Vintage Amiga Hardware Blog

I remember how difficult it used to be to set up a new Amiga before WinUAE enabled Amiga formatted hard drives to be mounted under the emulator.Workbench 3.5 and 3.9 came on a CD-rom but previous version of Amiga Workbench came on floppies. 

A 3.1 system needs quite a lot of patches and tuning before I would like to use it. So basically you needed to spend an evening chugging floppies in and out, finding application from AmiNet, finding archives (isn’t it funny you never find the executable variant of the LHA archive from AmiNET when you really need it).

Thanks to WinUAE you can have a premade Workbench installation up and running in the emulator which you can easily copy over to an Amiga formatted hard drive. You can work with floppy images instead of the real thing which is the best thing since sliced bread.

You can remove the card from your real Amiga, put it into a CF-reader on your PC and let WinUAE boot off your Compact Flash card so you can transfer files or maintain the system in a more efficient environment (no more read/write errors).

Currently I have two Amiga 1200, one is going to end up as a custom A1200 tower or integrated into a PC case together with a standard ATX sized PC motherboard whenever I got the time to work on it. The other is going to end up as a standard wedge case A1200.

Today I decided to finish up the software side of the wedge A1200 expanded with an Apollo 1260 turbo board.

I have a basic “no graphics board”-3.1 installation accessible in WinUAE which I had worked on during fall last year specifically made for the A1200. The installation consists of Workbench 3.1, some of my favorite patches and a “Work” partition containing a lot of applications.

Finding an A1200 in good shape is difficult these days. Most A1200 have yellow cases, either from sun or a smoking owner, a yellow case can be dealt with though. More irritating is the threaded holes for the screws used to screw together the case with, they are molded into the plastic case and I have not owned a single second hand A1200 that had all threads in good shape.

So my next mission is to find a solution to in some way replace the plastic barrels with a metal part in some way glued to the A1200 case. It is difficult to explain but you can be sure I will make a blog post about it in the future if I succed

Now enjoy how ugly Amiga screen looks like on a modern TFT through a DCE scandoubler (it is more ugly in real life).

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