Won a bog standard little beauty off eBay for about £30. No yellowing at all, which is rare as the plastic degrades really quickly on Amigas. My A500 is banana coloured. So, anyway:
Taking off the case, you can see that the original HDD is a miniscule little bugger. That's it in the top left:
It's about 80MB, so from the off that has to be replaced with something a little meatier. Luckily, my good buddy Yod@ supplied me with a 10GB Seagate liberated from an Xbox when he did one of his many upgrade mods. He was also kind enough to install all the WHD gubbins and games onto it and mod the lead to make it work. What a hero ^_^
Note the space on the board in the bottom right. This is important for later...
As you might be able to see, you have to remove the floppy power cable and mod it so that it powers that and also splits off to end in a standard Molex power connecter to run the HDD. The little Laptop-sized one was just powered off the board. Of course, I also had to get a 44-40 pin ribbon converter. Again, this was off eBay.
To work properly (and, in some cases, at all) the games have to load fully into RAM with no streaming. So you need an expansion board that fits in the trapdoor slot. The trapdoor is useless and impossible to fit anything in without removing the case anyway, so the trapdoor idea's a bit fikkin pointless. Here's mine sitting in the machine. Note the spce in the bottom left for the optional FPU (that I don't actually need):
As I mentioned before, the space you could see in the bottom left, which is the underside of the expansion board, has a vital gap: there's no 8MB SIMM. The eBay seller gipped me a bit there, even though I actually got the board pretty cheap (tenner). Luckily, again, Yod@ the uber-mod to the rescue. He sent me out an 8MB SIMM that fitted right on:
So there you go. The whole enterprise cost me about £45-odd, and I now have an expanded A1200 with 4GB-partitioned HDD on it, containing over 500 games 
That's awesome. I always wanted an A1200 as towards the end of the Amiga's life there were quite a number of 1200 enhanced games doing the rounds. Have you got anything of note on the HDD?
I always thought the following looked interesting, but never actually got to play them
Uridium (not the original, but the sequel, can't remember what it was called or if it was ever released)
Benefactor Strange looking game that sort of looked a bit like lemmings, but was nothing of the sort apparently.
Hired Guns Squad based Dungeon Master with Psy powers
I can heartily recommend the following games if you've not tried them already. Some of these are not so well known.
Moonstone Very basic super-gore hack em up combined with an adventure game to produce something strangely compelling.
Hunter Doesn't need an introduction this one, I'm sure this inspired a lot of the games we see emerging today.
Archapelagos Probably not spelt right, but a very strange game that just works.
Guy Spy OK so it's utter crap, but somehow this game kept me playing right to the end, why? I'll never know.
Lemmings 2P The 2 player mode in Amiga lemmings surprisingly provides one of the best 2 player experiences bar none.
There are so many unique games from that era and I'm sure that not all of them have stood the test of time. However there are undoubtedly some real gems in the Amiga back cat that are still as fresh as the day they were compiled.
God knows why the images have disappeared from above :?
EDIT: ah, I think my hosting site's down. N'mind.
No idea why I didn't update this thread: the Amiga never worked properly because the board was duff. When you boot, you can hold down mouse buttons to see what components you have installed and the board wasn't showing, even with the 8MB SIMM installed
I'm just about getting around to buying a replacement (with great resentment - the last one cost me £25 inc. dicking around!! T_T ) so impressions ahoy when it's running...
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Chavbury: "You can brand me as 'middlecore', 'casual', 'fucktard' or whatever you like."
I know Papercut's been holding out for a Team17 retrospective
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"Anyone who's played Namco's Cyber Sled and wished, however remotely, for a home version will be the first to figure it out:... - Tim Rogers
It would be real easy:
Worms 1 - great.
Everything else, including all of the Worms sequels - shite.
Its PaperCut's CyberSled....
Man Stunt GP best game the DC has to offer.
That and Lemmings on the PSP.
I don't use studly caps.
It would be real easy:
Worms 1 - great.
Everything else, including all of the Worms sequels - shite.
What happened to the whack and fly reviewing standards?
|>@|>3¬<\/T
It would be real easy:
Worms 1 - fly.
Everything else, including all of the Worms sequels - wack.
What happened to the whack and fly reviewing standards?
Very good point, fixed.
I can't even begin to explain how utterly wrong you are about Worms2 (PC Version the others are all shit). Its pixel perfect movement and finely tuned weapons balance + improved ninja rope and customisation options make it 1000 times better than Worms.
I played the demo of Worms continuously until the full game was released I then played that continuously until Reinforcements was released which eventually made way for Worms2. Once you understand the graphics (background dark foreground light) Worms2 is as pixel perfect as the original. You can land on a single pixel and rope to a single pixel.
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"Anyone who's played Namco's Cyber Sled and wished, however remotely, for a home version will be the first to figure it out:... - Tim Rogers
Amiga 1200... I have one of those. It hasn't seen the light of day in a while. I bought it about a year after they stopped making them for a "knock-down" price in my local Tandy (if anyone remembers them). I keep thinking I ought to unearth it and give it a warm up. May even try some games on it!
Xbox Gamertag - RogsR34UK
You should!
If you want to follow my route, swapping out the HDD is easy (although my pics of the install are b0rked, so I'll have to open it up and take some new ones) so the hardest part is getting hold of the WHD Loaded games, and putting them onto it. I dunno if you can just transfer the files by hooking it up to your PC and moving them from one HDD to another. Yuo also need to register your copy and pay the guy who invented the process. It's dirt cheap (about a tenner I think, then you can have and use any number of games you want) and well worth it.
I would guess you need some Amiga partitioning software to get the HDD to accept the files, but I could find this out. If anyone wants to follow in my footsteps, let me know and I'll endeavor to find out what's involved. I do know you need, for sure:
1) A1200
2) Replacement HDD (preferably a 2.5" laptop one, anything over 4GB. You can use a standard 3.5" HDD, but need a pin converter. See first post in this thread)
3) WHD loaded onto the HDD with games (these are cracked versions of the originals that can run off HDD by loading into memory, *not* emulated versions!)
4) Expansion board with over 4MB of RAM, preferably 8MB.
With 8MB, any game (including CD32 stuff and anything that used the A1200's AGA chipset, i.e. prettier versions of existing games!) can load directly into, and run completely from, RAM with no load times or glitching.
Some of this gear's getting expensive to get hold of. The Amiga community's still pretty active, and places like Power Computing still re-sell newly manufactured Amiga parts and accessories. Ebay is, as ever, your best bet.
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If the stuff can be transferred via a PC I have a lead that will connect a 2.5" hard drive to my PC via a USB. It came as an adaptor for a lead to connect a 3.5" disk (which I can use with a power supply to put PS2 stuff onto Hard Disk to run with HDAdvance 3).
I have plenty of original Amiga games so I presume that is a good starting point. (I used to be able to copy them so that I could run them as backups!)
I suppose the "big" expense would be the memory expansion. Not sure what mine has, but it is the standard A1200 with the 85Mb disk.
Xbox Gamertag - RogsR34UK
The expansion boards vary in price, but they are normally about £20-£25. Any HDD under 10GB effectively costs nowt, so it's a cheap process if you are patient and wait for the right gear to crop up at reasonable rates on eBay. Well worth doing, too
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If the stuff can be transferred via a PC I have a lead that will connect a 2.5" hard drive to my PC via a USB. It came as an adaptor for a lead to connect a 3.5" disk
Yup, I have one of these, too. It'll take 2.5" or 3.5" IDE / ATA / SATA drives and connect via USB 2.0.
My laptop died and I had to drag the stuff off the HDD. It's a fantastic piece of kit. Cost me a tenner off eBay
THIS ONE...
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Click for larger images!
I stealth-modded my A1200 to include two fans: one to bring air in and cool the working down, the other to extract.
1) First thing I did was buy two CPU fans and removed the heatsinks. Then, I opened the Amiga and removed the molex from the HDD:
2) I connected a splitter I bought:
3) daisy-chainded the two fans to it:
4) I put some double-sided foam tape to hold it in place. I would have used plastic cement, but wanted to be able to remove them if necessary:
5) Stuck the first one on to bring air in, over on the right near the HDD:
6) ...then the next one, set to extract over on the left:
7) Both on the caase, taped down, ready to go. Not much room left in that case now! :
8 ) This is it powered-on, working:
9) And here we are. You'd never even know it happened ^_~
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