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I am thinking about buying an Amiga 1200. I have a question though. Does the AGA graphic on board allow you to have more than a 4 color desktop? That always bothered me with my 2000's or 500's. :-?

Is there anything else about the 1200 I should know?

[Desler]

For sure! The standard chipset allows you a 256 coloured desktop. This and some newicons makes your wb look SWEET 8-)

[xeron]

Desler wrote:
This and some newicons makes your wb look SWEET 8-)

And sloooooow as hell I wouldn't touch AGA or ECS for workbench now, but I used to use 16 or 32 colours for Workbench, then 256 for web browsers.

[Orgin]

Is there anything else about the 1200 I should know?

Yeah anything above 64 colors is a pain to use. Especially in everything above lowres pal/ntsc. Resolutions like multiscan,dblpal,dblntsc etc in 256 colors makes everything crawl.

/Björn

[SilvrDrgn]

Does the AGA graphic on board allow you to have more than a 4 color desktop?

Absolutely, yes it does allow that. You can have up to a 256 color desktop without hacks. Adding hacks to the mix, you can even use a HAM8 screen. Keep in mind that the AGA chipset is very old. So, when you crank up the colors like that it gets very slow! If you're running a modem on the built-in serial port, it will slow that down too because the higher # of color screen modes use up a lot of DMA time, leaving not much left over to service the serial port.

If you're not planning on putting it in a tower and adding a graphics card (i.e. you're sticking with using AGA), then I would definitely recommend that you get FBlit. It forces the system to use the CPU as the blitter in appropriate cases. Thus, it speeds up a lot of display stuff. You can get FBlit from the following URL - FBlit Downloads.

Also, if using AmigaOS 3.5 or AmigaOS 3.9, make sure you read the appropriate FAQ. There's lots of valuable information in them! Here's URLs for those:

AmigaOS 3.5 FAQ

AmigaOS 3.9 FAQ

Wow! Thanx for the quick responce. Would an accelorator help a lot?

Also would a 4000 be a lot better choice over the 1200? They don't actually look that differnt to me.

[SilvrDrgn]

Accelerator would help with programs that need more CPU power - like raytracers or anything else that is computionally intensive. It will offer little benefit for the slow AGA chipset. Some things may improve, but not much. The display will only go as fast as the slowest link in the chain, which is itself. A4000 would be better to get because you have Zorro 2/3 slots available to use right off the bat. Those have to be added (rather expensively) to the A1200 by converting it into a tower. Anyway, you can get a Zorro gfx card and Picasso96 or CyberGraphX software to run it with. That will give you a display that is many orders of magnitude better than what AGA can provide.

Bummer then.. I passed up an incredible deal on a 4000 last month. I wasn't sure if I wanted one or not. I guess I will have to keep looking and will hold out for that.

Thanx