Ok... rough, short and ugly translation for this cool A1200-mod found in
http://batman.jypoly.fi/~saku/lehti/online/uusi/osastot/sekalaiset/eriamiga.html.
1. A1200 & Blizzard 1230-IV are about 41cm long combination, so normal 42cm wide case should be enough. Other minimum measures were height 9cm and depth about 35cm. After long search, old DUX-vcr was found with right measures.
2. DUX was cleaned from useless junk - inside electronics, and buttons and other adjusters from front panel were removed. Amiga was dissassembled too to measure and fit everything to new home. Lyra kb-adapter was bought, as well as two 90-degree PCMCIA adapter. Two adapter were required to fit networkcard inside the case. Lyra was needed because he wanted to play some old games that needed multiple keypresses at the same time, and Lyra allows that (My note: maybe you could buy some old used black IR-keyboard/mouse combination, and use it with Lyra and Mroocheck?).
3. He wanted to use S-Video instead of RGB and/or composite, because composite isn't very good, and only RGB-connect on his TV was used by DVD. So conversion to S-Video was required, and he created the output using some old hints for Sega Master System 2 users. He had some problems at first, but those schemes show the right way do this.
4. In the old DUX case following things were required to fit: motherboard, turbocard, harddrive, floppy-drive, additional floppy with controller, cd-rom drive, pcmcia networkcard and powersource. When he put all that stuff inside, it seemed quite tight. He had to took the casing of the powersource. Caution with those big capacitors. Plastic parts of the case were modified with Dremel. Front panel was nearly completely wasted, only borders were left. Backpanel was modified nearly as much. When the case was trimmed down to minimum, it was time to try hw everything fits inside.
He created some racks from aluminium for holding those drives - he planned those by making them first from normal cardboard. Front- and backpanel were too first created by cardboard to help making the final ones from aluminium using Dremel.
Powersource had to be modified - he had to saw heatsink to make it lower.
4. He made new smaller case for powersource from aluminium after discovering the problems it caused without it.
5. He sliced ide and floppy cables to bundle of 10 wires to save some room. Small holes for leds were made to the front panel. Leds weren't connected directy to motherboard, 180ohm resistors were used. New front panel for cd-rom drive was also created from alumiumiun and connected with "hotglue" (as well as many those parts). Fan was connected thru potentiometer, so he can adjust it's speed thru a knob at the back panel. Final touch was made painting everything matte-black, using nice self-made stickers for connectors and logo, and finally making nice hifi-look-a-like stands for it from chrome-tube and some black rubber beneath them.
As I said, this translation is quite messy comparing to that finely writted original article by Tero Siironen.
-q
