Sunday, December 25, 2011

A4000: Mounting Ratte's Auto switch & Buffing Grex

Hi my friends,

Today despite going out for presents and enjoying the day with friends, I decided since I stayed home @ night to tinker my lovely Amiga.
Having some more extra time tonight was really nice and it was time to permanently attach Ratte's Auto AGA/RTG switch and fill the extra PCI sockets of my Grex :D

Checking the space and ribbons, I decided to mount the Auto switch in the Expansion bracket position.
Well it was time to cut a VGA backplate exactly at Expansion bracket's dimensions



I positioned the VGA hole a bit to the right (just to be safe with ribbons from RTG/AGA) but mostly because I wanted the extra space IN CASE something comes up in the future :)

Well the following mod, took me quite some time, only because I tested the joints via a multimeter and continuity test many times to be sure! Don't wanna risk damaging something in my system :)
It was fun procedure though.



What on earth am I doing?.... Yep you understood correctly :)
Internal soldering of Ribbon that goes to Ratte's Auto switch. (Like BVisionPPC/CVisionPPC but now on Voodoo!)



Then it was time for stuffing and buffing my beloved Grex!
I already had the Voodoo3 and ESS-Solo-1 but now I also got...:

An RTL8029(AS) Ethernet NIC (Thanks Leo)



And an Terratec TerraTV/Radio card (Bt878 chipset) that I had for a really long time in one of my drawers LOL!



Stuffing it all was a really amusing moment since everything fitted like a glove without wires in the way :) Gotta love this Voodoo mod.

 


This is a photo with the wire installed that goes from DVD-ROM's audio signal to ESS-Solo-1's internal connector for CD. I already had it ready from my Delfina mod, so now it also works like a charm in this current mod.



And now some photos from the back of the A4000. Haven't showed a pic since I had the Delfina/USB NIC mod :)
You can clearly see... Ratte's Auto RTG/AGA swith on the Expansion bay, along with the PCI cards.
Amiga Paula's sound goes to ESS-Solo-1's "Line In" connector. I could have made it internal in ESS-Solo-1's AUX internal connector but I'd had to take apart the whole motherboard = NO FUN!





And finally a close up of Ratte's Switch mounted and sitting comfortably in the Expansion bay without interfering with the 80mm fan that blows some silent air into the CSPPC and Memory sockets :)




Just a quick photo from CSPPCs PCI menu...



...and we're ready to Rock & Roll :D
Everything works like a charm and I'm a happy Amigan. It's nice having such clean mods inside without too much wires cutting my airflow and vision to teh awesomenezz :D

I hope you like it as well.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Awesome Amiga, well done!

Anonymous said...

http://www.a1k.org/forum/showthread.php?t=45449

i took more than a year (two?) to get hands on a dev-system ... grex+radeon is working.

br
andre

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