Les Railton's (Phipscube) Super A1200 Part 9

Part 9 of the A1200 build from Les is here :)

Its been a while, and quite a strange year for me generally, but I have started messing around with the old A1200 Beast again. Whilst using her I found I wanted to see some kind of activity LED's for my NIC and DVD drives so I added a few: -

I drilled a 2.5mm hole into the side near the Delfina Mic + Line sockets so I can see when my NIC is active.

The LED is a flat top so its flush with the casing. I chose Yellow because when its off you can't notice it so much and I wanted a colour that matches the original top access LEDs. Here's the LED for the DVD: -

This is the NIC LED flashing away when active: -

And the DVD LED: -

Small tweak time. My System started showing the wrong date and time at boot up so I suspected the Lithium battery on the BPPC. Lo and behold it was only 2.5V, which isn't quite enough for reliable operation. So I needed to replace it.... but I decided to mod it a little at the same time: - Here's the offender

Its soldered in so I removed it

Whats this? A use for the big hole the original fan left!

I added a few small drops of super glue to hold it in, then wired into the original battery holes

Ignore the CR2032, it should be an ML2032 or VL2032. (the original Batt is a VL2020, RECHARGEABLE! I didn't notice the "VL")

There ya go!

I then stuck a thin piece of plastic under the board to avoid shorts If you want to perform this mod, then please be careful with the two tiny capacitors under the clock port connector if you use a PPC accellerator these are vital, if not you have to take them off anyway so no biggie 1 - It looks pretty much like the photos! quite a beast and not very desktop friendly. Its most certainly not designed to fit in a Desktop. 2 - If you ONLY want to play MP3's and you don't think you can modify the connectons how I have, then maybe yes, but i've honestly never used an MP3@64, I thought it was only for the C64, so thats how much I know . But when its running, the Delfina sounds soooo nice! It can be a bit of a ball ache to get running correctly on a heavily modded Workbench (As i'm finding now). It also doesn't work in Amiga OS 4.1 Classic (Much to my dismay). But I can heartily recommend it. 3 - It plays MP3's just sweet. Depends what you mean by lockups? whilst its playing MP3's? not that i've found, when its not set up correctly? yes, it can reak havok on my poor old '12

for audio you do indeed take L and R from Native and feed it into one of the lines of the Delfina. I've since bypassed that and I have native coming straight back out again next to the Delfina output through a filter (as I wanted to have native audio at cold boot time). But i'll explain why it looks like i'm feeding from one phono plug: -

If you look carefully in the pic you will see that the white wire (L audio) is connected to a pad that goes across to the L phono mount area (the 3 pole phono plugs allow mono sound. when only one phono is inserted, you get both channels out of one plug).. I just mounted it near the R side to keep the wires together

phew, installment 9 done, and 10 to follow soon