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[gafstu]

Guys,
I have just bought a standard amiga1200HD from ebay, and am looking into upgrading roms/memory/accelerator, and maybe putting it into a tower with a bigger hard drive/cd-rom etc.

Can anybody recommend any internet shops which sell the above kit, as it will take time to come across some of these things on ebay?

[Karlos]

Towers you can do yourself, if you don't mind a bit of DIY.

For other parts/expansions, GGSData seem worth a look.

-edit-

There are also members of this site that have stuff for sale on a regular basis. x56h34 never seems short of an accelerator card or three

[keropi]

IMHO, the best upgrade for the a1200 (excluding the compulsory 060 accel) is a zorroII busboard + zorroII RTG card... this will transform your amiga experience.... but it will cost you :-D
first u need an accelerator, some fastram, HDD/CDROM, a suitable tower and the RTG itself... it will cost, but will worth it... :-D :-D :-D :-D

[Karlos]

I dunno about that. The Zorro-II bus is kinda slow and you'd be limited to Zorro-II compatible cards only which offer less bang per buck than PCI hardware.

I agree that an RTG card is a must for a tower system but I'd have to say that the best option would be to go for either a BPPC/BVision or Mediator/Voodoo combo.

[keropi]

zorroII RTG is great for wb/games use. Do not get excited with pci buses and 3D cards... they mostly suck in 3D perfomance and you have to switch manually through native/rtg signals... I speak from personall experience...

[Karlos]

Hmm.

I never mentioned 3D, I was thinking in terms of cost effectiveness as 3D isn't an option if you opt for zorro-II anyway.

So, looking only at 2D:

The biggest problem with PCI systems available is that the CPU<->PCI bandwidth is typically quite lousy (not that much faster than accessing Chip RAM under AGA). This is the limiting factor for video and 3D, which generate a lot of traffic. That said, the CPU<->Zorro-II card bandwidth is actually *slower* than accessing Chip RAM under AGA.

A typical voodoo3000 card has a far faster blitter and pixel clock than any Z2/Z3 graphics card currently available, making it a lot better for 2D (of course, you need to make sure you are not using little endian modes).

You have a point regarding the native screens however. One solution is to fit a tv card and route the native video through that.

I'm not knocking Z2 cards, I've used one in the past, but you have to be realistic. Performance wise, they offer little compared to the PCI solutions currently available. Your contrary experience seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

[keropi]

you must also remember that not all zorroII cards are the same... I had a picassoII and now a piccoloSD64, the piccolo one is a lot faster...

[Mad-Matt]

Of course if you are interested in 2d/3d, A 68k/ppc + Bvision setup blows the other rtg solutions away. youll have to live without the normal a1200 output though, but ya get used to not missing it unless ya want to play the odd classic game which looks best on a classic tv anyway (instead of pixelated scandoubled output onto vga).

[stefcep]

Apart from a cpu and fastmem upgrade the most significant thing you can do is get a graphics card, unless you want to do alot of video resolution stuff. To be honest I had an A1200 and tried the upgrade path, but found it too costly and complicated, so I got an a4000, mainly because AGA is too slow for high res, high colour apps. BUT you may only want to run games, basic word processing and paint (eg Dpaint, brilliance,PPaint, Scala) in video resolutions in which case the A1200 is fine. As a general rule computer hardware starts too feel poor when you run software that was not meant to run on it

[gafstu]

ok thanks for all the advise! So whats the easiest way to get to the stage of adding a graphics card to an a1200 which already has 3.1 roms and an 8mb expansion?

[amigakit]

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