A Tale of A 1200  by Dave Hooton   <> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <>  What eliminates brainfade and re-generates enthusiasm? Something new and exciting, usually. In my case the long-awaited A1200! Long-awaited because of the agonising as to whether to get it at all, and then waiting for Commodore to deliver their next batch - from 29th April, with all dealers sold out, until 4th June. There is no denying the significance of this machine - it is the exact solution to my long-held requirement of a A500 replacement. Ignore the silly A500 Plus, the truncated (keyboard/chipset) A600. They offered no increase in CPU speed, no significant advance in the graphics chipsets. Forget the A4000 - too expensive, too fast, too advanced (except for A3000 power users, of course!). The A1200 came along with the significant advances desired, at the right price and WITH a hard drive, and with FULL 32 bit architecture. The price was then sweetened with a $200 cash-back (later $300) if you had some old electronic computational gear lying around - or bought a $5 calculator! Vicious Rumours Rumour had it that:- 1. RAD (Recoverable RamDrive) was gone - too many hooks for viruses; 2. Sound was gone, or disappointing; 3. The keyboard had an optional numeric keypad; and 4. It wasn't 5 times faster than an A500, as Commodore claimed. Off to my local store. Yes there is one - and it looks good. Disappointingly like an A500, but the numeric keypad is definitely there! OK! Response was 'snappy'. RAD mounted and survived a reboot. American magazines confirmed 5x speed provided you had 32-bit Fast RAM. Otherwise, it was a still-respectable 3x! Also, the old sound chips were there - the software wasn't. Just use your old WB2.0x stuff! Right! We're still cooking. Buying 2MB of Chip RAM is respectable, but I needed at least 3MB of memory. What was available? I think it was Tim (esteemed Ed.) who put me onto Rob at Ami-Tech before the A1200 was officially available in Australia, and there was already a card by MicroBotics - the MBX1200 - with battery backed clock, floating-point processor (FPU), and up to 8MB of 32-bit Fast RAM. The battery backed clock was also essential - why Commodore couldn't afford to put this in as standard escapes me. Locally (in Wollongong), I could get the A1200 at the same price as any other place. But not the MBX1200 - not within $200! Agony #2! Agony #1 was my in-grained conservatism toward being one of the first to purchase anything not tried and true, despite the good reports from USA and Britain. This was in February. So I delayed a month or so - before realising I'd blown Commodore's deadline on the cash rebate. That got extended to end-April, but supplies of the wonder machine were low. I got Ami-Tech to order a machine, after checking that the MBX1200 situation hadn't improved in Wollongong. Then it became known that some of the second batch of A1200's had defective hard drives - the A1200 was using features of the IDE protocol that most other computer manufacturers didn't! Thus revealing bugs in some makes/models. So I was partially vindicated on the "wait until" policy! Finally, in June, Ami-Tech said they had my A1200. Agony #3 - was the 40MB hard drive big enough? The swap-over to 80MB had reduced by $50 during the wait. Why didn't Commodore offer these, as the A1200's shrink-wrap box advertised? Then I was ordering the complete Bible-on-disk, and that would use 16MB. So the decision was inevitable, and I picked up the A1200 on June 12th. Ami-Tech had installed the drive and MBX, and gave me a further discount thanks to a flyer that Tim had sent me as a MegaDisc subscriber! Installing I think my wife had different motives in coming with me to "Sydney". When I mentioned (half-way there) we were only going to Cronulla, a dream of a city cinema and dinner went up in smoke! A suitable lunch and a return drive through Royal National Park seemed to appease things. The A1200 could still be installed before Ami-Tech closed for the day (just in case you understand!). And it was - very similar to the A500. It ran beautifully - machine, 80MB drive and 4MB memory expansion. Playing It booted so fast, I thought the startup-sequence was sus! But it was the bog-standard, long-winded, Commodore SUS. That drive rebooted in about 7 seconds - I'd measured 21 seconds on a standard A1200 with 40MB drive! It hums like a jet plane on the tarmac! According to SysInfo 3.01, it was 4.8x faster than a standard A500/A600, and about 4x faster than my A500 which also had Fast RAM. The drive holds 81MB of data and the read speed is about 1 million bytes/second! Windows were good and snappy, until I loaded it up with my usual collection of utilities and windows - when it slowed appreciably. Still faster than my A500, but disappointing. ScreenMode showed we were running an 256 colour WorkBench! Heck, my Mac at work is setup with 16. So I set the WorkBench to 8 colours. Even so, I'm not sure I need all 8. Two utilities broke early - ReadKwik/RiteKwik. No big loss, now that I won't be so floppy-oriented. Version doesn't seem to want to load libraries, even though reporting their versions OK! These, and any compressed (Imploder) libraries, worked normally though! KindWords3 worked, except for some peculiarities with "not enough memory" when there was - I suspect interference from Xoper, my system monitor. Even loading from floppy, KindWords was substantially faster getting to the workface. Sluggish text operations were much better. AZ and DW work. These being my all-time favourite text editor and directory utility, respectively. FastDisk 1.9 failed because it tried to setup with DF1: - which I had not bothered to connect. Hard Drive The drive is an 85MB Maxtor, which Rob at Ami-Tech assured me was much faster than the standard 40MB drive due to the way he had prepared it i.e. as a Custom File System in HDToolBox. I had no doubts about that after cold-booting. But exactly how good is it? I browsed through my pile of past Amiga magazines and found hard drive tests conducted in mid-1991 on SCSI drives using DiskSpeed 3.1. So I repeated their tests and compared the results. The Maxtor was right up there with the best of them on data read, write, and create speed. Ditto on file access performance. But it was at least 2.5x faster on seek/read and scan. There was little difference with CPU and DMA contention! More importantly, it placed consistently high on all tests. At best, only one other drive-interface was as consistent across the board. Now, this is not a conclusive comparison, as these other tests were conducted on 68000 CPUs (A500/A2000) with 50MB drives. But it does defeat the notion that the IDE drive interface is slow (a user said their 40MB drive was 20% slower than an A590, the slowest drive of them all!). WorkBench Utilities The Font preferences window is different to that in WB2.0, and pops up font requesters for the three text types. The requester for WB icon text allows the colours to be changed as well. It's a bit confusing when you consider the Palette preferences also allows text colours to be changed. But NOT the icon text directly - only the palette from which you can select the icon text colours! Things are a lot simpler with a 4 colour WorkBench! Anyway, the Font Requesters allow any size font to be chosen, even with bitmap fonts i.e. you are not restricted to the available sizes. Beware though! Bitmap fonts, after scaling, will be distorted. Reasonable results can be obtained from sizes that are double or half an available size. Outline fonts don't have this problem of course. Fountain has been renamed as Intellifont. MultiView is new, and is a simple text viewer, picture viewer, sound player - whatever datatypes are defined in the DataTypes drawer. It can print files or blocks. Well worth looking at. RAM Expansion The CPU expansion slot (trapdoor) is limited to 4MB according to the A1200 User's Guide. The PCMCIA expansion slot gets the other 4MB. But an accelerator card in the CPU slot may handle much more RAM. The MBX1200 can handle 8MB of AutoConfig memory by disabling the PCMCIA expansion! The software to do this is provided on a diskette, together with AIBB 5.0 and another utility, MBRTest-2, to test memory. With 4MB installed, the MBX has performed exactly as specified. I haven't tried the FPU as yet. Overseas reports gave it a relatively poor rating (in terms of value for money) compared to an accelerator card. Which is fine if you have the extra money - but I didn't buy the A1200 to turn it into an 32-bit A3000. Other memory expansion available in Australia costs the same as the MBX, without a battery backed clock and without an FPU. Enough said?! Conclusion A brilliant machine that has fulfilled my expectations of it. Some may be disappointed by the sound capability. Others may be dismayed/confused by the inability to use the new graphics modes on their standard 1084 monitor. Get it! Buy the peripherals you need afterward - flog the old A500 to raise the cash. Commodore will soon release a monitor to handle all display modes. Finally, thanks to Gus and Rob at Ami-Tech for installing the drive and memory expansion - especially the setup of the drive. They also held to their original quote made in April, despite the extra cost of the A1200 in June.  <> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <>