Amiga 1200 in rack has arrived

[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

[tasmanian guy]

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

Yep he sold that one to me on ebay for $60AUD, sure it is going to cost a little bit to spec it up (as in there is no keyboard, mouse, etc) but I think it is worth it for the form factor.
 
I believe Con, from Olin communications said the 1U cases were manufactured overseas but couldn't say where.

[tasmanian guy]

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

Hmm the drive is a teac one, I'm sure there are mods online for it though for the disk change, not that it will matter once the compact flash card arrives.
 
Still waiting to hear back about an Amiga 1230 accelerator card ideally after a 50mhz one with at least 16 to 128mb ram.

[kolla]

I also have an A1200 mounted in a rack, and I'm about to redo it using some nice shallow (25cm) racks from supermicro that have all ioport on the front. I'm using two pcmcia angle adapters to have the PCMCIA ethernet card inside the case, ideally I would want to replace that with one cable based, bendable adapter, but I suspect I have to build that myself.

[johnklos]

Hmm the drive is a teac one, I'm sure there are mods online for it though for the disk change, not that it will matter once the compact flash card arrives.
 
Still waiting to hear back about an Amiga 1230 accelerator card ideally after a 50mhz one with at least 16 to 128mb ram.

Back in the day, I used to use a common PC floppy drive, too. I wired the reset button of the case I was using to simulate a diskchange. Since I never used floppies all that often, it worked perfectly for me, and the nice thing is that if the drive ever dies, you can get another brand new from Newegg for $8 (or cheaper from lots of other places).

[johnklos]

I also have an A1200 mounted in a rack, and I'm about to redo it using some nice shallow (25cm) racks from supermicro that have all ioport on the front. I'm using two pcmcia angle adapters to have the PCMCIA ethernet card inside the case, ideally I would want to replace that with one cable based, bendable adapter, but I suspect I have to build that myself.

kolla: You and I have to talk. First, it's nice to know that there's lots of love out there for rackmount A1200s... For a long time, I thought I was the only one. Nice job!

Second, I'm a NetBSD geek, but I'm in the process of trying to help m68k/Debian get updated so that there can possibly be a Debian/squeeze release soon. Perhaps some of the work in Gentoo can help get Debian up to speed...

[kolla]

kolla: You and I have to talk. First, it's nice to know that there's lots of love out there for rackmount A1200s... For a long time, I thought I was the only one. Nice job!

Thanks

Second, I'm a NetBSD geek, but I'm in the process of trying to help m68k/Debian get updated so that there can possibly be a Debian/squeeze release soon. Perhaps some of the work in Gentoo can help get Debian up to speed...

Aha, I have a couple of colleagues who are involved with NetBSD, and they sometimes try to lure me over to their side.

My gentoo/m68k effort is quite a personal one. I needed a system that  could help me build the software I wanted with the features I wanted. Binary distributions simply dont give me that flexibility, Gentoo with its USE-flags and package masking does - I have to build everything myself, but that's ok, Aranym is of great help. I also find the Gentoo developer team quite a helpfull bunch, many of them are also embedded developers and adding m68k as a platform in portage happened after just some chatting over IRC.

I do follow Debian/m68k too, both mailing list and IRC, so that I have an idea on what's going on. I think the biggest problem with Debian and m68k is that Debian is too big and m68k too small, both as a community and in sheer compilation power. I think it would be better to treat m68k as an embedded platform and move over to Emdebian instead of going for a full fledged distro as squeeze. In my view, m68k systems have much more in common with the embedded platforms than they do with todays PCs for example.

My big hope for 2010 is that we will finally get updated glibc (or eglibc) with NPTL. I'm still on old glibc-2.3.6, I know Debian somehow managed to get as far as 2.5, but I never got that compiled here. :hammer:

[tasmanian guy]

Okay got a 1200 accelerator card now for around $220AUD dollars,  a Blizzard 1230 II Tubo Board" from Phase 5, running at 50mhz with 68030 (with MMU) and 6882 processor running at 50mhz as well with 32mb of ram.
 
A few more bits and pieces to arrive and my 1U rack Amiga will be complete :-)

[johnklos]

A few more bits and pieces to arrive and my 1U rack Amiga will be complete :-)

How about this bit?

http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=564

[tasmanian guy]

How about this bit?
 
http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=564

Ah hell, why didn't someone show me this before! :angry:
 
Hmm I may get one of those later on down the track, very nicely done I might add, I wonders if the three slots cut in my case fits perfectly with that or not? mmmm I must resist! :lol:
 
I ended up making my own as per the screen shots and all up it costed $2.25 from Jaycar (around 1.50 pounds).

[tasmanian guy]

I've now ordered an Amiga keyboard adaptor from amigakit since the one I was bidding on ebay went for $31, and you can get a brand new one for around $40.  Some silly buggers on ebay are paying too much.
 
I've purchased all the Amos stuff I can get my hands on, loved that version of basic.
 
I've also purchased a usb mouse to 9 pin joystick port converter.
 
I'd also like to get my hands on a analogue joystick to 9 pin joystick port converter for the flight sims on the Amiga that support it.
 
I've also got a Blizzard 1230, 50mhz cpu (with mmu), 50mhz fpu with 32 megabytes of ram, coming from the UK.
 
I'm also on the look out for a LCD TV that will do SCART, (very hard to find here in Australia, no luck yet).  Though I've ordered an amigamanaic svhs adapter, compact flash card adapter and an ATX power supply converter (in case the A500 gives up the ghost).
 
Can anyone report that an LCD with SCART (or SVHS) gets rid of the flicker in interlace modes?
 
Anything else I may need, except for maybe a new mortgage :-)

[rkauer]

Analog joysticks uses the Amiga serial port, not the proprietary Amiga DB9 joy port.

[tasmanian guy]

Analog joysticks uses the Amiga serial port, not the proprietary Amiga DB9 joy port.

Not according to this site (yes I am after an adapter).
 
http://www1.uk.freebsd.org/docs/rview/DPAnalogJoysti.txt
 
Does anyone know where you can purchase one?
 
Found amigakit sells one, will get one from there eventually :-)

[whiteb]

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

Well, think of it this way.

PAL/NTSC is just a TV or display standard.  The CPU/RAM has nothing to do with the display system of the Amiga.

so what SAVE said, is correct, you can 100% be safely confident that any system expansion will work on either NTSC/PAL systems without problems.

It is Display areas where PAL/NTSC comes in to play, or Power related with 110V or 220V.

[DavidF215]

I've purchased all the Amos stuff I can get my hands on, loved that version of basic.

I ended up with BlitzBasic 2. It took me only 3-4 weeks to create an Intellivision Astrosmash clone while I was in college. Amos is good, too.

[tasmanian guy]

I ended up with BlitzBasic 2. It took me only 3-4 weeks to create an Intellivision Astrosmash clone while I was in college. Amos is good, too.

Yeah well Blitz Basic 2 looked a bit more complicated, more C based than Basic based when I first looked at it all those years ago.
 
I've got the Amos Professional Manual, application supplement, Amos the Creator, Amos 3D but no Amos compiler yet.
 
Need to find a copy of Deluxe Paint V from somewhere, can't find it anywhere.  Another great program oh and Vista Pro, that was fantastic, I remember doing a video animation in TAFE of the Mars Mon Olympus with that and playing it on a TV, the teacher was amazed that I could generate such graphics on a home computer.