Be Excellent To Each Other

Well known for being wonderfully well designed physically, but suffering from an existence in the real world of early 90s capacitors, brittle keyboard membranes, incompatible and fragile floppy disk drives and plastic discolouration. And Amiga and Escom themselves.

The A1200 offered all kinds of incredible features beyond the A500, such as not being compatible with some of the games. Given the state of a lot of A500 games that's nothing to be sniffed at. Jokes aside, it had its own set of delightful titles, most of which were A500 ports with horrible backgrounds added.

The last not so great wedge computer.

Who had an A1200, and what did you play?

I had one.

Stand out memories are Pinball Fantasies/Illusions. Brian the Lion. Oscar. Zool 2 (I guess there was a Zool 1 but I never played it), Guardian: The Game Of Kings, and lots of weirdo demo scene stuff from cover disks.

Edit: and James Pond.

I had one.

I played this:

I haven't thought about Top Banana for years! There's something to download and play later on.

I 'found' an A1200 in my in laws loft a few months ago. Fully boxed and fantastic nick. This is the first time I've owned an A1200 as I only had a 500+ back in the day.

Do you hate yourself?

Fantasies more than Illusions for me but yeah I'd forgotten about those! They're still on my 1200's hd, with Deluxe Galaga and Gravity Power.

Brian is well 'ard.

I was always a bit underwhelmed by the A1200. A friend bought one and it didn’t seem to offer much over my A500

It was a fairly decent move forward. But, unsurprisingly, hamstrung by the way that the old system was still the development target. The more significant improvement that it could've been, alas, amounted to nothing. Which is rather what it eeded to remain competitive.

Couldn’t afford an Amiga, but I’ve still got my Atari ST in the loft. One of these days I’ll find out if it’s still working.

I got one not long after launch as I recall, as an upgrade to my trusty A500+, but in truth the A1200 was never that amazing, and it never really blew me away as the original A500 had.

It was nobbled out of the gate with no hard drive, a relatively mediocre CPU (the 030 (and 040?) were available but Commodore went with the 020 to keep costs down), not enough RAM, single floppy drive and so on.

Yes it was a lot cheaper than a PC, but as I recall Amstrad had relatively low-cost VGA PCs on the market at the time, which came with monitors and hard drives and were clearly far more powerful - I think Commodore needed to punch up with the A1200, and they didn't.

Games wise it had a few highlights but as has been noted above the massive number of A500/A600s out there meant it never established itself as a primary development platform, and all we usually got were 'enhanced' (ish) versions of other Amiga games.

I stuck with the Amiga for a while into the A1200 era, but it became increasingly apparent it was seriously outclassed by the PC. I remember visiting friends at the time who'd moved to PC (from being Amiga/ST folks like myself), and being blown away by CD-ROM based games, stuff loading in from hard drives, VGA graphics and early 3D games, all that sort of thing.

All games like Alien Breed 3D achieved was to highlight how far the Amiga was behind.

I eventually jumped ship in about 1995/1996 as I recall, purchasing a second hand 486 based PC with a modest hard drive and CD-ROM, at which point my A1200 was effectively retired.

One area where the A1200 did shine was on the demo scene, where demo coders really learned how to leverage some of the A1200's extra power and abilities, with some very impressive tech demos, I remember thinking that if that kind of effort were applied to commercial games it might have a chance - but of course it never particularly was.

I never threw my A1200 away, it's still packed away in a box downstairs with all my peripherals and disks.

I never had a 1200 back in the day. Pretty much everyone at school had an A500+ as we they all seemed to get them on the same christmas in 1991. We didn't get ours until early 1992. Must've been a joint birthday present for me and my brother. The only person I knew with a 1200 was a posh* kid, only child.

I did finally get a 1200 from ebay, early to middle last decade. I was lucky to get one before the prices went silly. Desktop Dynamite pack for about £50 I think it was.

*Posh to me in those days meant detached house and a front garden with grass

Have to say it, but I agree with Hearthly. The 1200 with a mandatory hard drive, a '030 and 2megs of Fast Ram would have been a pretty sweet machine. Commodore never had the balls to push it though.

amiga 500 guy here as well.. do have a cd32 now....

As do I. It probably needs it's own thread as I think it's a great console. There's a nice indie scene where people are porting A500/A1200 games to it with added joypad support. Stuff like Moonstone, Deluxe Galaga, The Lotus Trilogy and others. It's great.

Yes, i ported gravity power myself to the cd32!

I can't actually remember if I had a 1200 first time round or not. I think I was always at the cheaper end of the scale, with 500, then 500+ and maybe a 600. I've got one now though, but it always seems like the games I actually want to play are the older ones anyway so I end up using relokick.

I loved the CD32, but since I sold most of my games for it, they're proving rather costly to replace now.

You did indeed and after we spoke about it at the cottage, I googled it to see if I could download it and I came across your website. Good work!

I didn’t have a twelve hunnet. I only had an A500 with one mega ram. I ain’t made of money.

Is there a WHDLoad install for Gravity Power or anything? Be awesome to get that running on the RetroPie that I now have set up (thanks to DavPaz for the info!)

Re. the A1200 - it was my first and only Amiga, so it was very much "wow" for me (upgraded from a Spectrum +2A) and I kept mine from 1994 or so when I got it all the way through to 2003, although by the end it was unrecognisable as an Amiga. Should have held on to it, because it'd be worth a fucking packet these days given how much I'd upgraded it.

Petro Tystchenko (sp?) found a load of unsold, unused A1200s (Escom-era) in India a few years ago and raffled them off and I got one of them. It's up in the loft, have never tested it but I suppose I should!

I had a 1200 and an external floppy drive.

I got the 1200 for £20 of a bloke I worked with - the audio didn't come through the TV, that was broken, but the dedicated audio ports still worked.

I spent far too much time in tracker software writing rubbish songs.

EDIT: That seems to be a PC port!

EDIT: EDIT: Nope. Confused...

EDIT: EDIT: EDIT: It's a WHDloaded ADF? Maybe.

I had an external floppy drive now you mention it. Absolutely essential for playing Mortal Kombat as it would mean that you wouldn't have to swap disks to see the pit animation.

There's very few things that I have bought that I would consider life changing but the external floppy drive on my A500+ was definitely one of them.

I do have my current A1200 and A600 set up. Well, broadly speaking anyway. They're there because they're too bulky for me to put elsewhere

A500 meg and external drive.

Spent a lot of time in Octamed with a sampler.

oooh, look...

http://www.gravityforce20.com/

Online multiplayer?! Oh my.

I didn't find that version that much cop, tbh. It'd lost something compared to the original, but not sure what.

I don't like the touchscreen controls on the android version.

That's just the game zipped up, I'll see if I can configure it into an autobooting ADF/HDF or something.

Thanks.. good memories...


btw, they made a swos compilation for the cd32.. for those interested