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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: tasmanian guy on March 10, 2010, 08:11:25 AM
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Hi,
I finally got my Amiga 1200 rack. It turns out it has Kickstart 3.1 (pity I ordered a Workbench 3.0, 4 gig compact flash card for it oh well).
I took some pics for you to see. Looks like a late revision motherboard (but I am not too sure to be honest).
I'll have to drill a hole at the back for a ps2 keyboard adaptor and purchase a mouse adaptor that plugs into the 9pin port.
I was thinking of getting a SVHS adaptor that Cammy was using for a LCD TV and or projector (does that get rid of the flicker in interlace modes?).
I am also hoping to get a 1230 50mhz accelerator card later on next week as well.
It all fires up and gives the beautiful purple animation of putting a disk in (have got none to use at the moment to test).
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Would like to wish you lots of fun :)
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Would like to wish you lots of fun :)
Thanks, can anyone point me to where I have to connect LED's and what voltage that is required?
Cheers,
Byron
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Hi,
I finally got my Amiga 1200 rack. It turns out it has Kickstart 3.1 (pity I ordered a Workbench 3.0, 4 gig compact flash card for it oh well).
I took some pics for you to see. Looks like a late revision motherboard (but I am not too sure to be honest).
I'll have to drill a hole at the back for a ps2 keyboard adaptor and purchase a mouse adaptor that plugs into the 9pin port.
I was thinking of getting a SVHS adaptor that Cammy was using for a LCD TV and or projector (does that get rid of the flicker in interlace modes?).
I am also hoping to get a 1230 50mhz accelerator card later on next week as well.
It all fires up and gives the beautiful purple animation of putting a disk in (have got none to use at the moment to test).
Good to see she works.
The S-Video card from amigamanic isnt a flicker fixer. But they work clear and steady (NI) on SD LCD TVs and are great for games.
Happy to post you copies of WB3.1 for postage +$5 for the disks (labour for free (o:). As you have a 3.1 Amiga you are licensed. Let me know.
Enjoy the 1200.
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Thanks, can anyone point me to where I have to connect LED's and what voltage that is required?
Cheers,
Byron
Next to the Floppy power connector, it will have one pin missing to make sure the LED header is inserted the correct way around. Not sure of the voltage, it would make sense to be 5 but I am not sure - the schematics are available online.
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Hi,
I finally got my Amiga 1200 rack. It turns out it has Kickstart 3.1 (pity I ordered a Workbench 3.0, 4 gig compact flash card for it oh well).
Workbench 3.0 will work fine with kickstart 3.1, but yes as you have kickstart 3.1 its probably worth upgrading to workbench 3.1 as well.
So when your 4GB CF card arrives its still worth connecting it up and testing your A1200 system.
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Hi!
Haven't posted for ages but thought I would wish you lots of fun with your new toy!
Peace.
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Hi!
Haven't posted for a while but wanted to wish you lots of fun with your new toy!
Peace.
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Yep, enjoy your magical moments with your "new" friend :p
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How are the mobo's secured on these types of racks? I've seen some with double sided tape, short risers/spacers and some even look like they're screwed directly in! In any event, hope there's plenty of space between the solder side of the board and the metal frame.
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Hi,
I finally got my Amiga 1200 rack. It turns out it has Kickstart 3.1 (pity I ordered a Workbench 3.0, 4 gig compact flash card for it oh well).
I took some pics for you to see. Looks like a late revision motherboard (but I am not too sure to be honest).
I'll have to drill a hole at the back for a ps2 keyboard adaptor and purchase a mouse adaptor that plugs into the 9pin port.
I was thinking of getting a SVHS adaptor that Cammy was using for a LCD TV and or projector (does that get rid of the flicker in interlace modes?).
I am also hoping to get a 1230 50mhz accelerator card later on next week as well.
It all fires up and gives the beautiful purple animation of putting a disk in (have got none to use at the moment to test).
What is a "A1200 rack?" do they ship them still, and in different configs?
More info please.
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Hi,
It is securely screwed into the rack, it looks like a very professional job, I'll take some "overview" photos so you can see how it is fitted.
The floppy drive looks like a pc drive (escom model?), but it still makes the clicking sound. There are three holes for the LED's but they were not fitted. I may buy a proper 1200 as a spare, just in case anything happens to this one. The guy I bought it off said the cases were specifically made around 1997 for them and they were used as a video character generator.
Thanks for the offer of the workbench 3.1 disks too, to upgrade workbench do I require to do a complete format and reinstall or will it update over the top as I don't want to lose the 2000 whload games that have been installed on the compact flash (which probably wont arrive till next week).
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Hi,
... to upgrade workbench do I require to do a complete format and reinstall or will it update over the top as I don't want to lose the 2000 whload games that have been installed on the compact flash (which probably wont arrive till next week).
No, just choose install and alter the location, install hd will try and format, so regular install, then it will back up everything system related if you so choose if i remember correctly.
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Does a 1230 accelerator card purchased in the United States work on Aussie (PAL) Amiga's?
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Does a 1230 accelerator card purchased in the United States work on Aussie (PAL) Amiga's?
Yes. No reason it shouldn't or wouldn't. We'd all be up shits creek without a paddle if we couldn't purchase things like that without worrying about video or power supply standards.
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Thanks for that save2600, a 1230 Amiga accelerator 68030 it is (next pay).
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tasmanian guy: First, good for you, you lucky !#@$@%^*!?! Second, as Save2600 pointed out, you should be able to use most any accel. regardless of where it was made. My fantastic German-made 1260 and 12xx SCSI module will vouch for this :)
As for the LED's, in my experience, it's not a big deal. I don't know the voltage, but I had a burned-out LED in an A4000T, I just grabbed the first LED I found, worked fine... even a nifty blue LED worked fine.... (check the polarity, tho...) Ah, so I'd guess the voltage is ~4.5V..., the amperage is prob. about 35-40ma.
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tasmanian guy: First, good for you, you lucky !#@$@%^*!?! Second, as Save2600 pointed out, you should be able to use most any accel. regardless of where it was made. My fantastic German-made 1260 and 12xx SCSI module will vouch for this :)
As for the LED's, in my experience, it's not a big deal. I don't know the voltage, but I had a burned-out LED in an A4000T, I just grabbed the first LED I found, worked fine... even a nifty blue LED worked fine.... (check the polarity, tho...) Ah, so I'd guess the voltage is ~4.5V..., the amperage is prob. about 35-40ma.
Thanks for the info, I am just worried which way around the led wires go and if I blow anything up. I don't really want to kill my Amiga after just receiving it of course.
I've also found it hard to find any rectangle led's that the original Amiga used, I spose I could butcher one from somewhere, or perhaps someone here has got some spare Amiga LED's?
I am waiting to hear back from the dealer about the 1230 to see if it still available or not, it looks like they had not updated their Amiga stock for a year or so.
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Thanks for the info, I am just worried which way around the led wires go and if I blow anything up. I don't really want to kill my Amiga after just receiving it of course.
I've also found it hard to find any rectangle led's that the original Amiga used, I spose I could butcher one from somewhere, or perhaps someone here has got some spare Amiga LED's?
I am waiting to hear back from the dealer about the 1230 to see if it still available or not, it looks like they had not updated their Amiga stock for a year or so.
Hey, I was a little vague in my last post. You can't mess anything up on your Amiga if the LED polarity is reversed. I doubt you could even harm the LED itself... :) I don't have a bare Amiga motherboard here to check ( :( ) but there might even be a little indication showing where the positive (+) should go... at least there is on my Sega Genesis (oops, sorry, 'Mega Drive') As for the rect. LED's, RadioShack used to have them in thier 'LED Assortment'. Otherwise, check electronics places.. here in the states, I'd check 'All Electronics'....
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Hey, I was a little vague in my last post. You can't mess anything up on your Amiga if the LED polarity is reversed. I doubt you could even harm the LED itself... :) I don't have a bare Amiga motherboard here to check ( :( ) but there might even be a little indication showing where the positive (+) should go... at least there is on my Sega Genesis (oops, sorry, 'Mega Drive') As for the rect. LED's, RadioShack used to have them in thier 'LED Assortment'. Otherwise, check electronics places.. here in the states, I'd check 'All Electronics'....
Thanks for that I"ll have a look at Jaycar on the weekend, our electronic stores are going more like commercial (eg not stocking components eg Dick Smith). My only concern is trying to find rectangle ones like the Amiga, the rackmount case has got the holes for them cut lengthwise.:angry:
I also purchased off Amigamaniac his 23pin to SVHS converter, a better compact flash solution and a ATX to Amiga power converter in case the Amiga 500 power supply I have got ever dies. He is doing a great service to the Amiga community.
If anyone has an old Amiga that doesn't work, would they mind salvaging the LED's? Will pay postage costs and a some extra for your time :-):)
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Any 'surplus' electronics stores / websites that you know of? If so, these would be best to find rectangular LED's.
Just did a little Googling....
http://www.goldmine-elec-products.com/products.asp?dept=1233
You'd have to get the dimensions of the LED's, but it's a start... :)
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Tassie you're hooked bad...
Good luck to you and enjoy... Hopefully you can keep the missus off your back ... 0-:
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Tassie you're hooked bad...
Good luck to you and enjoy... Hopefully you can keep the missus off your back ... 0-:
Yeah well I don't believe in doing nostalgic trips by halves :-)
I'm going to post some pics. I may have scored lucky cos there is a Teac 3.5" floppy drive model 265 which I believe is a high density drive? I hope I"m correct.
Also I've posted a pic of a CD rom drive I am going to put in (still waiting on the compact flash card from the UK).
I hope you guys find it as interesting as I do, the first Amiga 1200 I have ever seen professionally put in a 1U rack.:hammer::banana:
You can see a heatsink has been glued onto one of the AGA chips.
You can also see some modifications been done to the motherboard.
Hope this gives you an idea and I wonder if anyone can still make custom 1U cases for others who want to put their Amiga into a rack.
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Yeah well I don't believe in doing nostalgic trips by halves :-)
I'm going to post some pics. I may have scored lucky cos there is a Teac 3.5" floppy drive model 265 which I believe is a high density drive? I hope I"m correct.
Also I've posted a pic of a CD rom drive I am going to put in (still waiting on the compact flash card from the UK).
I hope you guys find it as interesting as I do, the first Amiga 1200 I have ever seen professionally put in a 1U rack.:hammer::banana:
You can see a heatsink has been glued onto one of the AGA chips.
You can also see some modifications been done to the motherboard.
Hope this gives you an idea and I wonder if anyone can still make custom 1U cases for others who want to put their Amiga into a rack.
bump, so others will know :hammer:
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If anyone has an old Amiga that doesn't work, would they mind salvaging the LED's? Will pay postage costs and a some extra for your time :-):)
I could probably dig up some similar LED's here soon, the 'hamfest' (Amateur Radio Flea Market) season starts in two weeks. But if I walk into a U.S. post office and try to send a letter to Tasmania, I'm not sure they would know how.
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Hiya
I probably built that A1200 in a 19inch rack module :)
The 19nch "1U" rack modules were custom built for a company called "Movielink" which was based in River St Richmond, Melbourne. They used hundreds >yes I mean hundreds!< of A1200 in these rack units. When I was there they had over six hundred A1200's in use.
Movelink provides in-house-movies for hotels and motels throughout Australia and New Zealand and used up to 6x A1200's installed into cabinets along with modulators, vcr's and head end master modem etc to provide on demand and scheduled movies.
I was employed as their graphic artist/amiga technician during 1996-2000 and the A1200's were used to provide information and navigation pages for the movie system. Most of these pages were short animations all running off 880k floppies.
The A1200 motherboards were all PAL systems usually bought from Analogic in England after local aussie sources like Megatron were depleted.
So the floppy drive you have in the 19inch rack module is just a standard IBM 1.44 floppy with a custom cable I designed to connect to the Amiga. I does NOT provide diskchange signal.. sorry! But since these machines were only rarely rebooted, ran 24/7 for many years with the floppy contents usually copied into the Ram: device having diskchange wasn't a priority :)
The A1200 motherboard should have a heat sink on the Lisa custom chip.. heat problems were experienced in the cabinets and the Amiga's suffered from poor ventilation. Random resets and graphic corruption was common until we began to use the heat sink fixed onto Lisa.
Hope that helps
Az
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I could probably dig up some similar LED's here soon, the 'hamfest' (Amateur Radio Flea Market) season starts in two weeks. But if I walk into a U.S. post office and try to send a letter to Tasmania, I'm not sure they would know how.
I'm sure they will :-) I was over in the US in late 2006 and had to send stuff back from Los Angeles and New York. It got here safe and sound.
If you do find any LED's (or anyone with spare Amiga parts) let me know I am happy to pay for postage and a bit extra to cover for your time through paypal :-)
Really want to get this up and running and restored to it's former glory.
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Hiya
I probably built that A1200 in a 19inch rack module :)
The 19nch "1U" rack modules were custom built for a company called "Movielink" which was based in River St Richmond, Melbourne. They used hundreds >yes I mean hundreds!< of A1200 in these rack units. When I was there they had over six hundred A1200's in use.
Movelink provides in-house-movies for hotels and motels throughout Australia and New Zealand and used up to 6x A1200's installed into cabinets along with modulators, vcr's and head end master modem etc to provide on demand and scheduled movies.
I was employed as their graphic artist/amiga technician during 1996-2000 and the A1200's were used to provide information and navigation pages for the movie system. Most of these pages were short animations all running off 880k floppies.
The A1200 motherboards were all PAL systems usually bought from Analogic in England after local aussie sources like Megatron were depleted.
So the floppy drive you have in the 19inch rack module is just a standard IBM 1.44 floppy with a custom cable I designed to connect to the Amiga. I does NOT provide diskchange signal.. sorry! But since these machines were only rarely rebooted, ran 24/7 for many years with the floppy contents usually copied into the Ram: device having diskchange wasn't a priority :)
The A1200 motherboard should have a heat sink on the Lisa custom chip.. heat problems were experienced in the cabinets and the Amiga's suffered from poor ventilation. Random resets and graphic corruption was common until we began to use the heat sink fixed onto Lisa.
Hope that helps
Az
That is fantastic, who would of thought I would meet it's maker. I assume this is the link to the company http://www.movielink.net.au/
Do you know where they sourced the 1u cases from by any chance back then? Is there anyone that does custom 1u cases now?
The disk drive doesn't bother me and I was thinking of taking it out and putting a flash card panel there instead :)
I am surprised that there weren't more of these on ebay if there were hundreds of them, hopefully they all didn't end up as land fill.
Yes the Amiga 1200 has a big heat sink on the Lisa chip as shown in the pics. I am surprised it got so hot, but I suppose running 24/7 like that anything would get hot!
Do you know what happened to the LED's in these units, there are spaces for them in the front of the case, but there were none there.
Thanks for your insight into the use of my particular Amiga, it provides a piece of history of the Amiga use in commercial applications.
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Damn.That's even cooler than the G1200!
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Hey Goose, I checked out your efforts, kudos to you. Be really good if someone could come up with a case that would let us put an Amiga 1200 in a really nice professional case etc. This is the closest I've personally seen that comes close to being professionally done eg all the port holes are cut out perfectly, motherboard good fit in case, 3.5" floppy drive fits beautifully, pity they didn't have a slot for cd rom but I'll get that cut professionally (hopefully) once I know for sure the compaq cd rom drive is going to work with it.
I personally can't wait for the fpgarcade board to come out, that should be really interesting :-)
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Awesome snag TAZ!
I was looking at the latest pics and wanted to warn you about putting the Accel. in without anything to prop it up. The mobo looks like it sits really close to the case and the accel. might droop enough to have it rub/short out. If it is really close, a simple nylon spacer glued to the case (not the accel.) would be all you really needed...
Again, good luck!
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I never knew the Lisa chip got so hot. I suppose the air in that cabinet doesn't circulate because the power supply is external, right? My rackmount A1200 has a fan in the front directed towards the Blizzard 1260 and one in the power supply in the back, so air moves at least a little.
I thought about trying to find a 1U case into which I could put my A1200 motherboard back in the day - heck, it'd have been a lot easier since I wouldn't have had to replicate the ports - but since it was to make the A1200 colocatable, a PCMCIA ethernet card was necessary. Perhaps you could find a way to redirect the PCMCIA 180 degrees or something like that. It's a nice setup.
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I never knew the Lisa chip got so hot. I suppose the air in that cabinet doesn't circulate because the power supply is external, right? My rackmount A1200 has a fan in the front directed towards the Blizzard 1260 and one in the power supply in the back, so air moves at least a little.
I thought about trying to find a 1U case into which I could put my A1200 motherboard back in the day - heck, it'd have been a lot easier since I wouldn't have had to replicate the ports - but since it was to make the A1200 colocatable, a PCMCIA ethernet card was necessary. Perhaps you could find a way to redirect the PCMCIA 180 degrees or something like that. It's a nice setup.
There is a slot out the side for a pcmcia interface (see the pics I posted). Also to the other user, yeah I know about the accelerator board, I'll be certainly putting a spacer in there, to prop it up to make sure it is all good! :hammer:
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So with it having an IBM drive, and not having a disk change signal, does that mean if it asks for a different disk, it wont recognise it when I plug it in?
** it's funny I've had this Amiga, but can't use it, don't have a mouse, keyboard or any software (yet). Hopefully next week!
I got the Amiga Format Annual Special number 2 from a UK ebay seller, ah the memories take me back over 200 pounds for a 40mb hard drive (and back in those days that would of equaled around 500 dollars Australian).
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fpgarcade - Yeah all kinds of cool boxes to look into. Well, one thing that I learned making a 2nd g1200 was about the "nibbler". If you have never used one, you will be like wow! The thing chomps away at thin metal like cutting paper, like PacMan. All with a hand tool. And the cuts are nice, square and straight. It was way better than using a Dremel... actually fun to use.
http://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=en&q=nibbler+tool&cid=1947631286468551883&sa=title#p
Enjoy the rack!
Hey Goose, I checked out your efforts, kudos to you. Be really good if someone could come up with a case that would let us put an Amiga 1200 in a really nice professional case etc. This is the closest I've personally seen that comes close to being professionally done eg all the port holes are cut out perfectly, motherboard good fit in case, 3.5" floppy drive fits beautifully, pity they didn't have a slot for cd rom but I'll get that cut professionally (hopefully) once I know for sure the compaq cd rom drive is going to work with it.
I personally can't wait for the fpgarcade board to come out, that should be really interesting :-)
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Hiya Guys
We used to shoehorn into that 1U 19inch rack mount the standard A1200 motherboard, 8meg ram expansion, 2.5 to 3.5 IDE interface along with an 100meg internal Iomega ZIP drive replacing the floppy and a standard 3.5inch hard drive of around 150meg capacity.
Oh we also had a reset switch mounted into the front face, this was a simple push button wired to an upside down socket press fit over the keyboard interface.
So it was quite crowded inside!! What I used to do was place heavy duty fiber tape along the bottom on the inside as an electrical separation barrier from the metal 1U.
The standard 3.5inch IDE hard drive was mounted by drilling the required holes into the bottom of the rack and then tape over the area the drive would be sitting on! Screw from underneath and all could be transported without incident to remote locations all around Australia.
These machines would run SCALA presentations off the hard drive 24/7 and if any updates were needed, insert the 100meg Iomega ZIP disk, reset the machine and a custom startup script I wrote would find that a ZIP was present, copy all the contents of the Iomega into the SCALA directory on the harddrive, eject the Iomega ZIP disk and reboot the A1200... which would then start the SCALA multimedia presentation as normal off the hard drive.
Because some of the multimedia presentations would eventually have memory fragmentation... I had wrote a small machine code interrupt handler that would run behind SCALA and reboot the A1200 every 24 hours. This stopped all customer complaints of dropped pages or missing sounds.
So you CAN get a lot of Amiga stuff installed into the U1 rack case... if you use tape where the memory expansion sits!!
Hope that helps
Az
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Hiya Guys
We used to shoehorn into that 1U 19inch rack mount the standard A1200 motherboard, 8meg ram expansion, 2.5 to 3.5 IDE interface along with an 100meg internal Iomega ZIP drive replacing the floppy and a standard 3.5inch hard drive of around 150meg capacity.
Oh we also had a reset switch mounted into the front face, this was a simple push button wired to an upside down socket press fit over the keyboard interface.
So it was quite crowded inside!! What I used to do was place heavy duty fiber tape along the bottom on the inside as an electrical separation barrier from the metal 1U.
The standard 3.5inch IDE hard drive was mounted by drilling the required holes into the bottom of the rack and then tape over the area the drive would be sitting on! Screw from underneath and all could be transported without incident to remote locations all around Australia.
These machines would run SCALA presentations off the hard drive 24/7 and if any updates were needed, insert the 100meg Iomega ZIP disk, reset the machine and a custom startup script I wrote would find that a ZIP was present, copy all the contents of the Iomega into the SCALA directory on the harddrive, eject the Iomega ZIP disk and reboot the A1200... which would then start the SCALA multimedia presentation as normal off the hard drive.
Because some of the multimedia presentations would eventually have memory fragmentation... I had wrote a small machine code interrupt handler that would run behind SCALA and reboot the A1200 every 24 hours. This stopped all customer complaints of dropped pages or missing sounds.
So you CAN get a lot of Amiga stuff installed into the U1 rack case... if you use tape where the memory expansion sits!!
Hope that helps
Az
Fascinating stuff.
Did you also create the Scala presentations for the clients as well?
Who or what type of businesses used theses A1200 Scala set ups.
I remember going into an aged-care facility for work and saw what was an A500 inside a metal box used to run the entire in-house display system to announce all sorts of things-dinner times, menus, tv and cinema sccreenings, in-house professional services, and this would go to all of the tv in the centre.
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Now it can be mounted in a data center. :) Pretty neat, actually. Too bad C= didn't have the idea.
I like the small footprint it has. Personally, I don't like PC towers. Towers are too bulky, take too much room, and have too many wires. I had the A1200 because it was small. Too bad they never put the A1200 into the A500 case; then it could have had a CD drive and other options. An A500 case would be great these days because an LCD monitor could be place atop it and save some extra space. Less wires, too.
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Now it can be mounted in a data center. :) Pretty neat, actually. Too bad C= didn't have the idea.
I like the small footprint it has. Personally, I don't like PC towers. Towers are too bulky, take too much room, and have too many wires. I had the A1200 because it was small. Too bad they never put the A1200 into the A500 case; then it could have had a CD drive and other options. An A500 case would be great these days because an LCD monitor could be place atop it and save some extra space. Less wires, too.
Well here is my solution, I've managed to squeeze 3 led's in the slot. Check out the pics (it has been a few years since I've picked up the soldering iron but it all works).
Even the floppy drive light, can't test the hard drive light until I get the compact flash card.
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That is a fascinating bit-and the designer coming on forum is great!
In the US the CD32 was put in a case by or for Scala for similar use.
Wonder how many of these untis just were tossed in the trash once declared obsolete?
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Hiya guys
I did not design the 1U rack.. that was already done by the company when I joined them.. it was professionally designed and made by a fabricator, included all ports in the back to match the A1200 exactly, a pcmcia slot on the side and spaces for the A1200 LED's in the front... although we never got the LED's with the motherboards from Analogic.
The 1U rack screws together very neatly, the motherboard is very secure, it had to be considering we sent units all over Australia and New Zealand. A few were sent as samples to Singapore as well.
Yes I made up the majority or the SCALA multimedia presentations. I used an A4000 Tower as the main graphics system along with an expanded A1200. Both had external scsi Iomega Zip drives for building and copying of the SCALA presentations.
I worked for the company between 1996 - 2000 as the head graphic artist but I also had to help design Amiga to PC transfer of all existing projects because the company was moving away from VCR/Amiga's to using media centers with VCD / DVD playback.
Regarding the diskchange signal for the floppy... I made up a special install disk that had a "diskchange" icon that was run from ram: that we clicked whenever a diskchange was needed to install specialized software onto the harddrives.
I wrote alot of startup and installation scripts.. even a few assembly programs to make all of the different Amiga systems work correctly.. ie... for all pages on all machines to appear on TV screens in the same locations etc. Simple things like that required copying thousands of 880k floppies and sending them out to all of the service technicians within Australia. A big job!!
Az
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Hiya guys
I did not design the 1U rack.. that was already done by the company when I joined them.. it was professionally designed and made by a fabricator, included all ports in the back to match the A1200 exactly, a pcmcia slot on the side and spaces for the A1200 LED's in the front... although we never got the LED's with the motherboards from Analogic.
The 1U rack screws together very neatly, the motherboard is very secure, it had to be considering we sent units all over Australia and New Zealand. A few were sent as samples to Singapore as well.
Yes I made up the majority or the SCALA multimedia presentations. I used an A4000 Tower as the main graphics system along with an expanded A1200. Both had external scsi Iomega Zip drives for building and copying of the SCALA presentations.
I worked for the company between 1996 - 2000 as the head graphic artist but I also had to help design Amiga to PC transfer of all existing projects because the company was moving away from VCR/Amiga's to using media centers with VCD / DVD playback.
Regarding the diskchange signal for the floppy... I made up a special install disk that had a "diskchange" icon that was run from ram: that we clicked whenever a diskchange was needed to install specialized software onto the harddrives.
I wrote alot of startup and installation scripts.. even a few assembly programs to make all of the different Amiga systems work correctly.. ie... for all pages on all machines to appear on TV screens in the same locations etc. Simple things like that required copying thousands of 880k floppies and sending them out to all of the service technicians within Australia. A big job!!
Az
Fascinating, and so let me get this straight the Amiga will not know that I have changed the disks when I insert a different disk? Eg just say I was to play Alien Breed, and it asked for Disk 2, I insert Disk 2, will it work or not?
Cheers for the info.
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Yup!
if you replaced the cable and the drive with standard Amiga units.. it will work properly.
As Is... no diskchange signal is supplied on the cable
You probably can modify the 1.44 panasonic drive to swap the signal to another working wire... if you can find the mod online
Az
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Any idea who was the original supplier of these 1U A 1200 cases? I'd kill to get my hands on one.
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For the original supplier of the 1U rack system you might be able to get some information from this guy... one of the original technicians who worked at Movielink pty ltd around the time they were introduced.
http://www.olincomms.com/home.html
I believe he sold Tasmanian guy the A1200 on eBay
might know if any more are available??
or which company fabricated them?
Movielink also had some 1U rack modules made for A500's.. tho I only saw a few of those while I was employed there.
hope that helps
Az
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For the original supplier of the 1U rack system you might be able to get some information from this guy... one of the original technicians who worked at Movielink pty ltd around the time they were introduced.
http://www.olincomms.com/home.html
I believe he sold Tasmanian guy the A1200 on eBay
might know if any more are available??
or which company fabricated them?
Movielink also had some 1U rack modules made for A500's.. tho I only saw a few of those while I was employed there.
hope that helps
Az
Yep he sold that one to me on ebay for $60AUD, sure it is going to cost a little bit to spec it up (as in there is no keyboard, mouse, etc) but I think it is worth it for the form factor.
I believe Con, from Olin communications said the 1U cases were manufactured overseas but couldn't say where.
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Yup!
if you replaced the cable and the drive with standard Amiga units.. it will work properly.
As Is... no diskchange signal is supplied on the cable
You probably can modify the 1.44 panasonic drive to swap the signal to another working wire... if you can find the mod online
Az
Hmm the drive is a teac one, I'm sure there are mods online for it though for the disk change, not that it will matter once the compact flash card arrives.
Still waiting to hear back about an Amiga 1230 accelerator card ideally after a 50mhz one with at least 16 to 128mb ram.
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I also have an A1200 (http://amiga.nvg.org/chetter/) mounted in a rack (http://foto.kolla.no/image.php?file=2009%2Fkontor%2FDSC00175.JPG), and I'm about to redo it using some nice shallow (25cm) racks from supermicro that have all ioport on the front (http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/1U/503/SC503-200.cfm). I'm using two pcmcia angle adapters (http://amiga.nvg.org/chetter/chetter-pcmcia-big.jpg) to have the PCMCIA ethernet card inside the case, ideally I would want to replace that with one cable based, bendable adapter, but I suspect I have to build that myself.
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Hmm the drive is a teac one, I'm sure there are mods online for it though for the disk change, not that it will matter once the compact flash card arrives.
Still waiting to hear back about an Amiga 1230 accelerator card ideally after a 50mhz one with at least 16 to 128mb ram.
Back in the day, I used to use a common PC floppy drive, too. I wired the reset button of the case I was using to simulate a diskchange. Since I never used floppies all that often, it worked perfectly for me, and the nice thing is that if the drive ever dies, you can get another brand new from Newegg for $8 (or cheaper from lots of other places).
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I also have an A1200 (http://amiga.nvg.org/chetter/) mounted in a rack (http://foto.kolla.no/image.php?file=2009%2Fkontor%2FDSC00175.JPG), and I'm about to redo it using some nice shallow (25cm) racks from supermicro that have all ioport on the front (http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/1U/503/SC503-200.cfm). I'm using two pcmcia angle adapters (http://amiga.nvg.org/chetter/chetter-pcmcia-big.jpg) to have the PCMCIA ethernet card inside the case, ideally I would want to replace that with one cable based, bendable adapter, but I suspect I have to build that myself.
kolla: You and I have to talk. First, it's nice to know that there's lots of love out there for rackmount A1200s... For a long time, I thought I was the only one. Nice job!
Second, I'm a NetBSD geek, but I'm in the process of trying to help m68k/Debian get updated so that there can possibly be a Debian/squeeze release soon. Perhaps some of the work in Gentoo can help get Debian up to speed...
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kolla: You and I have to talk. First, it's nice to know that there's lots of love out there for rackmount A1200s... For a long time, I thought I was the only one. Nice job!
Thanks :)
Second, I'm a NetBSD geek, but I'm in the process of trying to help m68k/Debian get updated so that there can possibly be a Debian/squeeze release soon. Perhaps some of the work in Gentoo can help get Debian up to speed...
Aha, I have a couple of colleagues who are involved with NetBSD, and they sometimes try to lure me over to their side. ;)
My gentoo/m68k effort is quite a personal one. I needed a system that could help me build the software I wanted with the features I wanted. Binary distributions simply dont give me that flexibility, Gentoo with its USE-flags and package masking does - I have to build everything myself, but that's ok, Aranym is of great help. I also find the Gentoo developer team quite a helpfull bunch, many of them are also embedded developers and adding m68k as a platform in portage happened after just some chatting over IRC.
I do follow Debian/m68k too, both mailing list and IRC, so that I have an idea on what's going on. I think the biggest problem with Debian and m68k is that Debian is too big and m68k too small, both as a community and in sheer compilation power. I think it would be better to treat m68k as an embedded platform and move over to Emdebian (http://www.emdebian.org/) instead of going for a full fledged distro as squeeze. In my view, m68k systems have much more in common with the embedded platforms than they do with todays PCs for example.
My big hope for 2010 is that we will finally get updated glibc (or eglibc) with NPTL. I'm still on old glibc-2.3.6, I know Debian somehow managed to get as far as 2.5, but I never got that compiled here. :hammer:
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Okay got a 1200 accelerator card now for around $220AUD dollars, a Blizzard 1230 II Tubo Board" from Phase 5, running at 50mhz with 68030 (with MMU) and 6882 processor running at 50mhz as well with 32mb of ram.
A few more bits and pieces to arrive and my 1U rack Amiga will be complete :-)
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A few more bits and pieces to arrive and my 1U rack Amiga will be complete :-)
How about this bit?
http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=564 (http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=564)
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How about this bit?
http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=564
Ah hell, why didn't someone show me this before! :angry:
Hmm I may get one of those later on down the track, very nicely done I might add, I wonders if the three slots cut in my case fits perfectly with that or not? mmmm I must resist! :lol:
I ended up making my own as per the screen shots and all up it costed $2.25 from Jaycar (around 1.50 pounds).
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I've now ordered an Amiga keyboard adaptor from amigakit since the one I was bidding on ebay went for $31, and you can get a brand new one for around $40. Some silly buggers on ebay are paying too much.
I've purchased all the Amos stuff I can get my hands on, loved that version of basic.
I've also purchased a usb mouse to 9 pin joystick port converter.
I'd also like to get my hands on a analogue joystick to 9 pin joystick port converter for the flight sims on the Amiga that support it.
I've also got a Blizzard 1230, 50mhz cpu (with mmu), 50mhz fpu with 32 megabytes of ram, coming from the UK.
I'm also on the look out for a LCD TV that will do SCART, (very hard to find here in Australia, no luck yet). Though I've ordered an amigamanaic svhs adapter, compact flash card adapter and an ATX power supply converter (in case the A500 gives up the ghost).
Can anyone report that an LCD with SCART (or SVHS) gets rid of the flicker in interlace modes?
Anything else I may need, except for maybe a new mortgage :-)
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Analog joysticks uses the Amiga serial port, not the proprietary Amiga DB9 joy port.
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Analog joysticks uses the Amiga serial port, not the proprietary Amiga DB9 joy port.
Not according to this site (yes I am after an adapter).
http://www1.uk.freebsd.org/docs/rview/DPAnalogJoysti.txt
Does anyone know where you can purchase one?
Found amigakit sells one, will get one from there eventually :-)
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Thanks for that save2600, a 1230 Amiga accelerator 68030 it is (next pay).
Well, think of it this way.
PAL/NTSC is just a TV or display standard. The CPU/RAM has nothing to do with the display system of the Amiga.
so what SAVE said, is correct, you can 100% be safely confident that any system expansion will work on either NTSC/PAL systems without problems.
It is Display areas where PAL/NTSC comes in to play, or Power related with 110V or 220V.
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I've purchased all the Amos stuff I can get my hands on, loved that version of basic.
I ended up with BlitzBasic 2. It took me only 3-4 weeks to create an Intellivision Astrosmash clone while I was in college. Amos is good, too.
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I ended up with BlitzBasic 2. It took me only 3-4 weeks to create an Intellivision Astrosmash clone while I was in college. Amos is good, too.
Yeah well Blitz Basic 2 looked a bit more complicated, more C based than Basic based when I first looked at it all those years ago.
I've got the Amos Professional Manual, application supplement, Amos the Creator, Amos 3D but no Amos compiler yet.
Need to find a copy of Deluxe Paint V from somewhere, can't find it anywhere. Another great program oh and Vista Pro, that was fantastic, I remember doing a video animation in TAFE of the Mars Mon Olympus with that and playing it on a TV, the teacher was amazed that I could generate such graphics on a home computer.
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Yeah well Blitz Basic 2 looked a bit more complicated, more C based than Basic based when I first looked at it all those years ago.
I liked the C features of Blitz. Enabled me to use a single array rather than multidimentional arrays to store data. Easier for me to remember a object(1).x than object(1)(1) for variable 'x'.
Need to find a copy of Deluxe Paint V from somewhere, can't find it anywhere. Another great program oh and Vista Pro, that was fantastic, I remember doing a video animation in TAFE of the Mars Mon Olympus with that and playing it on a TV, the teacher was amazed that I could generate such graphics on a home computer.
I always wanted Vista Pro, but I never got it. It was quite advanced for a personal computer when it was released.
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I liked the C features of Blitz. Enabled me to use a single array rather than multidimentional arrays to store data. Easier for me to remember a object(1).x than object(1)(1) for variable 'x'.
I always wanted Vista Pro, but I never got it. It was quite advanced for a personal computer when it was released.
It isa pity that they haven't made some of these programs shareware or even freeware given the age. Vista Pro was great though it used to take ages to render the scenes on my Amiga 500 with 3 meg of ram! Be interesting to see what it is like on my Amiga 1200 once the 1230 50mhz accelerator arrives or even WINUAE (it would fly then!).
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I've now got the keyboard ps2 adapter installed (strange it never came with instructions from www.amigakit.com (http://www.amigakit.com)), the Blizzard 1230 50mhz with fpu of 50mhz and a whopping 64 megabytes of ram (seems funny to say that, but for an Amiga that is a lot).
I've got the ide 4 port buffer, a 2 meg compact flash card with Workbench 3.1
Having issues with whdload to work, it looks like it doesn't like my configuration with error messages about shadow mem and requiring kickstarts.
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I've now got the keyboard ps2 adapter installed (strange it never came with instructions from www.amigakit.com (http://www.amigakit.com)), the Blizzard 1230 50mhz with fpu of 50mhz and a whopping 64 megabytes of ram (seems funny to say that, but for an Amiga that is a lot).
I've got the ide 4 port buffer, a 2 meg compact flash card with Workbench 3.1
Having issues with whdload to work, it looks like it doesn't like my configuration with error messages about shadow mem and requiring kickstarts.
I dont know about Shadow mem, but WHDLoad asking for kickstarts, means its seeking Kickstart files in Devs:Kickstarts
Version Name Kickstart Image Name Relocation File
1.2 Devs:Kickstarts/kick33180.A500 Devs:Kickstarts/kick33180.A500.RTB
1.3 Devs:Kickstarts/kick34005.A500 Devs:Kickstarts/kick34005.A500.RTB
3.1 Devs:Kickstarts/kick40063.A600 Devs:Kickstarts/kick40063.A600.RTB
Devs:Kickstarts/kick40068.A1200 Devs:Kickstarts/kick40068.A1200.RTB
Devs:Kickstarts/kick40068.A4000 Devs:Kickstarts/kick40068.A4000.RTB
Now, the RTB files, are obtained from the SKICK archive on Aminet. http://www.aminet.net/util/boot/skick346.lha
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But remember the ROM images are not downloadable in a legal manner. Buy AmigaForever CD and you'll have all.
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But remember the ROM images are not downloadable in a legal manner. Buy AmigaForever CD and you'll have all.
I have the Amigaforever CD that I purchased so I use the rom files in that with the rtb files from skick, don't need to rename them or anything?
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Well finally my usb port adaptor arrived for my mouse, so I plugged in my Microsoft Intellimouse optical, no go, I plugged in an HP usb mouse (with a ball), no go. I send the ebayer a message asking does this adapter work with any particular mouse (on the auction it said any usb mouse)....then I tried my Microsoft basic optical mouse...YES it worked!!!!!
Thank God, no more Amiga key and cursor arrows while setting stuff up! I am amassing a game collection and programming collection having purchased Amos 3D, Amos the Creator, Ultimate Amos book, Amos Professional, etc, games I have purchased so far Combat Air Patrol, Falcon, F18, F19 Stealth Fighter, Flight of the Intruder, F29 Retaliator, Knights of the Sky, Battlehawks 1942, Their Finest Hour, all the classics, I was a flight sim junkie with the Amiga (pity the pc started to come out with better sims with their analogue joysticks, shaded skies and ground compared to the Amiga's graphics). I have to get a gamepad for the Amiga and a analogue joystick adapter for the games that make use of it!
Looking forward to doing some programming now and some classic gaming! Thanks to everyone who helped out with this, I'll take some photos soon to show it off.
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Yeah want to see with the goodies attached...:)
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Yeah want to see with the goodies attached...:)
I'd like to thank everyone who has helped with this project! I have been flat out running my own private business, working full time and assisting mates with their computers (unfortunately IBM clones). Having said that I have discovered Dark Basic for game programming and can't believe how similar this is to good old Amos!
I'll post some photos soon of my whole setup. I'd like to thank Cammie and Nathan (from Amigamaniac) for providing gear and assistance for my 19" rack Amiga.