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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Marketplace => Topic started by: dkedrow on February 01, 2007, 03:54:11 PM
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I'm putting some feelers out in the Amiga community to see if there is any interested in a bit of possibly rare Amiga 500 tower hardware.
In a nutshell, I have all of the parts needed to build an Amiga 500 Plus tower system with 4 or 5 Zorro slots, a video Slot, and Dataflyer RAM and Dataflyer SCSI boards.
Basically it's an Amiga 500+ motherboard and a VERY rare backplane board that plugs into the side socket of the motherboard that provides several Zorro slots AND a video slot. There is a little daughter board that plugs in under the Denise chip with a cable that runs to the backplane providing the interface for the video socket. I believe this makes it possible to use a Video Toaster or Genlock as well as a flicker fixer such as the one on the Picasso IV. I don't recall off hand precisely how many Zorro sockets there are, but I believe there are at least 4, possibly 5.
I also have what I believe to be a Dataflyer SCSI controller and a Dataflyer RAM board which provides some 30-pin SIMM sockets. It is fully populated but I also have some spare SIMMs I could include. These boards were plugged into two of the Zorro sockets on the backplane and worked perfectly.
All of this hardware was mounted in a huge tower case and powered by a single AT power supply with some custom power cable adapters. I have since removed all of the internals from the tower case and trashed the tower and power supply with the intention of some day mounting it in a more modern and smaller chassis but I never got around to it.
I haven't used this system in years. I did power it up about 3 years ago to make sure it all worked before I disassembled it and everything did work properly at that time.
The A500+ motherboard was purchased directly from a supplier as a brand new replacement board when the system was originally built. It includes the 512K trap door upgrade as well. The clock battery was removed from the motherboard from day 1 to prevent any potential for leak disasters. The clock was powered by a remote lithium cell which was trashed with the chassis, but someone could easily install a new NiMh replacement battery or just use a new remote lithium cell.
I believe the kickstart ROM is the stock 2.x that came with the Amiga 500+. I used to have a rom switching tower with the 1.3 rom as well, but I think that is long lost.
I will be taking some pictures this week to show what all this hardware looks like. I may also attempt to power it up to make sure everything still works, but I no longer have an Amiga mouse, keyboard, or monitor so the best I would be able to do would be to verify a kickstart screen comes up on my TV.
The only thing I'm not sure of is I honestly can't remember how the keyboard interfaced. I think I had a regular Amiga 500 keyboard mounted in a home made case with a cable that plugged into the rear of the tower. I'll take a closer look and get a little more info on that when I take the pictures.
To sum it up, here is a list of the parts:
- Amiga 500 Plus motherboard
- Amiga trap door chip RAM upgrade
- Backplane board + Denise daughter board with interface cable
- Dataflyer SCSI board for A2000 (works in backplane)
- Dataflyer RAM board for A2000 (works in backplane)
- AT power supply adapter cables (allows you to power everything with an AT power supply)
- Western Digital 9-gig 50 pin SCSI hard drive (noisy but works fine)
Any ideas what all this stuff might be worth? I'll most likely end up putting it on ebay but I could use some idea as to value. If anyone wants to make an offer I will also consider it. I would be willing to ship world wide if the price was right and assuming the buyer covered the cost of shipping.
Regards,
Dieter
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Never seen an A500 Tower Kit... Bit more detail?
This A500 tower kit is apparently a VERY rare kit that came out in Europe and wasn't around very long. The guy I got the system from (here in the States) said this one is one of maybe 3 or 4 sold to the US.
It's basically a backplane that plugs into the side of the A500 motherboard and provides slots similar to an A2000. There are 5 Zorro slots, 1 video slot, and 2 or 3 ISA slots.
You can mount it in a tower case with the A500 motherboard vertical and the backplane mounted to the bottom of the case perpendicular to the A500 motherboard.
I have the A500+ mobo, the backplane, AdRam trapdoor upgrade, Dataflyer SCSI, and Dataflyer 8x30-pin SIMM RAM board (w/8 megs on it).
I took pictures last night but forgot to bring the memory card to work today to upload them (I have 1-way cable at home so uploading large pictures takes for ever...I usually just do it from work).
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Any ideas what all this stuff might be worth?
The A500 plus is worth about £5, maybe £10 on a good day here in the UK (So thats $10 us, maybe $20)
The trap door ram upgrade isnt worth anything unless its something special, like the PC emulator board or fast ram.
The dataflyer would have been £20 ish but prices are going up a bit of late so maybe £35 ($40-70)
The ram board isnt worth much at all, although its nice that it uses 30 pin simms over ZIP and DIP chips, probably £10 ($20) if it sells
AT power adaptor: dunno really, £2?
The actual backplane is interesting, try and find a makers name and look it up at amiga.resource.cx (http://amiga.resource.cx)
Things like the Bodega Bay are collectable
It could be a Micronik A500 I guess, although the story doesnt fit
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It's probably is this backplane : HERE (http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/micronik500)
They aren't very rare in Europe; although not common either.
I might be interested if shipping to Holland isn't a problem...
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The backplane looks nothing like any of the the bus expansion boards on that page. Also, mine was sold specifically for a tower conversion, not an external expansion. There is no brand name on it, but there is a note silk screened on it that says something to the effect of "Dedicated to yadda yadda".
I'll try to post pictures tonight.
NOTE:
It is _NOT_ the Micronik A500 (6720).
It does look sort of similar, but mine is bigger and has 5 Zorro slots and no ROM sockets. Mine also has a connection for a FAN and some other connections for things like external parallel, external video, external keyboard, etc. It also has a Denice daughter board with a cable that runs from the Denice socket to the backplane to make the video slot on the backplane a fully capable video slot for boards like a Toaster.
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I may be interested (in the UK)
I look forward to seeing the pics!
Regards
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10 years ago i almost buy a bodega bay for my a500. I think maybe you have that hardware.
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EDIT: I put more pictures up, and made them smaller for people with low-res to see easier (I'm used to dual head 1600x1200 on SGI).
By the way, looking closer, it looks like it has 4x Zorro-II slots and 1x A2000 CPU slot, not 5x Zorro slots like I thought. Come to think of it, I think I had an accelerator board in there at one time, but removed it due to incompatibility with old games.
So, has anyone seen one of these before? Is anyone interested in buying it? :)
(http://www.kedrowitsch.org/images/amiga/image001.jpg)
(http://www.kedrowitsch.org/images/amiga/image002.jpg)
(http://www.kedrowitsch.org/images/amiga/image003.jpg)
(http://www.kedrowitsch.org/images/amiga/image004.jpg)
(http://www.kedrowitsch.org/images/amiga/image005.jpg)
(http://www.kedrowitsch.org/images/amiga/image006.jpg)
(http://www.kedrowitsch.org/images/amiga/image007.jpg)
(http://www.kedrowitsch.org/images/amiga/image008.jpg)
(http://www.kedrowitsch.org/images/amiga/image009.jpg)
(http://www.kedrowitsch.org/images/amiga/image010.jpg)
(http://www.kedrowitsch.org/images/amiga/image011.jpg)
(http://www.kedrowitsch.org/images/amiga/image012.jpg)
(http://www.kedrowitsch.org/images/amiga/image013.jpg)
(http://www.kedrowitsch.org/images/amiga/image014.jpg)
(http://www.kedrowitsch.org/images/amiga/image015.jpg)
(http://www.kedrowitsch.org/images/amiga/image016.jpg)
(http://www.kedrowitsch.org/images/amiga/image017.jpg)
(http://www.kedrowitsch.org/images/amiga/image018.jpg)
(http://www.kedrowitsch.org/images/amiga/image019.jpg)
(http://www.kedrowitsch.org/images/amiga/image020.jpg)
(http://www.kedrowitsch.org/images/amiga/image021.jpg)
(http://www.kedrowitsch.org/images/amiga/image022.jpg)
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Glad I didn't know about that 10 years ago or I'd never have switched to an A2000 and then 3000.
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Can't quite make out the pics, do you have any bigger ones? ;-)
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Bumped for more pictures. Should I just put all this up on ebay?
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I think you should donate it to Dennis of minimig fame.
Maybe he can reemplament the hardware of modern chips and we can all towerise our 500's
:-D
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Most, if not all of it is TTL. It would be cake to implement in FPGA with the exception of interfacing to this older 5v hardware requiring a bit of low voltage logic to 5v buffering.
In my opinion, it would be easier to XRAY the board to see the inner layers (assuming it has them), adapt the drawings for SMD, and stick with the discrete TTL design but use newer SMD parts.
Or just buy mine. :)
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Wow, it looks terrific - I do hope this mystery hardware is identified.
What is the purpose of the ribbon cable that appears to patch onto Denise?
Furthermore, what is the potential upgrade capacity of this board? Could an A2060 be used in the CPU slot, for example?
Kind regards,
James
x
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Furthermore, what is the potential upgrade capacity of this board? Could an A2060 be used in the CPU slot, for example?
Of course, if you mean Blizzard 2060 - as I have here in my A500T:
http://www.amiga.org/gallery/index.php?n=1801
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Just think of having one of these, with the Phase5 PPC protype board, running through the 2060. You would have the worlds first A500 running AOS4
:-)
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That's how it interfaces the video slot to the motherboard.
What is the purpose of the ribbon cable that appears to patch onto Denise?
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do you have a picture of the tower, that all this should fit in?
________
DC MARIJUANA DISPENSARY (http://dc.dispensaries.org/)
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No I scrapped the tower. It was just a regular old AT full tower case. It was a tall sucker, with 4 or 5 5.25" drive bays. The lower bay was cut out in the corner to clear the trap door Adram/A501 chip ram module. The backplane was bolted to the bottom of the case and the A500+ mobo plugged right into it and screwed onto where the PC mobo would go. The A2000 cards plugged into the backplane stood vertically.
|
|
| <- A500+ motherboard
|
| | | <- A2000 Zorro cards
| | |
------ <- backplane
======== <- bottom of tower case
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JJ wrote:
Just think of having one of these, with the Phase5 PPC protype board, running through the 2060. You would have the worlds first A500 running AOS4
:-)
Exactly what I was thinking.
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It would be cake to implement in FPGA with the exception of interfacing to this older 5v hardware requiring a bit of low voltage logic to 5v buffering.
Let the cake baking begin!!!!
(http://www.amigau.com/aig/items/petro_cake.jpg)
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I'm not 100% sure, but I used to have an expansion board
for my A500 which was build in a huge tower. I think it was made by checkmate. It had a videoslot which had a similar connection to Denise and I believe it also had a connection to Gary (??). Could it be that this board is the same one ?
I threw it all away when I moved.
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Oli_hd wrote:
The A500 plus is worth about £5, maybe £10 on a good day here in the UK (So thats $10 us, maybe $20)
The trap door ram upgrade isnt worth anything unless its something special,
I thought I had the only A500+ in the US, bought from a British expatriate with a 220V power supply and all. And I paid about 10x the price range you are quoting. And the trap door ram upgrade is something special. The A500+ has a built in 1MB ram + clock circuit and doesn't need another one; what it needs is the 1MB upgrade specially made for it to bring it up to 2MB chip ram for the ECS, making it similar to A3000 graphics but without the scan doubler. However, an ICD FF/SD will work. Now all it needs is an '030 and Zorro slots.
Hmm, how much you want for the board?:)
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Well, this A500+ does have the 8375 (Fatter?)Agnus, and with the AdRam "510 Plus" trap door upgrade I THINK I remember it being a 2 meg ECS system.
And as the previous poster just stated, it does have the on-board clock circuit. You can see in the pictures I removed the NiCad battery before it had a chance to leak and used a remotely mounted lithium cell via the small connection block I added. This motherboard is pretty much like-new.
Perhaps someone could put a Picasso IV in (I believe these to be fully Zorro II complaint slots and the space between the video slot and Zorro slot LOOK the same as an A2000...I could always measure to be sure) and have a flicker fixed 2meg ECS A500+ PIV system _WITH_ 8 megs of Fast RAM and SCSI (plus the 9.1 gig SCSI drive I'm also including) with the included DataFlyer expansion boards I'm selling with this stuff.
And just to be clear, the DataFlyer RAM board will have 8x 1x9 simms (8 megs) on it rather then only 4 as pictured.
Just to rehash, here's what I'm selling as a "kit":
Mystery A500+ Backplane
-- 4x Zorro II slots
-- 1x Video slot
-- 1x A2000 CPU slot
-- Provides power to A500+ mobo through AT power supply
A500+ Motherboard w/2 meg ECS Agnus
AdRAM A510 PLUS Trap Door expansion (makes a total of 2meg ECS?)
DataFlyer RAM Expansion w/8 megs RAM
DataFlyer SCSI Expansion
Western Digital 9.1 gig SCSI 50-pin 3.5LP drive
So, who's going to pony up and buy this crap so I can get it out of my living room??