My Dream Amiga System

In order to celebrate my own personal 20 year anniversary with my love for all things Amiga, I decided to order and build out a BRAND NEW Amiga 1200 system...



First off, I must that post 1995 the Amiga had really become somewhat of a rather large paper weight with all sorts of paper weight accessories including hundreds of 3.5" Amiga disks full of games, apps and utilities. I also had a hefty stash of Amiga books including 8 Abacus titles as well as several official Commodore reference manuals. Around 1998 I inherited my ex-best friend's Amiga 500 system which was nearly identical to my own minus the stereo speakers in his 1084 monitor and yellowed case. For some reason my own 500 did not have any yellowing of the plastic (knock on plastic). So I then inherited even more 3.5" disks. And somehow I managed to never jettison all this fabulous retro hardware out the airlock whenever I made a serious life change.

So that brings us up to 2009 where I find myself longing for the passion that the Amiga once gave to me and reconnecting to this old hardware and the Amiga community.

One of the first things I discovered while spending countless evenings surfing the tons of great information about the Amiga, was that there is still a (hopefully) thriving Amiga marketplace. I started looking around and found that the term "Amiga" on ebay brings up tons of people selling games, books and real Amiga hardware. Everything from the original 1000s, 500s, 2000s which I was quite familiar with. Then we have the missing link era of Amiga (for me) which includes the newer AGA chipset. These machines include the 4000 and 1200. I then found out there there is a British retailed called Amigakit.com which sells tons of Amiga hardware and software. They even have BRAND NEW unsold stock of Amiga 1200s! I had made up my mind! No longer would I settle for other people's used, modified and yellowed equipment. Just as in 1989 when I bought my brand new Amiga 500, I would be purchasing one of these NEW machines!

Now the great thing about Amigakit.com is that they will actually install and test any additional expansion parts you wish before they ship it off to you. This is great because they sell everything from flicker fixers to memory expansion.

So here is the system that I ordered:

** NEW (old stock) Amiga 1200 - this comes with a Motorola 68020 chip at 20mhz and 2mb of CHIP RAM.

** MTec "E-matrix" 1230 - A M68030 chip running at 40mhz with 32mb of FAST RAM!

** PCMCIA ethernet RJ45 adapter for the 1200's PCMCIA slot

** USB port

** Indivision AGA flickerfixer - Let's you plug your Amiga into any modern CRT/LCD panel

** Internal IDE 4GB CF hard drive - let's you boot your Amiga into solid state storage!

** OS 3.9 CD - This is the last version of the Amiga OS before it got splintered into various other projects. This is the last version that runs on 68k CPUs.

** A newer Amiga mouse - An improved version of the original 2 button

So I submitted my order and patiently waiting for them to build and bench test the system. I must say that I am overjoyed with the idea that I will be getting a brand new amiga with brand new accessories and expansion parts! This Amiga is brand new architecture (to me) because it has a different chipset called AGA and a newer OS. My Amiga 500 came with OS 1.3 and had the OCS chipset. So there are many many facets of this system that are new and magical to me! I am literally like a kid in a candy store! I have not looked forward to a new computer system in a very very long time. The last magic moment I had with computing was when I made the transition from Windows to Mac OS X. I am anxiously waiting for my brand new Amiga and I will document it every step of the way!

Until then... cheers!