Amiga 1200 in rack has arrived

[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 :-)

[J-Golden]

Awesome snag TAZ!

I was looking at the latest pics and wanted to warn you about putting the Accel. in without anything to prop it up.  The mobo looks like it sits really close to the case and the accel. might droop enough to have it rub/short out.  If it is really close, a simple nylon spacer glued to the case (not the accel.) would be all you really needed...

Again, good luck!

[johnklos]

I never knew the Lisa chip got so hot. I suppose the air in that cabinet doesn't circulate because the power supply is external, right? My rackmount A1200 has  a fan in the front directed towards the Blizzard 1260 and one in the power supply in the back, so air moves at least a little.

I thought about trying to find a 1U case into which I could put my A1200 motherboard back in the day - heck, it'd have been a lot easier since I wouldn't have had to replicate the ports - but since it was to make the A1200 colocatable, a PCMCIA ethernet card was necessary. Perhaps you could find a way to redirect the PCMCIA 180 degrees or something like that. It's a nice setup.

[tasmanian guy]

I never knew the Lisa chip got so hot. I suppose the air in that cabinet doesn't circulate because the power supply is external, right? My rackmount A1200 has a fan in the front directed towards the Blizzard 1260 and one in the power supply in the back, so air moves at least a little.
 
I thought about trying to find a 1U case into which I could put my A1200 motherboard back in the day - heck, it'd have been a lot easier since I wouldn't have had to replicate the ports - but since it was to make the A1200 colocatable, a PCMCIA ethernet card was necessary. Perhaps you could find a way to redirect the PCMCIA 180 degrees or something like that. It's a nice setup.

There is a slot out the side for a pcmcia interface (see the pics I posted).  Also to the other user, yeah I know about the accelerator board, I'll be certainly putting a spacer in there, to prop it up to make sure it is all good!  :hammer:

[tasmanian guy]

So with it having an IBM drive, and not having a disk change signal, does that mean if it asks for a different disk, it wont recognise it when I plug it in?
 
** it's funny I've had this Amiga, but can't use it, don't have a mouse, keyboard or any software (yet).  Hopefully next week!
 
I got the Amiga Format Annual Special number 2 from a UK ebay seller, ah the memories take me back over 200 pounds for a 40mb hard drive (and back in those days that would of equaled around 500 dollars Australian).

[TheGoose]

fpgarcade - Yeah all kinds of cool boxes to look into. Well, one thing that I learned making a 2nd g1200 was about the "nibbler". If you have never used one, you will be like wow! The thing chomps away at thin metal like cutting paper, like PacMan. All with a hand tool. And the cuts are nice, square and straight. It was way better than using a Dremel... actually fun to use.

http://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=en&q=nibbler+tool&cid=1947631286468551883&sa=title#p

Enjoy the rack!

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 :-)

[Azryl]

Hiya Guys

We used to shoehorn into that 1U 19inch rack mount the standard A1200 motherboard, 8meg ram expansion, 2.5 to 3.5 IDE interface along with an 100meg internal Iomega ZIP drive replacing the floppy and a standard 3.5inch hard drive of around 150meg capacity.

Oh we also had a reset switch mounted into the front face, this was a simple push button wired to an upside down socket press fit over the keyboard interface.

So it was quite crowded inside!!  What I used to do was place heavy duty fiber tape along the bottom on the inside as an electrical separation barrier from the metal 1U.

The standard 3.5inch IDE hard drive was mounted by drilling the required holes into the bottom of the rack and then tape over the area the drive would be sitting on! Screw from underneath and all could be transported without incident to remote locations all around Australia.

These machines would run SCALA presentations off the hard drive 24/7  and if any updates were needed, insert the 100meg Iomega ZIP disk, reset the machine and a custom startup script I wrote would find that a ZIP was present, copy all the contents of the Iomega into the SCALA directory on the harddrive, eject the Iomega ZIP disk and reboot the A1200... which would then start the SCALA multimedia presentation as normal off the hard drive.

Because some of the multimedia presentations would eventually have memory fragmentation... I had wrote a small machine code interrupt handler that would run behind SCALA and reboot the A1200 every 24 hours. This stopped all customer complaints of dropped pages or missing sounds.

So you CAN get a lot of Amiga stuff installed into the U1 rack case... if you use tape where the memory expansion sits!!

Hope that helps

Az

[stefcep2]

Hiya Guys

We used to shoehorn into that 1U 19inch rack mount the standard A1200 motherboard, 8meg ram expansion, 2.5 to 3.5 IDE interface along with an 100meg internal Iomega ZIP drive replacing the floppy and a standard 3.5inch hard drive of around 150meg capacity.

Oh we also had a reset switch mounted into the front face, this was a simple push button wired to an upside down socket press fit over the keyboard interface.

So it was quite crowded inside!!  What I used to do was place heavy duty fiber tape along the bottom on the inside as an electrical separation barrier from the metal 1U.

The standard 3.5inch IDE hard drive was mounted by drilling the required holes into the bottom of the rack and then tape over the area the drive would be sitting on! Screw from underneath and all could be transported without incident to remote locations all around Australia.

These machines would run SCALA presentations off the hard drive 24/7  and if any updates were needed, insert the 100meg Iomega ZIP disk, reset the machine and a custom startup script I wrote would find that a ZIP was present, copy all the contents of the Iomega into the SCALA directory on the harddrive, eject the Iomega ZIP disk and reboot the A1200... which would then start the SCALA multimedia presentation as normal off the hard drive.

Because some of the multimedia presentations would eventually have memory fragmentation... I had wrote a small machine code interrupt handler that would run behind SCALA and reboot the A1200 every 24 hours. This stopped all customer complaints of dropped pages or missing sounds.

So you CAN get a lot of Amiga stuff installed into the U1 rack case... if you use tape where the memory expansion sits!!

Hope that helps

Az

Fascinating stuff.

Did you also create the Scala presentations for the clients as well?

Who or what type of businesses used theses A1200 Scala set ups.

I remember going into an aged-care facility for work and saw what was an A500 inside a metal box used to run the entire in-house display system to announce all sorts of things-dinner times, menus, tv and cinema sccreenings, in-house professional services, and this would go to all of the tv in the centre.

[DavidF215]

Now it can be mounted in a data center.  Pretty neat, actually. Too bad C= didn't have the idea.

I like the small footprint it has. Personally, I don't like PC towers. Towers are too bulky, take too much room, and have too many wires. I had the A1200 because it was small. Too bad they never put the A1200 into the A500 case; then it could have had a CD drive and other options. An A500 case would be great these days because an LCD monitor could be place atop it and save some extra space. Less wires, too.

[tasmanian guy]

Now it can be mounted in a data center. Pretty neat, actually. Too bad C= didn't have the idea.
 
I like the small footprint it has. Personally, I don't like PC towers. Towers are too bulky, take too much room, and have too many wires. I had the A1200 because it was small. Too bad they never put the A1200 into the A500 case; then it could have had a CD drive and other options. An A500 case would be great these days because an LCD monitor could be place atop it and save some extra space. Less wires, too.

Well here is my solution, I've managed to squeeze 3 led's in the slot.  Check out the pics (it has been a few years since I've picked up the soldering iron but it all works).
 
Even the floppy drive light, can't test the hard drive light until I get the compact flash card.

[recidivist]

That is a fascinating bit-and the  designer coming on forum is great!
In the US the CD32 was put in a case by or for Scala  for similar use.
Wonder how many of these untis just were tossed in the trash once declared obsolete?

[Azryl]

Hiya guys

I did not design the 1U rack.. that was already done by the company when I joined them.. it was professionally designed and made by a fabricator, included all ports in the back to match the A1200 exactly, a pcmcia slot on the side and spaces for the A1200 LED's in the front... although we never got the LED's with the motherboards from Analogic.

The 1U rack screws together very neatly, the motherboard is very secure, it had to be considering we sent units all over Australia and New Zealand. A few were sent as samples to Singapore as well.

Yes I made up the majority or the SCALA multimedia presentations. I used an A4000 Tower as the main graphics system along with an expanded A1200. Both had external scsi Iomega Zip drives for building and copying of the SCALA presentations.

I worked for the company between 1996 - 2000 as the head graphic artist but I also had to help design Amiga to PC transfer of all existing projects because the company was moving away from VCR/Amiga's to using media centers with VCD / DVD playback.

Regarding the diskchange signal for the floppy... I made up a special install disk that had a "diskchange" icon that was run from ram: that we clicked whenever a diskchange was needed to install specialized software onto the harddrives.

I wrote alot of startup and installation scripts.. even a few assembly programs to make all of the different Amiga systems work correctly.. ie... for all pages on all machines to appear on TV screens in the same locations etc. Simple things like that required copying thousands of 880k floppies and sending them out to all of the service technicians within Australia. A big job!!

Az

[tasmanian guy]

Hiya guys
 
I did not design the 1U rack.. that was already done by the company when I joined them.. it was professionally designed and made by a fabricator, included all ports in the back to match the A1200 exactly, a pcmcia slot on the side and spaces for the A1200 LED's in the front... although we never got the LED's with the motherboards from Analogic.
 
The 1U rack screws together very neatly, the motherboard is very secure, it had to be considering we sent units all over Australia and New Zealand. A few were sent as samples to Singapore as well.
 
Yes I made up the majority or the SCALA multimedia presentations. I used an A4000 Tower as the main graphics system along with an expanded A1200. Both had external scsi Iomega Zip drives for building and copying of the SCALA presentations.
 
I worked for the company between 1996 - 2000 as the head graphic artist but I also had to help design Amiga to PC transfer of all existing projects because the company was moving away from VCR/Amiga's to using media centers with VCD / DVD playback.
 
Regarding the diskchange signal for the floppy... I made up a special install disk that had a "diskchange" icon that was run from ram: that we clicked whenever a diskchange was needed to install specialized software onto the harddrives.
 
I wrote alot of startup and installation scripts.. even a few assembly programs to make all of the different Amiga systems work correctly.. ie... for all pages on all machines to appear on TV screens in the same locations etc. Simple things like that required copying thousands of 880k floppies and sending them out to all of the service technicians within Australia. A big job!!
 
Az

Fascinating, and so let me get this straight the Amiga will not know that I have changed the disks when I insert a different disk?  Eg just say I was to play Alien Breed, and it asked for Disk 2, I insert Disk 2, will it work or not?
 
Cheers for the info.

[Azryl]

Yup!

if you replaced the cable and the drive with standard Amiga units.. it will work properly.
As Is...  no diskchange signal is supplied on the cable

You probably can modify the 1.44 panasonic drive to swap the signal to another working wire...   if you can find the mod online

Az

[Duce]

Any idea who was the original supplier of these 1U A 1200 cases?  I'd kill to get my hands on one.

[Azryl]

For the original supplier of the 1U rack system you might be able to get some information from this guy... one of the original technicians who worked at Movielink pty ltd around the time they were introduced.

http://www.olincomms.com/home.html

I believe he sold Tasmanian guy the A1200 on eBay
might know if any more are available??
or which company fabricated them?

Movielink also had some 1U rack modules made for A500's.. tho I only saw a few of those while I was employed there.

hope that helps
Az