Les Railton's (Phipscube) Super A1200 Part 7

Welcome to part 7 of this A1200 build of awesomeness :D

Well, here's some more bits and bobs i've been doing... I ROLLED MY OWN 3.9 ROMS! YES!!

I had all sorts of issues getting it there, but with the help of Marios and buying an el-cheapo Willem programmer off fleabay, I got there! (cheers Marios mate!) I am going to experiment a little more as for some reason the SCSI.Device I put on (Cosmos beta4) sometimes doesn't see my PROGRAMS and OS 4.0 Partitions, simply showing up as Uninitialised. But for now, it boots (after I altered my startup sequence to setpatch NOROMUPDATE QUIET, and commented out Blizkick). I basically used the same modules as in Marios' fabtastic guide, but added my own regged HSMathlibs and Cosmos' SCSI.Device. I decided to add a small discreet switch to manually override my Video Switcher: -

This is good for when I need to install a fresh OS or do things that would otherwise not involve having the switching software load up. I can then manually switch to RTG. The positions are AGA (and Auto RTG with software) as you see the switch now, then flicked over to the left (when looking from the front of machine) it manually sets BVision. I've now finally solved my BPPC cooling solution!

A 5mm laptop fan/heatsink combo! its just resting on the naked PPC there to show how it will fit. So how did I do this? here we go... I drilled two holes in the side to allow a small amount of air to pass over the regulators that sit nearby.

Here i'm making new holes and threadding them with a thread tool ready for some standoffs. I've already mounted two small nylon screws and nuts to the original mount holes. The nuts will be super glued down to the BPPC board to allow the screws to hold the whole unit onto the PPC chip.

The standoffs go in, they need to be cut down a bit..

Cut and filed down to be level with the nuts + 0.5mm for leeway

I rested the heatsink onto the board with the screws and nuts in place, then carefully put super glue on the nuts, then unscrewed the screws to leave the nuts in place. I added more glue around the edge, then put a hair dryer over the glue gently, this makes it dry a lot harder.

Arctic Silver 5 added to the PPC

hen a small 1mm thick copper plate placed over the top. this will help with dissipating the heat greatly.

More Arctic Silver on the copper plate

And the fan and heatsink combo put over that, then lightly screwed down with the nylon screws. I've added some small pieces of felt to avoid any vibrations on the trapdoor mesh.

It fits great. I had to fine tune the standoffs until they held the heatsink around 0.5mm above the nuts. If you look carefully you can see a small gap between nut and heatsink. This allows for a small amount of tightening.

I added some heat shrink to the Custom made Oscillator, just to make it look nice and its more insulated than with the scrappy tape I put on it before this

You can see the Oscillator in place and also the fan heatsink combo.... but can you notice the side vent? yes, thats going to pour airflow over the oscillators and the 060

But I need to put heatsinks on this controller.... (I also drilled two more air holes in the heatsink)

And these two ICs. They both originally sat under the PPC heatsink and enjoyed a dash of air from the old fan. now they get nothing and hit around 66 Deg C!

So I used some of these copper VGA heat sinks with sticky thermal pads attached (pack of 8 off ebay):-

There we go (I took off the black felt pads, they did nothing but bulge the trapdoor necessarily)

With the trapdoor cover on. I am happy I managed to make a solution that kept within the trapdoor. Now after 1 Hour on, The temps are, 52 Deg C on PPC (was 55), 50 Deg C on 060 (was 62) the controller hits 54 Deg C and the Regulator IC's hit 58 Deg C. Overall alot more evened out. I'm most happy that now my 060 is running MUCH cooler The fan is a bit quieter than the old one too so that's a bonus!

It only JUST fits!!!! (I added some 8mm feet too, you can see one in the corner there) So thats that I did buy an mATX supply and partly perform a retrofit to my Original PSU casing given to me by Mr Fitz (cheers steve) but the thing didn't work! I'm now looking into buying a VERY GOOD psu to be sure it will work and work well. Once I have it, i'll post what I do with photos of course I'm also mulling over the idea of cramming a Lyra 2 PS2 keyboard interface in the old girl, just like how Marios did on his lovely A1200D PPC, but not sure it will fit yet. Its such a good Idea I really would like to have this feature too. Its such a pain with the original keyboard hanging about when modding. Lets see what happens, maybe I can't do this. Anyway, hope you have all enjoyed my latest madness! Cheers!