motorollin wrote:
Now I've got the A1200 that's never "bin" opened, I'm thinking of making it a portable games machine. I'm going to remove the floppy drive (I assume it'll still boot without it?), and put in an IDE flash card reader instead of a hard drive, and add a RAM expansion. I then want to power the whole thing from a battery so I can make it truly portable.
I'm aware the A1200 has a 5v, 12v and -12v supply. So my first thought is to get a 12v battery and split the 12v supply 3 ways. One would supply the 12v, one would supply 5v via a transformer, and the other well I don't know, how do you make +12v in to -12v?! I would have thought I would need to transform 220v to 12v and rectify to a negative voltage? Or can I "convert" +12v to -12v?
Also, how much current would a system like this draw? Is it realistic to power it from a battery?
Sorry for all the questions. I'm excited :-)
--
moto
Getting the 12v down to 5v efficiently is a lot of trouble... just a buy a DC-DC converter from a good PSU site (I bought one from
www.mini-itx.com), that will take a 12V supply and out put a standard ATX supply (which which you can take the required power lines).
But you would probably need a nice big lead acid accumulator (read: car battery) to get any length of play... (unless you want to mess around with expensive Li-ION batteries and over charge protection circuits).
-Edit- Gah, everone else beat me to it :roll:
