned into more than one 4GB partitions?

[Harrison]

I'm unsure about this as I've only used HDs up to 2GB on size on an Amiga. I was led to believe at the time that 4GB was the total size of HD they could access over all partitions, but I could be wrong. Does anyone know?

[toomanymikes]

wow guys, thats some good advice. I have a bid going on an A1200 on ebay at the mo so ill have to wait and see if im successful - if not ill check out amiga kit (already added to my favourites on the broswer).
On that note - how much do you think is a fair price for an A1200? I have seen them go anywhere between £45 and £90. Say it was a base spec with a few games and no aftermarket upgrades?

[Harrison]

A basic A1200 with no upgrades or extras is worth roughly £40-50. If it comes in the original box with manuals and workbench disks then maybe slightly more.

With upgrades they can go for a lot more. A good spec for an A1200 is to get one with an HD of at least 1GB and a 68030 accelerator with some fast ram installed (8MB or more). Having an HD and 030 installed will be a huge difference to the system, as does some fast ram, and make it very nice to use. Such a system with those specs would sell for around £100 or more if there is interest.

One important thing to look for when buying an A1200 is the kickstart rom version. Make sure you get one with the 3.1 kickstart and not the 3.0. As this will allow you to run the newer version of Workbench (3.1, 3.5 and 3.9). If it only has 3.0 then you cannot run these.

And with the A1200 expansion is unlimited in terms of what you can add. You can even buy a tower conversion kit such as the Dbox 1200 and then have the ability to add PCI/zorro breakout boards, graphics cards, network cards, cd writers and whatever else you can think of.

[toomanymikes]

Jeezo - and i thought the thing died back in the late 90's! Damn it - you have me thinking now and those thoughts involve spending money...:yesyes:

[Sharingan]

Again, as I mentioned earlier, make sure you have a sufficient power supply before you start adding all these neat things. I've blown quite a few power supplies over the past years, and in some cases that can take out your hardware as well :)

[Harrison]

It's definitely far from dead, and expansion is only really limited by your budget.

And a lot of Amiga fans don't realise that the Amiga is still being developed in many ways. Workbench is still being developed with the current PPC only Amiga OS 4.0, and different companies are all working on ideas for future development of the Amiga One, but currently this is held back by court room disputes over who actually has the legal rights to develop and produce the hardware.

[Harrison]

Again, as I mentioned earlier, make sure you have a sufficient power supply before you start adding all these neat things. I've blown quite a few power supplies over the past years, and in some cases that can take out your hardware as well :)

This is very true. The original A500 came with a 60W PSU and that was strong enough for most things, but Commodore cut costs with the A1200 and it only comes with a 22W PSU as standard. You can buy larger external replacement PSUs for the A1200 such as the Goliath PSU I bought years ago for my A1200 that is a PC PSU in an external metal enclosure.

Using an A500 PSU with the A1200 is also another option.

[J T]

Especially as A500s are fairly easy to find, and cheap as chips on fleaBay.

[TiredOfLife]

There is still a fair bit of software for 3.9 and below being developed if you wanted to use your machine for something other than games.

[toomanymikes]

You mention using the amiga apart from games - what sort of things? I use my PC for 3D, image editing and CAD - is there anything like this?

[TiredOfLife]

Yes
Image editing software is still being developed at the moment by various people.
Image FX is supposed to be very good.
I have 1.5 but I think it's up to 4.5 now.

Not sure how up to date the CAD stuff is.
A search on Aminet should help with this and any other software you maybe interested in.

I use mine for the internet, email, chatting, radio, shopping etc.
Use it to listen to mp3 and have photos stored as well.
I have a fair few demos I like to watch as well.
Gaming also.

[toomanymikes]

How does it compare with a PC for the net and the photo editing? In terms of price too - is it expensive to mod the machine into something that can rival a pc? If i have to sell a lung i dont think my GF will be too happy!

[Stephen Coates]

For web pages it is great if you don't want pages that use CSS and similar things render properly. It is great for IRC though. WookieChat is a nice IRC client, although it, like IBrowse (for web pages) seems to lack simple copy and paste functions which gets really annoying.

If I remember correctly, PhotoGenics is a photo editing programme, which I would assume does alot of photo editing things. I have nver used it though so can;t comment on it.

I did read something about a photo organisation programme in a magazine, that is supposed to be like Apple's iPhoto, but i can't remember what it was called. It is OS4/PPC only though.

What do you mean by rival a PC? If you mean rival the Megahertz or processor cores then it won't, but I'm sure you would be able to do alot of nice things with an amiga which has a PPC and an 060, and even faster on an AmigaOne, which has a G3 or a G4 processor. Does anyone know how fast OS4's 68k emulation is compared to a real 68k?

Although you might be best off waiting a while before getting an AmigaOne and OS4, just in the event that all this legal stuff between Amiga and Hyperion gets nasty. Personally, I think the courts should just bang Amiga and Hyperion's heads together and tell them to get on nicely. After all, OS4, regardless of how illegal it might be looks like a very good OS, and Amiga should appreciate that.

At the moment you would probably be best off just getting an A1200 with a Blizard 1230 (for a 68030 processor) or a 1260 (for a 68060) and moving up to a PPC later, like I am (I currently have an 030). While this won't do as much as the PPC, it is MUCH nicer than the built in 020.

[Harrison]

As Steve mentioned Photogenics is a nice Amiga graphics package that can do a lot and is similar in function to older version of Adobe Photoshop. I used version 2 on my A4000 with a 68030 CPU and 18MB of ram and it was a bit slow, but usable. With more ram it would have been faster, but I think for good photo editing on the Amiga you need to consider a dedicated 24-bit graphics card.

Building an A1200 tower conversion and adding a breakout expansion board would allow the addition of a PC graphics card which would then open up the Amiga to true 24-bit graphics screenmodes that run much faster for things like graphics applications.

Also to do anything like this the fastest accelerator you can afford is needed. A Blizzard 1230 is really the minimum to consider. Don't go for any accelerator with a 68040 CPU in it as they need a lot of power and generate a lot of heat. The 68060 in contrast is faster, more compatible with anything that would run on the slower 030 CPU and runs cooler, so if you could afford an accelerator with the 68060 CPU then that is the one to get, otherwise get the 68030 first.

As Steve also mentioned, Web browsers on the Amiga are a bit out of date compared to current standards on the PC and Mac. iBrowse was recently updated and does now do a better job of rendering pages using CSS and Javascript, but it still lags behind current standards so many pages will not quite look as they were intended. It is usable though.

Any alternative route also suggested by Steve is the Amiga One. This is the next generation of Amiga developed around the PPC G3 and G4 CPUs. It is not backwardly compatible with classic Amigas so cannot run games from the original Amiga. Instead it uses a new hardware design and is designed for use with the latest version of Workbench, now known as Amiga OS 4. This is much more powerful and would give you power more equal to a PC. But as Steve also mentioned there are current legal issues between the developers of OS4 and the company that own the original copyrights to Workbench. So it could be worth holding off until we know the outcome of this before deciding on buying into the Amiga One.

The other advantage of the Amiga One reference design is that the computer is a PPC computer so can run versions of Linux compiled for it. This is therefore another way to gain access to anything the Amiga cannot currently do as it opens up access to Linux versions of graphics packages such as GIMP and web browsers such as Firefox 2.

The alternative option could be to build an A1200 tower conversion and add a dual accelerator card that comes with a 68060 and a PPC processor on the same card. This gives the best of both worlds as it allows the running of all software.

Personally if I were in your shoes I would begin by getting an A1200 with Kickstart 3.1 roms, a 68030 accelerator card with some fast ram fitted, an internal Harddrive and a PCMCIA network adaptor so you can access a network and broadband on it. This could be achieved for less than £200.

Then you could upgrade it later as needed.

Alternatively you could go straight for a tower conversion. Parts you would need to create a full and very nice A1200 tower would include:

DBox 1200 (the actual tower conversion kit)
A1200 motherboard with KS 3.1 roms (Amiga stores sell these)
PC keyboard adaptor (so you can connect any PC keyboard up)
Buffered IDE interface (this converts the standard A1200 HD IDE interface into one that can take up to 4 devices so you can then connect a cd/dvd drive as well as hd).
harddrive (could use cheaper 3.5" HDs as it's in a tower)
PCI breakout board (so you can then use cheaper PC PCI cards)
Voodoo 3 PCI graphics card
PCI ethernet card
CD/DVD drive.
floppy drive.
Accelerator card (Blizzard 1230 or better)And you can also add other compatible PCI sound cards to give better audio within Workbench.

Have I missed anything out of that list Steve?

[toomanymikes]

Wow - I think the only thing you missed was the kitchen sink!;)
Thats some really useful advice - thanks a lot. One question tho - I remember whent he A1200 first came out that there was compatibility problems with older amiga software and games. Was this due to the new OS? If so, have more recent OS solved this problem or will there still be compatibility problems?

[Stephen Coates]

Harrison - You missed USB, although USB isn't something I would rush to add, as things like graphics cards are more important.

toomanymikes - The A1200 can be a bit incompatible with older software, however this can be sorted quite easily. All you would need is a disk of ReLoKick 1.3. Boot up from this and it will change the machine to kickstart 1.3 temporeraly. You can also go into the early startup menu and change the chipset to OCS or ECS, and if a Blizard accellerator is casuing a problem then you can just switch it of at startup by holding down the '2' key.

This way, most stuff should work.

If you did run OS4, either on a PPC A1200, or an AmigaOne, you can always run old software in the OS4 version of UAE (I think it's called E-UAE).

[Harrison]

Good point. USB is very useful to use more recent things with the Amiga (as long as you can locate drivers for the actual items you wish to plug in). But that can easily be added at a later date.

And the compatibility isn't as bad as people initially thought between the A1200 on older software. The main cause of compatibility was due to hardware changes. The A1200 has Kickstart 3 so some older games didn't like it, but as Steve mentions you can use a free disk called ReLoKick 1.3 which will boot the A1200 into a Kickstart 1.3 environment until the next reboot and this will get most games to run on the A1200.

The A1200 also had compatibility issues with some badly coded A500 games due to it having newer versions of the custom chipset, as well as having 2MB of chip ram, whereas some games for the A500 were badly coded and tried to access specific memory addresses so crashed on the A1200, because due to the larger amount of chip ram the memory addresses were different so the game couldn't find what they were looking for.

Another issue with some games is the A1200's 68020 CPU as it contains a cache and some games didn't work with this. But in the early boot menu built into the A1200 (and accessed by holding down both mouse buttons during booting) you could switch off the cache to get many A500 games to run, and this is the most common thing needed to get most older games to run.

And in fact, out of all the games I ever played I only ever found 9 games that I could never get to work on the A1200, which isn't many when you consider I had copies of over 1000 games at the time. ;)

There are also some more A1200 degraders that can be used from Workbench. You set the downgrade options and then the utility will reboot the A1200 with these changes in place. This is useful for games that refuse to work with the 2MB chip ram as you can downgrade it to 1MB or 512KB to get some games to run.

[toomanymikes]

I take it that the 030 & 060 accelerators fit into the expansion port at the bottom of the A1200 or does it need the tower conversion first? If so do you know of any manufacturers names / prices / stores that sell these cards? I did a quick search on google but all i seem to get is output stats and motorola processor histories.

[Stephen Coates]

Yes, they both go into the slot underneath the A1200.

A tower conversion is not needed for the 030. The processor does get very hot, but not hot enough to need a fan, so it will work fine in a desktop A1200.

I believe the 060 will also work fine in a desktop A1200.

A PPC or an 040 does get very hot though and a tower conversion is recomended for these (although you can run them in a desktop as well)

[TiredOfLife]

There is a package called WHD that intalls games that weren't meant to, to your hard drive.
This also makes games that aren't compatible with the 1200 to work.
Also strips of the protection, so no need for codewheels and such.

[Demon Cleaner]

At least give him the link :)

WHDLoad support page (http://www.whdload.de/)

[Harrison]

The only downside of WHDLoad is that it won't work with cracked copies of games most of the time. So either the original games on floppy or via the CAPS (now SPS) versions of the games.

[toomanymikes]

If i was to pick up an A1200 with kikstart 3.0 rom is there any way of upgrading it to 3.1. There is one going on ebay with a HD and a blizzard 030 with 128mb but with kickstart 3.0. I would bid on it if there was a way to upgrade the kickstart.
Actually I would really appreciate some advice on how much you guys recon a system like this is worth- i dont mind paying but i dont want to get ripped off!

[Harrison]

Yes, you can buy 3.1 kickstart roms separately. They are socketed so not that hard to swap over. You just open up the A1200 and swap them over. Expect to pay about £20 for a set of 3.1 roms.

As for the A1200 you mention, I would expect a price of about £100-150 depending on interest. If you take the included parts individually the A1200 with KS 3.0 roms is worth about £35 and the Blizzard accelerator about £90. 128MB of ram is a really good amount too for Workbench related use.

[toomanymikes]

Fantastic - I have just won an A1200 with 120 mb HD and workbench 3.1 pre installed with disks and 50 games for 43 squid of ebay! Was this a good deal or have i been burnt? I dont really care cos im so happy to have an amiga that i always wanted winging its way to me as we speak. I'll see how i get on with the HD but i may upgrade it and buy an accelerator at the same time over the next month or two. So happy!:p

[Puni/Void]

Compared to the prices that are common in Norway, you've made an excellent deal. 1200's goes for a lot more than that over here.

As for the UK, I think it sounds ok, so I don't think you've been burned at all.

I see that you mention 50 games. Are we talking originals here, or are they just copied ones? I presume they are copies. ;)

I'm sure you are looking forward to set up the machine and turn it on for the first time. It's a magic feeling for sure. Hope everything will be in order when its all hooked up.

As has been mentioned by others here, a turbo-card will make a huge difference. This is especially true if you have some fast-RAM mounted on it. I've had a 68030 50mhz Blizzard Mark IV with 16MB fast for many years now, and everything runs smoother than on a vanilla 1200. You'll especially notice the effects of the card in demos, more demanding games, and last but not least - when you are using Workbench.

Have fun with your new machine! :)

[AlexJ]

My guide suggests a price of around £35-£40 for a basic A1200 so £43 for one with the 3.1 chips and 50 games seems a good deal.

[Harrison]

Yeah, definitely sounds like a good deal to me too. :thumbs:

Next wait for the Dragon Coldfire to be released and then buy one of those and a Dbox 1200 and you will be sorted. :)

[Sharingan]

Congrats man! That's a steal, especially compared to how much we had to pay for the stuff back then. Looking back, it's a mystery how Commodore managed to go bankrupt with the amount of money we were feeding them :)

[Harrison]

Commodore US were not making money is the answer to that one! Us Europeans, as well as the Australians were keeping the US parent company afloat for a long time before the end.