Vintage Amiga Hardware Blog

I took a short break from the A500 project today, because I thought it would be a nice idea not to mess it up so that I have something I can test the Multivison 500 scandoubler on when it arrives during the coming week.

During fall last year I put together a nice Amiga 1200 with an Apollo 1260 @ 50 MHz (but capable of 80 MHz) turbo board, DCE internal flicker fixer and scandoubler and a 1 GB Compact Flash card. The configuration was by no means finalized but it worked so good I decided to keep it that way. Maybe that is why I do not have a flicker fixer/scandoubler in my big box A4000D/PPC running OS4?

If you think a 060 won’t make a dramatically impact for speed in non graphic cards environments you are in for a shock. With an 8 color Workbench, the desktop was flying. In combination with Compact Flash card the boot up time was reduced and the operating system felt even more rapid, dare I say it almost felt like I was sitting in WinUAE?

So sometimes around December last year the A1200 refused to start, turned out it was the Compact Flash card which was toasted, which I suspected since I noticed that it got a lot hotter than the 060 CPU inside the Amiga case. So a quick email to Komplett and a Compact Flash card replacement was instantly sent to me, kudos to www.komplett.se, excellent service as usual. But why the CF-card failed is still a mystery.

However from then on my evening turned for the worse. HD-toolbox did not find the new CF-card and I was running a new workstation so I had to set up a new WinUAE configuration and reload the old partitions to the CF-card. And then I have to remove the Apollo 060 board before I install drivers for the accelerator. And then the Work: partition where nowhere to be found and could not be set up in HD-toolbox.

So at least things work on a technical level but not 100% on a software level, good to know that for future weekends. There is nothing worse than error checking non working Amiga hardware IMHO.

Anyways my plans for the A1200 are to keep it as it is but just tidy it up. I have not decided yet if is worth it to add an internal notebook DVD/CD-ROM. But I will definitely want to add a heatsink and fan on the 060 and try it out at faster speeds. And it is also going to get an 1.86 MB MicroniK floppy.

At least my 7 year old TFT monitor did work with the DCE scandoubler, I just had to run Amiga in NTSC, how nice. And how weird since it worked perfectly with an old Amiga 3000 I had a couple of years ago.

And this image has nothing to do with the Amiga, I just took it today as I was taking a walk on Skepsholmen in Stockholm.

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