ScuzzBlog: Diaries September 2018 Entry 9th September 2018: Post 01: Amiga 1200 - GVP A1230+ Amiga 1200 - GVP A1230+ Series II Back in 1995 I was playing SimCity 2000 on the Amiga 1200 and it was the first game that I had hit a road block with. Sadly the Amiga just couldn't handle the complexity of the game and slowed down to a crawl pace. It frustrated me no end. So on 3rd March 1995 at the Southampton branch of Silica I bought a GVP A1230+ Turbo with a clock speed of 40MHz for £299. A friend of mine wanted to see the card so came round to help me install. First thing they did was drop the card on the floor. My heart sank. Fortunately no problems and the card installed and ran no problems. I used the card for many many years until it was replaced with a Blizzard Turbo with 32MB RAM. The only real problem with the card was with games. It was so fast that some of the graphics played catchy up with the accelerator, like in Sensi Soccer. The sound in Ishar was a little messed up and Uridium and Worms refused to play point blank. But SimCity was a hoot and a half and seriously destroyed most of my sleep for months. Worth it though. For those following the blog know that I have been fiddling with a Seagate 1GB hard drive and with some tender tinkering have now got it running. Thing is I'm starting to have fun with the old VidiAmiga and need the speed and memory of the card. I have a 4MB PCMCIA RAM card in but need just a bit more. Also the speed of the GVP helps with file transfer and image conversion when saving large files. I also need to be able to sit down. And so I pulled the GVP from Christina as she wasn't that busy and grabbed my original Workbench disk box with all my goodies to find the GVP install disk. I also grabbed the card's instruction manual. I actually tried to get a DS1994 battery off Ebay but there wasn't any.. Unbelievable. OK. I now have the A1200 with the GVP but still work on the raw VidiAmiga files in the other main room with the bench. So I took advantage of a hole I created through the wall for a network cable to fish through the AMINet Serial cables for the interface I have. I set up a network with Graham the 1500 that is actually an Amiga 1200 and like magic I was able to transfer files in their raw state for me to edit on Jermaine in here. Wonderful. And so I'm back to March 1995 as it were with the GVP. And back it seems to my SimCity 'Flibble' of which I am mayor. It's quite a responsible job looking after all those people. So funny. Anyhoo that's that for Jermaine with the Seagate. I can do no more. Cuppa tea me thinks. As you do !! Amiga 1200 GVP A1230 First up my original Workbench disk box. That's what I'm looking for. Sorry to do this to you Christina. But I need that card. Enter the lovely Jermaine. To get the IDE working in the A1200 I needed to set the MaxTransfer in HDToolBox to 0x1FE00. I had earlier removed the 3.1ROMs from the Amiga Technologies machine and replaced with original 3.0ROMs to avoid conflicts running VidiAmiga and various games. Turns out that 3.1 Workbench is not set to PureBit, what ever that means and they updated the Animation data file to play straight from disk. Sadly all that conflicts with the digitiser and so had to go. Never mind. All working now. The DS1994 battery that I am struggling finding. A1230 running at 40MHz. Installed the AMINet Serial connectors and cables to Graham and Jermaine and now I can transfer files between rooms. All done

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Last updated 19th September 2018

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