Vintage Amiga Hardware Blog

Finally today I had some time to spare so I could try out my Indivision AGA Scandoubler/Flickerfixer that I received from AmigaKit earlier this week.

I have to say that it is very nice to be able to purchase new Amiga hardware for a reasonable price (when you take in to account how big the market is and how much time was invested in the product) that is not second hand or has passed ten owners before me. Let us hope that in the future there will be more new hardware available such as graphic boards and accelerators.

For quite some time Amiga scandoublers and flickerfixers have been very sought after and have recently been selling for a lot of money on Ebay. In these age when everybody have a TFT screen, it is not a question of if you want to run your Amiga on the TFT, you need to run the Amiga on the TFT because soon, regular CRT monitors and televisions will be extinct to museums.

Typically Amiga computers can not display its native resolution on a VGA screen (except the Amiga 3000 that has a built in scandoubler), this was great in 1989 because it drove the total price of Amiga home computer down since you could hook up your A500 to your TV.

To be able to view all native Amiga resolutions the Amiga needs to be equipped with a scandoubler/flickerfixer such as the Indivision, or you will need an old heavy multisync CRT monitor which rarely exist in resolutions over 15″.

The Indivision is a neat little circuit board that sits on top of the video chip inside the Amiga, once seated it is very securely attached to the A1200 motherboard. However keep in mind that some revisions of the A1200 motherboard have a flatter video chip so you need to carefully sand down the socket on the Indivision. The VGA cable is connected to the Indivision AGA and preferably mounted in the free place besides the mouse port. There is no installation of drivers afterwards but in order to flash the scandoubler with a never firmware that might improve picture quality you need to download a software package from the net.

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How glad I am that my Indivision AGA arrived today all the way from UK (please do not remind me that I could get it a bit cheaper from a retailer here in Sweden).

If I get some time today (else later in the week) I will update this post with a short review, otherwise by looking at other peoples review one can easely draw conclusion this is a major kick ass Amiga hardware release of the year!

Update: Indivision A1200 AGA review is here

Finally my preordered Scandoubler/Flickerfixer indivision AGA by Individual Computers have been shipped from AmigaKit. I look forward to test the new scandoubler and also look forward to mount my current DCE Flickerfixer into my Amiga 4000 that have been running without a scandoubler for more than a year.

Be sure to find some cool pictures and a review about the Indivision AGA here next week!

Update: Indivision A1200 AGA review is here

Late summer 2008 will see the introduction of a new scandoubler/flicker fixer to the Amiga 1200. If this is something you have missed for your A1200 I suggest you head over to Amigakit or Vesalia and preorder the Indivision AGA 1200 scandoubler /flicker fixer now.

Although the price may seem a bit hefty at first, recent prices of scandoublers and flicker fixers on eBay suggests this is actually a bargain price. I have no doubts I will be getting almost twice my money back ten years from now if I ever get bored with my Amiga 1200. But hey I have to be honest here, I did not preorder it to make big bucks ten years from now, if I did I would have ordered more than one

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I purchased a Melody 1200 Pro soundcard for my Amiga 1200 today. The Melody sound card was produced in 1998 and forwards by Kato and was available in a lot of different versions such as a Zorro 2 card and different clock port variants of the sound card.

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 Just two months ago I was given a free classic maxi tower, these kinds of cases are somewhat rare these days so I immediately said I would take it when offered.

Today I added a second maxi tower to my ever growing case collection. It is as the previous one ATX format and has six external 5.25″ slots.

So how relevant are these kinds of cases to the Amiga?

Well, back in 1997 the coolest thing you could do was to hack your trusty A1200 into the biggest tower you could find, head for a really tall building and scream -Amiga, back for the future.

Then when you arrived at home again adoring your gigantic Amiga tower packed of  PC crushing  power you added a huge Amiga sticker to your tower so that your friends would not mistake your server-size chassis for a run of the mill Quake-gaming computer (while you wished your A1200 030 25Mhz ran Quake faster than your buddy’s P166).

Wow, how times have changed…