NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #18/NN_1992_18.iso/spool/comp/sys/amiga/hardware/14032

Internet Message Format | 1992-08-13 | 12.7 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!dtix!darwin.sura.net!news.udel.edu!ravel.udel.edu!jeremym
From: [e-mail] (Jeremy A Moskowitz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Subject: Summary: I've fallen and I can't upgrade (long)
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 13 Aug 92 13:31:02 GMT
Sender: [e-mail]
Organization: University of Delaware
Lines: 290
Nntp-Posting-Host: ravel.udel.edu



Well.. I wanted to know what to do when all my drive bays were
full and needed to mount another hard drive somewhere.

I got some answers. Good ones. Bad ones. But answers, though.

Here's some of the shorter ones:
    1) Get a PC card with nothing on it, and mount it there,
if you're really ambitious, get a trace off the card from the mother
board power suppy to power the drive.
    (I'm not that ambitious)
    2) Get an external case.
    (Forget it. $$++)
    3) Get an IBM mini-tower case or tower case to keep your drives in
    (Nah.. too big.. I have no desk space or floor space so...)
    4) Sell the two drives, and get one big 200 MB.
    (I got too many offers! :-)

However - there were some lengthy solutions which I will gladly
reproduce here. The first one shows how to mount up to
    2 Floppy Drives
    1 5 1/4 drive of any kind
    2 Lps Drives
    2 1.5" Drives
    Extra Fans for Cool Sailing
    Pleanty of room for extra cards
    Pleanty of room for hard cards.

The second letter shows how to hack out a 2000T case with an IBM tower case.

Neither of these should be done for the faint of heart - (but they look
great!)


Lets begin with the first one:

Wow. This was a piece of work. Let me tell you.

Theres one note of clarification in the letter which I have designated
with brackets. <>. You'll see.

Here's the first letter I got.


From [e-mail] Tue Aug 11 19:39:37 1992
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    (5.65c/IDA-1.2.8) id AA27609; Tue, 11 Aug 1992 19:39:27 -0400
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    id AA15992; Wed, 12 Aug 1992 01:39:17 +0200
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1992 01:39:17 +0200
From: Roland Orre  <[e-mail]>
Message-Id: <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail] (Jeremy A Moskowitz)
In-Reply-To: [e-mail]'s message of Tue, 11 Aug 1992 17:27:20 GMT
Subject: I've fallen and I can't get UPGRADED!!!
Reply-To: [e-mail] (Roland Orre)
Status: ORSr


Oh, that's no problem. An Amiga user can always upgrade. In fact, you
have space for several hard disks that you may not have thought of.
If you take a look behind the front cover of your 2000 you will find
that this space is slightly more than an inch. I have put one of
my Quantum 105 LPS there but you can actually put two there.

To manage this you have to get a somewhat longer SCSI-cable and split
this in two 25-wire parts so it can be fed out just at the left side
of the 5" drive, in my case a SyQuest and in your case an tape-drive.
It may be cheapest to fix the cable your self. The 50 pin connectors
can be bought in any well stocked electronics store. It may be cheaper
to buy 25-wire cable also. I have actually 2x25 wire all the way from
the GVP controller under the Fusion Forty accelerator to the SyQuest
and out to the LPS drive because I think the 50-wire cable was to
clumsy.  You have also to drill a few holes in the front sheet metal
to fasten the drive.

It can be argued that you will decrease the airflow a little, but just
a little. Especially in my case as the first thing I did when I bought
my 2000 three years ago was to remove the noisy standard fan and
replace it with a silent, in my case PAPST fan. The silent fan has a
little lower air flow than the standard one but it is completely
enough when you don't have an accelerator. To take care also of this
part and really keep the 68040 silicon cool I took my old 12 V
standard fan and built it into an old plastic case for 5" diskettes,
added a regulator, LM317, and a potentiometer and a piece of bus
connector board that could be fit into the Zorro II bus connector to
supply power to the fan. The connector board was glued with some
epoxy. Now the machine is both cool and silent and I don't have
any dead space between the 1,5" Quantum Pro drive, mounted on the
GVP SCSI board, and the front sheet metal.

If the new drive you are going to add is of the 1.5" model you can
not use this method. In that case you have to get a somewhat longer
SCSI cable and look at the leftmost PC-only bus slots. Here you have
a lot of space that you will probably never utilize in any other way.
This place is perfectly fit for a couple of 1.5" Quantum Pro drives,
Maxtor drives or equivalent. You just have to fix a metal sheet
slightly bigger than a Zorro II board and screw this to the case.
You can probably supply the drives with power from the PC bus
(I don't remember if 12 V is available there) but I would rather
recommend that you connect it directly to the power supply.

To clarify things I have tried to make a sketch of my current Amiga
configuration below. (The scale may not be correct)

       /---+------------------------------------------------+
       |LED| optional            | optional             |
       |   | 1.5" height     | 1.5 height           |
       |---| drive               | drive                    |
  o    | L |----------------------------------------------- |
  p    | P | optional space for 386 boards etc.         |
  t    | S |                                |
  i    | d |                                                |
  o -> | r |------------------------------------------------|
  n    | i |  Transputer Link interface                     |
  a    | v |------------------------------------------------|
  l    | e |  Pro RAM 2000 4 Mb to use with 68000           |
       |---|------------------------------------------------|
  m    | L |  GVP SCSI II board  | 1.5 " Pro Drive          |
  o    | P |---------------------|                          |
  u    | S | The old 12 V fan    |--------------------------|
  n -> | d |    with reg         |  cool space              |
  t    | r |------------------------------------------------|
  e    | i |   Fusion Forty 68040 board + 8 Mb              |
  d    | v |------------------------------------------------|
       | e |/~\cable/~2x25~~~\         |  puzzle IO-board   |
       |-------------------+  \        |--------------------|
       |               |---\+      |                    |
       |       3 "         | S  |      |  Power Supply      |
       |       floppy      | y 8|      |                |
       |                   | Q 8|      |                |
       |-------------------| u  |      |                |
       |                   | e M|      |                    |
       |       3 "         | s b|      |                |
       |       floppy      | t  | ---- +--------------------|
       |                   |----+  2320 deinterlacer        |
       \----------------------------------------------------+

<The two drives designated as "Optionally moutned" are actually OUTSIDE
the case. Between the lip of the cover and the case itself>

Good luck with your upgrade,
Roland Orre                     | O---O---O Studies of |       [e-mail]

The next message shows how to hack yourself a tower case:

From [e-mail] Tue Aug 11 22:54:04 1992
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    id AA07864; Tue, 11 Aug 92 19:53:35 PDT
Date: Tue, 11 Aug 92 19:53:35 PDT
From: [e-mail] (Jose Ochoa)
Message-Id: <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: I've fallen and I can't get UPGRADED!!!
Status: ORS

Ok, ok I'll give you some advice.  But first let's recite the Hacker's Creed:

I will acknowledge the shortcomings of an unamed company that through it's
horrid marketing has left me with few upgrade options.

I will be good to my computer and not shuck out the window or lead it through
some other painful death after many hours of hacking.

And

I will definitely blame my uncareful actions on advice from other fellow
hackers.


Ok.


Now first you need to find a case.  I mean a big case.  The bigger the
better.

There are some differences between pcs and Amigas (Thank GOD!) that make
putting a 2000 motherboard into a case very difficult.

First, everthing on a pc motherboard is an upgrade....be it a serial card,
vga card, modem, etc.  So for the most part a pc is a motherboard with
a bunch of other boards.  Now the Amiga has several built in ports which
have a whole through the standard 2000 case that they slip through.

You can do one of two things....you can build connectors which can go from
the motherboard's c ports to holes on a tower case that are already there.
(These are there because some pc cards have extra external connectors that
must be mounted somewhere besides where the main card goes)

Or you can cut out a narrow rectangular strip out of metal from the back
of the tower case so that the ports can slip through.  This is what I did.

The first method requires you to build or buy the connector cables.  Probably
build them since the cable has to have a small profile otherwise it will take
up some space on the tower case from the back of the motherboard.  Though, you
might be able to get some off the shelf L-shaped connectors.....you get the
picture.

The second method while closer to the design of the 2000 case will require a
power tool (jigsaw) with an appropriate blade to cut through metal.  Not your
every day hack.

You also have to deal with the keyboard port and the joystick/mouse ports.
I handled mine by buying extender cables and sticking them out a hole in
the front of my tower case.  (UGH!, ugly buy I could think of an elegant
solution)  YYou could stick them out the back through somewhere, maybe.

A note on the first method.  The 23 pin RGB and external disk drive ports are
non-standard and are hard to find connecctors for.  You could hack up a 25 pin
cable though.



With me so far!


CARDS:

The seven amiga slots are fairly comparable to the pc slots (since four of
the are pc slots).  Once you get the motherboard lined up it should be no
problem.  Mounting the motherboard in the tower case will require you to
drill some holes since the holes already provided for motherboards are for
pcs and they aren't the same place.

That sounds good, huh?  We there are two problems.  The CPU slot and the
Video Slot.  These are definitely in places that pc tower case makers
don't account for.  The best way around this is the BIG, BIG tower case.
But I'm not sure that they make tower cases that big in that tall dimension
anyway.  The CPU isn't too big of a problem with a big tower case but the
Video slot is just in the wrong place (from a pc tower case point of view).

This is one thing that I didn't have to worry about too much.  I don't have
any need for the Video and CPU slot at this time anyway.  (In fact, my video
slot is nudged in between the power supply (they are usually at the top and
back of the case) and the case itself).


POWERSUPPLY:

Lets dispell the rumor that pc and Amiga Power supplies are diffent.  They
aren't really.  All it requires is a jumper change on the 2000 motherboard (
You'll have to ask on the net about this one.  I bought my 2000 used and it
already had a pc power supply)

That nifty 200-300 watt power supply that comes in the tower case will be
a welcome boost to your overworked computer.

The only thing different is the connector.  You'll have to have a multimeter
to read the signals on the 2000 power supply and match them with the pc
power supply using another amiga power supply connector.  Or hack the one
you have!  NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART

You could also try to find some way to put the 2000 power supply in the case.


CONCLUSION:

As you can see this is a real project.  It will take time.  Planning out ahead
of time how your are goin to deal with different problems will save you many
headaches.  Researching your 2000 motherboard and what makes it different
from a pc motherboard will help make a decision as to what tower case will
require the least hacking.

These are things just off the top of my head.  Please respond back with
any questions as I am sure I've missed a few things.


Joe

[e-mail]


Well.. there it is, boys and girls. If anyone has any other real world
solutions, post em as a follow up. I'd love to keep track of this
and generate another post.


Thanks to Roland and Jose for making this post possible. I'd also like to thank
my agent, my girlfriend and my Amiga. (Relax, I'm kidding.)

Hope this helps.

--
     // Email: [e-mail]------\  Monitor of---------------\
    //  Registered Commodore Amiga Developer|  Comp.sys.amiga.EMULATIONS|
\\ //                    This is the Nineties Hamton - -
 \X/            Go get a bank loan, and buy yourself a clue!