I listened to a podcast where someone who didn't (seem to) have much Amiga experience was talking about getting an Amiga 1200 in working order.
Which made me think: what would be a good "starter pack" to get a bare A1200 working in a meaningful way? For that, I think you need two things: a harddrive and a way to exchange files with the modern computing world.
Both can be accomplished with CF cards. So the starter pack would contain:
- an IDE-to-CF adapter to be able to use a CF card as an internal harddrive
- a CF-to-PCMCIA adapter to read (and write) one or more CF cards with data that was downloaded from the internet using a modern computer with its own CF card interface
- two CF cards
- the CF card intended as the harddrive has Workbench and the right drivers (CFD133 and fat95) installed
- the starter pack comes with a barebones Workbench floppy that can mount FAT formatted PCMCIA cards
So what I'm thinking is to talk to some of our favorite Amiga shops and suggest this starter pack (either with option 1 and/or 2) as a product.
Or am I barking up an already solved tree? From what I've seen many people get over the initial "getting stuff on the Amiga" hump by creating a bootable internal CF card using WinUAE. But that always sounded quite complex to me.
Or perhaps the number of new A1200s that require setup is so low that it's not even worth the effort?