Building an Amiga 1200 tower, part 2: mounting motherboard and BlizzardPPC
Part 1: Building an Amiga 1200 tower, part 1: mounting motherboard and BlizzardPPC
So during my X-mas vacation I finally got some time to put in to my A1200T power Amiga build that I oh so optimistically wrote about back in September.
Now, this is not a system I am going to keep since I have not got any space left for more towers at home, once it is finished I am going to auction it off. In Part 1 I mentioned my BPPC and Bvision, but now I am thinking of selling them individually because I can think up 100 things that can go wrong if you ship such a complex setup around the world.
The Amiga 1200 tower hardware:
-A1200 motherboard
-Gift-Top tower
-MicroniK Zorro 2 bus-board
-Swedish made PC-keyboard adapter
-IDEfix
Ah… not so impressive?
Exactly, it is going to be a barebones system, I will let the buyer decide what CPU to run or what graphics board to run (Zorro graphics in Zorro 2 wont be fun though if you want high-resolution with 16-32 bit screens, but fully workable).
I am already thinking of the pitch lines:
“Have you ever dreamed of an Amiga 2000 in a tower, or an Amiga 2000 in a tower with the AGA chipset?”
So what have kept this build on hold?
I mean last post in this series was posted on October 25th 2009, and now it is 31 December.
The pathetic 2.5” 20 cm IDE cable
Guess what…
It was a pathetic 20 cm 2.5” IDE cable that I stupidly ordered from eBay without reading that delivering times of the ordered product could be up to two months! (yes, that is right, 2 months). So finally after two months, this fine little cable showed up, sure it was cheap, but I guess I will pay 10 times more and get it in 2 days instead if I ever would need such a pathetic cable again.
With the pathetic 20 cm 2.5” IDE cable in my hands I was able to mount the IDEfix 4 IDE device buffered interface to the A1200 motherboard. The IDEfix was then hot glued to the bottom of the case, but you can still remove the IDEfix since it attaches with Velcro to the bottom plastic plate hot glued to the case (yes, this is how they are supposed to be mounted in towers).
Once upon a time these buffered IDE interfaces where all the rage with Amiga users, without them you could destroy your Amiga (the ads said). Please, if anyone who have been running more than one 3.5” device of the internal IDE port in an A600 and A1200 have broken your Amiga by doing so, please step forward – you will become instant world famous in the Amiga world (we need celebrities too you know).
The Amiga 880kb DD floppy drive
I did not know if I had a spare floppy drive with faceplate compatible with the Amiga, but sure I did have one in the closet, with just a slightly off tone color compared to the case.
Digging into another box I found a floppy cable from some old PC I threw away years ago. 10 minutes later I was scratching my head, where the f”k do I find a floppy to test?
These days, finding an Amiga compatible floppy is more difficult than finding an Amiga floppy drive IMHO. Sure I had 30 DD disks but none of them worked, until I found that golden disks that you should never loose, the HDtoolbox HD installation Amiga disk. Amazing, the floppy drive worked great.
The Amiga PC-keyboard adapter
I actually did mess around a bit with this project back in November when I got the keyboard adapter for it. It is a Swedish made “PK” something AT-keyboard adapter for DIN-plug keyboards, if you remember PS2 keyboards (no “Mr 15 year old” who grew up with Tekken, I did not mean a “Playstation 2 keyboard”), they had a round small plug. DIN is the same but the plug is bigger, according to universal laws applied in America, anything bigger is better, so I am wondering why this standard disappeared over the years? Any fans in the user base of this blog know the truth, please comment.
The PK Amiga keyboard adapter fits over the square chip to the left of the white keyboard cable slot, at least it should. My KB-adapter did not want to stick to the chip no matter how hard I pressed it.
Yes, I guess you already guessed it – hot glue (the answer to all your vintage computar problems). If I was a bit more professional vintage computer blogger I would probably have sanded down the socket a bit, but since time you have that you can invest in any kind of hobby is reduced to /dev/null when you reach upper twenties or lower thirties corners need to be cut while keeping the higha quality of result.
This nice tower already have a round hole made for a DIN style connector on the back so mounting it to the tower was x-tremely easy. Finding an old DIN-style keyboard was not a problem. I am still not a fan of the Win95 key (nowdays called the “Windows key”) on a keyboard so I stocked up on a couple of old school keyboards with no Windows keys and they typically have the bigger more professional DIN plug.
Part 3: the story continues
I know you are already looking forward to it.
For the third part I am going to mount the MicroniK Zorro 2 bus board in the tower. I will need to solder a power cable for the bus board because it uses its own connector standard and will not take a PC AT-PSU without some work.
See you then 
Update:
And guess what, the MicroniK board was sold, so now it is just the tower case with the motherboard left, still thinking of finish it and sell it off just without the Zorro board. Let us hope some free time will magically arrive at my Amiga underground bunker full to the roof of vintage Amiga hardware and Amiga 3500 prototypes.
