Warp 1260 Review - EXTREME Amiga 1200 Upgrades

the Amiga 1200 has always been one of my favorite computers of all time in fact I've still got really vivid memories of the first time I ever saw one in my local computer shop long before I'd read about them in any magazines or anything like that and originally thinking what is that elongated Amiga 600 and then of course I read all the magazine review shortly after learned about the new agey a graphics chipset the faster Oh 20 process server with a lot better fast RAM could actually make this machine 5 times faster than my current Amiga 500 I knew right then that I had to have one and I got my Amiga 1200 a year later in fact it was just a few months before commodore went bust in April of 1994 but I did keep using it as my main machine until around Windows XP s release in 2001 so it really was testament to just how powerful and expandable the Amiga 1200 was that I was able to use it as my daily computer for pretty much a decade and another will be those who are quick to point out that respect out 486 with a 24-bit graphics card and the sound blaster was already outperforming the Amiga 1200 as soon as it was released and even the atari falcon has got its fans but for a 399 pounds sheen that could replace my amiga 500 i thought be a 1200 was great and it turned out to be way more expandable than the designers ever planned it to be the price difference between the low end and meager 1200 and the top-end amiga 4000 that was huge at 399 pounds and 2,000 pounds respectively and you could actually expand the Amiga 1200 to be a machine just as powerful if not more so than the Amiga 4000 and I remember people transplanting the motherboards into tower cases and adding all manner of expansions to ports that were never intended to be used like that like the clock port and adding things like Zoro slots and PowerPC accelerators so the Amiga 1200 has always been a surprisingly expandable machine today a lot of the classic Amiga accelerators fetch big money if you manage to track one down on eBay and apart from cards like the vampire it's kind of felt like most recent immigrants elevators have focused a bit more on the lower to mid end kind of range with 60 out of 30 accelerated car and a bit of extra RAM which are great for increasing performance on a few games but not quite the powerhouses that we had in the past but that's about to change and today we're going to be having a look at a new device that brings top-end classic Amiga performance back to the Amiga 1200 and very soon the a500 thanks to CS lab the warp 1260 is a new all-in-one device that brings some big upgrades to your stock Amiga 1200 and inside this innocent-looking white box lies an expansion that I could have only dreamt about as a teenager so let's have a look what's in here so first we've got a plastic bag containing the cooling fan and an audio splitter cable more on that later and here is the main event the powerhouse there is the warp 1260 and if we look at the back of the very nicely designed box I've got to say we can see a full list of specs and features contained on this trapdoor expansion for the Amiga 1200 on there we've got a Motorola 6800 60 CPU running at up to 105 megahertz 256 megabytes of ddr3 800 megabytes RAM we've got built-in RTG graphics meaning that you can get full 1080p 32-bit color displays over HDMI out of this we've got a 16-bit audio codec with a 24-bit sampler a fast IDE connection Wi-Fi module and Armco processor that we'll talk more about a bit later on SD cards support hardware JPEG and mp3 decoding and it's even got onboard USB now a lot of these features were just not possible several years ago on a desktop Amiga 1200 back then to get this kind of expandability you needed to tell your system and add a lot of very expensive separate add-on cards and looking inside the box itself we get ACS lab sticker very important we've got the HDMI and USB hub that will fit in just a bit a few little cables a pen is very handy the Wi-Fi antenna and in here is the warp itself now this one is fitted with the Motorola 6800 six new revision six that is under this massive custom heatsink and it is actually a really nice design as the Amiga 1200 keyboard will fit nicely above this with no obstruction and I just want to say a big thank you to the guys from CS labs for supplying me with this o 60 and the retail units you're probably gonna have to supply your own chips as they can be quite hard to source these days but there are guys like John hurtle who often sell these to the amiga community but you just got to be aware of buying fake clones on eBay for unrealistically cheap prices if you need to hand track him on down leave me a comment and I'll do my best to give you a hand and on here we can see the IDE connector with a compact flash card and adapter installed next to that we've got the audio connector and there's a scan doublet input on here as well now I did ask the guys at CES Labs if it was compatible with the in division AGA and unfortunately it isn't but they're working on their own scan doubler which will be a separate product that you can install so I'll talk more about why you'll probably want to get one of those very soon but hopefully it won't be too long until they release that we've also got a micro SD card slot on here as well and on the back of the card we've got even more exciting things to explore we've got the Armco processor running at 418 megahertz next to that you can see the ddr3 ram we've got a Wi-Fi chip but also the USB headers are on the side of it as well with the HDMI output and an expansion connector and a connector for the battery to keep the amigas real-time clock saved when you power off the machine so fitting the card should be pretty straightforward all I need to do is flip my 800 around and as you can see from here I've already got an expansion in the trapdoor which is just a simple 6830 accelerator weird 64 megabytes of RAM and a clock battery and the warp 1260 is physically a bigger card than the ACA 12:30 that I had in there previously so it's not going to be possible to fit it properly without opening the meter up and besides there are other things that we need to fit inside the case so we will need to open the Machine up so after we remove the screws we need to take the keyboard out and I've also got a IDE hard disk just kind of loose it here as well that I've wrapped with insulating tape so it doesn't short out the reason is I couldn't use a bracket when I had other expansions in here before it wouldn't fit and of course the ACA 1230 needs to come out as well and while we're here we'll also remove the floppy drive as I'm gonna need access to the expansion area underneath it which actually at the moment has already got a DVI connector in there now I did mention before that I used to have an individual AGA Skanda blur in there I did a video on that a few years ago I removed that recently and never got around to taking the DVI port out so we'll just do that quickly now and now the a 1200 is ready to receive the warp 1260 now fitting the card is actually pretty simple it just goes up through the trapdoor hole and then you need to line it up with the edge connector now I do said this is easy in theory it's not quite so easy when you're leaning around a camera and lights so uh yeah a quick cut here while I put it on my knee and there push it into place and after I've done that you can see it is a nice snug fit and the next thing to fit is the USB and HDMI connector hub now this is 3d printed plastic that just pushes into place into the back of the Amiga and it is a very tight fit and requires quite a bit of force to push in and then you can screw that into place afterwards and then you just need to plug the other ends of the cables into the ports on the walk 1260 again a bit fiddly to do on camera but I got there in the end and I'll also attach the clock battery as well which is just on this small wire insulated so it can replace a loose inside the case and then it means your Amiga 1200 can keep the correct time when it's powered off and obviously cramming all of this extra power into the slim Amiga 1200 case is going to increase the heat inside the machine particularly if you're running this at the top speed of 105 megahertz the Amiga 1200 slim case just wasn't designed with much cooling in mind but luckily the warp guys have come up with a solution and it's actually a protein the idea of fitting a fan into the Amiga 1200 desktop case but I did find that this was the most tricky part at the entire installation for me the idea is that this fan sits over the amigas floppy and keyboard connectors acting as a pass-through but also taking these five volts power to it from the amigas floppy connector but the fit of it is actually really tight up against the floppy drive I do know that some Amiga 1200 drives have got the data and power cables of the opposite ends compared to mine which might be a factor but it took me about 15 minutes to get this fitted properly without popping off and really that was just by sheer look as I couldn't see what I was doing when it was fitted though it works just fine and then you connect the amigas floppy power cable and the keyboard connected plug to the top of the fan and we also get this audio combination cable which will mix in the amigas Palo audio with the arm output from the warp 1260 now you can do a more permanent solution by Sol during the cables inside your Amiga and the guys from CS labs have actually put together a really handy guide on how to do that but for now we'll just use our cables treading out the bottom of my Amiga and then we fit the Wi-Fi antenna to the corner of the chip there's a small UFL connector that just pushes over and then all we need to do is hook up an HDMI cable and we should be good to go now I also do a quick power on and test before putting a case back together just in case I've done something wrong and it needs to all come apart again and I'm using a PC power supply from a mega kit now this is a model for the Amiga but it means we've got plenty of power to run the system and expansions although it's not a requirement and there we have it booted just fine into a very nice high res Amiga workbench and at this stage I didn't have a mouse connected so I thought I'd just quickly pull the Apple Mighty Mouse from my Mac behind there and try plugging it into the warps USB port on the off chance that it would work and I was pretty surprised to see that it did no drivers needed it just works straight away which is really cool and if we run a basic system information tool which Amiga it shows that we've got a Motorola 6800 60 running at 50 megahertz and it also identifies it as a revision 6 chip with an FPU and an MMU onboard we can see the AGA chipset the Picasso 96 which is the RTG system that gives that really high color and high resolution graphics and it correctly identifies a machine as an Amiga 1200 admittedly a very souped up one and we'll just quickly set the correct date and time while we're in here as well as at the moment the system thinks it's 1978 so if we just do that quickly and then we click on save that will be backed up by the battery now now 50 megahertz is a nice speed boost over the 14 megahertz so 20 but let's try bumping the speed up a bit shall we now there are some tools included to easily set things up like the CPU speed and the fans all controlled by software running this program here called warp diag lets me set the CPU to lots of different speeds well let's just ramp it right up to its maximum of 105 megahertz and since doing that will make the chipper and hotter let's put the fan to work as well on maximum setting and upon doing that I can hear a very slight fan hum coming from the Amiga 1200 but it's not too loud at all we can also see the mouse identified has been connected to the USB hub and we can change the mouse pointer speed in here as well we can even select roms in here - we'll stick with three point 1.4 for now and give the system a reboot so the new settings come into effect and then if we run which Amiga again you can see that the CPU is now identified as running at one hundred and five megahertz so it looks like we are set at full speed now at the moment I'm running the original firmware that the guys supplied at CS labs but actually it's really easy to update it they bring up new revisions of the firmware all you have to do is download it to a USB stick insert that into the Amiga power off and power on and then the arm trip will kick in and it will actually update the firmware on the FPGA on board so that means it's really simple to do upgrades in place and eventually they're gonna have this working over Wi-Fi as well now it mentioned the lack of a onboard scan doubler and this Samsung monitor is actually particularly choosy about screen modes it will display 1080 and 720 just fine but anything else gives me an out of range error plus if you want to run classic Amiga games and demos that are not intended for RTG at the moment you're gonna need a second display or a monitor that will also accept at 15 kilohertz pal and NTSC signals and has got both HDMI and RGB scar or maybe composite input that would see and then if you open any programs that are hard-coded suzi amigas native chipset they're gonna output the video by the amigas RGB port now this is a little bit annoying to rely on two different screens but that's just the design of the Amiga they were intended mainly to be used with RGB monitors or televisions now to get around this you need a device called a scandal ax which increases the frequency of the amigas native screen modes so displays that expect higher signals can then display them now like I mentioned I did have the in Division AGA fitted in this machine that I did a video on a few years ago unfortunately as mentioned the warped 1260 is not compatible with there but the team are going to be bringing out their own scan doubler that will be released soon allowing you then to display everything via the HDMI connector meaning that you'll only need one monitor for everything so now we've got this working beefed up to the maximum Amiga 1200 can we actually do with it well of course we've got access to much more screamer solution and more colors than the standard set up and everything of course is really responsive and that means you can run all your favourite classic applications a lot of them in higher scream modes and they perform and look really good but what about the games that's what you want to see so another question that's gonna be asked in the comments can it run crisis well no of course not but it can run Doom and whenever you see a demo of an Amiga accelerator or a graphics card you nearly always see doom being proudly displayed and if you're not a big Amiga fan you might be thinking well what's so special about running a 25 year old PC game obviously doom is on pretty much everything today but Amiga fans do run doom as a bit of a badge of honor simply because when doom was new we were told that it couldn't be done by none other than John Carmack from its software himself in a reply to an email from 1994 he said the Amiga is not powerful enough to run Doom it takes the full speed of a 60 aro 40 to play the game properly even if you had chunky pixel mode in hardware having to convert this to bit planes would kill it even on the fastest Amiga Hardware not to mention the effect it would have on the majority of the Amiga base of course the Amiga community saw that as a challenge and sure enough a few years later when it was open sourced doom was running on the Amiga just fine but on the WAP 12 60 if you want to play old pc FPS games it also handles quake and a pretty playable framerate as well and there is also a recent amiga port of diablo that runs great on here but for me if i want to play these games i can use a dumpster-dive pc or a Raspberry Pi or something I can see that from a technical achievement running these on the Amiga is cool it's quirky and something you never thought you'd see when these games were new but I want to run amiga software so let's try out a few of the more demanding later amiga games payback was released in 2001 and it was a very successful attempt to make a grand theft auto clone for expanded amigas now it was also released two fears later on the Game Boy Advance and then the iPhone and the Mac but the Amiga version was the original and as you can see it runs really nicely on this setup and the game itself is lots of fun to play I'd highly recommend giving it a download if you've not played it before and we've got napalm the Crimson crisis now this is an RTS game that was released in 1998 and it needs pretty high specs to run now this game crawls on a standard amiga 1200 but as you can see even though RTS games are not my preferred gyeon-woo and I don't really got any idea what I'm doing it does run nicely on this setup the display is a little bit flickering in parts but otherwise it plays great and in a really decent framerate a night-long is so good this is another later Amiga game that a lot of people probably haven't tried as it came out in the year 2000 by click boom and it's a really atmospheric cyberpunk adventure game and again this was designed for really high-end amigas now it's really optimized for PowerPC accelerators and as you can see even with the O 60 and the RTG the frame rate of the animations is still a bit janky but the game itself is actually totally playable and runs really smoothly now this one admittedly was a PC port but it was also released commercially very late on in the amigas life as a commercial game the Amiga has native first-person shooter games as well Kalume was one of my favorites back in the day and I still play this on a standard amiga cd32 console and even at this a low frame rate really picks early blocky graphics it was still lots of fun to play but in RTG with the no 60 we can run gloom deluxe and this runs beautifully with no slowdown everything looks nice and high-res and it is a really fluid experience and it's the same with the third game gloom 3 zombie Edition and I want to give a shout to gasmer Finn from Alpha software who was behind this game as I know guess sometimes watches a channel and this is breathless now I've got this game running in a ga mode vibe amiga standard RGB graphics and I want to show you that even using a GA having the O 60 in here will still give a decent speed boost to the more demanding Amiga games like this and the Daddy of high end Amiga FPS games is the famous Alien Breed 3d to the killing grounds now this was an amiga exclusive that came out in 1996 by team17 and it was an attempt to do a quake style game for the amiga but it was really really ambitious and to be fair hardly any amigas at the time could run this game at a decent speed even ones with accelerators and lots of ram but if we had the walk 1260 on our Amiga 1200 's back in 1996 we could applied this game in all its glory and it actually runs really nicely on here we just had to wait 24 years as well as games having me walk 1260 also opens the door to the small but impressive high-end amiga demo scene now there are demos that are made especially for o 60 based machines like this one the awesome star struck by the Black Lotus now this came out in 2006 and it was released for amigas and atari falcon machines equipped with 60 accelerators and generally this is considered the best o 60 demo on both platforms and it's got some jaw-dropping effects in here and possibly even more niche than mio 60 demos we've got ones that are made for Oh 60s and RTG displays that of course we can display on here as well so as you can see it runs high in games and demos very nicely but having the O 60 in here also makes the world of emulation a much more viable option now the amigas always been very good at emulating the classic 68 came Mac and of course having the 105 megahertz so 60 in here this makes this machine the fastest classic Mac around and using the shapeshifter emulator we can boot directly into classic Mac OS and run games and demos at full speed and of course this means we can play some games that were never actually released on the image all have superior versions on the Mac like the very nice Mac port of Prince of Persia now this came out later than the Amiga version and it's got some much nicer graphics and I would have loved to have a loan in the dark on the Amiga back in the day and I did mention that there is a 480 megahertz Armco processor on board as well which at the moment we can use for mp3 decoding meaning that you can listen to mp3 files on your amiga now at the moment support is just implemented in the command line it's only really just being done but you can store mp3 files on a USB stick and explore the contents of them using the warp tool software and we can see that I've got an mp3 directory and if we look in there I've got a song from the brilliant retro grooves of volume 3 that I'll link in the video description and using the amigas command line we can play it from here and the ARM chip will start streaming the file and we can continue using the Amiga while it's playing without any slowdown at all and of course it's only just been introduced and this whole experience will become a lot easier and there it will be supported with like a mega ramp and software like that in the future but as you can see it's all working already so a few questions I know will be asked in the comments so first of all how much is the card and when can you get hold of there well the card is not cheap it's gonna sell at 499 euros without the OU 60 chip now I've been chatting to the team and they do have a few Oh 60 s in stock but not many of them so really it's gonna be down to you to source your own and it is expensive but when you consider exactly what you're getting and how much the alternatives would cost you if you want to run real Hardware not emulation this is actually decent value for such an expansion and the team are going to be putting order information on their website which I'll link up in the video description Amiga walked out a you very soon and being that I've got a pre-release model of it it is still in beta so some things like USB and the microSD card slot on the Wi-Fi and not supported by a meagre OS at the moment but that is coming so that means it will be possible to put USB stick in or I have a micro SD card mounted and read the contents on workbench and use it for file copying and is a standard disk or even boot from them and the Wi-Fi will be used to get the Amiga online and they're actually working on doing this at the socket level using the BST socket library so you won't need a separate static roadshow or miami deluxe anything like that and they're also working on a version for the amiga 500 which is amazing and if i do manage to get my hands on one of those cards i will of course do a full video on that in the future and also an amiga 4000 version which I'm really excited about as the amiga 4000 is my main amiga and you know things that the vampyre haven't been released for the a 4000 year and i don't know if it ever will happen so having such an expansion in there would just be incredible so in conclusion I think this is a fantastic bit of care everything about it is just pure quality from the build the packaging even the betta software support at the moment it's rock-solid even at this stage and the team are fully committed to evolving this into the ultimate classic amiga expansion and having a no 60 accelerator in my Amiga 1200 was always a dream back in the day so to get one with RTG graphics mp3 decoding USB onboard Wi-Fi all in one simple tooth expansion it's just incredible and sure it is a niche product and yes it's expensive but if you want an Amiga 1200 expanded to its absolute limit then this card is worth every penny and to be honest it's just amazing than expansions like this being made for the Amiga in 2020 so if you've got any questions please do leave a comment and I'll try my best to answer them or I will direct them to the team at CS labs and if you enjoy my videos here on YouTube I also do a weekly retro gaming podcast now actually we had David Pleasants and Trevor Dickinson talking about what happened to the Amiga after Commodore to promote a new book that they're working on together at the moment recently we've had violet Berlin from bad influence on there the making of Prince of Persia with Jordan Mechner and you can check out all of those on your favorite podcast app search for the retro hour or downloaded directly from our website at the retro our comm and one here on YouTube here's another one of my videos you might enjoy and if you'd like to see me do more videos like this please consider supporting my channel on patreon I'll see you next time

Channel: Dan Wood

Views: 85,586

Rating: 4.9303775 out of 5

Keywords: warp 1260 amiga, warp 1260 review, amiga, 68060, commodore amiga, oddware, amiga upgrades, amiga 2020 upgrades, amiga expansions, amiga vampire, fastest amiga, vampire v4 standalone amiga, lgr, warp 1260 amiga 1200, 90s, nostalgia, old pc, 90s pc, retro pc, retro amiga, amiga games, 90s fps games, 486 pc, pentium pc, dan wood

Id: 3vyGk9jOC84

Length: 25min 32sec (1532 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 24 2020