Commodore Amiga 1200

Summary: The first Amiga I have ever owned. This one is a machine which a friend put together from a spare motherboard, and various spare parts from the many upgrades he has carried out. Needless to say, as a machine built mainly out of spare parts, it is a little less reliable than most. Amigas are normally very stable reliable machines, main problems usually caused by overheating...which is about the only problem I do not face. No offence to the guy who built the machine, I'm very grateful for it, and it gets a great deal of use, now that I have learned how to deal with its little nuances.

System Specs...

Processor: Motorola 68030/50MHz

Memory: 2Mb System, 16Mb Extended.

Internal Storage: IBM 306Mb 2.5" IDE Harddisk.

External Storage: Internal Double Density 3.5" Floppy Drive, External Double Density 2 Drive Floppy Disk Drive.

Display: PAL, NTSC, Multiscan, DBLNTSC, VGA screenmodes.

Interesting Features: Plenty...

Firstly, there's the fact that before it was put into this machine, the motherbaord exploded...literally..sparks and everything, and the keyboard interface was fried. So, the maker, being the resourceful man he is, took the interface from an A500, and wired it into the motherboard. Though this works, it is decidedly temperamental, and is the main troublemaker of the system.

Mouse Port: In the case of this machine, the mouse connector was irreperably damaged...I'm not going to ask how...but the solution the maker had was to internally connect a two way joystick adaptor. So I now have a little grey box with the mouse and joystick attatched on the end of a wire coming from the back of the machine.

Blizzard 1230 Accelerator board: This board has the main processor of the machine, upgrading it from the base 68020 chip, to a two processor system, with the 68020 and the on board 68030 chip working together. Also allows memory to be upgraded, in this case with a 16Mb SIMM.

Double External Floppy Drive: A necessity really, as the internal one is very close to dead. 2 drives in one unit, quite handy when copying disks. Runs of an external power supply, and plugs into the Floppy Drive Port on the A1200.

Case Logo.

A very clean A1200. Far cleaner than mine...