Towerizing an amiga 2000 motherboard?

[haywirepc]

A friend of mine gave me an old spare amiga 2000 motherboard but he had no power supply or case. I did give me a spare a2000 mouse and keyboard.
 
I am curious if the a2000 mb will fit in a mid-size tower case, or if anyone has towerized their amiga 2000. It may take alot of ebay hunting to find all the parts I'll need (more ram, accellerator, video card and so on)
but I think it would be worth it in time...
 
Anyone else put an amiga 2000 mb in a tower?

I'd apreciate anyone's thoughts or advice before I decide to do this.
 
Thanks,

Steven

[QuikSanz]

A tower on the A2000 is kind of a waste. You cannot expand to PCI and there are plenty of Zorro II slots. I know the footprint is large just stickit on a side table.

Chris

[cv643d]

I was oh so close to go forward with my A2000T project back in 2003.

There are a couple of problems with the A2000,

-The motherboard is HUGE, (did I mention it was huge?). You need a fairly large tower case, and even then you will not be able to use the bottom units for harddrives. Most common, it is to cut a slot in the bottom bays for the motherboard to fit though, or remove the bottom bays all together. You can fit it in a midi tower but it will be tough, and you will waste a lot of 3.5" and 5.25" units. Better find a maxi tower, the older the better and even then expect to loose a couple of bays.

-The video-slot is not aligned with a Zorro-slot, instead it is at the top of the motherboard, ok this problem can be easely solved with an extender or an Indivision ECS, but you should know about it.

Other than those two problems, the A2000 belongs in a tower IMHO, but, but...

....  it is 2009 now and Amiga users can afford to be a bit picky IMHO, with the A2000 you will never have fast graphics, you are stuck with slow Zorro2 graphics (yes, it is slow), even if you go for a low end combo such as A2630 and Picasso2, I have to warn you, it was so slow I just sold the componentes and put the A2000 under the bed.

If you go big with a 060 board and a loaded A2000 system then a tower might be worth it, otherwise, stick with an A1200 IMHO, it will be cheaper.

[haywirepc]

I'm not sure I understand why the video would be too slow if I got a zorro rtg card and an accellerator, wouldn't the video with a rtg card like picasso be as fast an on
an a3000 or a4000?
 
Sorry I just don't understand the difference, I thought zorro slot boards give generally the same performance no matter what the host.
 
I have an OLD full tower 486 case, wow from the 486dx2 66mhz days. The board is blown but the case and ps are huge and looks big enough for the project. The a2000power supply I have fits nicely in the spot for the power supply.
 
Thanks for warning me about the video speed issue, can anyone else confirm this? How would the video speed be with in indievison ecs instead of
a rtg card?
 
I'm kind of hesitant about going ahead with a project like this now. Maybe I should hold out for an a4000 or a3000 motherboard? I see them for sale in working condition occasionally, or if anyone here has one for sale let me know.
 
I guess I'd like to do this so I can slowly build a great amiga system without shelling it all out in one shot. Building it bit by bit would help my pocket alot.
 
Steven

[Tension]

Personally, I would try and get hold of an A1500/A2000/A2500 case and put the mobo in that.  There's really no need to towerise.  Plus the aforementioned Zorro slot alignment problems.

[save2600]

Agreed, towering will be a futile exercise in frustration. Best bet it to find a real Amiga case and be done with it. Failing that, you can just purchase an A2000 for cheap and keep your mobo as a spare.

And yes, a nice accelerator and a nice video card such as the one in my sig are the makes for a really fast A2000 system. Zorro II and all. Having a little experience with MorphOS on an Efika, I can tell you my A2500 setup BLEW it away as far as the Desktop graphics speed and overall snappiness of the system in general. Slight apples to oranges comparison there (as far as the functionality of some of the programs), but I wouldn't be discouraged from exploring and upgrading your A2000...

[Tension]

Also bear in mind that the A2000 will be useless without an accelerator and SCSI card.  Unless you use it for vanilla A500 1987 style games.

[haywirepc]

Well like I said, I had in mind building it bit by bit so It won't hit my pocket like crazy all at once. I put togther a dedicated emulation pc for amiga forever. I thought that would be enough, but somehow, I still want the real thing. Actually I think playing with that just made my lust for a real amiga even worse
 
Emulation is nice but there is nothing quite so smooth a a real one.
The hardware is so expensive and I'm pretty broke as usual so I have to
sort of build one in slow motion. Might take awhile but I think it will be worth the effort.
 
I checked out this old tower I have. Looks like with some case mods it will fit nicely in there, since its an ancient full tower case made for those ancient full size at boards.
 
If anyone has a spare power supply, floppy, floppy cable, keyboard or mouse cheap, let me know. I have a 1084s for now till I get going, then I'd like the indievision scandoubler eventually.
 
Thanks for everyone's thoughts, any other ideas on this type of project, I'm all ears.
 
Steven

[Tension]

You could probably get a complete A2000 for about £150

[trilobyte]

Anyone else put an amiga 2000 mb in a tower?

I'd apreciate anyone's thoughts or advice before I decide to do this.
 

I towerized my A2000 back in '98 with a real Mikronik tower case.  It didn't last long in that case because the case's layout totally interfered with something I had intended to do.  I think it was not physically able to accommodate a Toaster, due to the way the front drive brackets were built up.

One nice thing about towerizing an A2000 is that you can use one power supply for the mobo/zorro, and another for all your drives.  Boy would that be noisy.

I kept that Mikronik tower around for a while but it was freaking HUGE and I ended up tossing it during a move.  I had probably lost some parts to it by then anyway.

- t

[save2600]

Haywire! Where in shitsville do you reside! God (or Wayne)... this should be a pre-requisite for signing up here. Fill out your frickin' profile already! People NEED to know your geography for cryin' out loud...

[J-Golden]

I don't think anyone has mentioned it, but there is also something called a "tick" signal that the A2000 mobo needs.  I ran into this when I tried to do the same thing and hit the wall when I couldn't use the PeeSee tower power supply...

[trilobyte]

I don't think anyone has mentioned it, but there is also something called a "tick" signal that the A200 mobo needs.  I ran into this when I tried to do the same thing and hit the wall when I couldn't use the PeeSee tower power supply...

This site:  http://amigamaniac.com/atx_to_amiga.html  says you can flip a jumper on the mobo to source the tick elsewhere...

- t

[J-Golden]

This site:  http://amigamaniac.com/atx_to_amiga.html  says you can flip a jumper on the mobo to source the tick elsewhere...

- t

My attempt was back in 1998-ish and I remember reading that.  It DOES suppythe tick signal but with some kind of side effects.  Wish I could remember though what it was and where I read it...

*EDIT*

Couldn't find the orig. piece abo. odd Tick counts from J300, but here is a recent thread that brings it up...

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=38939

The first response from Cast. talks abo. the unstedy tick...

[Damion]

I'm not sure I understand why the video would be too slow if I got a zorro rtg card and an accellerator, wouldn't the video with a rtg card like picasso be as fast an on
an a3000 or a4000?

At least here Z2 and Z3 are about equal until the screenmode is greater than 1024x768x16. It's true there's a _lot_ less bandwidth with Zorro 2, so it might depend on how well your accelerator and other cards utilize it. With an '060, SCSI2, and good graphics card, it's not going to feel any different than a similarly equipped Z3 machine, *unless* you pick a large 24/32-bit screenmode (in which case the Z3 computer will simply feel "less slow").

Thanks for warning me about the video speed issue, can anyone else confirm this?

I can say I've ran a lot of benchmarks (including quake) on my A2K and A3K, and found little difference. Games and demos using low-res rtg screens are going to perform the same.