Les Railton's (Phipscube) Super A1200 Part 8
Installment 8 of this mega build is an epic, so go grab a brew before you start :)
Well here's my latest stuff: -
So there is the keyboard controller the Lyra II has to sit on.
And i'm gonna take out the Video phono plug and place the PS2 plug there instead.
Hmmm... this needs modding!
EEK! Best not remove the connector then
Didn't say anything about soldering wires underneath voiding warranties did it?
The level of destruction needed to take one Video phono connector off.
There it is!
Out you pop me lad!
There is the Lyra II in place.
bit of tape to insulate.
On goes the Indi and IDE Fix.
I Took the board out again to solder on the PS2 connector. same methods I used to hold on the Audio mixer, basically soldered the body of the connector to the metal sheilding.
There we go, nice and flush. I had to heat and move the connector a few times to get it in the right place
Testing the fitting with an Amiga keyboard (well a CDTV keyboard with a CD32 Adapter).
And with a PS2 PC keyboard, both plug in snugly.
Sliding the board back in... ooo, it JUST fits!
1 mm to spare underneath.
Roughly drawing where the wires go on the PS2 connector.
And soldered on.
Here's the switch I have connected to the keyboard selector jumper. Shorted = PC keyboard, open = Amiga Keyboard.
From underneath the lip.
Another one of those wide shots of all the sh*t in my A1200, how it still works baffles me!
The Lyra II just nesting quite tightly in there!
Added some stickers to be sure, don't want to forget and plug the wrong type of KB in!
Did the same for my manual override switch on my Auto Video Switcher. Not as dangerous, but still good to have
The keyboard works!
CDTV Keyboard with a CD32 (A4000) adapter So thats the Lyra II in! And it helped very much already not having to keep the original keyboard in when needing to do tests (I was doing some tests with the clock port adapter lastnight, swapping ports)
PSU.... what a PITA! I've bought 2 mATX units, one cheapo, one expensive (was a seasonic 350W) none of these worked. I ended up pulling 3 full atx PSUs from old work pcs to do some tests and all but 1 failed on +5V. The one that passed and booted my machine reset when ever I put a CD in the drive! so the only PSU's that work are my old trusty ATX and the APOWER. Well I decided to stick with my old trusty ATX and give Ziggy my APOWER (as it was getting very hot). I also decided to put the A1200 aside for a bit and get Ziggy's A600 up and running properly with VGA out and fully loaded HDD with WHDLoad and games. I was sat happily loading up Zig's A600 and after about an hour I noticed something....... The APOWER was getting hot!!? almost as hot as with my A1200, "this isn't right" I thought. So I took it out of the plastic casing, and it was then running ALOT cooler. I did the same with my A1200 and again it ran alot cooler than before (a bit hotter than with Zigs A600, but not stupid hot) I don't know why I didn't think of that before! So I decided to give something a try, put the APOWER in the original PSU I got off Steve a bit ago instead of an mATX PSU. So here is how I did it: -
Here's The PSU in all its original glory.
Inside the original supply.
I need to cut these wires out.
The supply sans board, I took a quick note of the voltages for each coloured wire. bear in mind that the colours can be different so if you plan to do this, double check the levels with a meter before you start wiring up.
I had to do some trimming
I hot glued a 12V Fan in the top.
Here's the APOWER out of its case.
Wiring up to the Power lead and switch.
Quick check it all fits ok.
The APOWER fits onto 2 of the original mounts with a small amount of grinding on the board.
Mounted a block terminal for attaching the DC lines.
With all the lines connected.
Full view of the supply all in with the fan over the top.
I made a small PWM fan controller to bring the fan noise down to whisper quiet.
And there she is with all assembled.... who could guess it has a small beast in there?! I actually did this mod about 3 weeks ago, and since then its been running both my A1200 and Ziggys A600 when i've been working on it. And its not getting hot at all, its ultra cool and ultra quiet now, even in these hot days we are having at the moment in Denmark! On a note of heat, my A1200 seems to be handling the high early summer temps at the moment. Its getting generally 2 degrees or so hotter than before on the CPU's and BV but i'm still not running it any more than 2 hours at a time. Ok, I bought some more things too: -
A Lyra II 1200, I'm gonna try and force this into the old girl to allow external keyboard connection. So i'll be totally ripping off Marios' awesome mod, I hope you don't mind mate
A close up of the beaut, the jumper at the top there allows PC or real Amiga keyboard connection, i'll put a switch under the back lip a bit like the manual video swich to choose between these and plonk some wires on that jumper header.
And finally for now, I bought a 320GB PATA drive, yes its a bit OTT, but i'm a bit of a to the maxx kinda guy so figured why not! I see that OS 4.1 Classic is finally imminent so will plump for that when its out and see how it runs clean on this drive and keep the 80Gig one loaded as it is for now as a backup. Oh! I also redid my custom 3.9 roms and simply put the old SCSI device from the original OS 3.1 roms for now until Cosmos' betas are sorted. I didn't try PFS3 yet, but want to get started on the 320GB drive now on the 3.9 Partition. the 80GB drive will be my fallback (as its set up to easily change my ROMS should I need to) and build the 320GB up with all the cool chit. What else? Oh yeah, I want to put my DVD drive through a regulator connected to the +12V line to try and take a small bit of fluctuation off the +5V rail. Anyway, thanks for looking!
PHEW!!! told you this one was an epic, part 9 will appear soon (ish)
