Amiga 1200 in rack has arrived

[save2600]

Does a 1230 accelerator card purchased in the United States work on Aussie (PAL) Amiga's?

Yes. No reason it shouldn't or wouldn't. We'd all be up shits creek without a paddle if we couldn't purchase things like that without worrying about video or power supply standards.

[tasmanian guy]

Thanks for that save2600, a 1230 Amiga accelerator 68030 it is (next pay).

[marcfrick2112]

tasmanian guy: First, good for you, you lucky !#@$@%^*!?! Second, as Save2600 pointed out, you should be able to use most any accel. regardless of where it was made. My fantastic German-made 1260 and 12xx SCSI module will vouch for this
As for the LED's, in my experience, it's not a big deal. I don't know the voltage, but I had a burned-out LED in an A4000T, I just grabbed the first LED I found, worked fine... even a nifty blue LED worked fine.... (check the polarity, tho...) Ah, so I'd guess the voltage is ~4.5V..., the amperage is prob. about 35-40ma.

[tasmanian guy]

tasmanian guy: First, good for you, you lucky !#@$@%^*!?! Second, as Save2600 pointed out, you should be able to use most any accel. regardless of where it was made. My fantastic German-made 1260 and 12xx SCSI module will vouch for this
As for the LED's, in my experience, it's not a big deal. I don't know the voltage, but I had a burned-out LED in an A4000T, I just grabbed the first LED I found, worked fine... even a nifty blue LED worked fine.... (check the polarity, tho...) Ah, so I'd guess the voltage is ~4.5V..., the amperage is prob. about 35-40ma.

Thanks for the info, I am just worried which way around the led wires go and if I blow anything up.  I don't really want to kill my Amiga after just receiving it of course.  
 
I've also found it hard to find any rectangle led's that the original Amiga used, I spose I could butcher one from somewhere, or perhaps someone here has got some spare Amiga LED's?
 
I am waiting to hear back from the dealer about the 1230 to see if it still available or not, it looks like they had not updated their Amiga stock for a year or so.

[marcfrick2112]

Thanks for the info, I am just worried which way around the led wires go and if I blow anything up.  I don't really want to kill my Amiga after just receiving it of course.  
 
I've also found it hard to find any rectangle led's that the original Amiga used, I spose I could butcher one from somewhere, or perhaps someone here has got some spare Amiga LED's?
 
I am waiting to hear back from the dealer about the 1230 to see if it still available or not, it looks like they had not updated their Amiga stock for a year or so.

Hey, I was a little vague in my last post. You can't mess anything up on your Amiga if the LED polarity is reversed. I doubt you could even harm the LED itself... I don't have a bare Amiga motherboard here to check ( ) but there might even be a little indication showing where the positive (+) should go... at least there is on my Sega Genesis (oops, sorry, 'Mega Drive') As for the rect. LED's, RadioShack used to have them in thier 'LED Assortment'. Otherwise, check electronics places.. here in the states, I'd check 'All Electronics'....

[tasmanian guy]

Hey, I was a little vague in my last post. You can't mess anything up on your Amiga if the LED polarity is reversed. I doubt you could even harm the LED itself... I don't have a bare Amiga motherboard here to check ( ) but there might even be a little indication showing where the positive (+) should go... at least there is on my Sega Genesis (oops, sorry, 'Mega Drive') As for the rect. LED's, RadioShack used to have them in thier 'LED Assortment'. Otherwise, check electronics places.. here in the states, I'd check 'All Electronics'....

Thanks for that I"ll have a look at Jaycar on the weekend, our electronic stores are going more like commercial (eg not stocking components eg Dick Smith).  My only concern is trying to find rectangle ones like the Amiga, the rackmount case has got the holes for them cut lengthwise.:angry:
 
I also purchased off Amigamaniac his 23pin to SVHS converter, a better compact flash solution and a ATX to Amiga power converter in case the Amiga 500 power supply I have got ever dies.  He is doing a great service to the Amiga community.
 
If anyone has an old Amiga that doesn't work, would they mind salvaging the LED's?  Will pay postage costs and a some extra for your time :-)

[marcfrick2112]

Any 'surplus' electronics stores / websites that you know of? If so, these would be best to find rectangular LED's.

Just did a little Googling....
http://www.goldmine-elec-products.com/products.asp?dept=1233

You'd have to get the dimensions of the LED's, but it's a start...

[gertsy]

Tassie you're hooked bad...
Good luck to you and enjoy...  Hopefully you can keep the missus off your back ... 0-:

[tasmanian guy]

Tassie you're hooked bad...
Good luck to you and enjoy... Hopefully you can keep the missus off your back ... 0-:

Yeah well I don't believe in doing nostalgic trips by halves :-)
 
I'm going to post some pics.  I may have scored lucky cos there is a Teac 3.5" floppy drive model 265 which I believe is a high density drive?  I hope I"m correct.
 
Also I've posted a pic of a CD rom drive I am going to put in (still waiting on the compact flash card from the UK).
 
I hope you guys find it as interesting as I do, the first Amiga 1200 I have ever seen professionally put in a 1U rack.:hammer::banana:
You can see a heatsink has been glued onto one of the AGA chips.
You can also see some modifications been done to the motherboard.
Hope this gives you an idea and I wonder if anyone can still make custom 1U cases for others who want to put their Amiga into a rack.

[tasmanian guy]

Yeah well I don't believe in doing nostalgic trips by halves :-)
 
I'm going to post some pics. I may have scored lucky cos there is a Teac 3.5" floppy drive model 265 which I believe is a high density drive? I hope I"m correct.
 
Also I've posted a pic of a CD rom drive I am going to put in (still waiting on the compact flash card from the UK).
 
I hope you guys find it as interesting as I do, the first Amiga 1200 I have ever seen professionally put in a 1U rack.:hammer::banana:
You can see a heatsink has been glued onto one of the AGA chips.
You can also see some modifications been done to the motherboard.
Hope this gives you an idea and I wonder if anyone can still make custom 1U cases for others who want to put their Amiga into a rack.

bump, so others will know :hammer:

[hardlink]

If anyone has an old Amiga that doesn't work, would they mind salvaging the LED's?  Will pay postage costs and a some extra for your time :-)

I could probably dig up some similar LED's here soon, the 'hamfest' (Amateur Radio Flea Market) season starts in two weeks. But if I walk into a U.S. post office and try to send a letter to Tasmania, I'm not sure they would know how.

[Azryl]

Hiya

I probably built that A1200 in a 19inch rack module

The 19nch "1U" rack modules were custom built for a company called "Movielink" which was based in River St Richmond, Melbourne. They used hundreds >yes I mean hundreds!< of A1200 in these rack units. When I was there they had over six hundred A1200's in use.

Movelink provides in-house-movies for hotels and motels throughout Australia and New Zealand and used up to 6x A1200's installed into cabinets along with modulators, vcr's and head end master modem etc to provide on demand and scheduled movies.

I was employed as their graphic artist/amiga technician during 1996-2000 and the A1200's were used to provide information and navigation pages for the movie system. Most of these pages were short animations all running off 880k floppies.

The A1200 motherboards were all PAL systems usually bought from Analogic in England after local aussie sources like Megatron were depleted.

So the floppy drive you have in the 19inch rack module is just a standard IBM 1.44 floppy with a custom cable I designed to connect to the Amiga. I does NOT provide diskchange signal.. sorry!   But since these machines were only rarely rebooted, ran 24/7 for many years with the floppy contents usually copied into the Ram: device having diskchange wasn't a priority

The A1200 motherboard should have a heat sink on the Lisa custom chip.. heat problems were experienced in the cabinets and the Amiga's suffered from poor ventilation. Random resets and graphic corruption was common until we began to use the heat sink fixed onto Lisa.

Hope that helps
Az

[tasmanian guy]

I could probably dig up some similar LED's here soon, the 'hamfest' (Amateur Radio Flea Market) season starts in two weeks. But if I walk into a U.S. post office and try to send a letter to Tasmania, I'm not sure they would know how.

I'm sure they will :-)  I was over in the US in late 2006 and had to send stuff back from Los Angeles and New York.  It got here safe and sound.
 
If you do find any LED's (or anyone with spare Amiga parts) let me know I am happy to pay for postage and a bit extra to cover for your time through paypal :-)
 
Really want to get this up and running and restored to it's former glory.

[tasmanian guy]

Hiya
 
I probably built that A1200 in a 19inch rack module
 
The 19nch "1U" rack modules were custom built for a company called "Movielink" which was based in River St Richmond, Melbourne. They used hundreds >yes I mean hundreds!< of A1200 in these rack units. When I was there they had over six hundred A1200's in use.
 
Movelink provides in-house-movies for hotels and motels throughout Australia and New Zealand and used up to 6x A1200's installed into cabinets along with modulators, vcr's and head end master modem etc to provide on demand and scheduled movies.
 
I was employed as their graphic artist/amiga technician during 1996-2000 and the A1200's were used to provide information and navigation pages for the movie system. Most of these pages were short animations all running off 880k floppies.
 
The A1200 motherboards were all PAL systems usually bought from Analogic in England after local aussie sources like Megatron were depleted.
 
So the floppy drive you have in the 19inch rack module is just a standard IBM 1.44 floppy with a custom cable I designed to connect to the Amiga. I does NOT provide diskchange signal.. sorry! But since these machines were only rarely rebooted, ran 24/7 for many years with the floppy contents usually copied into the Ram: device having diskchange wasn't a priority
 
The A1200 motherboard should have a heat sink on the Lisa custom chip.. heat problems were experienced in the cabinets and the Amiga's suffered from poor ventilation. Random resets and graphic corruption was common until we began to use the heat sink fixed onto Lisa.
 
Hope that helps
Az

That is fantastic, who would of thought I would meet it's maker.  I assume this is the link to the company http://www.movielink.net.au/
 
Do you know where they sourced the 1u cases from by any chance back then?  Is there anyone that does custom 1u cases now?
 
The disk drive doesn't bother me and I was thinking of taking it out and putting a flash card panel there instead
 
I am surprised that there weren't more of these on ebay if there were hundreds of them, hopefully they all didn't end up as land fill.
 
Yes the Amiga 1200 has a big heat sink on the Lisa chip as shown in the pics.  I am surprised it got so hot, but I suppose running 24/7 like that anything would get hot!
 
Do you know what happened to the LED's in these units, there are spaces for them in the front of the case, but there were none there.
 
Thanks for your insight into the use of my particular Amiga, it provides a piece of history of the Amiga use in commercial applications.

[TheGoose]

Damn.That's even cooler than the G1200!

[tasmanian guy]

Hey Goose, I checked out your efforts, kudos to you.  Be really good if someone could come up with a case that would let us put an Amiga 1200 in a really nice professional case etc.  This is the closest I've personally seen that comes close to being professionally done eg all the port holes are cut out perfectly, motherboard good fit in case, 3.5" floppy drive fits beautifully, pity they didn't have a slot for cd rom but I'll get that cut professionally (hopefully) once I know for sure the compaq cd rom drive is going to work with it.  
 
I personally can't wait for the fpgarcade board to come out, that should be really interesting :-)