Happy Birthday to the Wonderful Amiga 1200 – 30 years old Today!
The Amiga 1200 was the second machine I ever bought, in the Amiga-line, and I never looked back, with its truly excellent graphics powered by the AGA chip, to its 2MB of built-in Memory, with an optional 8MB which could be fitted via the Expansion Bay underneath, and many more expansions could be added, such as External Floppy Drives as well
The Amiga 1200 was also modified and became the sadly ill-fated CD32 Games System, which incidentally will be celebrating its 30th birthday in September 2023
Anyway back to the Amiga 1200, I remember getting this with the Desktop Dynamite Games Pack, which as I remember included the Dennis Game and Deluxe Paint
Opening it up at Christmas, and then instantly wanting to set it up, plug it in, and play, although it was Teatime, so it had to wait until later on into the Evening
Then I took it upstairs into my bedroom, plugged it into my trusty 14″ TV, and started playing Dennis initially, then I just had to get out Cannon Fodder from my Collection and enjoyed having a blast all night into the early hours (well it was Friday Night so no school the day after)
I remember it clearly as I awoke with it there right in front of me, sat on my computer desk, with my Amiga 500 on the floor in its box
Then I goto load another Game, and suddenly it did not load, it gave me the horrid GURU MEDITATION error constantly, and as a Child, I thought why is this game not working?!
I tried in vain to get the Game to load, I ended up giving up at the time, so I would switch back to another Game which loaded perfectly, Hearing the Floppy Drive spin up, Click! Click! Click! Buzz! Click! sounds as the Floppy spun up and read the contents off the disk into the Amiga Memory
Decades later of course realising that the Game would not load in later Kickstart ROMS (eg KS2/3) due to some hooking into undocumented features of the Kickstart 1.3 ROM
There were so many Great Times, and still are, with the Amiga 1200, for me it was, and still is, a machine to own in 2022
The machine itself can be highly modified nowadays, from internal Compact Flash Hard Drive, to Trapdoor Memory Expansions, and EasyADF which you can slot into the Left-side PCMCIA Slot, which allows you to backup Amiga Disks to ADF and/or Restore Disks back to the original Floppy Disks, and you can even get a replacement USB Floppy Emulator to replace older Floppy Drives which have died a horrible death and no longer read your Disks anymore
You can also Kick the Amiga 1200 back to Kickstart 1.3 via ReloKick, although nowadays, You can pretty much use WHDLoad Installs for such awkward Games, infact I have converted some Games to work under WHDLoad for this Blog using a Generic Workbench 1.3 WHDLoad Image, so Games such as 5K Invaders and 6K Pacman can now be played natively under Kickstart 2/3 and even have a Quit Key thanks to WHDLoad
The Amiga is so versatile, and had many Applications written for it, such as Word Processors, Database and even Spreadsheet Programs, so it was also ideal for Office Environments as well, which really made the Amiga, the one stop shop for everything (almost!)
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What were your memories of the Amiga 1200 – Please let me know via the Reply Form (below) or the Feedback button (right)
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Find out more about the Amiga 1200 on Wikipedia
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I loved my A1200 when I had in Christmas 92 (I think? maybe a year later). I thought it looked so sleek, so neat and tidy. However, that same year my mate got a SNES and we played that a lot that Christmas. I think he had Donkey Kong and it blew the socks off the likes of Dennis and Oscar that came with my A1200 (I actually played Lemmings a lot that Christmas for some reason).
But despite that, I still loved it, especially once I got a hard-drive, making octamed compositions much easier and just general messing about with the OS.
Yep, loved it and still do!