A500: A590 SCSI controller mods

Hey peepz.

Since I haven't done anything important (except softwarewise) on my lovely Amigas I though about testing for fun an A590 that I have (which might be the host of my future FPGA Arcade or not).

As I didn't have an external PSU to test it, I thought of performing the Selfpowered mod as the well known website clearly explains:

http://members.iinet.net.au/~davem2/overclock/a500hd.html

This is how the mod looks on my A590

As I don't have a SCSI HD and because I had a spare PCD-50B SCSI Multicard Reader so I thought about attaching this instead :)
Ofc in order for all LUNS to be fully recognized (and not only the first LUN that is the PCMCIA port) you need to switch the Pin 4 of the Dip switch to ON!
Manual as long as BBOAH say that it's reserved but Mechware after fiddling around he realized that Pin 4 enabled parity!

Anyway, I put some spacers by cutting some hotglue material (lol) and glued them in place. It doesn't look bad :)

After upgrading my Version 6.6 EPROMS to 7.0 (regards to my Willem) we were down to business.
Success, Power led opened and also my custom ClassicWB 68k booted just fine! :)

Time to remove the humongous thick Fan and put a silent Scythe/Kaze 40x40x10mm fan instead.

And voila. Mod is ready and A590 works like a charm :)

Here are some screenshots from the ClassicWB 68k running on my A590.

Dunno if I'm gonna keep that in the future, but at least I know it's working properly.

Only annoying part is that A590 blinks 30 times before CF boots but I guess that's something to do with searching through the other SCSI ID and LUNS which I haven't tinkered on how to disable (if possible).

Also I haven't put any passive termination which might be the cause as well (sorry I didn't have 25pin terminator handy).

That's all for now :)

A4000: Custom 5.25 bracket

From my previous A4000, I realized that good airflow and heat dissipation is rather difficult due to the not so spacy case and devices.
First of all CD/DVD-ROM units are rather big and along with the cabling makes it kinda messy.
I made a quick comparison back between the length of a normal DVD-RW and a slim DVD-RW.
Result was indeed amazing!




Ok I had to put it! Finding a 5.25 bracket back then wasn't easy and after a lot of searching around I found a really neat unit that has a spot for a slim CD/DVD unit, a spot for an 3.5 unit (floppy/multicard reader etc) and 2xUSB headers!
I quickly put a slim slot-in DVD-RW that I had along with a stock A4000 floppy to check it out! Not bad I'd say...




Well. After selling my A4000 and getting a new one... I came across the same issue as before but now I had the solution in my hands! In the following pictures you can see a test paint I used (which kinda suxed) along with a tray slim DVD-RW nice and neat Temperature/Fan control bracket that I bought.




I really liked the combo cause it's really good to know the temperature and fan speeds of my 060/PPC CPUs and VGA without being too kitsch.
It definitelly needed a good paint though cause that thing had so many colors... Ewww! Result was pretty perfect





I really like it and it works just fine! I found out that the Temp/Fan control bracket had also an Alarm per Temperature that you can set at will and also at a fan error (I tested it by pressing one working with a finger) you also get an alarm sound except the 0rpm message. NEAT!

The most awesome part though was that the bracket it's so thin that the 3.5" slot is almost empty!!! Time to take advantage of this extra space (as always lol).



This is the bracket of the default 2.5" HD for A600/A1200. Since I had 2 spare of these (nice to use CFs in my Amigas lol) I thought about modding it a bit for my needs.




...and now, you can place it inside the Temp/Fan bracket...





It fits like a glove! Also the cables for the Fan/Temp connectors/sensors were glued to the sides of the internal bracket.



Yep... the 2.5" Hard Drive is very well putted in it's bracket and it's ready for receiving it's own care... meaning an ACard!

More soon to come :)

A600: A604 received! Case change and more

Yesterday I received the wonderful A604 Chip RAM Expansion from AmigaKit.
What an awesome designed product! It's so small comparing it with the A603 and offers a lot more things.

• 2x clockports (instead of 1)
• Custom clockport extender 2nd clockport for mounting Subway (special driver required)
• The second clockport reaches a 60% higher transfer speed than the first, which makes Subway a lot faster!
• Angled Indivision ECS socket that makes Indivision ECS co-exist along with the floppy!
• All the usual stuff like 1MB Chip RAM to max out A600's Chip RAM to 2MB total, and RTC.

Getting a new A604 also gave me appetite to re-case my A600 into a spare that I had which was more white (near mint) and didn't have any cut on the case. Keeping the floppy on the case was a nice thing to have.




My spare A600 is really awesome but required removing of the TV Modulator and a good mobo bath!!!
Modulator was an easy task to remove (done it 4-5 times in the past) and a good bath is always nice for my Amiga mobos :)

This time I decided NOT to remove the stock power connector since I got some time ago a nice PSU from MechWare.



Since I wanted to minize the cutting on the new case I decided that except from the replacement of the TV Modulator with the VGA connector for the Indivision ECS, I'd also make a small hole for the Kickstart switch (that simultaneously disables ACA on Kickstart 1.3).





You can check the internal mod of both the VGA connector and Kickstart switch that gets it's +5V from a nearby resistor and Ground from the nearby RGB's connector ground :)



As you may have seen I'm using Mika's angled CF2IDE adapter since for the time being I didn't want to make a hole above PCMCIA (waiting kipper2k's rev.2 CF2IDE adapter in the following days since I had issues with his rev.1 in my previous setup).

You can check some photos of the so far re-casing. I really loved the way that Indivision ECS's cable can go under Indivision and Subway making it look really clean:





Looking good doesn't it? The mods are looking a lot cleaner without the extra cabling that existed in my previous mod. Only need to see now where am I gonna put the USB headers, although I will use for sure the headers I used on my A1200 as well.

Just before I close this post, I thought it'd be nice to include 2 more photos of the A600 in use... Enjoy :)