Friday, I had a package delivered and in that package was something I had wanted again, for a long long time. But before we get to the box and its contents, I just want to give a big thank you to the person that sent me this. It is someone here on GBAtemp. I'm not sure if you want to be named so I will call them SweetieLover70, but thank you so very very much. I know I have said this over and over again in PM's but that this really means a lot to me. When that PM came in out of the blue, I just sat there looking at the post for a good 10 minutes before I could even process it. I didn't think there was any kind and generous people left in the world and with the way my health has been lately I had been struggling quite a lot and this is really what I needed. So once again SweetieLover70, from the bottom of my heart, Thank you so very very much. You have not only made my Christmas, but my year too.
Now I know what the rest of you are thinking;
it is of course ...
View attachment 190923
An Amiga 1200.
What's so special about an Amiga 1200 I hear you ask? Well this was pretty much where I got my start with computers. It's where the spark came from that ignited the flame that become a profession and a hobby. The foundation for this was always there, being bought up with the spectrum and C64 but the Amiga is where it all got real.
Personal History
I come from quite a large family 3 Brothers and 2 sisters with everyone being older than me other than 1 younger sister. So, I was a middle child. My parents didn’t love me any less, just kind of got overshadowed by my younger sister and there was quite an age gap between me and my youngest, older brother, but nevertheless I kind of latched on to him for attention and constantly raided his stuff. I would have been about 5 or 6 when he brought home an Amiga 500 with 1mb expansion. It was like WOW to me it was like having an Arcade in my home. I’ll never forget the first time he let me play with it on my own. I can even remember the game. Dynamite Dux. As I say this was the first time, I had ever used Floppy (3 ½ inch) disks. I picked up the disk reverently and offered it up to the drive waiting for the magic to happen. And waited. And nothing. I was used to tape at this point and had just put the disk just enough for the drive to hold it but it wasn’t actually in and was afraid to apply any pressure out of fear of breaking it. So, I did what any 6-year-old would do playing with their brother’s expensive computer. I ran to get my mum. My mum being my mum had absolutely no idea, but just pressed it further in to the drive and click! The game loaded and I was happy for the night.
As time went on my brother continued getting new games (pirated of course) and I continued playing. Occasionally id bug my brother about X game and not being able to get past a level or a boss and he would tell me to check out the docs disks. These Docs disks were disks that were made by groups like LSD and contained walkthroughs, cheats, programming how to crack software, I believe that my brother also owned a copy of Jolly Rogers Cookbook (AKA the Anarchists Cookbook) but that’s not really applicable here haha. But I started reading these discs. It started with as I said just walkthroughs and cheats but life in a small town can get boring and rainy days are never fun so I would start reading a vast array of topics and trying things out.
And then a fateful day came. Monkey Island had just been released and my brother had bought what he had assumed was a cracked copy but turned out to be a 1:1 copy with the copy protection (dial-a-pirate) intact.
He’d bought it from some muppet on a car boot so he had no chance of getting his money back. By this point I had been reading though these disks for months (if not a year at this point) and although I didn’t understand everything, I thought what did I have to lose? The game was worthless to my brother and we had everything we needed, an amiga Action Replay and a hex editor (from an Amiga cover disk) So I set about cracking the secret of monkey island. Now I will skip over a lot of the details or I would be here forever but the basics of it is I would use the Action replay to dump the memory at the dial a pirate screen to another blank disk and compare what had changed and what hadn’t, then I basically bodged the game to generate the same ‘face’ every single time. Still had a problem tho. I didn’t have a code wheel not a big problem I just borrowed one from a friend for 5 seconds while I was around their house and that was it. My first adventure in cracking was done. It all just bloomed from there really, I started getting deeper and deep into programming and learning the limitations of the machine. As I sold copies of games to friends and in the school yard, I would plough that money back in to new games. I taught friends who were interested in cracking how to do it and eventually we teamed up and formed a group … U.I.A.A.D. Eventually my brother upgraded to the 1200 and the 500 was mine. I enjoyed playing the games still but often spent a lot of time writing my own tools and seeing how others had cracked certain games.
Eventually the 500-scene died and I was back to bugging my brother for his machine, which eventually he just gave to me. And I enjoyed everything about the Amiga and that’s how things went of course all things must come to an end and around 1995 or 1996 I moved on to the PC and pirating PS1 games with the a U.I.A.A.D boot screen (I have no idea if any of these still exist.)
The last time I used an actual amiga was around 1999. The keyboard on my 1200 had died and I packed it away and put it in the loft. I’ve fixed other peoples amigas and played amiga games in emulation. But its never quite been the same. And I should say at this point that the 1200 never had any upgrades done to it. And the 500 just had the 1mb ram upgrade. There were some pretty cool (for the time) upgrades for the 1200 but although I had money from piracy, I did other things with the money that won’t be discussed here.
The Present Amiga
I’ve wanted another Amiga for many, many years now. As I have said I can play any Amiga game anytime I like through emulation but you never get the same experience with emulation as you do with the real hardware. It’s the sound of the disk drive motor and lights on the console it’s just not the same.
While the Amiga was in the post to me, my biggest concern was its condition. These machines are now nearly 30 years old, with the first Amiga 1200 rolling out of the factory in 1992 and they suffer from all the same things as all 30-year-old electronics do: leaky capacitors, damaged motherboards, lifted traces, perished belts (disk drive). The list could go on. But when it arrived it had none of these problems. The motherboard was clean and damage free, the capacitors seem in good condition (although will be replaced at some point in the not too distant future more on that shortly) and came with IDE hard drive, capacity unknown but its not uncommon to have a 8gb HDD with two 4gb partitions and a Phase 5 Blizzard 1230 mk III accelerator board (no ram).
The Future Amiga
Plan A
There is one tiny little problem at the moment. I actually don’t have an Amiga power supply. Supplying power isn’t too much of an issue in itself. It uses 3 rails, +12, -12 and +5 which is quite easy to get out of a triple output switch mode power supply. The issue only really came up when I tried to get myself a reproduction of the square DIN plug. In the Low end amiga range 500,500+,600 and 1200 as well as the C128 Commodore in their infinite wisdom decided to use a proprietary 5 pin square DIN. No silly, standard round DIN plugs for the Amiga oh no! When I was initially thinking about it before I received the amiga I figured I would just solder on to the test points and run the cable though the rear expansion port. Then I received it and realised that would literally be a crime for such a wonderfully preserved amiga. Now you can get replacements from pretty much 1 man and because they are from one man you are pretty much bent over a table and taken from behind not on the cost of the item itself, but the postage. The item itself only costs about £6 the postage was £15! Fuck that! That’s £21 before I buy the actual power supply, the 5 and 3 core flex and the Great British (possibly the world’s greatest) 3 pin plug. So, I took to eBay and found a dead Amiga 500 power supply for £14 including postage
Now I should mention that the Amiga 1200 was a mistake. Just one of the many mistakes that caused the downfall of Commodore. After Jack Tramiel left, Commodore Seemed to adopt a “People will like what we tell them to like” attitude and cut costs wherever they could, often to the detriment of the products themselves. This led to them making the same mistakes over and over again. For instance, they released a multimedia system to compete with the likes of the 3DO and CDI the CDTV. It was literally an Amiga 500 with a CDROM drive and no keyboard. And they would not allow stores to sell them alongside the Amiga range, insisting that it should be placed as far away from them as possible. They later repeated this with the CD32 which was an Amiga 1200 again with a CDROM drive and without the keyboard and floppy drive. The reason I say that the Amiga 1200 was a mistake is that they halted the development of the AAA chip instead cannibalising it and creating the AGA chipset. They also skimped on components especially with the Power Supply. Without going in to barmy amounts of technical details, the original power supply was only just about powerful enough to run a stock Amiga 1200. This was in fact a massive failure point for a lot of 1200’s. My power supply will be more than capable of running the HDD (at least initially) and Blizzard accelerator.
Video isn’t a big issue as the 1200 comes with component output baked in. For testing this is fine. Eventually though this will be upgraded to a SCART output once I have proved it working.
One of the reasons I wanted an Amiga again is that I wanted to preserve my Cracks and Cracktro’s from back in the day. It may not mean a lot of anyone else but to me its part of my personal history. The current plan is to back up every disk I own (around 2000) and then make a freely distributable, version of the cracktros for anyone who is interested. But there is a big axe hanging over this. The last time these disks were read was 20 years ago and these disks were not the finest examples of floppy disks to begin with. The HDD will be replaced with a Compact Flash or SD adapter so I can more easily transfer the images over to PC I will replace the Floppy drive with a Gotek floppy emulator.
Next thing on the chopping block are the Kickstart ROMs, the ones currently installed are v40.68 (3.1) by installing the latest ROMs I’ll be able to install a newer version of Workbench and have some more modern features (but not too modern … I hate what they did with Amiga OS 4 Final). This will allow me to add a DVD/CD drive (so it’s essentially a CD32) and some other bits and pieces.
From a cosmetic stand point, I did consider briefly towering the Amiga up (It was very popular back in the day ) to allow for further expansion, but this for me atleast, would spoil it for me so I will be doing something that will put my mark on the machine, but I will save the details on that for later
Plan B
In the event that I can’t get the Amiga working there is a second route I think I could take. I have an amiga floppy drive and I think with the aid of a raspberry pi and a bit of jiggery pokery I should be able to read the disks.
As for the rest of the amiga if I end up going this route, I will be using it as a Raspberry PI case with the Keyboard being used as a USB with the help of a KeyRar v2 .
Well folks, that’s about it for now. I thank you for making it this far I know that it has been a bit of an avalanche text and pictures ( No I wasn’t channelling my inner Fast6191), I hope you enjoyed it though, and I wish you and your families a wonderful Christmas and the happiest of new years!
As always if you have any questions please ask and comments are always welcome!
View attachment 190928
Now I know what the rest of you are thinking;
it is of course ...
View attachment 190923
An Amiga 1200.
What's so special about an Amiga 1200 I hear you ask? Well this was pretty much where I got my start with computers. It's where the spark came from that ignited the flame that become a profession and a hobby. The foundation for this was always there, being bought up with the spectrum and C64 but the Amiga is where it all got real.
Personal History
I come from quite a large family 3 Brothers and 2 sisters with everyone being older than me other than 1 younger sister. So, I was a middle child. My parents didn’t love me any less, just kind of got overshadowed by my younger sister and there was quite an age gap between me and my youngest, older brother, but nevertheless I kind of latched on to him for attention and constantly raided his stuff. I would have been about 5 or 6 when he brought home an Amiga 500 with 1mb expansion. It was like WOW to me it was like having an Arcade in my home. I’ll never forget the first time he let me play with it on my own. I can even remember the game. Dynamite Dux. As I say this was the first time, I had ever used Floppy (3 ½ inch) disks. I picked up the disk reverently and offered it up to the drive waiting for the magic to happen. And waited. And nothing. I was used to tape at this point and had just put the disk just enough for the drive to hold it but it wasn’t actually in and was afraid to apply any pressure out of fear of breaking it. So, I did what any 6-year-old would do playing with their brother’s expensive computer. I ran to get my mum. My mum being my mum had absolutely no idea, but just pressed it further in to the drive and click! The game loaded and I was happy for the night.
As time went on my brother continued getting new games (pirated of course) and I continued playing. Occasionally id bug my brother about X game and not being able to get past a level or a boss and he would tell me to check out the docs disks. These Docs disks were disks that were made by groups like LSD and contained walkthroughs, cheats, programming how to crack software, I believe that my brother also owned a copy of Jolly Rogers Cookbook (AKA the Anarchists Cookbook) but that’s not really applicable here haha. But I started reading these discs. It started with as I said just walkthroughs and cheats but life in a small town can get boring and rainy days are never fun so I would start reading a vast array of topics and trying things out.
And then a fateful day came. Monkey Island had just been released and my brother had bought what he had assumed was a cracked copy but turned out to be a 1:1 copy with the copy protection (dial-a-pirate) intact.
He’d bought it from some muppet on a car boot so he had no chance of getting his money back. By this point I had been reading though these disks for months (if not a year at this point) and although I didn’t understand everything, I thought what did I have to lose? The game was worthless to my brother and we had everything we needed, an amiga Action Replay and a hex editor (from an Amiga cover disk) So I set about cracking the secret of monkey island. Now I will skip over a lot of the details or I would be here forever but the basics of it is I would use the Action replay to dump the memory at the dial a pirate screen to another blank disk and compare what had changed and what hadn’t, then I basically bodged the game to generate the same ‘face’ every single time. Still had a problem tho. I didn’t have a code wheel not a big problem I just borrowed one from a friend for 5 seconds while I was around their house and that was it. My first adventure in cracking was done. It all just bloomed from there really, I started getting deeper and deep into programming and learning the limitations of the machine. As I sold copies of games to friends and in the school yard, I would plough that money back in to new games. I taught friends who were interested in cracking how to do it and eventually we teamed up and formed a group … U.I.A.A.D. Eventually my brother upgraded to the 1200 and the 500 was mine. I enjoyed playing the games still but often spent a lot of time writing my own tools and seeing how others had cracked certain games.
Eventually the 500-scene died and I was back to bugging my brother for his machine, which eventually he just gave to me. And I enjoyed everything about the Amiga and that’s how things went of course all things must come to an end and around 1995 or 1996 I moved on to the PC and pirating PS1 games with the a U.I.A.A.D boot screen (I have no idea if any of these still exist.)
The last time I used an actual amiga was around 1999. The keyboard on my 1200 had died and I packed it away and put it in the loft. I’ve fixed other peoples amigas and played amiga games in emulation. But its never quite been the same. And I should say at this point that the 1200 never had any upgrades done to it. And the 500 just had the 1mb ram upgrade. There were some pretty cool (for the time) upgrades for the 1200 but although I had money from piracy, I did other things with the money that won’t be discussed here.
The Present Amiga
I’ve wanted another Amiga for many, many years now. As I have said I can play any Amiga game anytime I like through emulation but you never get the same experience with emulation as you do with the real hardware. It’s the sound of the disk drive motor and lights on the console it’s just not the same.
While the Amiga was in the post to me, my biggest concern was its condition. These machines are now nearly 30 years old, with the first Amiga 1200 rolling out of the factory in 1992 and they suffer from all the same things as all 30-year-old electronics do: leaky capacitors, damaged motherboards, lifted traces, perished belts (disk drive). The list could go on. But when it arrived it had none of these problems. The motherboard was clean and damage free, the capacitors seem in good condition (although will be replaced at some point in the not too distant future more on that shortly) and came with IDE hard drive, capacity unknown but its not uncommon to have a 8gb HDD with two 4gb partitions and a Phase 5 Blizzard 1230 mk III accelerator board (no ram).
The Future Amiga
Plan A
There is one tiny little problem at the moment. I actually don’t have an Amiga power supply. Supplying power isn’t too much of an issue in itself. It uses 3 rails, +12, -12 and +5 which is quite easy to get out of a triple output switch mode power supply. The issue only really came up when I tried to get myself a reproduction of the square DIN plug. In the Low end amiga range 500,500+,600 and 1200 as well as the C128 Commodore in their infinite wisdom decided to use a proprietary 5 pin square DIN. No silly, standard round DIN plugs for the Amiga oh no! When I was initially thinking about it before I received the amiga I figured I would just solder on to the test points and run the cable though the rear expansion port. Then I received it and realised that would literally be a crime for such a wonderfully preserved amiga. Now you can get replacements from pretty much 1 man and because they are from one man you are pretty much bent over a table and taken from behind not on the cost of the item itself, but the postage. The item itself only costs about £6 the postage was £15! Fuck that! That’s £21 before I buy the actual power supply, the 5 and 3 core flex and the Great British (possibly the world’s greatest) 3 pin plug. So, I took to eBay and found a dead Amiga 500 power supply for £14 including postage
Now I should mention that the Amiga 1200 was a mistake. Just one of the many mistakes that caused the downfall of Commodore. After Jack Tramiel left, Commodore Seemed to adopt a “People will like what we tell them to like” attitude and cut costs wherever they could, often to the detriment of the products themselves. This led to them making the same mistakes over and over again. For instance, they released a multimedia system to compete with the likes of the 3DO and CDI the CDTV. It was literally an Amiga 500 with a CDROM drive and no keyboard. And they would not allow stores to sell them alongside the Amiga range, insisting that it should be placed as far away from them as possible. They later repeated this with the CD32 which was an Amiga 1200 again with a CDROM drive and without the keyboard and floppy drive. The reason I say that the Amiga 1200 was a mistake is that they halted the development of the AAA chip instead cannibalising it and creating the AGA chipset. They also skimped on components especially with the Power Supply. Without going in to barmy amounts of technical details, the original power supply was only just about powerful enough to run a stock Amiga 1200. This was in fact a massive failure point for a lot of 1200’s. My power supply will be more than capable of running the HDD (at least initially) and Blizzard accelerator.
Video isn’t a big issue as the 1200 comes with component output baked in. For testing this is fine. Eventually though this will be upgraded to a SCART output once I have proved it working.
One of the reasons I wanted an Amiga again is that I wanted to preserve my Cracks and Cracktro’s from back in the day. It may not mean a lot of anyone else but to me its part of my personal history. The current plan is to back up every disk I own (around 2000) and then make a freely distributable, version of the cracktros for anyone who is interested. But there is a big axe hanging over this. The last time these disks were read was 20 years ago and these disks were not the finest examples of floppy disks to begin with. The HDD will be replaced with a Compact Flash or SD adapter so I can more easily transfer the images over to PC I will replace the Floppy drive with a Gotek floppy emulator.
Next thing on the chopping block are the Kickstart ROMs, the ones currently installed are v40.68 (3.1) by installing the latest ROMs I’ll be able to install a newer version of Workbench and have some more modern features (but not too modern … I hate what they did with Amiga OS 4 Final). This will allow me to add a DVD/CD drive (so it’s essentially a CD32) and some other bits and pieces.
From a cosmetic stand point, I did consider briefly towering the Amiga up (It was very popular back in the day ) to allow for further expansion, but this for me atleast, would spoil it for me so I will be doing something that will put my mark on the machine, but I will save the details on that for later
Plan B
In the event that I can’t get the Amiga working there is a second route I think I could take. I have an amiga floppy drive and I think with the aid of a raspberry pi and a bit of jiggery pokery I should be able to read the disks.
As for the rest of the amiga if I end up going this route, I will be using it as a Raspberry PI case with the Keyboard being used as a USB with the help of a KeyRar v2 .
Well folks, that’s about it for now. I thank you for making it this far I know that it has been a bit of an avalanche text and pictures ( No I wasn’t channelling my inner Fast6191), I hope you enjoyed it though, and I wish you and your families a wonderful Christmas and the happiest of new years!
As always if you have any questions please ask and comments are always welcome!
View attachment 190928
