Sunday, May 30, 2010

Retr0brighting a spare A1200 case

I had successful results some time ago trying to Retr0bright an A500 PSU and an A600 case. This time I made the mixture better and since the sun these last days is too great here in Greece. I thought of taking advantage of it for my spare A1200 case.

Just for information, I got the external casing + keyboard from eBay. OFC I knew it would be in sh*ty condition but didn't care much since it was for spare A1200 and most of all - because I had plans of Retr0brightin' it

OK here are the tools of teh whitening:




And here is after some Retr0bright application to the case + keyboard @ my balcony.




Only after 5 hours of letting my Amiga in the sun... the results where stunning! (I removed it prior to the recommended 8hours since I saw that the results were good).
The results that follow are from 3 stages in before and after:


- 1st Stage (As received from eBay seller)





- 2nd Stage (After cleaning it thoroughly with lotsa water and cleaning fluid)




- 3rd Stage (After 5h in the sun with application of Retr0bright)



Lookin' Good aye? For the NO believers, you can clearly see that this is the Amiga I used on Before and After, seeing the keyboard that has some flaws in some keys (like "R", "T" and "I")


Merlin, you da man!

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

A600: Power connectors + Subway/HxC mounting

Tonight I tried to make some boring but totally required mod that I also made in my Desktop A1200 PPC. Power connectors (via screw) to be able to mount whatever fan/power header for Apollo/blah blah is needed.



Next to it, I mounted the Subway USB (you can see one small mini PCB underneath that holds it better.



Last but not least I mounted firmly the HxC SD Floppy Emulator in such way, being able to insert/remove the SD card as a Floppy Disk.




Nice huh?

OK some panoramic photos as always:



Just before I close this update, 2 more pics from the HxC in use (along with my custom LCD (+future buttons) extension as I try some "Shadow of the Beast 2"




Waiting my Apollo to arrive from Sweden after the upgrade... then more photos will take place

Friday, May 21, 2010

A600: PicoPSU via Ian's ATX adapter mounting + more

Ok, one more update since I had a little time these days (after work ofc)

First of all I wanna thank Ian for the wonderful ATX adapters of his. I had some timing issues with my A1200's adapter so he made some modifications and also a prototype with an angled adapter so I got both and apart from working PERFECTLY in my A1200 now... the A600 prototype is very sexy for my needs! Cheers again man.



While waiting the adapters to arrive, my good friend Keropi offered to make me an Inox backplate for hosting PicoPSU's power plug (instead of the classic Amiga power connector).



After some desoldering of the origiinal power connector... the result was perfect



Time for mounting Ian's proto adapter... Well since I didn't want an internal CD, I figured the best position would be the one that most slim internal CD mods reside. Added some spacers underneath for holding the adapter+pico together and some straps to hold the cables intact






Of course I also made the cabling + header for the Power switch (that for now I haven't decided where to put it best).




I was so glad that everything worked like a charm upon booting Then again, I have made the same procedure in my beloved A1200 without issues and with a more hardware heavy environment.

One thing I haven't mentioned is that I have ordered an HxC SD Floppy Emulator device from Lotharek. It arrived some days ago and looks and works just fine (except some minor disk change incidents that I'm trying to settle).



The bad thing with this adapter (as it comes) is that it doesn't have a header for mounting the LCD Display + Buttons externaly. (In my case since I'm gonna install it inside A600 - in Floppy drive's position - I wanted the LCD+buttons somewhere else).
Of course the header place exists along with the signals so I just soldered the header myself.



Jeff's Manual clearly states the signals for making your own mods for external panel, but just for safety, I made a continuity test with my multimeter to the embedded LCD header plus buttons and I made my own extension




And yep... It works like a charm (sorry for not putting a pic - I forgot lol)
Button signals will be putted in the female header once I figure where I'm gonna put the panel + buttons in A600's case.


That's all for now... stay tuned for more soon

Sunday, May 16, 2010

A1200: Debian PPC installed.

At last I managed to also install Gnome in Debian Sarge PPC (had some issues with some packages these days... and Sarge being an old dist, makes repositories searching more troubled)...


Just some pics with the effort (sorry for the quality though).


A1200: Partition schema

I'm making my progress slow but steady
Atm I have also putted DJBase's Clockport Expander that works (I wonder if I could also manage to fit my Delfina in there but will be very hard).

So far I have the following HD's/partition's setup that work like a charm:

BPPC's SCSI --> ACard
CF2IDE with 16GB Transcend 133x CF
- Partition1: DH0 --> OS3.9 (950MB - SFS)
- Partition2: DH1 --> MorphOS PuP 1.4.5 (950MB - SFS)
- Partition3: DH2 --> Work (13GB - SFS)

A1200's IDE --> 4way buffered adapter (soon to be Idefix Express)
All connections only in Primary and none in Secondary. Using 44pin 3way cable (to not have extra wires for powering devices)
PRIMARY MASTER: CF2IDE with 4GB Transcend 133x 4GB CF (might change to bigger soon)
- Partition1: SDH0 --> OS4.0 (950MB - FFS - Since OS4.0 doesn't recognize BPPC SCSI)
- Partition2: SDH1 --> Boot-Linux (50MB - FFS - for future Boot to Linux from Early Startup)
- Partition3: Linux --> Debian Sarge 3.1 APUS (2GB - Ext3)
- Partition4: Swap --> Debian Sarge 3.1 APUS (500MB - Swap)
PRIMARY SLAVE: Slim DVD-RW drive (with JAE to 44pin IDE adapter)

Everything works just fine and of course OS3.9, OS4.0, MOS can access the DVD-RW along with Linux in same chain.

OMG how the hell am I gonna stuff all these inside? It's a lot of challenge I know but I hope I will succeed. More soon to come
I'm just so happy the PicoPSU hasn't failed me with all that power hungry beast