Amiga 1200 in rack has arrived

[Azryl]

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

[Azryl]

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

[Azryl]

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

[Azryl]

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

[Azryl]

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