• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Advice on Amiga choice and upgrading?

G

gladders

Member
Joined
Oct 7, 2015
Messages
35
Location
London
Hi everyone, I'm new here but I am getting quite interested in vintage computing and thought I could tap your expertise.

I am considering options for collecting vintage computers (currently proud owner of a C64 and an MSX2) and I think my next machine will be an Amiga of some sort.

I am mainly going to use it for gaming, but I want also to explore other software, I am appreciating the history and peculiarities of these old machines.

I am drawn at first to the Amiga 1200 because of its more powerful chipset and also because it has a HDD port (so I can install WHDLoader) plus I can upgrade its RAM to 8MB. All good.

However, it can be quite pricey on eBay (at least £100 for the unit by itself) and on closer inspection RAM upgrades look less than straightforward, and if the 1200-exclusive software is less than stellar it may not be worth the extra cost (although it would definitely be a prestige item!)

So can anyone recommend the Amiga 600 as an alternative? It appears to be similar to the 1200 in every way bar an older chipset and no numerical keypad. However, it still has a HDD port and upgradable RAM, albeit it won't play 1200-exclusive software.

Thoughts on either? And is upgrading the RAM a tricky job - I see pictures of the trapdoor under the 1200 and it looks like it's not as simply as slotting the RAM into conveniently-positioned slots, but a matter of opening up the machine and adding new boards/soldering, is that correct?

Is there a decent online guide for RAM upgrades anywhere?

Many thanks for your comments :)
 
Personally, I love the Amiga 600. I own two and wouldn't exchange them with some other model. Stick an ACA-620 in (about 100 bucks) and you have enough speed and memory for all ocs/ecs compatible WHDLoad games. However, that combo will be just as expensive as a stock A1200.

The cheapest way would be a stock A600 with a 2 MB PCMCIA SRAM card, which will also speed up the A600 by 30% when configured to 100ns. This will already allow you to run most WHDLoad games with the PRELOAD option turned off.
 
gladders said:
So can anyone recommend the Amiga 600 as an alternative? It appears to be similar to the 1200 in every way bar an older chipset and no numerical keypad. However, it still has a HDD port and upgradable RAM, albeit it won't play 1200-exclusive software.
Click to expand...

They are very different machines.
The Amiga 600 is a 'classic' Amiga, with the classic chipset and CPU, like the Amiga 500/1000/2000 before it.
It just has 'modern' features such as IDE controller and PCMCIA slot.

The Amiga 1200 is an 'AGA' Amiga, with the new chipset. It is not fully backward compatible with a classic Amiga, so it depends a lot on what you want.

gladders said:
Thoughts on either? And is upgrading the RAM a tricky job - I see pictures of the trapdoor under the 1200 and it looks like it's not as simply as slotting the RAM into conveniently-positioned slots, but a matter of opening up the machine and adding new boards/soldering, is that correct?
Click to expand...

The trapdoor is used for an expansion card. It just slots into place. Usually you put an accelerator board in there, which contains both memory and a faster CPU.
The A600 also has a trapdoor, but the two are not compatible.

As already mentioned, the PCMCIA slot can also be used to add memory to both an A600 or an A1200.

CPU upgrades will break compatibility with some games.
Another thing that may break compatibility is the version of the Kickstart ROM. The A600 ships with a 2.0 ROM, and the A1200 with a 3.0 or 3.1 ROM. Older games will only run on a 1.3 ROM.
You can either use software to load an older version of Kickstart in memory and reboot (costs 512KB), or get a physical chip and a small PCB so you can switch between the two chips.

I would say that an A600 with 2 MB and Kickstart 1.3 is the most compatible system for games.
 
I own a 600 with a 4Mb SRAM card (good luck getting one of these! Flash cards don't work of course) and a 2Mb A603 expansion. I use a 2Gb CF card for storage. This is as high as you can go while still being able to claim that you're using a real A600 - it is quite entertaining when people think they are using a 600, while having CPU upgrades and whatnot installed :)

It's good enough. The 600 can come with two ROM variants (v2), the earlier revision will corrupt your filesystems if they are larger than 20Mb or so, so you might as well buy a 3.1 ROM from the start.

WHDload games are usually tested on a 68020+ CPU, and a disproportionate amount of them freeze or have bugs on a 68000 - so have a handful of floppies available...

Any "modern" desktop utility (IRC, browsers) will croak on even a fully-equipped A600 like mine - they use the MUI, which is an incredible resource hog memory and CPU-wise. An XT with Windows 3.0 is faster. Networking is off the table anyways: you either use SLIP, or a PCMCIA ethernet/wifi card, but then the 4Mb SRAM is off the table and nothing network-aware and worthwile will fill fit in the remaining 2Mb (!). Also: AmiTCP randomly freezes with SLIP.

I wouldn't get an A600 if I were you.
 
Well, if you ask me, an OCS/ECS Amiga shouldn't be upgraded.
Most games require 512k chip and 512k slow (or 1mb chip), and one or more floppy drives.
Harddisks don't work very well, since 99 out of 100 Amiga games are designed as booters (people couldn't afford harddisks, so games were not prepared for harddisk installation anyway).
WHDLoad is a hack for that, but I've never used it (I'm a 'real' Amigan, used an A600 and A1200 back in the early 90s, before things like WHDLoad were a thing).

If you ask me, you should invest in a GoTek drive instead, if you don't want to fool around with real floppies. It's closer to the real thing than trying WHDLoad.
 
gladders said:
So that's one favouring an A600 and one warning against :D
Click to expand...

To be exact, I wouldn't _buy_ an A1200 either :) I like the Amiga (very formidable hardware capabilities - although easily falls into disrepair), but the AmigaOS is far too buggy for my taste: admirable multitasking effort, but it's really all over the place. And the clunky mouse-based GUI is no substitute for a quick textmode with Volkov Commander (there's a - quite bloated - clone: NTP).
 
On the Amiga, DirectoryOpus was a very popular file manager. Funny enough it still exists, now for Windows: https://www.gpsoft.com.au/
But back in the day you didn't use the OS much, since you were floppy-based anyway. Just stick the floppy of your app/game/demo in the drive and reset to boot.
 
I had an NTSC, OCS, A500. That was the 'most compatible' machine I had for games. But, even then, a lot of games were PAL and didn't look right.

I sure never thought the Amiga OS was buggy, at all. The problem I always found was that a lot of software did a lot of things to violate the programming guidelines. Also a lot of software was buggy, and since there is no memory protection built into the OS, that's where you run into trouble.

In my experience, it's not feasible to have an Amiga that both runs the popular games, and gives you the full productivity experience. You really need two machines. For an upgraded machine, I always preferred the A3000. Once you get a good graphic card, AGA is totally irrelevant. The A3000 has SCSI which I always preferred over IDE. Overall it's a nicer machine than the A4000 and certainly the A1200.

But my upgrade path went A500->A2000->A3000. So, most of my peripherals made sense. If you went A600->A1200 things would be different.

I could never past the lack of numeric keypad on the A600. But then, I'm the guy with the numeric keypad on his C64.

I disagree than a 68020-based Amiga can't run MUI well. I never had any issues. But, I always changed all the default settings in MUI, and I never ran a lot of colours without a graphic card. (OCS/ECS/AGA are horribly slow at pixel-by-pixel graphics like a GUI typically uses). For a long time, I ran two-colour Super High Res Interlaced on a 12" monochrome monitor. That was fast. It was my first web-browsing experience.

I've currently got an stock A3000/030/25 which screams along just fine. But I don't play games on it.
 
KC9UDX said:
In my experience, it's not feasible to have an Amiga that both runs the popular games, and gives you the full productivity experience. You really need two machines.
Click to expand...

I fully agree. Then again, what kind of 'productivity' would you expect to do on any Amiga in 2015? But yea, I think you'll want a 'standard' OCS/ECS machine for the popular games/demos, and then perhaps a 'project' Amiga where you experiment with fancy hardware and 'what could have been'.
And if you're a demoscener, you need an Amiga 1200 with 060@50 and 8+MB of fastmem of course, for all those great AGA demos (virtually all AGA demos require an accelerator with an 030 or better CPU and an FPU. Stock A1200 wasn't very powerful and the Amiga scene was split between people who kept to the classic OCS/ECS machines, and people pushing the hardware envelope).

KC9UDX said:
I could never past the lack of numeric keypad on the A600. But then, I'm the guy with the numeric keypad on his C64.
Click to expand...

I only used it in ProTracker (it acts as a drum pad there).
I had a driver that allowed you to map the numpad on a section of the real keyboard, very similar to what many laptops do.
Worked well enough.
 
Scali said:
Well, if you ask me, an OCS/ECS Amiga shouldn't be upgraded.
Most games require 512k chip and 512k slow (or 1mb chip), and one or more floppy drives.
Harddisks don't work very well, since 99 out of 100 Amiga games are designed as booters (people couldn't afford harddisks, so games were not prepared for harddisk installation anyway).
WHDLoad is a hack for that, but I've never used it (I'm a 'real' Amigan, used an A600 and A1200 back in the early 90s, before things like WHDLoad were a thing).

If you ask me, you should invest in a GoTek drive instead, if you don't want to fool around with real floppies. It's closer to the real thing than trying WHDLoad.
Click to expand...

That's good advice...so the majority of games function on, say, a 500 with 1MB RAM? Is there a list somewhere that shows precisely how many games would be missed out on that spec?
 
KC9UDX said:
In my experience, it's not feasible to have an Amiga that both runs the popular games, and gives you the full productivity experience.
Click to expand...

That is the case, unfortunately. An A600 is not bad for an oldie-games computer (and definitely easier to acquire than an A500+A590), but by the time it becomes WHDload-capable, it ate a lot of monies. It really might be more useful to get a floppy emulator (never had one) for an A500/600 instead.

I disagree than a 68020-based Amiga can't run MUI well.
Click to expand...

An 68020-expanded "A600" can of course (seen it at a friendo - or was it 030?), but the stock 68000 A600 really can't.
 
I think I will aim primarily for games compatibility as priority then...what would be the best all-rounder? The floppy drive emulator sounds a more viable option than WHDLoad in that case.
 
gladders said:
That's good advice...so the majority of games function on, say, a 500 with 1MB RAM? Is there a list somewhere that shows precisely how many games would be missed out on that spec?
Click to expand...

No idea... but by the time the AGA-based Amigas were launched, Amiga was already near the end of its life. From 1985 to 1993, it was all ECS/OCS (A500/600/1000/2000 with <= 1MB). From 1993 to 1996, they built the AGA models (A1200/4000). By then PC had already taken over the gaming market anyway (because well, Wolf3D/Doom).
So relatively few AGA games were developed, and at least some of them were released for both types of Amiga. Eg, for Pinball Fantasies you had the standard OCS/ECS version, and an AGA-enhanced version with slightly more colourful graphics, but otherwise the same game.
So you don't really miss much. AGA was a case of too little, too late.
 
Last edited:
Scali said:
I fully agree. Then again, what kind of 'productivity' would you expect to do on any Amiga in 2015?
Click to expand...

All of it, actually. I never stopped. The only thing a "classic" Amiga can't do well is play modern video formats, and, as of recent web browsing.

For those uses though, I VNC to a PC which resides in an inaccessible place.

I have never found a likable replacement for TurboCalc or ProVector.

I have two "classic" Amigas in constant use. One is a bone-stock A3000 which I do MIDI work with. (Audio work as well if I can ever find my Delfina! :mad:) The other is an expanded-to-the-hilt A2000, which I do everything else with. It also has a 1541 drive hooked up for file transfer to my Commodore 8-bits. Sooner or later I will be doing file transfers much faster than floppy disks though.

The A2000 is the "main computer" in my house. If I can ever fix my CyberStormPPC, that will change.
 
For gaming using real floppies an A500 with 512K trapdoor RAM and dual floppies can't be beat. People should start on that cheap model and if they like it maybe get an A1200 with HD and 030 expansion to play AGA games and use WHDload.

I started with the A500 setup above and purchased a bookshelf full of boxed Amiga games to play. Later on I snagged all the desktops (A1000, A2000, A3000, A4000) plus an A1200 with an 030/50 Blizzard. Amigas are fun to play with but can get expensive with upgrades and vintage monitors.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top