Since I am having various problems getting my a3000, one of my a4000s and a couple of a2000s working to my standards I starting poking around another project I have going: the retro-puter. I have an old radio case about 3' high, maybe from the 40's and I am going to modify the wooden box to accept the a3000 mobo and then rig up an LCD screen in an art deco frame to hang above the cabinet. I intend to use European hinges so the keyboard can come down in front of the cabinet without otherwise showing the place where it hides to the casual viewer. Get the idea? Like a 1940 comic booc hero's secret weapon sort of thing. Like early Batman maybe. I figure the a3000 is a good choice as it will not need a flicker fixer. Assuming I can ever get the damn thing to boot at all.
But remember the Walker? and a couple of other things like that? Even the early games boxes like the Sega Saturn didn't have a pewter colored square ended box as a case. I wonder how hard it would be to build a mobo in a different shape in order to insert it into a less-than-square case? Like something organic. I recall seing articles on computers that would be made in layers rather than sheets so that the computational mechanism would be quite small and so the case itself could be almost any shape at all... like the stuffed toys we buy our kids. Is it possible, you think, for a person to build a computer... say an Amiga... in more organic forms so as to fit a more user friendly case, like sculpted into a sphere or torus? Seems like with those laser manufacturing machines that build up plastic forms by firing into a vat of chemicals you ought to be able to build a non-cartesian computer. Wouldn't that be fun? Anybody want to run with this idea?
