Looking for 2000 case upgrade/configuration ideas (long)

[blanning]

Hello.  I'm getting around to putting my 2000 together finally.  I have several options, but some problems to solve.  So i'd like to hear any ideas that anyone has.

Here's my goal.  Sorry for being so long-winded  I'm trying to build a sort of vintage computer museum for myself and my kids.  One of the fun things about this for me is to find as much strange and unusual hardware and cram it into a single functioning computer... sort of a computing swiss army knife.  So it's interesting for me to have a lot of different types of hardware, even if I might not use it all all of the time.

So I have a 2000 with a gvp 030 board now.  It has two scsi hard drives attached to the gvp board.  I'm in the process of adding a buddha board and catweasel to the machine.  (for my c64 and apple adventures)  For now, I'd like to add an ide cdrom, ide hard drive, and a 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drive.  So you see my problem: not enough space in the case (and probably power supply, i'm hacking an AT PS to address that)

I'd like to add a separate case to the 2000 to house some of the extra drives.  I have a slim desktop case that I've gutted.  I have the two floppies and ide disk in there now.  The new PS probably goes here also.  I also have a 7 bay external scsi case.

In the scsi case, I plan to put a scsi cdrom or dvd drive and any other weird stuff i can find.  A jaz and zip drive definitely.  But maybe a tape drive or an orb drive, or full height scsi disk.  I think someone made a color slide and film negative scanner that fits in a full height bay also.  Anything that looks weird or interesting, or was formerly ridiculously expensive.

I could ditch the slim case and put the floppy drives and ide disk in the scsi case as well.  But it might be cool to have three cases for one machine.  :lol:  And to make things more interesting, I have a second 2000 with an a2091 (?) commodore scsi drive card with a disk mounted on it.

My main problem is ribbon cable length.  Ideally, I'd like to run a ribbon cable from the buddha out of the back of the case, into the back of the slim desktop or scsi case and hook up the ide devices.  The cables aren't long enough though.  I've seen ribbon cable extensions before, but I haven't done a google search for them yet.  I know cable length is also part of the ide and floppy standard so longer cables might cause problems.  Power cables are no problem to extend.  I could probably buy the crimper and make my own ribbon cable extensions.  It might hurt stability.

The best solution would be to cut a hole in the bottom of the desktop case and the top of the 2000 case.  :-o  This would work perfectly.  I'd *really* rather not do this though.  I guess I could pick up an empty 2000 case from somewhere so I wouldn't be butchering a perfectly good 2000.

I could probably also hack a full tower case and drop the bottom half of the 2000 case into that, maybe cut out the entire back of the case.  I know someone made an upgrade tower that did exactly this.  This feels like cheating to me though.  I'd like to keep the 2000 case intact.  I guess I have an expansion chassis fetish.  :lol:

So am I crazy?  Does anyone have any more ideas?

brian

[ZeBeeDee]

I say use Lego for the case a lá Motorollin  :-D

Linky

[blanning]

ZeBeeDee wrote:
I say use Lego for the case a lá Motorollin  :-D

Linky

The funny thing is that something like this is on the agenda.  I was planning to eventually get a 1200 motherboard and parts from somewhere and either make my own case out of plexi or do something with legos.

I'm a long time lego fan with a vast quantity of legos.  A lot of people say they have a lot of legos but I assure you they're amateurs.   :-D   I had a lego based business for a few years where I would drive around the country buying up old sets and to resell them.  In some cases, I would sell them as whole sets if they were rare/valuable.  In other cases, I would part out the sets.  I wrote software that drove a website where people could bid on individual pieces.  The last auction we did had 33,000 lego bricks.  We made a fair amount of money and had 6000 lego bricks left over.  (you'd be amazed at what people don't want.  We have probably over 500 indian horses)  That was just one auction.  Right now, I'd say we have enough bricks to fill a 12'x12' room to a depth of about six inches.  Needless to say, the kids love it.  

So a lego computer case or two has crossed my mind.   :lol:

[ZeBeeDee]

Great minds think alike @ blanning  :-)

Maybe if Moto needs some more bricks he can purloin a few from you? :lol:

@ Moto ... Get in there mate! Plenty of spare lego bricks  :lol:

[blanning]

ZeBeeDee wrote:
Great minds think alike :-)

Maybe if Moto needs some more bricks he can purloin a few from you?   :lol:

ok, but he has to come here and sift through the pile.   :lol: