The Insane Trip Of Going Back In Time ” Get Boinged ” Starts Right Here…
Let’s rewind the clock a bit.
Nearly ten years ago, I had the brilliant idea of selling my big-box Amiga 1200.
This wasn’t just any Amiga, either. It was loaded with just about every upgrade you could think of: a Prelude sound card, a Mediator SX, one of those fancy Elbox IDE splitters, and plenty of other hardware that I have probably forgotten by now.
At the time, it seemed like a sensible decision.
Of course, as anyone in the retro computing scene knows, selling your dream setup usually feels like a great idea right up until the moment you realise you still need it.
A couple of years later, I found myself diving back into Amiga development and beta testing with renewed enthusiasm. Suddenly, I wasn’t focusing solely on CD32 projects anymore. Cross-platform development was becoming a bigger part of what I was doing, and once again, I needed access to a properly equipped Amiga system.
That’s when the regret started to kick in.
The machine I had spent years building, upgrading, and perfecting was gone.
And, as is often the case with Amiga hardware, buying all those parts back again wasn’t going to be cheap.
The Insane Journey Begins…
A friend of mine, Roar, came to the rescue.
We have this strange habit of giving each other stuff whenever we meet up. At one point, he turned up with the Amiga 1200 you see in the pictures. Well, sort of.
It was a base machine with a faulty keyboard and a few quirks here and there, but otherwise it was in excellent condition. The motherboard had already been recapped, the case was in great shape, and overall, it was a very clean machine.
From that day on, I considered it mine 🤣.
Roar knew that we were having reliability issues while beta testing software on the CD32 alone, especially when it came to testing across different CPU configurations and accelerator setups. That was one of the main reasons he decided to give it to me.
Naturally, I didn’t leave it stock for very long.
I purchased a Terrible Fire 68060 accelerator directly from AlenPPC—the same guy I had bought several other TF boards from over the years. Then I took things a step further and went hunting for a suitable 68060 processor.
As anyone who has looked for one recently will know, that is easier said than done.
After a fair bit of searching, I eventually managed to track one down: a Motorola 68060 Rev. 4 LC.
The journey back into Amiga madness had officially begun.
TERRIBLE FIRE 060…
It didn’t take long before I realised just how unsuitable this CPU was for game development and testing.
Sure, it was fast for its time, but it wasn’t the kind of setup I wanted if I was serious about revisiting old projects or experimenting with new ones.
At that point, I more or less abandoned my journey back in time with the A1200. This was sometime around 2022, and the machine ended up being pushed aside once again while I focused on other things.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago.
While doing some spring cleaning a couple of years or so ago, were I was preparing our small storage room to become a playroom for our youngest son, I stumbled across something I had completely forgotten about.
Hidden away inside a larger box was my old Blizzard 1260/66 with a 240MHz 603e PPC processor.
The board was sitting there, carefully wrapped up inside a taped cardboard box that I had received from a friend of mine, Mario. He had borrowed the accelerator for several years (almost 10?) while testing compatibility with AmigaOS 4 and various PPC-related projects.
At some point, he returned it to me.
At some other point, I put it away for safekeeping.
And then, apparently, I completely forgot it existed.
Finding it again felt like uncovering buried treasure.
Deep Down In The Underground Levels…
Yeah, I know. How is that even possible?
Well, to put it gently, we found a lot of things in there that both my girlfriend and I had completely forgotten about. There was plenty of Amiga and console-related stuff too, all packed away while we were building our new house.
So, what happened next?
I found a backup from 2004 and immediately thought, “Yep, this will do the trick.”
It didn’t.
By that point, I had already heavily upgraded and customised my A1200, and the backup was simply too new as i needed one from early 2000s. I kept digging through other backups, but most of them crashed, behaved strangely, or were generally unstable.
Eventually, I reached the point where I said to myself:
“Screw this, I’m starting from scratch.”
So I wiped the CF card.
“This is easy,” I told myself.
And then, before I could even create a boot disk, the A1200 rebooted.
Brilliant.
Fortunately, the fix was quick. I opened up the A1200, pulled out the CF card, plugged it into my Pegasos II, and created the boot disk there instead.
Crisis averted.
At least for the moment.
The OS Woes…
Time to install AmigaOS 3.9.
But how the hell was I going to do that without a CD-ROM drive? It had been years since I last attempted anything like this, so it was time to hit the internet and see what solutions people were using these days.
It didn’t take long before I found the answer: check out the guide on John “Chucky” Hertell’s blog.
I downloaded his package of files, tools, and step-by-step instructions, and got to work.
Before long, I had the ISO running through DiskImage and the wonderful DiskImageGUI.
The AmigaOS 3.9 installation went surprisingly smoothly. Heck, I even created an emergency floppy disk while I was at it.
And then…
The real trouble started.
Boing Bag 1 simply refused to install, no matter what I tried. I recreated the AmigaOS 3.9 ISO using multiple tools, tested different approaches, and spent far more time on it than I care to admit.
Nothing worked.
The authentication check inside Boing Bag 1 just kept saying one thing:
NO.
At that point, I was completely stumped.
The Internet Knows What?…
And this is where I gave up.
Well, for about three weeks anyway.
I posted online asking for help and received plenty of good suggestions, but nothing seemed to solve the problem. My conclusion at the time was that my original AmigaOS 3.9 CD was somehow broken.
Or maybe not… (keep reading).
Last night I started thinking about the whole thing again. Curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to investigate exactly how the Boing Bags unpacked their updates.
It didn’t take long to discover that the actual update files inside the archive were stored in a password-protected ZIP file.
That was all the motivation I needed.
I had the day off, my youngest was happily playing Astro Bot, and I suddenly had plenty of time on my hands. So I began digging into the encryption method. Using a few GPL tools that I had to compile myself for the Amiga—because, yes, I still don’t own a PC—I started pulling things apart.
Incidentally, compiling everything on my Pegasos II running AmigaOS 4.1 went surprisingly smoothly.
After a fair bit of detective work, I eventually figured out how the password verification was being performed. It was actually a pretty ingenious solution.
And then…
Success.
I found the password.
Boing Bag Installed…
Boing Bag 1 was finally installed—albeit manually—and it worked like a charm. Then came Boing Bag 2…
And it was the same nonsense all over again.
Luckily, I had a much better understanding of the process this time around. The password protection was even crazier than before, but with a little help from AI, I somehow managed to extract the required password and get things moving again.
Boing Bag 2 was installed successfully, and everything was looking great. To be honest, I would have been perfectly happy stopping at this point if it hadn’t been for Chucky’s installation guide constantly tempting me to go further.
So, it was time to patch the 68060 library with BPPC fixes.
That went surprisingly smoothly, and before long, Boing Bag 3 and Boing Bag 4 were installed without any drama at all. Suddenly, I found myself staring at a fresh installation of AmigaOS 3.9 complete with WarpUp/WarpOS support.
The very first thing I did?
Rush to make a backup of the installation before the Amiga gods have a chance to change their minds.
So, what was next?
The next step was installing a long IDE cable with three connectors. This allowed me to use the first CF card as a dedicated system drive, while the second would serve as a transfer card. The plan was to mount that second CF card in the secret trapdoor at the back of the A1200.
I call it a secret trapdoor because I had completely forgotten it even existed. The only reason I remembered it was thanks to an eBay seller who had it listed as a recommended accessory when I bought the long IDE cable.
I firmly secured the CF card adapter to the plastic housing, and it fit perfectly—as if Commodore had planned it that way from the very beginning. Everything lined up beautifully, including inserting and removing the card from the outside of the machine. It was one of those rare mods where everything just works exactly as intended.
With that done, I started loading games onto the partitions, installing software, and generally setting everything up. It was all looking fantastic…
Until…
Brian The Lion To The Rescue…
All of a sudden, apps, games, and even the OS itself started throwing up all sorts of strange crashes, errors, and warning messages.
I almost gave up again, but then I remembered a trick I learned the hard way back at RetroSpillMessen 2017. The idea is simple: take a WHDLoad game that you know works 100% reliably and copy it across all partitions and CF cards you’re testing. In this case, I used Brian the Lion AGA—the exact same game that helped me track down problems back then.
The crazy part? The CF card I was using as my boot drive and for storing smaller files was actually faulty. Out of its entire 4GB capacity, only the first 75MB worked properly. The rest was riddled with CRC errors.
That card went straight into the bin.
I copied everything over to another CF card and repeated the test, moving Brian the Lion across all eight partitions on the drive. This time, everything worked perfectly.
Sometimes the simplest troubleshooting methods are still the best.
Backup and yet more backup…
At this point, I had a very solid setup. Everything inside the A1200 was neatly installed, and the outside looked clean and polished too.
I started looking through my collection of SSDs and various CD-ROM drives—SATA slot-loading models, tray-loading drives, and more. Then I suddenly remembered that I had a PCMCIA CD-ROM drive tucked away somewhere. Perfect timing, I thought. A clean setup and a chance to try something a little different.
The driver I found was called PcmciaCD, and I installed it exactly as described. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to work.
After trying a few different approaches, I had the idea of simply using it together with the internal CD filesystem handler. To my surprise, it worked! A complete shot in the dark, but a successful one nonetheless.
Of course, I’ll continue experimenting with the setup and follow the developer’s instructions more closely. But first, I’m making a backup😂.
Next step: even more modifications…
I’m a huge fan of many of the later Amiga CD games, and playing them without their CDDA Red Book audio tracks is downright painful. So yeah, it was time to go old-school once again.
I rushed out and bought a handful of parts: a couple of 2Y-to-2RCA adapters and a mini-jack to dual RCA cable.
The idea was simple: mix the CDDA audio signal together with Paula’s output. It’s a very amateurish solution, and I’m sure some electronics expert would have a heart attack if they saw it, but you know what? It works. And it works surprisingly well.
It’s probably one of the cheapest and most hackish modifications I’ve ever done to an Amiga, yet the result is fantastic. CD audio now plays alongside the Amiga’s normal sound output exactly as intended, bringing those classic CD-based games back to life.
Sometimes the most ridiculous solutions end up being the most effective.
Everything Is Peace…
This is the RCA Y-adapter — just a dollar or two each. Mixing the sound this way results in slightly lower volume, but who cares? I have a volume slider anyway. 🤣
Everything is now connected together: large bootable CF cards, a quick-access CF card holder hidden in the trapdoor, and the CF card adapter securely mounted beneath the floppy drive. The CF card adapter is configured as SLAVE, which was easily done by removing the jumper from the two pins at the top of the adapter.
I ordered several different 44-pin IDE cables from AliExpress. The one that ended up fitting my A1200 setup was a 50 cm cable with three connectors.
I won’t be opening the A1200 again anytime soon, but fitting that cable was a bit of a puzzle. I had to fold it three times to make it reach the CF card in the hidden trapdoor compartment. It took some patience, but it was far from impossible.
I’m using two 16 GB SanDisk CF cards, and both passed testing without a single CRC error.
The floppy drive remains fully functional.
Filled To The Brim…
My Blizzard PPC (060/66/240) draws additional power from the floppy power connector, and I’m using a PSU with extra power capacity to handle the load.
The PCMCIA CD-ROM drive is painfully slow, but it works perfectly fine for games and applications. Annoyingly, it requires its own external power supply, although I may look into solving that later.
I also picked up a 4-way video and audio switch from AliExpress. It only supports RCA composite video and RCA audio, but even though I normally use an RGB cable for the best possible picture quality, it’s incredibly convenient to simply press a button and switch between my PS2, PS3, CD32, and Amiga.
This project has taken quite a bit of time, but wow, has it been fun. Getting the CD-ROM drive working was especially satisfying, as I was convinced it was dead on arrival.
Everything is now fully assembled and working perfectly.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
