This is awesome. For a very long time I yearned for an Amiga 1200. On Wednesday I received an alert that somebody put up an offer for an Amiga 1200 including other random retro stuff on Willhaben. I immediately called the guy. He said he already got some offers and will give the items to the first person who shows up. So I put my money to my mouths and told him I would immediately wire him a deposit, which I did. 30 minutes later he messaged me that he got the money and took down the item on Willhaben. We then arranged a meeting on the weekend for a pickup.
And yesterday I picked it up. About 250km each way. And here it is now in all it’s glory:
All together the haul included:
- Amiga 1200
- Amiga 1200 Power Supply
- C64 Power Supply (cable broken)
- A C128D Keyboard (wow)
- 4 Quickshoot Joysticks
- A Competition Pro
- 2 Sigma Multifunction Joysticks (unfortunately very rusty)
- 2 very rusty external Floppy Drives
- 41 3 1/2 Floppy Disks (some in very bad shape – very dirty and smell moldy)
- 61 5 1/4 Floppy Disks in two boxes. The disks look ok. One box has a broken lid.
The seller told me he runs a cleanout service and that all that stuff was found in a cellar. So I am a bit worried about humidity damage. For now I focused on the Amiga 1200. This time I resisted the urge to immediately plug it in to see if it works. Instead I took everything apart and inspected all the parts and gave the Amiga 1200 a preliminary cleaning.
It didn’t look bad at all. It was only moderately dirty inside. The case has a few tiny nicks at the edges. But the motherboard looks mint. Only the keyboard base plate is really rusty on one side, which might indicate that the machine has been exposed to humidity for some time. Even the flash rust on the metal shielding is pretty normal for the age.
So I put everything back together and tested the power supply. It’s a heavy linear power supply. The voltages are all ok. But I postponed using it for now though. Because I already have an original Commodore switch mode power supply suitable for the A1200. After plugging in the power supply, mouse and and monitor cable I turned it on. And… nothing. After checking everything I realized I did not plug in the power supply. 😳 What a silly rookie mistake. So plugged it in and turned it on and … YES, first picture:
At first I thought it still didn’t work. But it just took a bit longer for the boot screen to appear then I am used to from the A500. Probably because of HDD boot checking or such. Next I tried some disks, but no luck. The disk drive makes a squeaky noise when rotating. I’ll have to look into that later. For now I replaced it with the Gotek drive from my Amiga 500. I tried Workbench 3.1 and a game (Gravity Force – yeah).
I am very very happy. No other Problems so far. So what’s next? I will try to get the internal disk drive working again. Also the rusted keyboard base plate needs some treatment. And the machine needs a hard drive. Probably a compact flash drive. That’s going to be fun…