Amiga 1200 in rack has arrived

[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.

[tasmanian guy]

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

Fascinating, and so let me get this straight the Amiga will not know that I have changed the disks when I insert a different disk?  Eg just say I was to play Alien Breed, and it asked for Disk 2, I insert Disk 2, will it work or not?
 
Cheers for the info.

[tasmanian guy]

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

Yep he sold that one to me on ebay for $60AUD, sure it is going to cost a little bit to spec it up (as in there is no keyboard, mouse, etc) but I think it is worth it for the form factor.
 
I believe Con, from Olin communications said the 1U cases were manufactured overseas but couldn't say where.

[tasmanian guy]

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

Hmm the drive is a teac one, I'm sure there are mods online for it though for the disk change, not that it will matter once the compact flash card arrives.
 
Still waiting to hear back about an Amiga 1230 accelerator card ideally after a 50mhz one with at least 16 to 128mb ram.

[tasmanian guy]

Okay got a 1200 accelerator card now for around $220AUD dollars,  a Blizzard 1230 II Tubo Board" from Phase 5, running at 50mhz with 68030 (with MMU) and 6882 processor running at 50mhz as well with 32mb of ram.
 
A few more bits and pieces to arrive and my 1U rack Amiga will be complete :-)

[tasmanian guy]

How about this bit?
 
http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=564

Ah hell, why didn't someone show me this before! :angry:
 
Hmm I may get one of those later on down the track, very nicely done I might add, I wonders if the three slots cut in my case fits perfectly with that or not? mmmm I must resist! :lol:
 
I ended up making my own as per the screen shots and all up it costed $2.25 from Jaycar (around 1.50 pounds).

[tasmanian guy]

I've now ordered an Amiga keyboard adaptor from amigakit since the one I was bidding on ebay went for $31, and you can get a brand new one for around $40.  Some silly buggers on ebay are paying too much.
 
I've purchased all the Amos stuff I can get my hands on, loved that version of basic.
 
I've also purchased a usb mouse to 9 pin joystick port converter.
 
I'd also like to get my hands on a analogue joystick to 9 pin joystick port converter for the flight sims on the Amiga that support it.
 
I've also got a Blizzard 1230, 50mhz cpu (with mmu), 50mhz fpu with 32 megabytes of ram, coming from the UK.
 
I'm also on the look out for a LCD TV that will do SCART, (very hard to find here in Australia, no luck yet).  Though I've ordered an amigamanaic svhs adapter, compact flash card adapter and an ATX power supply converter (in case the A500 gives up the ghost).
 
Can anyone report that an LCD with SCART (or SVHS) gets rid of the flicker in interlace modes?
 
Anything else I may need, except for maybe a new mortgage :-)

[tasmanian guy]

Analog joysticks uses the Amiga serial port, not the proprietary Amiga DB9 joy port.

Not according to this site (yes I am after an adapter).
 
http://www1.uk.freebsd.org/docs/rview/DPAnalogJoysti.txt
 
Does anyone know where you can purchase one?
 
Found amigakit sells one, will get one from there eventually :-)

[tasmanian guy]

I ended up with BlitzBasic 2. It took me only 3-4 weeks to create an Intellivision Astrosmash clone while I was in college. Amos is good, too.

Yeah well Blitz Basic 2 looked a bit more complicated, more C based than Basic based when I first looked at it all those years ago.
 
I've got the Amos Professional Manual, application supplement, Amos the Creator, Amos 3D but no Amos compiler yet.
 
Need to find a copy of Deluxe Paint V from somewhere, can't find it anywhere.  Another great program oh and Vista Pro, that was fantastic, I remember doing a video animation in TAFE of the Mars Mon Olympus with that and playing it on a TV, the teacher was amazed that I could generate such graphics on a home computer.

[tasmanian guy]

I liked the C features of Blitz. Enabled me to use a single array rather than multidimentional arrays to store data. Easier for me to remember a object(1).x than object(1)(1) for variable 'x'.
 
 
I always wanted Vista Pro, but I never got it. It was quite advanced for a personal computer when it was released.

It isa pity that they haven't made some of these programs shareware or even freeware given the age.  Vista Pro was great though it used to take ages to render the scenes on my Amiga 500 with 3 meg of ram!  Be interesting to see what it is like on my Amiga 1200 once the 1230 50mhz accelerator arrives or even WINUAE (it would fly then!).

[tasmanian guy]

I've now got the keyboard ps2 adapter installed (strange it never came with instructions from www.amigakit.com), the Blizzard 1230 50mhz with fpu of 50mhz and a whopping 64 megabytes of ram (seems funny to say that, but for an Amiga that is a lot).
 
I've got the ide 4 port buffer, a 2 meg compact flash card with Workbench 3.1
 
Having issues with whdload to work, it looks like it doesn't like my configuration with error messages about shadow mem and requiring kickstarts.

[tasmanian guy]

But remember the ROM images are not downloadable in a legal manner. Buy AmigaForever CD and you'll have all.

I have the Amigaforever CD that I purchased so I use the rom files in that with the rtb files from skick, don't need to rename them or anything?

[tasmanian guy]

Well finally my usb port adaptor arrived for my mouse, so I plugged in my Microsoft Intellimouse optical, no go, I plugged in an HP usb mouse (with a ball), no go. I send the ebayer a message asking does this adapter work with any particular mouse (on the auction it said any usb mouse)....then I tried my Microsoft basic optical mouse...YES it worked!!!!!
 
Thank God, no more Amiga key and cursor arrows while setting stuff up! I am amassing a game collection and programming collection having purchased Amos 3D, Amos the Creator, Ultimate Amos book, Amos Professional, etc, games I have purchased so far Combat Air Patrol, Falcon, F18, F19 Stealth Fighter, Flight of the Intruder, F29 Retaliator, Knights of the Sky, Battlehawks 1942, Their Finest Hour, all the classics, I was a flight sim junkie with the Amiga (pity the pc started to come out with better sims with their analogue joysticks, shaded skies and ground compared to the Amiga's graphics). I have to get a gamepad for the Amiga and a analogue joystick adapter for the games that make use of it!
 
Looking forward to doing some programming now and some classic gaming!  Thanks to everyone who helped out with this, I'll take some photos soon to show it off.

[tasmanian guy]

Yeah want to see with the goodies attached...

I'd like to thank everyone who has helped with this project!  I have been flat out running my own private business, working full time and assisting mates with their computers (unfortunately IBM clones).  Having said that I have discovered Dark Basic for game programming and can't believe how similar this is to good old Amos!
 
I'll post some photos soon of my whole setup.  I'd like to thank Cammie and Nathan (from Amigamaniac) for providing gear and assistance for my 19" rack Amiga.