A1200 into an A500 case

[Photon]

Agree with Jope. Or at least, I gave conductive paint a try on my A600 keyboard, and it was unreliable. In that case, I solved the problem (chafed off copper strip ends) by cutting 1cm off the ribbon and removing 1cm plastic.

It's not so hard to do Jope's keyboard circuit mod, that's essentially why I gave this A1700 idea a go in the first place!

And if you have a soldering station, it's pretty easy to get some thin wires on the keyboard chip and connect them to an 8 pin connector which just plugs into the A500 keyboard connector.

For me, the only problems were

1) case bottom sagging after dremeling it (RF shield risers etc) flush. Solution: an extra rubber foot on the underside.

2) I wanted my Apollo 1260 to have the full 64MB of RAM, which made its tilted 32MB SIMM hit the keyboard. It must not touch the SIMM. Impossible to solve. My "solution" was to put spacers to lift the keyboard, and pretend there isn't a tiny gap between case halves on the side.

Eternal truth: "All hardware mods are smooth sailing until you try to close the case." :p

[Photon]

Hardly. A500 cases are almost always more yellowed than A1200 cases, and both A1200 mobos and cases can be bought in as-new condition on amigakit.com. So

In my case, I could finally fit the full 64MB of my 68060 card and put it inside a case. Part of the decision was also to get rid of the n-key rollover limitation/bug of the A1200 keyboard/controller. (I type very fast, so it irritated me all the time.)

You can fit more, like a bigger, quieter fan if you have an accelerator. It's mainly a novelty mod, but for me it allowed me to put everything I wanted inside an all-in-one demoparty computer.