The Commodore Amiga is the greatest computer ever made.

I think you've hit the nail on the head - it wasn't long before people were putting A1200's in tower cases or coming up with external IDE adapters to fit cheap CD ROM drives, etc. It's always been a computer people tinkered with to get the most bang for their buck, and that's filtered down to today, with all sorts of clever add-ons, expansions, etc. And of course, once Commodore went bust, and existing 3rd party support drifted away, the only people who were left to support the Amiga were the people who owned Amigas. As a platform, there's a real DIY aspect to it, which I love. Once upon a time, games developers used to lament that they were getting hemmed in by the Amiga's standards, because loads of people owned an Amiga 500 and never bothered expanding it. These days, you'd be hard pressed to find an Amiga still in use that is completely stock.

That accelerator is a bit of a bonus. A stock A1200 isn't much of a boost over an A500. But with an 030 @40Mhz and some extra RAM, you're in for a treat.

Thanks for the upload! Amiga 1200 is a amazing machine. Im looking forward to part 2.

Not sure if you mentioned it, but a recap should be first on your list. This will be a fun project for sure. Ré the case mods, I think that is a product of users actually using their machines and possibly being done years ago. These days I find there is a trend towards preservation.

What a nice donation to the shack. I look forward to episode 2.

Great video as always. Even better as you've featured my modded A1200 @ 4:25! 😍

probably said it before.....always wanted an amiga so its great to see these videos......roll on part 2!

Looking forward to the next video in this series. The more I see of these Retro video's, the more I miss my Amiga 500 and 1500, the more I want to see if I can buy one again. Lot of more's there :)

Back in the day mounting a 3.5" hard drive and squeezing the case closed was the way most amiga 1200 budget upgrades went. I knew many machines and my own original from 1993 and a friend of mines machine ran like that until the late 90's with no fizz bang. We still have our original machines. I had a gvp 1230 accelerator with a 50mhz 030 which is still running fine.

It's funny that you showed The Fate of Atlantis when mentioning the temptations of PC games, as this game exactly marked my transition from Amiga 500 to PC. I absolutely loved all the Lucas Arts adventures, so I had no hesitation in placing a pre-order for the game, for the Amiga, as I wanted it as soon as it came out. I think this must have been from Special Reserve, they had adverts in most magazines of the time and I used to buy most of my Amiga games from them. However, I had been thinking about buying a PC for a while, using money I had saved up from my first job. I think I must have seen in a magazine somewhere the details of the PC version of The Fate of Atlantis, with its promise of 256 colour VGA graphics and no disk-swapping (the memory of the horrendous disk swapping on the Amiga version of Monkey Island 2 was still fresh at the time). So, I bought a PC (a 486 DX2 50, which I still have) and I rang up Special Reserve and changed my pre-order from the Amiga to the PC version. And that was that. I don't think I bought another Amiga game and the PC replaced the Amiga on my desk and sadly the Amiga was boxed up and put away. The good news is that I still have the Amiga, still in its original box and I do get it out from time to time, although I tend to use emulators for playing Amiga games these days.

11:55 At this, it usually cycles different shades of grey for about 2 seconds, then tries to boot from the hard drive. With the lack of a hard drive, it hangs on the screen for up to 10 seconds more before giving you the purple insert disk screen. However, even if it did find a hard drive, it could still end up hanging on grey as it loads workbench or something. So in short, yes, this is normal for an A1200.

So glad that Beast is in better hands now 🙌🏾

The long delay on the grey screen is it looking at the IDE interface. Once you have a drive attached, that delay will disappear!

I have always wanted an Amiga. The closest I got to one was at a couple of shows, so I never got to enjoy what they could do. Emulation works, but isn't the same thing and real hardware. Thanks for the video, it reminds me of why I still want one!

Lovely video cant wait for the next episode !

Laughed when I saw my very own transparent A1200 at 4:16. Original case safety stored away in the box the new A1200 case came in.

Still have my original A1200. No idea if it still works, but it did the last time I checked about 15 years ago. The hard disk required a format, but otherwise still worked. It was the computer I learned how to upgrade and system manage on. It still has the stock Workbench 3.0 ROMs, but has a 1gb HD, a Blizzard card with a 68030 running at 50mHz(I think, but don't quote me on the clock speed, it was waaay too long ago, but good enough to run Doom at full speed at 320x200) and either 4 or 8mb of fast RAM, depending what I was doing that day. The reason for the difference in RAM at times is that if I plugged my SCSI adapter and 8mb of chip RAM in, it would green screen on boot, so if I wanted to use the CD-ROM drive I had to swap the fast RAM SIMM over to 4mb. I still have the CD-ROM and SCSI adapter, but the adapter is broken. Those PC cards were really dodgy, I think I had 3 of 'em. I also have the official A1200 dust cover and aftermarket higher wattage power supply with built in fan.

Eeek! You should probably replace those mangled clock port pin headers. They're too far gone. There were a lot of neat expansions made for the clock port since it was the only other internal expansion port in the A1200 and accelerators usually went on the trapdoor port. It's a slow bus but it was used for a lot of things like sound cards and the like.

Had a Blizzard A1230@50MHz and it was a beast, add in an FPU it does make it a bit faster too.

Looks like a gentle touch of a hot bulb :D

You should invest in some type of UV lighting, a plastic container, and either reflective tape or tinfoil for the outside of the container, So you can do retro brighting indoors, It's not that costly at all and you never have to depend on the sun again.

Internal 3.5 inch drives like that were common as far as I remember. The dealers used to sell them as kits with the advantage that they were cheaper than 2.5 inch drives. I think you were meant to leave the top RF shield in and cut one of the ribs on the case to get it to fit instead of wedging it on the top of the PCB like that though.

Looking forward to this refurb!

Accelerator worth more than the Amiga. :) BTW I don't think it's accurate to say it has more support now than it did back in the day. Remember that at the time the market was big enough to support several dedicated magazines that you could buy in any newsagent. They were all packed with ads for weird and wonderful add-ons and had readerships in the hundreds of thousands.

Nice! Wondering how you will handle the case... Love my 1200. Had one back in the day... Loved it... Had to get one again, which I did years (8 ish?) ago... Was tricky finding a A1200 here in the US for a decent price back then. Can imagine it hasn't gotten better. Have a 28Mhz 030 with 32M RAM in it now. You really do need at least some RAM for an A1200 to perform happily. And a processor and RAM make it fly. Love the PCMCIA option. Mostly use it for ethernet (I also have a PCMCIA SCSI card I can use with a CDROM). Admittedly, I also got a PCMCIA WiFi card I haven't used, because my 1200 is sitting about 18 inches away from my router. ;-) I wouldn't say I routinely browse the internet with it :-), but it is nice to be able to pop over to Aminet from time to time. And they are still releasing new versions of AmigaOS!!! Enjoy and I'll be watching to see how your progress proceeds... ;-)

My old Amiga 1200 PPC /060, BVision 3D Vga, USB, 128mb ram, AmigaOS4 and OS 3.9 on home made tower chase. 😎 Only Amiga make possible! 💪 RULEEZ Coming soon, new AmigaOS4 multicore on new Notebook PPC 64bit 😎

Nasty ol' solder blob! Thankfully that's all it was! Good eye on that one!

If they came out earler i might have got one but by the time i was spending to much time working, down the pub or raving.

Have an A1200 in my collection but it's only got the HD - would love an accelerator card to check out some of the faster stuff. And I have seen several 1200s with those melty patches on the case, definitely something up with the design if that keeps happening.

Love the video, I have currently got 2 A1200s brought ages ago, one in a tower with a blizzard ppc board and one in desktop with a Vampire. Fun machine to use and play with! Just a minor comment on the video, the logo "swish" sound between segments is kinda harsh.

If the board has not been recapped, you should do this immediately.

You should have seen the original wiring it was put together with tape and I replaced the tape with terminal Block as a temp measure as was planning to install the whole computer with a ez-tech tower

My A1200 has been sat in its box on top of the wardrobe for over 20 years, no tinkering, just the shop installed HD and a Blizzard accelerator in the trapdoor... wonder what the chances of it just working are?

Click this video as I was a little surpised on the damage ! - Dave / South West Amiga Group

The A1200 is my second favorite retro computer I have four of them would of been five but I sold my A600 many years ago as I did not like it. More fool me as the upgrades now available are fantastic. Anyway I digress, Looking at the the damage to the case I think it has been close to a 60 watt bulb.

I'd highly recommend a mSATA SSD on a 2.5" 44 pin IDE converter board. They are marginally fast, energy efficient, cool and system compliant. And if that turbo board works, try to obtain a 16bit PCMCIA network card and transfer files over the network with sambafs. That way you can get rid of those annoying CFCards. :)

Just noticed in the video, your A1200 is made in the Philippines. Mine is made in Scotland.

4:57 I like those "cutscenes" but my suggestion is to make them little bit quieter :). Ps. nice video

That was a stroke of luck with the blob of solder! Look forward to part two.

lol fizz bang the art of early upgrading and overclocking lol

4:05 Oh my God...😍

i had one of these machines from new, it was pretty good but it was released too late and other technologies rendered it redundant fairly quickly. Nice to see one again though. Please get rid of the swooshy sounds on the transitions though, i don't think it helps the flow of the narrative. Just my opinion. Love your restorations. I'm in the Uk too and if you want to retrobrite have you considered buying a few meters of UV LEDs and making an LED enclosure

Shortly after the introduction of the A1200 I was in a dilemma if I should get the A1200 or should buy a PC. After talking to a computer guy back then I got a recommendation to get a PC because Amiga was a "dead end". I still wonder what could have happened if I got an Amiga 1200 instead.

Where do you get your diag Roms?

Powering on an A1200 after so long is a bit dangerous as the caps tend to leak out. First thing every A1200 user should do is to replace these old leaky caps and replace them with new ones. After that you can power on the machine.

No internal varta battery of death, only a dozen or so little capacitors of death

i miss my a1200.. :( sold it to get a 486 dx2/66...

For me it would be a tough choice between getting one of the cases shown on the kzfaq.info channel, or using it as a starting point for an a4000TX motherboard build.

My Amiga 1200 needs help, floppy drive fault and capacitors?

the pimple below the space bar is a screw being too long mark

When is it melted and when molten ? Asking for a friend 😎

Those destroyed clock-port header pins are misplaced on this board. This is a known problem on some Amiga 1200s from the factory. The pins should be actually near the expansion socket/floppy, not towards the custom chips. Please research this problem online for a proper fix, when working on the board, and don't just blindly replace the clock port pins!

"What might have been if money and time had been kinder to Commodore back in the day." You mean, "What might have been if Commodore's leadership had not had their head up their arses."

you do realize commodore purchased the amiga company ,

well the mouse wont work when insertet into the wrong port hehe :D

Is it weird that I want a machine even more after it's been mistreated?

nice vid, but those wooshing noises are not good

Ahh nice a “real” commodore A120” not the later German knock offs!

That's a shitty escom model I guess.. I once bought another a1200 and thought it wasn't working because of that delayed boot

As far as my memories go back (and they go back well beyond the eighties into the seventies) an Amiga was some 2 - 2.5 times more expensive than a PC of similar capabilities. Amiga was never cheap, and this is probably another reason added to the many by which the PC won the race.

Ha ,ha,The Truth came out,The old computers are and still will be the best,And all those dos and/ or Windows PCs, Macintoshs aren't, weren't all that great,Huh !!!!.Just all money, ego,and bragging rights, branding butt kissing!!!!

I wonder what were those guys thinking releasing that thing in 1992. PCs have Windows 3.1 (and even WWG 3.11), a 32-bit protected mode OS (vs. 68020 having no memory management/protection whatsoever), with sound, video, unlimited screen resolution and TrueType/Type1 font support. Also, a 1992 PC had a choice of video- and audiocards with the standard ISA interface, unlike shitty proprietary builtins. PCs also supported high-resolution, high-frequency monitors instead of CRT TVs those micros used. It was obsolete by like 5 years at that point.

Those woosh transitions are…distracting :-/

I wish your videos were 20mins long. It just gets into the mix and it’s over. *sad face*