towering an a4KD- mouse and joystick placement

[Will-i-am]

Like the subject says... what do you do with the joystick and mouse ports when you towerize an A4000D? I'm wrestling with this dang desktop and the easiest solution to my problem would be if the PSU wasn't in the way of the long cased CD drive I want to install. I keep looking at inexpensive towers, hell, you can buy an older tower for $15 at a chop shop, toss out the guts and modify the crap out of the mounts...all of which I can do, but the mouse and joystick ports are attached to the mobo. HOw do you end up with them on the back or some other convenient location? I do NOT have $400 to buy a special tower case for the beast. I can scrape up maybe $30. Hell to be an Amiga freak and not have a lot of cash.

[Will-i-am]

okay, not trying to be REAL stupid here... the ports are soldered to the mobo, right? I'm looking at them now. Are you attaching these extensions to the wires on the mobo, or plugging them into the ports themselves? The other end of the extension cable would have what? A second pair of ports? If so, where would you get them? If you mean cut the ports from the board and wire up extensions to carry the ports over to the back plate of the tower, where is the best place to cut them free? I had thought about taking my other desktop apart for a second pair of ports and sort of cobbing up some extensions from old joysticks and mice, but was hoping for a more "elegant" solution. On the other hand, if I'm talking about hacking an old Gateway tower or a cheapo CompUSA model, I suppose "elegant" is out...Here's an off the wall point I was wondering about as well. I'm REALLY interested in carving a tower out of some black walnut/butternut wood and making a computer that looks like an Art Nouveau cabinet. Can you think of a problem with a roomy but wooden box to place a computer into? It might look a bit like a vanity only with the monitor taking the place of the mirror.

[Will-i-am]

patrik wrote:
@Will-i-am:

Why not just buy a new short CD-ROM drive like the Lite-On 529S which works fine in the A4000D and is just 17cm deep, leaving 4.5cm of clearance between it and the powersupply. This is a very easy solution to your problem and it shouldnt set you back more than somewhere between $15 to $20.

As another plus you will also be able to keep the A4000D in its original Amiga-looking case .


/Patrik

Well, the basic reason I guess is that I didn't know about it..8-) AND the second reason, which could be the main reason, is that I have been trying to figure out why the short CD drive I already bought doesn't seem to want to work on the desktop model even though it works just great on the tower model I have. So I figured maybe I could leave the short drive in the tower and put the long one in the desktop and everything works fine except for the part about the long drive sticking out of the front of the desktop model. So a tower case (cheap) became an option except I couldn't find info on what to do about the placement of the joystick and mouse ports. It looked to me like they'd end up on the bottom of the tower or somewhere inside. $20 eh? I could live with that if the dang thing actually worked on THIS particular Amiga, currently known as the Beast. It's amazing how many articles you can find on towerizing an A1200 and how few you can find on towerizing an A4000. I even sent out an email to a guy selling CD drives to find out if it would fit a 4000D and got a snotty reply back that the A4000 was a piece of "crap" and he wouldn't even answer the question! Sheesh. I kinda like my 4000's....I have 3 of them. I like the way they do my CADD stuff and the animations are nice. Except this damn CD drive doesn't FIT!. Okay..extension cords for the ports. Got it.

[Will-i-am]

Hey, I'm perfectly capable of plugging in the drive to the wrong cable and all that. But I have been very methodical in this. It's a brand new out of the box Sony CD drive. It works fine on the IDE cable plugged into the IDE interface on the tower. No problem. I even installed os 3.9 using it. BUT when I plug it into the IDE cable on the desktop model the thing won't even boot from a floppy. I plug the IDE CD drive which works fine on the Tower into the exact same cable (the tower has both ide and scsi) and it boots just fine. The ide drive in the tower, the longer cased drive, is an older one bought at a chop shop. It works on both machines. I know I can buy a short case that works on the desktop, sure. You can spend anywhere from $120 to $35 as far as I can tell, BUT it is a problem with, so far, no solution. And like many Amigans, a problem like this drives me freakin' crazy!! WHY won't the blankety blank SOB BOOT even from a floppy. It acts like there's some kind of a short, or the floppy drive isn't plugged in. I tell ya, I have been very careful. I have to think there is some difference here that we are missing. Geez, I got two threads on the same subject! Well, look, the tower-joystick port question is solved. I will babble on about the CD drive on the CD drive thread, okay? But I'm serious... it is a real skull cracher....

[Will-i-am]

patrik wrote:
@Will-i-am:

Is the short CD-ROM the only unit on the IDE-cable in the A4000D?

Is the short CD-ROM jumpered as master or slave?

When it doesnt even want to boot from a floppy, does the harddrive-light on the A4000D stay lit forever?


/Patrik

Some of this I covered in the other thread...but I have tried all configurations of HD, CD and jumpers for master and slave. Bottom line is that when the short case is plugged into the desktop, it won't boot. Same drive plugged into the tower boots just fine. Long case CD plugged into the desktop at the same point and the same settings boots just fine. Makes no sense, does it? So either I forget having a CD drive in the desktop, or I buy another one with a short case and hope this one works, or I put the long case in the desktop and have it stick out over the floppy drive 1". I'm ready to give up. There's a difference but I can't find it. Must be the meds.

[Will-i-am]

patrik wrote:
@Will-i-am:

Have you tried this?
1. Remove the IDE-harddrive completely from the A4000D.
2. Jumper the short CD-ROM as master.
3. Connect one of the outer end connectors of the IDE-cable to the A4000D IDE-connector.
4. Connect the other outer end connector of the IDE-cable to the short CD-ROM.

Then see if it boots from a Workbench-floppy.


/Patrik

yes, all of the above. The quandry is illustrated like this. You take two CD/RW drives, one with a short case, one with a long case. Set both of them to "slave" and the HD to "master" Plug the long case into the ide cable. The computer boots and the drive is usable. Now unplug the drive and plug in the short cased drive. Turn on the power. The HD lights up then the CD drive light flashes, the HD light goes out and the machine sits there with not a flicker on the monitor. Normally this would say the short cased drive is busted, right? Now turn to the tower a4000 with the cyberstorm cpu. Plug in the long cased drive, the thing boots just fine. Unplug it and plug in the short cased drive. The thing boots just fine. Try the desktop machine with the CD drive(s) as master, as slave, as the sole drive in the machine booting from floppy...whatever I try, if the short case is plugged in, nothing will make the desktop boot. Makes not a lick of sense! I was hoping someone would tell me that the short case Sony drives have some kind of setting internally that the tower can override or something but the desktop can't handle. No such luck. Nobody can explain it. It could very well be something I'm doing, but it would have to be something I have consistantly done a couple of dozen times and I find that hard to believe. I mean, plugging-unplugging...check the pins, check the jumpers.... it's not rocket science, it's not like configuring a cable modem....which I can't do. But Since nobody can figure it out, then I say to hell with it. I'll leave the drive out of the desktop model, use it in the tower and have a tower with two working cd/rw drives. Now I have to figure out why the tower won't install Boingbag 1. It was supposed to help the other strange things the tower exhibits but only goes to 40% and then hangs up. The tower works well on some things, but screws up on others. But it will run all the CD drives I can plug in, short and long....

[Will-i-am]

They both are running os 3.9, although parts of the tower os seem not quite right. ON the other hand, the tower runs both cd drives just fine. I think the idea that the HD and the CD drives might be fighting makes a certain ammount of sense. The desktop has a Seagate Medalist 3210 and the tower has a Quantum Atlas. Even though the cpu's are different it shouldn't be a problem?? The tower has a Cyberstorm PPC '060 and the desktop has a GVP T-rex '040. I suppose I could swap the cpu's (again) For awhile I was swapping them on a regular basis trying to figure out which went with which plan I had for the total package of all these computers. I have 8 now working with a total of 6 OS's and I had this insane idea I could network them. Hell, I can't even get them to boot at the same time! Unix, Linux, Amiga OS's 1.3, 2.1, 3.9, and Win ME.....

[Will-i-am]

The tower has a scsi HD and an IDE cd drive...the long case model. The desktop 4K only has IDE devices, no scsi interface. I can put the HD from the desktop into the tower if I mount it to the IDE interface along with the CD drive (as a slave). I haven't tried this combination yet because I figure that the short CD drive works fine in the tower so I don't need to test that. Likewise I'm not sure what testing the desktop HD in the tower would show. A funny aspect to this is that the OS on the desktop seems really stable. Everything except the short case CD drive works great with it. The tower has problems with the OS... parts that crash when used, like the Preferences programs, like Dopus4 crashing when you try to open it... Boingbag 1 tries to install and locks up at 40% complete. You'd think the tower would have problems with the CD drive but it switches happily between the two CD drives. The desktop HATES the short cased drive and can't even boot from a floppy when it's attached. Can't figure it out. I am thinking seriously about trying to connect the two machines thru a null modem cable and copying everything on the desktop HD into the HD on the tower, since the desktop seems otherwise the more stable. That will eliminate any software differences. All I'd need to do then is install the Phase5 PPC software and see if that is somehow enabling the tower to use the short cased CD when the desktop can't. That's about all I can think to do at this stage.

[Will-i-am]

Framiga wrote:
oh now i've understood :-) the HD is SCSI . . .ok

Try to move the CD0 file from Devs:DosDrivers/ to Storage:DosDrivers/ and mount it after the boot.

But the machine won't boot when the CD drive is physically attached to the computer! It can be attached to the tower and everything works fine, but not the desktop. So are you suggesting tht after a successful boot it's safe to plug the CD drive into the cable and then mount the CD0: file? I was always told this was not a good idea, although I have considered it.

[Will-i-am]

Framiga wrote:
nope . . . never said those.

Although i've already done so, i DON'T suggest you to do so.

Simply remove the CD0 from Devs:Dosdrivers/

In this way the CDROM will not be mounted at startup.

Well, I un-mounted it a few times, remounted a few times, tried various CD drive programs, like Fryingpan, atapipnp and asimcdfs....you get the idea. Nothing seems to enable that particular CD drive to work with this particular computer. Other drives work fine and the drive itself will work on the other machine. Maybe I should reassemble the other A4K desktop I have....I have to modify a psu and plug in a cpu....If the tower will boot from the one-of-a-kind '060 board then I can put the Cyberstorm into the working desktop, put the '040 into the "parts" desktop and then see if the CD drive will work on either of the desktops. That's a hell of a lot of working, though, just to get a drive to work. If it works on either one, then that's the 'puter it stays with. No more swapping parts for me! After all this fooling around, I still haven't stabilized the tower and I'm still thinking about putting the desktop into a tower case.

[Will-i-am]

patrik wrote:
@Will-i-am:

Did the new 68060-libraries make any difference?


/Patrik

I think I have maybe three sets of '060 libraries. I have the ones that came with 3.9, the ones from Phase 5 (assuming they aren't the same) and an install disk from Atlantis with a modified '060 which I think goes with the unique '060 board. I'm planning on pulling the tower apart and trying once again to get the '060 card to work. The '060 libraries won't help the desktop since it only has an '040 board in it, but when I start in on the tower if I can make the '060 board work there then I will switch the Cyberstorm into the offending desktop and see if the difference enables the Beast to work with that short case CD drive. If it does I don't need to put it into a tower.