Be Excellent To Each Other

A horrible thought just crossed my mind. Since 1992 I've been saying Amiga 1200 as "Amiga Twelve Hundred". Everyone else I knew at the time called it this. But what if we were wrong? BEEX poll time!

"Amiga Twelve Hundred" in my house.

(more often abbreviated to "A Twelve Hundred" though).

Why wouldn't it be "a twelve hundred"?

A one two hundred

One-two-to the double-izzo.

1200 will always be ‘twelve hundred’ to me rather than ‘one thousand, two hundred’ as the latter is really clunky language. It may be more of an American convention, I'm not sure.

Its twelve hundred for the same reason as the A500 was five hundred and the A600 was six hundred. It wouldnt make any sense to be a one thousand two hundred.

Oh, but thinking about it, wasnt there a 1000 and a 4000? They wouldnt be called a ten hundred and forty hundred respectively? Hmmm, tricky.

Amiga izoo

The Crazy World of Amiga Brown.

An Amiga by any other name is still an Amiga.

As far as I know the CDTV didn't mention it was an Amiga anywhere on the box which was probably for the best.

I've always called mine (yes, I do have one of my very own) an A Twelve Hundred. Never thought of it any other way.

I'm sure they 'rebranded' the CDTV as the Amiga CDTV later on, when they bundled with a keyboard and floppy disk drive. At least on the marketing material (adverts).

The 1200 always was said twelve-hundred for me, as I assumed it was named as such in order to sound twice as better than the lower-spec 600.

Glad to see my sudden seed of doubt dispelled.

Hopefully that's the real Mr Dave who voted above. It's a cunning plan to find out how many Mr Dave's we have.

Ay Twelve Hundred.

Ay Five Hundred, Ay Twelve Hundred, Ay Three Thousand.

Ay Four Thousand. I never did get around to owning one of those.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/AMIGA-A4000-040-1 ... 754wt_1139

There you go.

Starting bid: £600.00

And this is still why...

A friend of a friend I knew from when I was working at the Uni place had a nominal A4000; it was the guts of one, disassembled and mounted in some crazy rejig of a full-size PC tower case, with all manner of outlandish add-ons like multiple hard drives and modems and stuff. This would have been 1997, so well after most of the rest of the world had moved on to x86. It cost him a small fortune.

Yep, my A1200 is like that, and I used it as my only machine up until '99 I think. Had an 060 processor in it, so actually faster than a stock 4000.

Bloody hell. My A1200 isn't that far off it in terms of performance and has a much larger and faster hard drive and more memory.

BTW anyone know where to get laser mice as opposed to standard optical? They are the only kind I can get to work with my A1200's USB to mouse adaptor. Standard optical fail but the laser mouse I had hanging around is fine but it's just so dinky its annoying.

I had A4000/030. Oh how I wish I'd gone for an A1200, like more sensible people did.

Ay twelve hundred

By the time I sold my A1200 in 2003, it was in a full-size PC tower case, had a 120GB hard drive, 128MB of RAM, a 68060/50MHz processor, a Voodoo3 3000 graphics card, Ethernet LAN card, SoundBlaster 128 sound card and two CD writers.

I spent a goddamn fortune on that computer, and ended up selling it for £350. What a waste.

Was that a Blizzard accellerator, and did you buy it from someone in Scotland in about 2001/2?

All my amigas were left behind after the Becuntening

And my spectrum, that my dad bought when I was a nipper. Still worked, too, with shedloads of games.

Woe.

There's an Amiga in my mum's attic somewhere. I'm not sure if it's a 1200 or 500+.

It was a Blizzard accelerator, and I did indeed buy it second hand, probably around that time. Buggered if I can remember who from though. I don't think it was from eBay.

I probably bought it from an advert on Amibench or something, I take it you had one for sale around that time?

Yeah, on Amibench too. And the reason I ask is that I dimly recall it going to a Garry or Gareth..

So I'm the only one not to go for twelve hundred

tsk.

I sold my A1200 for pennies too, relatively speaking. One of my biggest regrets that was, I flipping loved that computer.

I've been mucking about with the most recent version of WinUAE though lately and that's become a decent emulator over time, although clearly it's better for playing games with rather than anything else. I couldn't find much in the way of proper display emulation to access the higher res modes of Workbench, for instance. You can have it use a folder on your PC's hard disk to emulate an Amiga hard disk, meaning I now have an emulated A1200 with an effective 2TB hard disk attached. Also means it's a doddle moving files between the emulated Amiga and Windows, since it's only using your Windows file system anyway.

It would just be nice if they had better display support and emulated network hardware on there.

Umm, I'm pretty sure WinUAE (at least the version I use, Amiga Forever) supports RTG modes which go up to as big a resolution as you like..

I'm going to have to have another play with it when I get home then.

Probably me, then.

I also bought a broken Blizzard PPC 240MHz (with the 060) for £150 around the same time, with a view to getting it fixed cheaply. Never did though, can't remember what I did with that.

Bad news, there's 3 of you.

Hah, I'd like to think so.
I've just remembered who I bought it off. Who I haven't thought of for probably 10 years. To the googletron.

I had a little go in my lunch break and you're right, I'm an idiot. But how do I get Workbench to display in higher resolutions? I'm running Kickstart 3.1 and Workbench 3.1 - am I meant to have drivers or something?

Man, I'm so out-of-touch - I used to be a whizz with Amigas. I suppose it has been a good 16 years since I last attempted to use one like this.




...And now I feel really old.

I'm running my workbench at 640x512 (interlaced) and it runs wonderfully on my LCD over SCART. God knows how. Happily does 1280x512 if I want to but that is too small to use.

I used to know my way around them fairly well, but last time I loaded up my A1200 and went into Workbench, I couldn't remember how to carry out the simplest tasks on it. Years of using Windows has pushed that Amiga stuff out of my brain it seems.

What is scary is that I equally used to be pretty whizzy around Mac OS 9 and X from my post-Amiga years of Mac ownership, but since selling my last iMac a few years ago in favour of a self-built Windows PC, all of that knowledge is dribbling out now too.