Blast from the past! I had the Amiga 500, my sister had the 500+, and I got a 1200 for Christmas. Two of my best friends also got 1200's, some brilliant games from them days. Zool, Cannon Fodder, Pinball Fantasies, Simon the Sorcerer and Monkey Island to name a few. I wish I hadn't got rid of them now.
Great vid as always! My first computer was an Amiga 500 and then I eventually got two 1200's. All three eventually went to a friend and I got PC like a lot of people did. Two years ago another mate sold me his old original 1200 that he'd had up in his loft and it now sits in my bedroom hooked up to a CRT TV. The best home computer evah!
As a former 64, 500 and 1200 owner I enjoyed this video and I really dig your passion for the machines. Even had a BBS up for awhile.. good stuff. Great job Dan!
Great stuff, I can still remember the day when my dad and I went out and got our A500 512K RAM! soon upgraded it to 1MB via a trapdoor ram upgrade (with clock!!). Currently I still have the A500 I also have an A1200 and an A4000/40 which is still a great machine. When you thing back the Amiga was a real power house compared to the average PC at the time, and a pioneer of many things that we take for granted on modern PCs. R.I.P Jay Miner
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Thanks for this unbelievably informative video, Dan. Back in the 80's I met the Amiga in a magazine here (I guess it was BYTE or PC Magazine), and thought it was an amazing machine. I live in South America, and in those days there were no Internet, so my chances to buy one were literally zero. Now I see I wasn't wrong, thanks to your video. So sad it didn't continue :( . Who knows what would them achieve!
A actually was using an Amiga1200 'til way after 2006 when I switched to Mac. And that btw was an unaccelerated A1200 with "only" some more Fast Ram (8MB) and an upgrade from the already installed ca. 800MB Hard Drive (Escom) to a 3GB one (which I sadly wasn't able to backup yet) as well as a 4xCD-Rom and some external Floppy Drive. It was really painful surfing via AWeb with only a 56k Modem, since the unaccelerated Amiga only was able to squeeze ca. 32k through it's serial port.
So happy to come home from work Dan to find you've uploaded a new video. Made my day. Great review. Im relatively new to the Amiga 1200 (had a 600 back in the day). Drooling at the prospects of what I can do to my new machine and the journey of discovery learning to use it. Great vid all round. Keep them coming.
Hello Dan, I just wanted to take the time to say thank you for your videos. As a computer user here in America, Amigas were hard to come by. I am fairly sure we are about the same age, so when you were using such a mind blowing computer in 1992, I was still using a Commodore 64! There wasn't much of a hacker scene in the states at the time. The Amiga world is one that we really missed out on. Thank you, and you have a new American subscriber. :)
Commodore defined my teen years, and moving to a PC was a bitter pill to swallow at the time when I was left with no upgrade option for Amiga. The transition of Lightwave3D to PC and the power of a 486 left no competition. It's hard to comprehend an compare the power of the beast that sits next to my desk today to either of those machines. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. :)
I was always more into the serious side of the Amiga, the OS the programs and productivity software to be honest. I did enjoy the odd game of course, but the main attraction for the Amiga to me was the groundbreaking operating system.
I know I'm a bit late 😅, but I'm really curious about your gaming side since you're doing awesome console videos too. What is your gaming background, did you play only Amiga back in the day or it was more of snes/megadrive and later Playstation ? What about pc gaming? Long, I know, but you can do it 😂
Hello. Im a former amiga 1200 owner and darlo resident (county durham my friend :-) now living in Christchurch, NZ. Love your videos and am now so nostalgic for my old machine im going to get amiga forever.
Was really good to see an Antique still in running order. I still have a couple of A500's lying around somewhere, i have no Idea if any of them still live. I still have the SCSI hard drive that mounts on the side too. Was the most advanced computer of it's time most certainly. I certainly would like to know how to put game images on that hard drive, it was a 500 Meg which was big in the day for an amiga. Those old SCSI drives were very well made, it probably still works. Thanks again for a historical run down on A1200 beast. I always wanted one at the time.
I do realise this is an old video but this posting made my day. Thank you for your time and I must admit this video made me feel all warm inside, I had an Amiga a500 and gave it an upgrade because I NEEDED IT! I installed an upgrade through the underside trapdoor, "mammoth 4mb and a 020 FPU and it was fantastic!) I could play VIRUS and other taxing games at the speed originally intended! PS could you give me a link to a workbench 3.9 that has no malware please as I am now emulating the Beloved AMIGA:) PPS I still play Robocod AGA and Z/X out on this machine. LONG LIVE THE KING/AMIGA:)
Topsoft, I remember those guys well in Stockton, they were down the little back alley, their shop was like a little Aladdins Cave, Steve and Alex in there were great guys. They moved round the corner early 90's into a bigger shop on the corner and then into the shopping center. I frequented their shop, bought stuff virtually every week on my C64 from them. Currently have an Amiga 600 with Easy ADF and the PCMCIA CF adapter, should be getting a 1200 in the next few weeks so will finally be able to experience the AGA games as back in the 80's & 90's I was an A500 user.
omg!! 20th!?!? GEEZE I remember seeing it in the UK Amiga Magazines here in NZ and being excited about it at ~12 years old lol. Never got one, stuck with the A500+ for a while but always drooled over it :)
The yellowing is sped up by sunlight, but the direct cause is an incorrectly mixed batch of plastic that contains more starch than recommended. This usually results in the yellowing of plastic, which can be reversed by the application of bleaching chemicals. There's actually a hugely rare selection of about 300 Super Nintendos that turned green over time, but there are only a few still in existence.
I had a sweet A1200 with a 64MB expansion board. It was a neat machine. Did a lot of graphics and animation with it. Years ahead of anything else at the time.
The A1200 was indeed the best computer ever made, hands down! I was late to the Commodore party, parents couldn't afford to buy me the C64 when I was a kid, they got me the Sharp MZ-700, dear oh dear, the only graphics capabilities on that thing was the funky characters printed on the side of the keys and beeps for sound lol Wasn't until 1988 when I used some of my college fund to buy the C64, can still remember to this day walking into Tandy computers and buying the C64 for £150. Absolutely loved the C64, it was such a huge step up from that sharp mz computer, eventually got myself a 1541 disc drive and the action replay mk6 cartridge which I used to make copies of all my games from tape to disc, boy did that transfer how awesome the C64 was to use, games loading in just a few seconds. Think it was around 1992/3 when I brought an Amiga 600, the A1200 was out at the time but I couldn't afford that at the time so opted for the A600, around 1994 I got the A1200 race & chase pack and sold the A600 to my brother. Had many years of joy using the A1200, didn't take me long to get a hdd to use & wanting more power I used two Blizzard accelerators, the 1230 & then the 1260, that 060 was a speed demon compared to the standard 68020! Still got all my amiga gear stored in the loft, if I had the space I'd have the A1200 all setup & running although I'd have to get the board re-capped to be safe as I wouldn't want those things exploding & damaging the board.
Can still remember the day I brought my a1200, bloody thing had a duff floppy disc drive lol, replacement unit worked like a charm and I still have my Amiga 1200 with a Blizzard 1260 accelerator stored away in mint condition.
Best computer I ever owned. I did all my university coursework on a 1200 (back in 91-94). And played every game ever written (well, a few!) AND made music on it with Protracker which I'd learned to use on my old 500 some years before.
I had one shortly after launch. Actually bought the Amiga 600 at first after having an Atari STe for few years. Realised the Amiga 600 was not much of an upgrade to that instantly and also missed the numeric pad. So back to Dixons as it was then and returned the 600 and begged my mother to pay extra for 1200. It was a nice machine but not enough software pushed it. Ended up selling to a mate of mine who played championship manager on it exclusively! Wish I’d kept having seen all the homebrew support it ended up with
I remember walking into a computer shop to get some commodore 64 games and seeing an Amiga500 playing mods in ProTracker. My parents got me the A1200 for Christmas a few years later. I also used Wordsworth for my college work and D-paint. I still own it and recently set it back up at work to play around with at lunch time
Only had an A500+ but seeing this stuff again really brings back great memories. First gaming machine/home computer, from when I was about 6 years old. Loved it and can't forget those fantastic games.
My old A1200 still boots, as far as I know. And I had it on the internet back in 2001 or so. PCMCIA adapter worked a treat. I moved it into an old 2000 HD box as I was hacking away at mine as well. Got to add the CD drive quite easily then. :-) Maybe I could make a vid of it sometime and show the old original 2000 power supply running it. :-)
When i had my 1200, i was dialing up BBS everyday. Then suddenly one day, the BBS changed it's network... to something called the internet. I was greeted with a screen about being welcome to the internet etc etc, and the flashing cursor. I had no f****** clue what was happening, and gave up on computers until 1995. So i had 2 iconic scenarios in duality, a unique home computer and the introduction of the internet.
I know that this is a vert old video, but if you still have troubles with cable management I recommend buying velcro cable ties from places like eBay and AliExpress. They are dirt cheap and work very well, especially for what you pay for them.
Hi, there Dan back of the day in 1987 here in Australia when the Amiga 500 first come out. It cost the same as a commodore 64 with the 1541 floppy disk drive. Where is the idea of that?
Ah the ZIP STICK! I thought I was alone. After destroying pretty much every QuickShot joystick ever sold, I ended up with a Zip Stick and found it BULLET PROOF! Deserved more exposure than it got at the time IMHO.
Yeah I hope the second edition of the book does eventually come out, it's 2 years late now though and keeps getting pushed back :( Actually the A500 is the ONLY Amiga that Commodore actually released a CDROM drive for, so you're in luck there, it's called the Amiga A570, it slots on the side and will allow you to run pretty much all CDTV titles.
Nice .. I started running a bbs on a comadore 64 with a 300 baud modem when I was 15 then ran one on a 128 machine . Then moved to an amiga and ran a bbs also was part of fidonet and had 4 scsi drives on my 500 machine .. Was alot of fun . I upgraded the chips in the 500 some had to solider etc .. newer kick start fater angus etc . upgraded it to 2 meg of chip ram and had a side car with 4 meg of ram and a 100 meg hd daisy chained 3 more drives off of that 500 was 2000$ can at the time and 4 meg of ram and the 100 meg hd was 1000$ can
As someone who only really uses amiga for gaming, Would you recommend buying one of these to play amiga games? or does it feel very similar to playing the emulators we have readily available such as winuae on pc?
I loved my Amiga 1200, I used it for everything from playing games to writing my college work. I even used Cross Dos to port my pascal programs from the Amiga to PC DOS/Turbo Pascal. Those were the days!
Cool video, it's great to see these machines still being used & developed. I couldn't afford an A1200 when they came out back in '92. Back then I was still using a Commodore 64. I eventually got an A1200 off ebay about 3 years ago & have upgraded it over the past couple of years. I'm also interested in the newer Amiga OS & plan to get a Mac Mini G4 to try out MorphOS. I did give Icaros a try but couldn't install it as didn't seem recognise my Apple keyboard or USB mouse :(
Those damn good amigas, revolutionary and light years ahead of the competition. Nothing quite beats Amiga for innovation. Perfection housed in a keyboard form factor. Unbeatable!
I was an Atari STE user (and honestly the ST and Amiga were not designed for the same markets, it just panned out that way after the 500 was introduced_. I respect the capabilities of the Amiga (of course, anyone would), but I ultimately liked my STE more than my Amiga 600, mainly for personal preferences. The Amiga was an historic, groundbreaking design. The ST was a great workhorse/all rounder.
Atari ST got some great MIDI software like Qbase, not available for the Amiga. Amiga got MusicX and Bars and Pipes. For everything else, including the OS itself, Amiga was the better machine.
I am an original C64 and A500 user from the old days (1985-1994). I switch to PCs after that. I have an Amiga 2000 and 1200 that I just won on Ebay. I want to add the Indivision ECS and AGA (respectively) to the two Amiga systems. But, I am curious, why did you have your A1200 hooked up via your SCART connector AND the Indivision output to a DVI cable? Are both required for different screen modes? I was under the assumption the Indivision would output all screen modes.
The Amiga 1200 was a great computer, especially when you put an expansion board in the back. I loved mine as a kid, a faced a crossroads decision to keep it and learn to program in AmigaE (based on C I believe) or sell it and get a guitar. I chose the latter. Got more girls that way. ;-)
Hi I have a Question which joystick did you use in this Video for the amiga? Is it a modded Competion Pro? It clicks relly nice, it might have very good microswitches? because on the old original Competition Pro joysticks the microswitches were bad back in the day. When you have used it for a certain of time the buttons fail to respond. It would be nice if you could tell me which joystick do you use or any tips to reactive my old Competition Pro joysticks! thanks
Fair question, main reason was they were owned by an American parent company who dragged them down. Commodore in the UK and Germany were very profitable, but the parent company in America wasn't. Sadly bad management at head office pulled the whole company down and the Amiga with it in 1994.
As a kid growing up with a Commodore 64, I always wanted an Amiga! My family ended up getting a 286 and 386 PC in 1989 instead, and they were nice in their own way, but I still loved Amigas, and got a used 500 several years later, although sadly I don't have room to set it up at the moment. Is there any way to set up a Compact Flash card like that on a 500, or do you really need a 600 or 1200?
LOL @ Arthure - A1200 in 1990, indeed! Nice video techguruuk! I still have my A1200. Resurrected it about 18 months back, it needed the soldering iron out having not been used since about 2005 and suffering in a house move. Its spec (a beast back in the day) A1200, OS3.9, Power tower, Blizzard PPC & BVision, 50Mb RAM, 4Gb 3.5" HD running on Power Flyer Gold, HD floppy drive, Microvitec 1738. It's messier than yours! It's *Deluxe* paint, BTW. I don't recall any commercial tie in with Dulux!
If this helps to resolve the issue the reason cases on old computer go yellow is because of the fire retardant chemicals on the plastics...not the plastics themselves. It can be reversed. It was discussed pretty heavily on the "Atari-Forum". Retrobright I think was the most effective solution used which involves removing the chemicals off the plastics without damaging the plastics themselves.
Just came across this, pretty old video and a good one... and by now there's even more hardware for the Amiga 1200! And you can have a great WHDLoad setup like this, but just in case anyone who sees this doesn't know - you don't have to play all of them stretched... :)
Got it 3 times returned as i finally had a working product. From Keybord errors do drive issues. But then it was great playing Wincommander and the Alien Breed Special Version on it. :)
It was funny the Amiga version aka port of wing commander look better,and played better then the pc version of course ,but got a d- rating, and yet the pc version got a A+rating Go figure..
It's a shame a lot of the Amiga books focus on the company and corporate shit as I find that so tedious and really doesn't represent the better side of the Amiga. I'd much rather read the second book, a biography of an Amiga owner, retrospective game reviews or various interviews with game developers, demo sceners or even just avid fans.
You have a really neat Amiga 1200 system there! Have you considered putting an 060 in it to give it even more speed? I had a PPC towered up A1200 which sadly died and I had to leave it behind when I emigrated. But hoping to pick up another A1200 when I come back to the UK at Christmas and build it up a bit. The DVI adapter looks great, does it make pal low res games look blocky though on a monitor?
Bank of England inflation calculator has £399 in 1992 being worth £832 in 2019 so the Amiga 1200 wasn't cheap but was well specified for the time of its release.
I'v ehad ALL Amigas except the 4000T BUT my favorite was my fully expanded 1200 wich built in in a PC-tower case , with the PC pcu mod, the pc-keyboard mod and all that.. I used that in my studio for about 10 years as a music/ DAW computer.. it travelled around the world with me AND it still wors great as a MIDI DAW computer. BUT the basic concept of the Amiga 600 and 1200 was great...small portable and with ( or the possibility ) to put in a hard drive ( 1200 HD already had one )
I love Amiga, me personally to this day and beyond will always be the best computer in the world, none of this firmware update crap, you turn on your Amiga and just play, how simple is that. I have 2 mint condition A500's and plus a few new and sealed items I will never open like the A520 modulator still sealed in box plus a sealed box tank mouse and more. I have a brand new never used A1200 coming next week which I will preserve as I will get another A1200 to use and upgrade etc. Only Amiga !
Everybody who owns an Amiga 1200 needs to get the special 'CD32' crack on disk for Lotus III so it runs at full AGA speed. And then you have to set your Amiga to PAL60 via the NTSC toggle (machine still outputs PAL not NTSC video). Once you have done that you will probably never need another racing game :)
Brilliant stuff Dan and as informative as ever! I'm bizarrely hooked on the A600 when it comes to nostalgia (I love the A500 but I was an ST guy in the early days) but quite clearly the A1200 is the definitive model of Amiga to own.......i'll definitely pitch up with one eventually though :)
Excellent tutorial video, more people should see this :) While Indivision adds some PC style modes that makes it more useful for those who want to run last decade's utilities on last decade's hardware, I would say that hunting for a good condition CRT or wide-bodied quality TV is worth it. If the TV has 2 SCART jacks, it usually supports a perfect RGB picture in connector #1. Games+Indivision+flatscreen=choppy, blurred picture as soon as anything on the screen moves.
Hi what a great video!! I pulled my original 1200 from the loft this week but sadly the internal HD and floppy were toast, I have ordered a new floppy from amigakit and an RGB to scart cable, PCMCIA C flash card and a 68020 128MB accelerator (I used to have a blizzard board back in the day but sold it) I got my HD replaced with a CF card, awesome to be playing BIP and sensible soccer again, lots of it wont work till I get the ram card but its enough to warm the cockles, such a great bit of kit.
One of the best games I had on my Amiga 1200 was a special AGA version of Lotus III that ran twice as fast as the A500 version (same as CD32 version). Some versions of Lotus III are just AGA fixes and still run at the same choppy framerate as the A500 version (which means half the speed update of the previous release of the game).
Do you get proper aspect ratio with that non-4:3 monitor? GUI as well as programs/games? Also, is the video signal being converted to digital from analog, or is it digital all the way?
Blast from the past! I had the Amiga 500, my sister had the 500+, and I got a 1200 for Christmas. Two of my best friends also got 1200's, some brilliant games from them days. Zool, Cannon Fodder, Pinball Fantasies, Simon the Sorcerer and Monkey Island to name a few. I wish I hadn't got rid of them now.
Great vid as always! My first computer was an Amiga 500 and then I eventually got two 1200's. All three eventually went to a friend and I got PC like a lot of people did. Two years ago another mate sold me his old original 1200 that he'd had up in his loft and it now sits in my bedroom hooked up to a CRT TV. The best home computer evah!
As a former 64, 500 and 1200 owner I enjoyed this video and I really dig your passion for the machines. Even had a BBS up for awhile.. good stuff. Great job Dan!
Great stuff, I can still remember the day when my dad and I went out and got our A500 512K RAM! soon upgraded it to 1MB via a trapdoor ram upgrade (with clock!!).
Currently I still have the A500 I also have an A1200 and an A4000/40 which is still a great machine.
When you thing back the Amiga was a real power house compared to the average PC at the time, and a pioneer of many things that we take for granted on modern PCs.
R.I.P Jay Miner
Thanks for this unbelievably informative video, Dan. Back in the 80's I met the Amiga in a magazine here (I guess it was BYTE or PC Magazine), and thought it was an amazing machine. I live in South America, and in those days there were no Internet, so my chances to buy one were literally zero. Now I see I wasn't wrong, thanks to your video. So sad it didn't continue :( . Who knows what would them achieve!
A actually was using an Amiga1200 'til way after 2006 when I switched to Mac. And that btw was an unaccelerated A1200 with "only" some more Fast Ram (8MB) and an upgrade from the already installed ca. 800MB Hard Drive (Escom) to a 3GB one (which I sadly wasn't able to backup yet) as well as a 4xCD-Rom and some external Floppy Drive.
It was really painful surfing via AWeb with only a 56k Modem, since the unaccelerated Amiga only was able to squeeze ca. 32k through it's serial port.
So happy to come home from work Dan to find you've uploaded a new video. Made my day. Great review. Im relatively new to the Amiga 1200 (had a 600 back in the day). Drooling at the prospects of what I can do to my new machine and the journey of discovery learning to use it. Great vid all round. Keep them coming.
Heartwarming is the word! Awesome trip down memory lane. It's so nice to know that other people out there love this tech they way do.
Hello Dan,
I just wanted to take the time to say thank you for your videos. As a computer user here in America, Amigas were hard to come by. I am fairly sure we are about the same age, so when you were using such a mind blowing computer in 1992, I was still using a Commodore 64! There wasn't much of a hacker scene in the states at the time.
The Amiga world is one that we really missed out on. Thank you, and you have a new American subscriber. :)
Commodore defined my teen years, and moving to a PC was a bitter pill to swallow at the time when I was left with no upgrade option for Amiga. The transition of Lightwave3D to PC and the power of a 486 left no competition. It's hard to comprehend an compare the power of the beast that sits next to my desk today to either of those machines. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. :)
I was always more into the serious side of the Amiga, the OS the programs and productivity software to be honest. I did enjoy the odd game of course, but the main attraction for the Amiga to me was the groundbreaking operating system.
I know I'm a bit late 😅, but I'm really curious about your gaming side since you're doing awesome console videos too. What is your gaming background, did you play only Amiga back in the day or it was more of snes/megadrive and later Playstation ? What about pc gaming? Long, I know, but you can do it 😂
Hello. Im a former amiga 1200 owner and darlo resident (county durham my friend :-) now living in Christchurch, NZ. Love your videos and am now so nostalgic for my old machine im going to get amiga forever.
Was really good to see an Antique still in running order. I still have a couple of A500's lying around somewhere, i have no Idea if any of them still live. I still have the SCSI hard drive that mounts on the side too. Was the most advanced computer of it's time most certainly. I certainly would like to know how to put game images on that hard drive, it was a 500 Meg which was big in the day for an amiga. Those old SCSI drives were very well made, it probably still works. Thanks again for a historical run down on A1200 beast. I always wanted one at the time.
Such an amazing system. Happy birthday Miggy.
I do realise this is an old video but this posting made my day.
Thank you for your time and I must admit this video made me feel all warm inside, I had an Amiga a500 and gave it an upgrade because I NEEDED IT! I installed an upgrade through the underside trapdoor, "mammoth 4mb and a 020 FPU and it was fantastic!) I could play VIRUS and other taxing games at the speed originally intended!
PS could you give me a link to a workbench 3.9 that has no malware please as I am now emulating the Beloved AMIGA:)
PPS I still play Robocod AGA and Z/X out on this machine.
LONG LIVE THE KING/AMIGA:)
Topsoft, I remember those guys well in Stockton, they were down the little back alley, their shop was like a little Aladdins Cave, Steve and Alex in there were great guys. They moved round the corner early 90's into a bigger shop on the corner and then into the shopping center.
I frequented their shop, bought stuff virtually every week on my C64 from them.
Currently have an Amiga 600 with Easy ADF and the PCMCIA CF adapter, should be getting a 1200 in the next few weeks so will finally be able to experience the AGA games as back in the 80's & 90's I was an A500 user.
Absolutely the best Amiga 1200 review on you tube! 10 out of 10 sir! Your inspiring me to get my a1200 in shape. Nice to see you back again Dan!
omg!! 20th!?!? GEEZE I remember seeing it in the UK Amiga Magazines here in NZ and being excited about it at ~12 years old lol.
Never got one, stuck with the A500+ for a while but always drooled over it :)
This looks awesome. I would love a similar system. This is really an amazing computer!
I had an Amiga 1200 for xmas 1992. Favourite computer ever i really do miss not been able to play on it now, i had so many games for it.
The yellowing is sped up by sunlight, but the direct cause is an incorrectly mixed batch of plastic that contains more starch than recommended. This usually results in the yellowing of plastic, which can be reversed by the application of bleaching chemicals. There's actually a hugely rare selection of about 300 Super Nintendos that turned green over time, but there are only a few still in existence.
Great to have your voice as a waveform in real time!
A memory refreshing review!! Thanks Dan I really love like this review it is quit interesting that this machine still alive! Good modifications though
Belting video there fella. Definitely brought back some memories of the good old days!
What an awesome set up! Such a throw back to my childhood, love it!
ive been checking out a few of your vids over the past week,, but one,, this one was the motherload... absolutely loved it,, thank you
I had a sweet A1200 with a 64MB expansion board. It was a neat machine. Did a lot of graphics and animation with it. Years ahead of anything else at the time.
The A1200 was indeed the best computer ever made, hands down!
I was late to the Commodore party, parents couldn't afford to buy me the C64 when I was a kid, they got me the Sharp MZ-700, dear oh dear, the only graphics capabilities on that thing was the funky characters printed on the side of the keys and beeps for sound lol
Wasn't until 1988 when I used some of my college fund to buy the C64, can still remember to this day walking into Tandy computers and buying the C64 for £150.
Absolutely loved the C64, it was such a huge step up from that sharp mz computer, eventually got myself a 1541 disc drive and the action replay mk6 cartridge which I used to make copies of all my games from tape to disc, boy did that transfer how awesome the C64 was to use, games loading in just a few seconds.
Think it was around 1992/3 when I brought an Amiga 600, the A1200 was out at the time but I couldn't afford that at the time so opted for the A600, around 1994 I got the A1200 race & chase pack and sold the A600 to my brother. Had many years of joy using the A1200, didn't take me long to get a hdd to use & wanting more power I used two Blizzard accelerators, the 1230 & then the 1260, that 060 was a speed demon compared to the standard 68020!
Still got all my amiga gear stored in the loft, if I had the space I'd have the A1200 all setup & running although I'd have to get the board re-capped to be safe as I wouldn't want those things exploding & damaging the board.
Can still remember the day I brought my a1200, bloody thing had a duff floppy disc drive lol, replacement unit worked like a charm and I still have my Amiga 1200 with a Blizzard 1260 accelerator stored away in mint condition.
Best computer I ever owned. I did all my university coursework on a 1200 (back in 91-94). And played every game ever written (well, a few!) AND made music on it with Protracker which I'd learned to use on my old 500 some years before.
Good to see you back Dan! Awesome videos!
I had one shortly after launch. Actually bought the Amiga 600 at first after having an Atari STe for few years. Realised the Amiga 600 was not much of an upgrade to that instantly and also missed the numeric pad. So back to Dixons as it was then and returned the 600 and begged my mother to pay extra for 1200.
It was a nice machine but not enough software pushed it. Ended up selling to a mate of mine who played championship manager on it exclusively!
Wish I’d kept having seen all the homebrew support it ended up with
I just realised, this video is almost 10 years old now itself. As if the 1200 review wasn't making me feel old already!
You brought back a few memories. The Amiga was an incredible machine. Well ahead of its time.
I have been a lucky possessor of an A1200 since 1993. Never ever going to sell mine. A glorious machine. Long live Commodore!
I remember walking into a computer shop to get some commodore 64 games and seeing an Amiga500 playing mods in ProTracker. My parents got me the A1200 for Christmas a few years later. I also used Wordsworth for my college work and D-paint. I still own it and recently set it back up at work to play around with at lunch time
Only had an A500+ but seeing this stuff again really brings back great memories. First gaming machine/home computer, from when I was about 6 years old. Loved it and can't forget those fantastic games.
My old A1200 still boots, as far as I know. And I had it on the internet back in 2001 or so. PCMCIA adapter worked a treat. I moved it into an old 2000 HD box as I was hacking away at mine as well. Got to add the CD drive quite easily then. :-) Maybe I could make a vid of it sometime and show the old original 2000 power supply running it. :-)
Can you do a video on all the ad-ons you've done to your 1200, why and where to get them from?
When i had my 1200, i was dialing up BBS everyday.
Then suddenly one day, the BBS changed it's network... to something called the internet.
I was greeted with a screen about being welcome to the internet etc etc, and the flashing cursor. I had no f****** clue what was happening, and gave up on computers until 1995. So i had 2 iconic scenarios in duality, a unique home computer and the introduction of the internet.
Slight correction: HAM8 lets you use 262,144 colors out of 16M colors. :)
Had the Amiga 500 back in the day with a full 1MB and battery back up clock! Oh yeah!!!! Really tempted to buy an A1200.
Glad you enjoyed the trip down memory lane :)
Thank you for your nice review. I cannot help wondering why you keep the picture streched in 16:9, can't you set your TV to 4:3?
I know that this is a vert old video, but if you still have troubles with cable management I recommend buying velcro cable ties from places like eBay and AliExpress. They are dirt cheap and work very well, especially for what you pay for them.
Brian Bagnall's Amiga book is still in the works!!! Hopefully it will get there sooner or later...especially as many people pre-ordered.
Hi, there Dan back of the day in 1987 here in Australia when the Amiga 500 first come out. It cost the same as a commodore 64 with the 1541 floppy disk drive. Where is the idea of that?
7:04 to be fair, they're right. Bare minimum it NEEDED Fast Ram.
Thats all.
Ah the ZIP STICK! I thought I was alone. After destroying pretty much every QuickShot joystick ever sold, I ended up with a Zip Stick and found it BULLET PROOF! Deserved more exposure than it got at the time IMHO.
Sorry I'm so late seeing this video. Enjoyed the look round inside the A1200. Thanks.
Yeah I hope the second edition of the book does eventually come out, it's 2 years late now though and keeps getting pushed back :( Actually the A500 is the ONLY Amiga that Commodore actually released a CDROM drive for, so you're in luck there, it's called the Amiga A570, it slots on the side and will allow you to run pretty much all CDTV titles.
ahhh id love an Amiga 1200 never experienced one but looks amazing - Keep up all the hard work on the videos!
Nice .. I started running a bbs on a comadore 64 with a 300 baud modem when I was 15 then ran one on a 128 machine . Then moved to an amiga and ran a bbs also was part of fidonet and had 4 scsi drives on my 500 machine .. Was alot of fun . I upgraded the chips in the 500 some had to solider etc .. newer kick start fater angus etc . upgraded it to 2 meg of chip ram and had a side car with 4 meg of ram and a 100 meg hd daisy chained 3 more drives off of that 500 was 2000$ can at the time and 4 meg of ram and the 100 meg hd was 1000$ can
As someone who only really uses amiga for gaming, Would you recommend buying one of these to play amiga games? or does it feel very similar to playing the emulators we have readily available such as winuae on pc?
Brilliant :D The Amiga always pulls you back!
I loved my Amiga 1200, I used it for everything from playing games to writing my college work. I even used Cross Dos to port my pascal programs from the Amiga to PC DOS/Turbo Pascal. Those were the days!
Reading "A Company on the Edge" now. Very interesting book - looking forward to the follow up book detailing the Amiga era.
The book was cancelled a year ago :(
Thanks for that, keep us updated with your A1200 too :)
Absolutely love your videos!
Recently bought a Mac mini G4 and installed MorphOS thanks to you.
I want that machine!!! Great review btw.
Cool video, it's great to see these machines still being used & developed. I couldn't afford an A1200 when they came out back in '92. Back then I was still using a Commodore 64. I eventually got an A1200 off ebay about 3 years ago & have upgraded it over the past couple of years. I'm also interested in the newer Amiga OS & plan to get a Mac Mini G4 to try out MorphOS. I did give Icaros a try but couldn't install it as didn't seem recognise my Apple keyboard or USB mouse :(
Wow, where did you get your time machine from then, as the A1200 wasn't released until late 1992.
Those damn good amigas, revolutionary and light years ahead of the competition. Nothing quite beats Amiga for innovation. Perfection housed in a keyboard form factor. Unbeatable!
I was an Atari STE user (and honestly the ST and Amiga were not designed for the same markets, it just panned out that way after the 500 was introduced_. I respect the capabilities of the Amiga (of course, anyone would), but I ultimately liked my STE more than my Amiga 600, mainly for personal preferences. The Amiga was an historic, groundbreaking design. The ST was a great workhorse/all rounder.
Atari ST got some great MIDI software like Qbase, not available for the Amiga. Amiga got MusicX and Bars and Pipes. For everything else, including the OS itself, Amiga was the better machine.
It was my first Amiga model and it is still on my desk. Thanks for the interesting video.
I am an original C64 and A500 user from the old days (1985-1994). I switch to PCs after that. I have an Amiga 2000 and 1200 that I just won on Ebay. I want to add the Indivision ECS and AGA (respectively) to the two Amiga systems. But, I am curious, why did you have your A1200 hooked up via your SCART connector AND the Indivision output to a DVI cable? Are both required for different screen modes? I was under the assumption the Indivision would output all screen modes.
The Amiga 1200 was a great computer, especially when you put an expansion board in the back. I loved mine as a kid, a faced a crossroads decision to keep it and learn to program in AmigaE (based on C I believe) or sell it and get a guitar. I chose the latter. Got more girls that way. ;-)
I owned a A1200 , and it was a great time. My first computer graphics hardware.
Hi I have a Question which joystick did you use in this Video for the amiga? Is it a modded Competion Pro? It clicks relly nice, it might have very good microswitches? because on the old original Competition Pro joysticks the microswitches were bad back in the day. When you have used it for a certain of time the buttons fail to respond. It would be nice if you could tell me which joystick do you use or any tips to reactive my old Competition Pro joysticks! thanks
Fair question, main reason was they were owned by an American parent company who dragged them down. Commodore in the UK and Germany were very profitable, but the parent company in America wasn't. Sadly bad management at head office pulled the whole company down and the Amiga with it in 1994.
As a kid growing up with a Commodore 64, I always wanted an Amiga! My family ended up getting a 286 and 386 PC in 1989 instead, and they were nice in their own way, but I still loved Amigas, and got a used 500 several years later, although sadly I don't have room to set it up at the moment. Is there any way to set up a Compact Flash card like that on a 500, or do you really need a 600 or 1200?
the machine that warms our heart is definitly the amiga 500 !
LOL @ Arthure - A1200 in 1990, indeed!
Nice video techguruuk!
I still have my A1200. Resurrected it about 18 months back, it needed the soldering iron out having not been used since about 2005 and suffering in a house move.
Its spec (a beast back in the day) A1200, OS3.9, Power tower, Blizzard PPC & BVision, 50Mb RAM, 4Gb 3.5" HD running on Power Flyer Gold, HD floppy drive, Microvitec 1738. It's messier than yours!
It's *Deluxe* paint, BTW. I don't recall any commercial tie in with Dulux!
If this helps to resolve the issue the reason cases on old computer go yellow is because of the fire retardant chemicals on the plastics...not the plastics themselves. It can be reversed. It was discussed pretty heavily on the "Atari-Forum". Retrobright I think was the most effective solution used which involves removing the chemicals off the plastics without damaging the plastics themselves.
I still have my 1989 Amiga 500 with Workbench (the orange disk, 1.3). Great music from Jaguar XJ220! Good old days! Congrats!
Really interesting - many thanks!
Just came across this, pretty old video and a good one... and by now there's even more hardware for the Amiga 1200! And you can have a great WHDLoad setup like this, but just in case anyone who sees this doesn't know - you don't have to play all of them stretched... :)
Brilliant news, hope you enjoy MOS, it's a sweet OS :)
Got it 3 times returned as i finally had a working product.
From Keybord errors do drive issues. But then it was great playing Wincommander and the Alien Breed Special Version on it. :)
It was funny the Amiga version aka port of wing commander look better,and played better then the pc version of course ,but got a d- rating, and yet the pc version got a A+rating Go figure..
It's a shame a lot of the Amiga books focus on the company and corporate shit as I find that so tedious and really doesn't represent the better side of the Amiga.
I'd much rather read the second book, a biography of an Amiga owner, retrospective game reviews or various interviews with game developers, demo sceners or even just avid fans.
You have the ultimate Amiga setup.
Thanks for the upload. You sound exactly like Dave Gorman ; )
You have a really neat Amiga 1200 system there! Have you considered putting an 060 in it to give it even more speed? I had a PPC towered up A1200 which sadly died and I had to leave it behind when I emigrated. But hoping to pick up another A1200 when I come back to the UK at Christmas and build it up a bit. The DVI adapter looks great, does it make pal low res games look blocky though on a monitor?
Bank of England inflation calculator has £399 in 1992 being worth £832 in 2019 so the Amiga 1200 wasn't cheap but was well specified for the time of its release.
I'v ehad ALL Amigas except the 4000T BUT my favorite was my fully expanded 1200 wich built in in a PC-tower case , with the PC pcu mod, the pc-keyboard mod and all that.. I used that in my studio for about 10 years as a music/ DAW computer.. it travelled around the world with me AND it still wors great as a MIDI DAW computer. BUT the basic concept of the Amiga 600 and 1200 was great...small portable and with ( or the possibility ) to put in a hard drive ( 1200 HD already had one )
I love Amiga, me personally to this day and beyond will always be the best computer in the world, none of this firmware update crap, you turn on your Amiga and just play, how simple is that. I have 2 mint condition A500's and plus a few new and sealed items I will never open like the A520 modulator still sealed in box plus a sealed box tank mouse and more. I have a brand new never used A1200 coming next week which I will preserve as I will get another A1200 to use and upgrade etc.
Only Amiga !
Everybody who owns an Amiga 1200 needs to get the special 'CD32' crack on disk for Lotus III so it runs at full AGA speed. And then you have to set your Amiga to PAL60 via the NTSC toggle (machine still outputs PAL not NTSC video). Once you have done that you will probably never need another racing game :)
Will do!
Brilliant stuff Dan and as informative as ever! I'm bizarrely hooked on the A600 when it comes to nostalgia (I love the A500 but I was an ST guy in the early days) but quite clearly the A1200 is the definitive model of Amiga to own.......i'll definitely pitch up with one eventually though :)
techguru, you really are the tech guru when it comes to the Amiga. :) Looks pretty complicated to set up.
Excellent tutorial video, more people should see this :) While Indivision adds some PC style modes that makes it more useful for those who want to run last decade's utilities on last decade's hardware, I would say that hunting for a good condition CRT or wide-bodied quality TV is worth it. If the TV has 2 SCART jacks, it usually supports a perfect RGB picture in connector #1. Games+Indivision+flatscreen=choppy, blurred picture as soon as anything on the screen moves.
it boots up after 39 seconds. it looks for a floppy or hard disc at boot time? thanks.
Actually the review starts about 3 mins earlier at 5:10 if you want the background on the A1200 :)
Hi what a great video!! I pulled my original 1200 from the loft this week but sadly the internal HD and floppy were toast, I have ordered a new floppy from amigakit and an RGB to scart cable, PCMCIA C flash card and a 68020 128MB accelerator (I used to have a blizzard board back in the day but sold it) I got my HD replaced with a CF card, awesome to be playing BIP and sensible soccer again, lots of it wont work till I get the ram card but its enough to warm the cockles, such a great bit of kit.
One of the best games I had on my Amiga 1200 was a special AGA version of Lotus III that ran twice as fast as the A500 version (same as CD32 version). Some versions of Lotus III are just AGA fixes and still run at the same choppy framerate as the A500 version (which means half the speed update of the previous release of the game).
Wow, I want one...!
I still have an old A1200 kicking around (I believe it still works...!) How much would a conversion to a machine like that cost?
this was truly a brilliant piece of machinery
Do you get proper aspect ratio with that non-4:3 monitor? GUI as well as programs/games? Also, is the video signal being converted to digital from analog, or is it digital all the way?
Another thought, I have an A3000 but no one mentions what you can do with these nowadays, and there does not seem to be any mods available