retroputing

[Rockin' Kat]

Ok.

I got another hard drive cable.. got it all set up... and discovered the power socket on back of the 1200 had a bad solder joint. Cold solder joints are are particularly inconvenient - and really @#$ing annoying - to have to work around so I had to take the whole computer apart pretty much all the way... I think I swore at every single screw and tab I had to undo while trying to reach the power socket so I could reflow and add solder to fix the stupid thing. Anyway after all that the I now have an Amiga 1200 with 2GB hard drive(I wonder how big I can go... could say, a 40GB be hooked up?), VGA card, 68k accelerator and SCSI card which would appear to work.

I have now booted it a couple times. I pretty much don't know anything about this opperating system. I'm having to fumble around with it.

At startup it tells me intuition is trying to change the screen but I need to close some applications. I found that what I had to do was go into the startup folder and double click the amiclock to make that quit and then it'd up the screen resolution to what I have it set at.. And then I could double click it and re open it...

The resolutions are really weird.. Why oh why would I want to go and run at 1280x400 interlaced? It's all tall and squished looking... so I've got it set at 640x400 interlaced. I read somewhere that the indivision AGA card supports Highgfx screenmodes up to 1024 x768.. I wonder how I get that? Some kind of driver?

And then there's the weird issue with shutting the computer off... I guess I need to quit workbench? But I can't seem to do that... at first it was telling me I had so and so number of applications open so I couldn't quit workbench... Then I figured out I could make that go away by going into the startup folder and double clicking all the applications in there.. which would either quit them, or bring me to a screen where I could go to the menus and the top of the screen and quit them there...

And then I'd get this message: Cannot quit yet, open count = 1

At that point I can't figure out what's going on and I get stuck having to just switch the computer off. I hate that, it just feels so wrong.

So my next things I guess are if maybe I should use my OS 3.9 disk to reinstall and start over... and then... if so.. how do I do that? Is there some way to boot to the scsi cd rom; or is there something else I have to do; some floppy I have to write? I'm able to mount the CD... so that much is working.

Then there's getting the computer to work with the pcmcia ethernet card... and getting some kind of browser going.. and all that comes with that... because there's no way I can let it go un-networked.

...What have I gotten myself into?
_________________
-RK
"Stand Back! I've got an open power supply and I'm not afraid to do something stupid with it!"

[Ice Breaker]