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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Wed Dec 07, 2016 10:53 am

As some of you already know, my NOS A1200 seems to have a fried RGB video out port. While I was tinkering with my immaculate 2000, my 1200 sat patiently in the closet waiting to come back whenever I deemed it necessary.

Well, after a matter of weeks I re-boxed the 2000 and pulled the 1200 back out. I plugged everything back together like I'd done in the past a thousand times. Flipped it on.

A black screen sat humming with its green power light staring back at me.

I'll be honest that my first thought was my 1084s monitor had suddenly decided to pop. I frantically plugged my old 500 into it, though, and there was the trusty Workbench screen, asking me to insert the disk.

Long story short, the most excellent Amiga Love Terriblefire should be receiving the 1200 in the next few days and it'll most likely undergo some sort of minor surgery.

This gets complicated, but I had previously sold the 2000 to a hardcore Amiga fan in Illinois. But if I shipped it off, that would mean I'd be Amiga-less for who knows how long?

My sickly 1200 is a fantastic machine: NTSC with 12V power for the North American market, found "new" from a warehouse for decades with all of its accessories and books. I upgraded the harddrive to 4GB CF and added an ACA1221 card which I unlocked to the max 128MB RAM. (It's totally bananas.) But it is odd in the sense that, even though it was for North America, it came from Amiga after it had become a part of Escom, and they decided that (presumably all) machines should default to PAL no matter what. So, on nearly every boot, I had to hold down the mouse to pick NTSC mode. I've since learned how to reverse this default, but for the past year it's been a bit annoying.

Naturally, now that I had no Amiga in my house at all, I went on the hunt. And holy smokes, did I find me some Awesome. I found an original Commodore A1200 NTSC model, made for North America when C= was still alive. I need to crack open the case later this week to see if I can find a build date stamped on it somewhere.
NTSC1200.jpg
The newest member of the family.

The previous owner invested in a series of nice upgrades for the machine herself.

Here's what it comes with:
  • Single owner home (I'm now the 2nd) since it was originally sold BITD (back in the day). She also owns a 4000 she recently recapped, but is holding onto that for now.
  • Case has some mild yellowing but overall really pretty great looking.
  • Working floppy
  • Original 40MB hard drive
  • Fully loaded 8MB RAM DKB 1202 [DKB 1202 also includes the optional PLCC FPU 68881 running at 16MHZ. It can be easily upgraded to 68882@40MHz by replacing the crystal and FPU, if I ever get the itch.]
  • A500 power supply for additional amps
  • Dataflyer 1200 SCSI by Expansion Systems
  • Fully registered copy of WHDLOAD
  • Amiga mouse
  • CF-IDE44 Pin HD Adapter from Amigakit. (In case I want to upgrade to a flash drive... like the one I just removed from my sick 1200)
Overall, it looks and sounds like a perfect fit. I can't wait to get it set up and decide which upgrades to keep and which ones to replace with other parts I have on my desk. I'm back, baby!





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