Nintendo Entertainment System

[Product Image]
The Amiga 1200.

It's surely a fool's folly to retread the well documented history of Commodore or the Amiga line of family computers, but a super breezy gloss over for the Amiga 1200 would go something like this...

By the 90s the Amiga 500 was getting a bit long in the fang. Some stop-gaps to try bring it up to speed were tried like the 500+ with the ECS chipset, or the 600 which was a shrunken 500+ with hard disk support. The 1200 represented the biggest step forward for the performance of the Amiga in the home market, with its greatly improved EC020 processor, AGA chipset and like the 600, hard disk support.

The AGA Amigas introduced Workbench 3.0, at the time an equally big step up over 1.x and 2.x as seen on the earlier systems. The 1200 featured an angular chassis concealing a Motorola 68EC020 CPU @ 14MHz with the then-new Amiga AGA chipset, featuring more colours and a wider palette. A slick new feature was a CPU expansion connection exposed under the machine to allow more powerful CPUs to be added later. The AGA chipset did bring with it compatibility issues with older software though and alas, it was among the final group of products Commodore produced.

Specifications

Motorola 68030 @ 50MHz, 68882 FPU @ 50MHz

CPU upgraded using Phase 5 Blizzard 1230 Mk IV

2MB Chip RAM, 128MB Fast RAM

32GB mSATA SSD, JMicron SATA to PATA bridge

Amiga AGA Chipset

Phase 5 SCSI Kit IV

External Panasonic 2x CD-ROM

External Iomega Zip100

Linksys 802.11b wireless card

Commodore 1940 multisync monitor

Kickstart 3.1, AmigaOS 3.9

Unique features

I'll be honest, my Amiga is far from the most unique model out there - it doesn't have any crazy parts inside that clip on top of the surface mount components inside, nor any hectic big accelerator that needs active cooling... still, with what it does have it's pretty peak Amiga 1200, you couldn't get much fancier in the mid 90s!

Personal history

I was gifted my Amiga 1200 for my 16th birthday - at the time, it was already nearly a decade old from a company that had long ceased to exist, but my god, I was in love. My poor old desktop PC got absolutely no attention for months after I got the Amiga. In the 23 years I've owned it so far, it's seen many thousands of hours of both work, play and browsing.

At first, I used it stock. And rapidly realized 2MB Chip RAM only wasn't enough. I installed an 8MB Fast RAM card which made life much less miserable and let me play many more games from hard disk using the at the time new technology of WHDLoad.

As I've gotten older and my expendable income has increased, I finally could splash on the more desireable upgrades like the 1940 monitor that supports the fancier AGA video modes and the Blizzard 1230 MkIV. Now, it's pinnacle gaming Amiga able to run essentially every classic title ever written for the platform. It won't run some of the newer titles but who knows, maybe one day the ever evolving project will involve a PiStorm or a TF1260... hmm... Quake on the 1200... tempting...