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Desktops and mini PCs · Commodore Amiga

Commodore Amiga A1200

6owners with an opinion
80%of verdicts positive
4/1positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance; criticized for reliability.

What owners wrote

Likes it
older accelerators still work and are great compatibility-wise of course, there's also terrible fire which is great. I'd put Vampire the last actually, in-part due to compatibility and as you've said it.. you can pretty much do the thing with RPI and heck, you can even have rpi as an accelerator within an amiga - PiStorm. I have three A1200s, two A600s, and an A500+. In each A1200 I have in order of least to most powerful: Blizzard 1230 with 030+FPU, Blizzard 1260 with 060, and TF1260 with 060. If I'm after most compatibility and games, it's 1230 that gets out. B1230 is just plug and play, you put it into Amiga and it's faster. That's it. With 1260 both Blizzard and TF you have to install stuff, play with it etc. It's good for demos and demo coding where target always is anyways Blizzard 1260. In A600 I have one stock and one with Furia with 030. A500+ is stock (actually A500 reworked to be A500+). Technically that's the full circle of it. There's no new stuff made for it or advantage of more power than this. Demos are made for 060 anyways. I also have PCMCIA cards with WiFi on them so that I can move stuff to amigas over the air, or even remote execute code. Aside from ALL OF THAT (including a bunch of 1084s monitors), I have RPI 400 on which I have installed an emulator. It gets most use out of all of the above. I boot it up, it's an amiga, has all the crap on it and most of it works immediately. What's also cool is it's a computer in a keyboard with a mouse, just like amig…
Doesn’t like it
I might be biased as the A600 was the first computer I bought with my own money, but there was no way I would have bought a 386SX over the A600. This article is so tilted towards the American market and that's fine. I used to play Wolfenstein 3D on a friend's PC. They certainly did not pay anything like what I had, but within a year or so they would have had to upgrade as well. The thing is I could do more with my A600 than most people who used a pc. One the games were there and the games were great to play, the first game I bought for the A600 was almost all I needed for Sensible Soccer, soon to be upgraded to SWOS. but there were probably 50 - 100 games that were just amazing. Photo and Video Editing, Making Music all in 1992 in fact the A600 kept me going way into 1999. I then bought a A1200 but it was not the same... Saga and Nintendo were the challange to the Amiga, I am not saying Doom did not have a big effect but I think we just assumed there would be a release at some point. Three words, plug and play! I do wish Commodore would have released the A1200 in the A600's package if they had. I probably would not have been able to buy it. I got an Amiga Format magazine in the hope that the 3 half inch disks would fit into my home computer. (( they didn't half an inch out )) lol It showcased the A600 and the style of the machine was so much better for the time than the A500 it looked sharp and new I ended up buying it within weeks or month or so. The A500, A600 and A1200 are…
Likes it
Cold booting my 7 MHz A600 to a fully loaded, functional and responsive desktop takes 17 seconds from hard drive (I just measured). Pretty decent, I'd say. There's plenty about Amiga that is and/or feels instant. My workhorse is a 14 MHz A1200 and I use it at least once a week, so I get plenty of opportunity to compare. For its intended use cases, most things feel very snappy. Then there are of course areas where it doesn't stand a chance compared to a modern PC, even if the workload is "Amiga sized". Decompression and picture downsampling, for example.
Likes it
When I was about 16 and considering spending my hard-earned money on my first computer, I was drooling over the Falcon. I wanted to make music, so the built-in MIDI ports on the Atari computers was very compelling. However... my best friend at the time was big into the Amiga so in the end I got an A1200 (and never regretted it). But I still drool when I see the Falcon!
Neutral
I enjoyed this read. It mirrored my own experiences closely, growing up in the 80s/90s in the UK. My first home computer being the C64, then A500, and later an A1200 with 6MB RAM, HDD, squirrel SCSI with various optical media and a 1084ST (originally bought second hand, stuffed full of lowres porn...). I too chased the ultimate desktop - MagicWB, newicons, MUI (licensed!), heavily configured DOpus, various file format plugins, alt disk formats etc. 97 or so was when I had an old 386 handoff, and 98 when I first installed Linux. I triple booted into BeOS for a while. Coming back from Uni in '98-'02 and using the Amiga less and less, until I finally got rid of it after a trace on the keyboard burned out and the HDD gave up. I have continued to play with emus over the years, CAPS with the IPF for.at was an interesting project for someone who didn't care for 'cracktros' and respected the physical copy protections lf the day. Lately, AmigaVision running on FPGA 'emulation' is my choice. Don't chase the upgrades - the Amiga was a machine of it's eta - when hw tricks got you a long way, and it wasn't pure cpu cycles and blitting.
Likes it
AGA was much too little, too late. The premier AGA model, the A1200, even shipped without even a sliver of FASTRAM, making all programs compete for cycles with the graphics chipset. An Amiga games with even, say, 64 kbytes of FASTRAM could have put compute code in there at twice the speed and even made use of the (rudimentary) instruction cache of the 68020. The A1200 was welcome and I loved it but it was a half-assed attempt and it showed.
Doesn’t like itHasn’t owned it
The Raspberry Pi fits the bill better - it will run some form of desktop Linux for a long time into the future and it is such a simple cheap design - just 4 IC's with some bits. The same can't be said of the A1200 - flaky old circuitry that you cannot source new parts for except cannibalize donor boards - and it is huge and slowww.