How far can a desktop A1200 be expanded?

[Marco]

Right, since my A1200 is working again I want to know exactly how much I can add to it without towering the system, what can reasonably be fitted into the original case and not cause serious headaches wondering if it's going to explode and die at any second?

Specifically things like:

accelerators - an 060@50Mhz should be fairly safe right? I read that the 040s are a concern in desktops because of the massive heat they generate, but the 060s don't have that problem. What about adding PPC? Aside from a new power supply what else is needed to run a PPC accelerator safely?

power supply - I dunno but I've read the standard Amiga ones are not all that good and a replacement is needed for an expanded system, but what is available, and how much should I expect to spend on a replacement?

usb - I've seen the 'subway' card on Amigakit, it says it connects to the clockport on the 1200, but will it fit inside the case? And again - any heat/reliability problems with it in a stock case?

sound and graphics - is there anything I can do about the Amigas', er 'quaint' sound capabilities? For graphics I've read about the bvision graphics card, but it seems like I'd need a PPC card to run that and I doubt adding more stuff on top of a BPPC could help heat/reliability issues.

I also want to run OS3.9 but don't have an external CD-ROM drive, will any old external drive from a PC work or is there some special connection needed to hook one up to the Amiga?

TYIA for any help you can offer, I am fairly clueless as this would be my first attempt at upgrading an Amiga, I realise it'll still be fairly crap compared to a modern PC, but it's a laugh to do IMO.

[Marco]

Cool, I'll need a little help with acronyms though, I know what IDE and SCSI are (obivously) but what's an ATA4 harddisk? and what's EIDE'99?

DCE SD/FF is just meaningless to me I'm afraid.

For the power supply, I'm not much of a DIY person, in any fashion whatsoever, so I'd probably feel better just getting a power supply already modified like the 'big foot' one you mention, are they still manufactured? Or if not does anyone still have them for sale? I checked Amigakit and they have lots of standard ATX for A1 and Pegasos and the plain old brick Amiga PSU, but that's it.

[Marco]

Right, thanks for all the help guys, I should stress I really don't want to tower the 1200, or put it into a fugly PC desktop case, no offense to those who like such things, just not my style; my style being the Commodore 'wedge', looks too cool to ditch that.

I should have realised SD/FF meant scandoubler/flicker-fixer, was thrown off by the company name in front, yes I'll definetly be getting an external one of those to hook it up to a nice monitor, I think for acceleration a 1260 will have to do, I don't want to start taking out the floppy drive and having hassle with air-flow and cooling, like I said in my first post, I want the thing to run reliably. What would I need to add for SCSI? I've seen a SCSI adaptor on Amigakit, a blizzard one, 1230-IV I think it was called.

Oh and one completely unrelated question: does anyone know if it might be possible to connect an A1200's internal keyboard, to standard PC? You see, Eventually I want to get one of those tiny mini-itx boards and put it inside a 1200 case, I've seen similar mods that put one inside a SNES, a C64, a Commodore PET, a C1541 external floppy drive and various other retro computers/consoles so it'd certainly fit inside a 1200 case, but if it's not possible to use the keyboard, it makes the whole idea kinda pointless. If it is possible then such a computer would be great for Linux with UAE and maybe also AROS.