Sun 19 Oct 2008
Yes, this is what my teaser from the previous post is going to become. Yesterday I picked up a very nice Gift Tower System for the Amiga from Amigaz.
It is an excellent Amiga 1200 tower and must be quite rare since not much information about the tower is available on the net.
IMHO nothing beats the looks of the first generation MicroniK A1200 steel tower with the hinged door over the drive bays, but I have to admit that this Gift tower looks totally awesome with three external 3.5” drive bays and three external 5.25” drive bays and a nice calm front without overexposed cooling vents.
Office gray rules!
Inside it there is lots of space for bus-board expansion and Zorro boards and there are even two neat holders for the turbo-board.
If you get the opportunity to purchase this Polish made A1200 tower called the Gift tower system I highly recommend you to do so.
Let us leave this mind-blowing Amiga tower and focus on the hardware instead. Yes, I am going to run four floppy drives in this Amiga.
-No, you do not need more than one floppy!
-No you do not even need a floppy anymore on the Amiga. But it could be nice to have one or two around 
One DVD-rw is going in the 5.25” unit while the empty 5.25” unit is probably going to hold a control panel for an internal Sound Enhancer and some other devices
Going into the tower we are going to find a basic A1200 motherboard, Indivision scandoubler off course. A MicroniK 6860 Zorro 2 bus-board, an Ariadne network card and a PCMCIA 90 degree extender with a Netgear 16-bit WIFI card.
I have not decide if I should run the Melody 1200 Pro or the Toccata 16-bit Zorro 2 soundcard in the tower.
I have had a spare BlizzardPPC card in my drawer for close to a year now and it is going to power the motherboard together with a BVision graphics card.
Switching between native- and RTG-graphics modes is going to be handled with an Eyetech Bmon monitor switch. I am actually going to show off the Bmon setup in a future blog post.
The Bmon product family is probably one of the most confusing Amiga hardware I have owned (I remember I had a hard time just understanding the review of these monitor switches in Amiga Format since originally there where a couple of different variants each offering slightly different functionality).