Vintage Amiga Hardware Blog

I am selling some Amiga hardware parts on AmiBay.

Amibay for you who have not heard about it is a site where you can sell and buy used parts for Amiga and other hobby computers for free.
On to the parts for sale:

PCMCIA right angled adapter for Amiga 1200 and Amiga 600 tower hacks or rack hacks

Amiga 1200 and Amiga 600 can use inexpensive PCMCIA-network cards (not all supported though) together with the correct drivers from Aminet and PCMCIA/compact flash adapters.

Usually the PCMCIA slot on the A1200 abd A600 gets blocked when mounted in a tower case or rack case. I have seen really creative solutions for this problem, the best one is the one where the tower was placed on bricks and rectangular hole was made at the bottom of the case. Yes, they say Amiga users are creative, must be some truth to that one.

Anyway, if you do not want to place your Amiga tower on bricks or hacking ugly slots in your tower case (hey, why should not your 1.5 meter tower house a tiny PCMCIA network card?) you will need a 90 degree adapter for the PCMCIA port so you can use cheap ethernet or Wifi on the Amiga.

Eyetech BMON/SMON Video Switcher for the Amiga

This one is strictly for those who know what it is, once upon a time in the Amiga-west there was a company known for making all kinds of crazy stuff for Amiga, I really have to give credit to Eyetech because they really tried hard to come up with solutions to all the problems Amiga had.

For example:

Amiga dude: “I want to add Zorro graphics board to my Amiga 1200 desktop and I only want one Zorro slot and I do not want to hack it into a tower”.
Eyetech  guy:–“No problem, we can fix it, we have an external one-slot Zorro solution for the A1200”.

Amiga dude: “I want to towerize my precious A1200 but for some kind of crazy reason I would really, really like to keep the bottom half of my A1200 case in the tower”.
Eyetech  guy: “–No problem, just zip tie the entire bottom half of your A1200 including motherboard to our big tower”.

Amiga dude: “I wanna hack together an Amiga and a PC in the same tower, then I want to switch between them with a switch so I can use one monitor and one set of keyboard and mouse for both my kick-ass Amiga and my Winblows82 computar”.
Eyetech  guy: “–No problem we have a solution.. .”

 etc etc.. you get the point I think.
 
Anyways, one of the more useful products they sold back in the day was the BMON system. The BMON system is famous for its modular concept, you see, there is also an AMON, and I think a CMON, let us not forget the SMON. 

It was a set of devices (with boring but funny names) with which you could switch between graphics output from the RTG card and from the AGA (aka the GPU of the Amiga).

So this is how it works: You connect the internal scandoubler (a DCE internal Scandoubler/Flickerfixer or any other scandoubler with your homemade cable) to the BMON/SMON, you also connect output from CyberVisionPPC/BlizzardVision to the BMON/SMON. Then a third hardware device enter the scene, the Eyetech B-Mon/C-Mon/S-Mon/A-mon-manual switch, which is nothing more than a fancy switch mounted on a circuit board. Flip the switch and you get AGA output from the scandubler to your monitor, flip the switch again and you get output from the RTG-card on your monitor. Wow, no need to keep a 1084 monitor anymore when you want to play Speedball 2.

If you did not like to switch manually you could mount the A-something, and the switching would happen automatically. Or if you had an A1200 you could mount the A4000 KB-adapter which would let you switch between AGA/RTG with the wildstar button on the keyboard (*), I actually have this one but it is not for sale yet. The A4000 keyboard adapter is slightly amusing because it also has pinout for a reset button and the fact that the pinouts for a mini-DIN connector for a genuine Amiga 4000 keyboard is not soldered to the little device. Maybe it will work with A4000 keyboards if you solder it in yourself, or maybe it will blow your house up. Life is full of exciting choices.

So here is the reason why it is strictly for those who knows what it is, (because  I know I just confused you by my explanation above), this is only the BMON/SMON-module, there is no switch, there are no cables, so you need to know what you have in order to be happy about it. If you need the full package, you can find it here, but then you would have little use for this.

In theory you should be able to build the switch yourself, but you will need another switch to see how it is built I think.

MicroniK PC-keyboard adapter and power adapter for Infinitiv tower case

MicroniK have made quite a lot of cool stuff for the Amiga, they are best known for their line of flimsy plastic Amiga towers back in the late nineties but they did produce a lot more stuff than just that good looking (flimsy) modular tower.

Because there where more than one Amiga 1200 tower made by them during the time MicroniK was active in the Amiga market I am unsure which of their towers this part fits in.

I guess it is the plastic Infinitiv tower, but I might be wrong. So instead let us discuss what it is in detail so I can confuse you even more and find a buyer in the nische market of Amiga users who are creative and either owns an Infinitiv tower without this part or think he can hack together a better tower and would need this part.

First, this is a keyboard adapter. I am 99% sure it is a PC-keyboard adapter but is compatible with Amiga 4000 keyboards too since it has a mini-DIN connector on the back. The flat ribbon cable is attached to the A1200 motherboard instead of the original keyboard.

PC-keyboard adapters for the Amiga 1200 usually does not look like this one so why is it so tall and big?

Well it is also where the power cable from the PSU is attached, then power is routed to the end of the circuit board into a plug that plugs into the A1200 power connector.

In a perfect world this would be plug and play with old style AT-power supplies, but it is not since MicroniK had their own standard on the power plug of their power supplies. This is not a huge problem since an adapter could easily be made, but you will need to know the pinouts from the MicroniK PSU otherwise you will fry this adapter.

Sunrize Industries AD516 16-bit Zorro 2 Amiga soundcard

And finally, I am offering for sale my trusty AD516 16-bit soundcard made by SunRize Industries. This is actually a real classic in the Amiga world mostly used in professional environments such as video editing back when the Amiga crushed all competitiors in that market. 

As we all know, the “professional” stuff from the Amiga world never really became that useful to own now that classic Amiga is not the major force it once was (woops, I can already hear people mailing me “My A1200 030 is faster than my quadcore blablabla”, sorry guys ).

I mean, a V-lab Motion is a nice piece of hardware, but I would not want to use one to convert my VHS-tapes to Mpeg with one these days.

But the AD516 is still useful in these days since it has got AHI support which means you can use it in any application supporting AHI such as games or MP3 players (yeah, before you post reply and complain you can play MP3 on PC better, do not do it, Amiga is best at playing MP3 files ).

This is actually the second AD516 I have owned. I got the first one in 1998 or 1999 together with an A3000 IIRC and had absolutely no use for it what so ever because there was no AHI support for it then.

I even mailed Martin Blom (the author of AHI)in a desperate attempt to find a solution to the problem and offered my AD516 for loan during development, unfortunately he did not have any time for it, so I eventually sold it without knowing it was still a pricey card even without AHI support.

If you are interested in the above, get in contact with me on AmiBay and let the EuroDollars switch hands…

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