Amiga questions

From: Julian Richardson <JRichardson_at_softwright.co.uk>
Date: Fri Mar 30 07:07:43 2001

a few A1200 Amiga questions (do they hit the 10 year limit? I know I got my
A500 in the early 90's, and I think A3000's were around then, right??)...

Anyway, here goes:

Do all 1200's come with built in IDE hard drive controllers - or did
commodore do things on the cheap and only add controllers for machines
shipped with drives (I'm assuming the controller lives on the main board
itself)?

Will the 1200 accept any size (capacity) drive? Or wasn't the OS / ROM code
hard-drive aware and cheated by making the drive look like a big floppy (I'm
sure there were systems which did this, but I can't remember if the amiga
was one of them)?

Presumably 2.5 drives are the preferred method - but there's nothing to stop
3.5" IDE drives being used with a suitable adpator (OK that's actually an
IDe question - I think it's just the connectors that differ between them
though, right?)

On the hardware side of things, someone said the 1200's IDE controller is
basically unbuffered I/O straight to the CPU (which sounds possible
certainly with IDE) and so it's real easy to toast things - is that true?

What are the options of networking a '1200 (ideally TCP/IP stack on the
Amiga, using SLIP or something to a Unix box maybe? Are there things around
that allow this, with NFS mounting of drives for data copying?)

Can PC SVGA multisync monitors be used with the 1200, or won't the monitor
sync to a low enough frequency for the Amiga (seem to remember that was the
problem with the 500, not sure if the 1200 has any sort of 'fix' for this on
the Amiga side though)


Having seen how cheap 1200's are these days, and having a pile of spare IDE
drives lying around (both 3.5 and 2.5) I'm quite keen to get a 1200 to put
Deluxe Paint on - it's still far better than any art package I've seen on
modern systems despite being ancient by modern software standards! I can't
be bothered using my old A500 for this though - too slow and too painful
without a hard disk...

directions to an Amiga FAQ that may answer some or all of the above would be
most useful too! :-)

cheers!

Jules
Received on Fri Mar 30 2001 - 07:07:43 BST