Expert: Gregory Donner - 5/3/2007

Question
Hey Greg! Firstly, it's amazing people are still around who know how to deal with an Amiga related problem after all this time! So thanks for that!

As you may have worked out, I own an A1200, A600 and A500+, and have done since 1993/4 ish I think. I've recently got them all out of the attic, along with millions of floppy disks and games, given them all a good clean, tested them and played some games on them. And I'm pleased to report that all 3 machines are running brilliantly, as are nearly all of the 15 year old floppy disks.

But,

I've decided I want to learn how to properly operate an Amiga! Just switching it on and loading a game such as Colonization or Heimdall or even James Pond Robo Cod is one thing, but I 'd like to know how to format disks, set up the hard drive in the A1200, create and re-name folders and files.

I understand they're not PC's, but you've got to admit, the A1200 gets pretty close, it's a brilliant machine! But I don't know how much of that hard drive is free, what size the RAM is, if it's accelerated or not, and so on and so on.

How can I find all this stuff out? How can I learn to become a bit of an Amiga expert myself? Are there any books, magazines (used to be), videos, courses, etc that could help me?

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer,

Will

- - -

Amiga 1200, Workbench 3.1, Kickstart 3.0, 388MB 2.5" IBM HD, External Floppy Drive x2, RGB > SCART cable,

Amiga 600, Kickstart 2.0, no HD but HD cradle present inside, UNKNOWN amount of RAM, UNKNOWN upgrade capabilities

Amiga 500+, Kickstart 2.0, no HD, 1MB RAM, UNKNOWN upgrade capabilities

Answer
Hi Will,

You can check how much RAM is available on any of your Amigas by typing "avail" in the Shell window. There's a program called "SysInfo" on Aminet that can tell you what kind of cards/speed, etc. you have:

http://aminet.net/util/moni/SysInfo.lha

As far as books go, only the early days had the really helpful books, so I don't know how useful they would be to you. Later days are better kept up with Amiga magazines--they have excellent reviews, product info, how-to's etc. Some magazine names are "Amiga Format" ".info" and some others--I suspect if you google for Amiga magazines, you'll find some on ebay.com.

I hope this helps!

Greg