Amiga 1200 in rack has arrived

[tasmanian guy]

Hi,
 
I finally got my Amiga 1200 rack.  It turns out it has Kickstart 3.1 (pity I ordered a Workbench 3.0, 4 gig compact flash card for it oh well).
 
I took some pics for you to see.  Looks like a late revision motherboard (but I am not too sure to be honest).
 
I'll have to drill a hole at the back for a ps2 keyboard adaptor and purchase a mouse adaptor that plugs into the 9pin port.
 
I was thinking of getting a SVHS adaptor that Cammy was using for a LCD TV and or projector (does that get rid of the flicker in interlace modes?).
 
I am also hoping to get a 1230 50mhz accelerator card later on next week as well.
 
It all fires up and gives the beautiful purple animation of putting a disk in (have got none to use at the moment to test).

[tasmanian guy]

Would like to wish you lots of fun

Thanks, can anyone point me to where I have to connect LED's and what voltage that is required?
 
Cheers,
 
 
Byron

[tasmanian guy]

Hi,
 
It is securely screwed into the rack, it looks like a very professional job, I'll take some "overview" photos so you can see how it is fitted.
 
The floppy drive looks like a pc drive (escom model?), but it still makes the clicking sound.  There are three holes for the LED's but they were not fitted.  I may buy a proper 1200 as a spare, just in case anything happens to this one.  The guy I bought it off said the cases were specifically made around 1997 for them and they were used as a video character generator.
 
Thanks for the offer of the workbench 3.1 disks too, to upgrade workbench do I require  to do a complete format and reinstall or will it update over the top as I don't want to lose the 2000 whload games that have been installed on the compact flash (which probably wont arrive till next week).

[tasmanian guy]

Does a 1230 accelerator card purchased in the United States work on Aussie (PAL) Amiga's?

[tasmanian guy]

Thanks for that save2600, a 1230 Amiga accelerator 68030 it is (next pay).

[tasmanian guy]

tasmanian guy: First, good for you, you lucky !#@$@%^*!?! Second, as Save2600 pointed out, you should be able to use most any accel. regardless of where it was made. My fantastic German-made 1260 and 12xx SCSI module will vouch for this
As for the LED's, in my experience, it's not a big deal. I don't know the voltage, but I had a burned-out LED in an A4000T, I just grabbed the first LED I found, worked fine... even a nifty blue LED worked fine.... (check the polarity, tho...) Ah, so I'd guess the voltage is ~4.5V..., the amperage is prob. about 35-40ma.

Thanks for the info, I am just worried which way around the led wires go and if I blow anything up.  I don't really want to kill my Amiga after just receiving it of course.  
 
I've also found it hard to find any rectangle led's that the original Amiga used, I spose I could butcher one from somewhere, or perhaps someone here has got some spare Amiga LED's?
 
I am waiting to hear back from the dealer about the 1230 to see if it still available or not, it looks like they had not updated their Amiga stock for a year or so.

[tasmanian guy]

Hey, I was a little vague in my last post. You can't mess anything up on your Amiga if the LED polarity is reversed. I doubt you could even harm the LED itself... I don't have a bare Amiga motherboard here to check ( ) but there might even be a little indication showing where the positive (+) should go... at least there is on my Sega Genesis (oops, sorry, 'Mega Drive') As for the rect. LED's, RadioShack used to have them in thier 'LED Assortment'. Otherwise, check electronics places.. here in the states, I'd check 'All Electronics'....

Thanks for that I"ll have a look at Jaycar on the weekend, our electronic stores are going more like commercial (eg not stocking components eg Dick Smith).  My only concern is trying to find rectangle ones like the Amiga, the rackmount case has got the holes for them cut lengthwise.:angry:
 
I also purchased off Amigamaniac his 23pin to SVHS converter, a better compact flash solution and a ATX to Amiga power converter in case the Amiga 500 power supply I have got ever dies.  He is doing a great service to the Amiga community.
 
If anyone has an old Amiga that doesn't work, would they mind salvaging the LED's?  Will pay postage costs and a some extra for your time :-)

[tasmanian guy]

Tassie you're hooked bad...
Good luck to you and enjoy... Hopefully you can keep the missus off your back ... 0-:

Yeah well I don't believe in doing nostalgic trips by halves :-)
 
I'm going to post some pics.  I may have scored lucky cos there is a Teac 3.5" floppy drive model 265 which I believe is a high density drive?  I hope I"m correct.
 
Also I've posted a pic of a CD rom drive I am going to put in (still waiting on the compact flash card from the UK).
 
I hope you guys find it as interesting as I do, the first Amiga 1200 I have ever seen professionally put in a 1U rack.:hammer::banana:
You can see a heatsink has been glued onto one of the AGA chips.
You can also see some modifications been done to the motherboard.
Hope this gives you an idea and I wonder if anyone can still make custom 1U cases for others who want to put their Amiga into a rack.

[tasmanian guy]

Yeah well I don't believe in doing nostalgic trips by halves :-)
 
I'm going to post some pics. I may have scored lucky cos there is a Teac 3.5" floppy drive model 265 which I believe is a high density drive? I hope I"m correct.
 
Also I've posted a pic of a CD rom drive I am going to put in (still waiting on the compact flash card from the UK).
 
I hope you guys find it as interesting as I do, the first Amiga 1200 I have ever seen professionally put in a 1U rack.:hammer::banana:
You can see a heatsink has been glued onto one of the AGA chips.
You can also see some modifications been done to the motherboard.
Hope this gives you an idea and I wonder if anyone can still make custom 1U cases for others who want to put their Amiga into a rack.

bump, so others will know :hammer:

[tasmanian guy]

I could probably dig up some similar LED's here soon, the 'hamfest' (Amateur Radio Flea Market) season starts in two weeks. But if I walk into a U.S. post office and try to send a letter to Tasmania, I'm not sure they would know how.

I'm sure they will :-)  I was over in the US in late 2006 and had to send stuff back from Los Angeles and New York.  It got here safe and sound.
 
If you do find any LED's (or anyone with spare Amiga parts) let me know I am happy to pay for postage and a bit extra to cover for your time through paypal :-)
 
Really want to get this up and running and restored to it's former glory.

[tasmanian guy]

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

That is fantastic, who would of thought I would meet it's maker.  I assume this is the link to the company http://www.movielink.net.au/
 
Do you know where they sourced the 1u cases from by any chance back then?  Is there anyone that does custom 1u cases now?
 
The disk drive doesn't bother me and I was thinking of taking it out and putting a flash card panel there instead
 
I am surprised that there weren't more of these on ebay if there were hundreds of them, hopefully they all didn't end up as land fill.
 
Yes the Amiga 1200 has a big heat sink on the Lisa chip as shown in the pics.  I am surprised it got so hot, but I suppose running 24/7 like that anything would get hot!
 
Do you know what happened to the LED's in these units, there are spaces for them in the front of the case, but there were none there.
 
Thanks for your insight into the use of my particular Amiga, it provides a piece of history of the Amiga use in commercial applications.

[tasmanian guy]

Hey Goose, I checked out your efforts, kudos to you.  Be really good if someone could come up with a case that would let us put an Amiga 1200 in a really nice professional case etc.  This is the closest I've personally seen that comes close to being professionally done eg all the port holes are cut out perfectly, motherboard good fit in case, 3.5" floppy drive fits beautifully, pity they didn't have a slot for cd rom but I'll get that cut professionally (hopefully) once I know for sure the compaq cd rom drive is going to work with it.  
 
I personally can't wait for the fpgarcade board to come out, that should be really interesting :-)

[tasmanian guy]

I never knew the Lisa chip got so hot. I suppose the air in that cabinet doesn't circulate because the power supply is external, right? My rackmount A1200 has a fan in the front directed towards the Blizzard 1260 and one in the power supply in the back, so air moves at least a little.
 
I thought about trying to find a 1U case into which I could put my A1200 motherboard back in the day - heck, it'd have been a lot easier since I wouldn't have had to replicate the ports - but since it was to make the A1200 colocatable, a PCMCIA ethernet card was necessary. Perhaps you could find a way to redirect the PCMCIA 180 degrees or something like that. It's a nice setup.

There is a slot out the side for a pcmcia interface (see the pics I posted).  Also to the other user, yeah I know about the accelerator board, I'll be certainly putting a spacer in there, to prop it up to make sure it is all good!  :hammer:

[tasmanian guy]

So with it having an IBM drive, and not having a disk change signal, does that mean if it asks for a different disk, it wont recognise it when I plug it in?
 
** it's funny I've had this Amiga, but can't use it, don't have a mouse, keyboard or any software (yet).  Hopefully next week!
 
I got the Amiga Format Annual Special number 2 from a UK ebay seller, ah the memories take me back over 200 pounds for a 40mb hard drive (and back in those days that would of equaled around 500 dollars Australian).

[tasmanian guy]

Now it can be mounted in a data center. Pretty neat, actually. Too bad C= didn't have the idea.
 
I like the small footprint it has. Personally, I don't like PC towers. Towers are too bulky, take too much room, and have too many wires. I had the A1200 because it was small. Too bad they never put the A1200 into the A500 case; then it could have had a CD drive and other options. An A500 case would be great these days because an LCD monitor could be place atop it and save some extra space. Less wires, too.

Well here is my solution, I've managed to squeeze 3 led's in the slot.  Check out the pics (it has been a few years since I've picked up the soldering iron but it all works).
 
Even the floppy drive light, can't test the hard drive light until I get the compact flash card.