I’m typing this, and I can hardly contain my excitement except knowing about it for months. Yes, the world is about to be introduced to ‘The A1200’. the follow-up to “The A500” Retro gaming… thing.
Many of you know that I;m a fan of the Commodore Amiga. The whole existence of this post should tell you that. I’m even typing this on an Amiga branded keyboard. Instead of going into great detail, I’ll just link back to my old posts, of which there are several. If you want to read them again, then knock yourself out.
My love affair with the Amiga started in Xmas 1993 when Santa somehow managed to get one down our tiny little chimney. It survived my teenage years, and even got upgraded with a hard drive and memory expansion. It became the most important Xmas present I ever received. I even did some programming, with some of my stuff even surviving on Aminet to this day.
While the PC clearly became my machine of choice growing up through the years, and even providing technical support for some really rather major game companies, the Amiga really never left my mind. even managing to get it hooked up and talking to my PC way back in
Unfortunately, as can be seen in the Xmas post above, my Amiga is faulty. It’ll either crash on boot up with a ROM error (red screen) and/or a corrupted screen. It’s probably beyond saving.
Fast forward to 2021. I rescued my Amiga hard drive (Part 1) (Part 2) and I even went on to buy a Greaseweazle to rescue hundreds of floppy disks.
In 2022, I bought The A500. My main thought was, back in the day, that while it had everything else spot-on, the keyboard being just a single block of plastic and merely there for show, seemed a bit of an annoyance. Sure, you could stick a PC keyboard up it, and , but it was always just another thing that needed to be plugged in.. And, while it’s actually here on my desk, I don’t use it that often.
Over the recent years, there’s been a resurgence in full-size devices. I have a “The Spectrum” with a fully working keyboard, which I love, and a “The C64”. I’ve yet to even unbox that, despite having it for about 5 months. Bloody real-life getting in the way.
Next in the line, and the whole point of this post is… The A1200! yes, a full sized A1200, with working keyboard. Preorders for it start on November 10th, and although the price tag is going to be nearer £200 than I’d actually like, to be able to just use an Amiga straight out of the box without having to fiddle around with external keyboards will probably bring a tear to my nostalgic eye.
Now, with this not even reaching preorder stage, I can’t tell you a lot about it, certainly nothing that has already been said, but here’s what I think is going to happen.
The innards. It’s going to be the same, or as near as matters, to the ‘The A500’. An ARM based emulation board, everything spun onto one chip. The previous machine did emulate the Amiga A1200, so I can’t see the hardware needing to be too different.
ROMs. No, not talking about games, but the actual system ROM. I can’t remember if ‘The A500’ had stock Amiga ROMs or if they were modified in any way, due to copyright/licensing. I know ‘The Spectrum’ has a custom ROM, and while 99% perfect, some games misbehave unless you have the original Sinclair ROMs available.
It’s going to be built as a retro gaming accessory, so some of the things I’d like to see are probably out of the question. Personally, a real-time clock and the ability to access hard drive images would be a dream, but probably beyond the scope of something that’s going to be eventually sold in toy shops.
As I mentioned, I’ll be preordering, then following the progress closely. I’m sure every retro gaming site on the planet comes out with the news before I will, but I’m sure it’ll give me something to type about.
For those interested, or wondering, yes, I have typed the King’s Lynn trip, but due to real life getting in the way over the last few months, I’ve never really finished it to the standard that I liked. I may return to it some day, but i also want to start typing about other stuff again. I’ve got a while stack of unsigned music I’d like to also reply to the ones I’ve featured who got back to me, and I never replied…
Life. Tsk.
Also, due to some unknown encoding error, every apostrophe on the site is a mix of garbled letters. Don’t know why, but I’ll endeavour to fix that.
