A1200 Project

[StuKeith]

You still moving local fella? Tis a nice area the forest you know!

[Harrison]

Localish. Not the New Forest though. I will be moving to Fishbourne, near Chichester. Also a very nice area, but quite different with all the water. Loads of places to walk and explore in the countryside around there though.

Back to the A1200 project. I received a 2.5" external HD enclosure today so I can access the HD from the PC to set it up (the USB to IDE cable I already had stopped working recently). I just tested the enclosure and it works perfectly. Only cost about £3 from ebay, including shipping too!

So now I can get to work setting the drive up and getting the A1200 project under way.

The only parts and ideas I'm still on the lookout for are:

CD drive audio cable - Rather than trying to do one of the internal hardware hacks to permanently mix the CD audio into the Amiga audio, my new plan is to feed the audio output from the CD drive to a pair of rear mounted phono connectors. I will then be able to connect the CD and Amiga audio up to either a splitter cable for the straight unbalanced simple method of mixing the two together, or for CD game audio feed both into an audio mixer I've got.
(I might have one in one of my many boxes of cables)

Amiga RGB to Scart cable - I looked to see how much these were being sold for and the cheapest I've seen is £15. I have loads of spare scart cables so thought I might have a go at making my own cable!

Blizzard 1230 MKIV (that can come later once I have more money to spend )

[Harrison]

I've just finished partitioning the 2.5" 40GB HD using a USB enclosure connected to the PC, with WinUAE, HDToolbox (WB3.1 install disk) and SFS.

It all went fine and now I have three partitions (2GB, 2GB, 33GB) on the HD all using the SFS filsystem. (Thanks to KG's tutorial on doing this as it made it much easier).

One question. Is there any way to get WB3.1 to report the correct size of partitions on large HDs? It is currently showing the largest of the partitions as 1200MB. And HDToolbox also showed very random sizes when trying to set the size of each partition. I ended up having to work out roughly how big each cylinder was and then make the partitions the size based on this. Seemed to work though.

Next to get ClassicWB on the drive.

[Zetr0]

realistically the best thing to do is install OS3.5, its has better support for larger disks and file types than 3.1.

when setting up the A600+ project I had OS3.5 running on it with a 20GB HDD reported all the sizes perfectly, including dual layer 8.5GB DVD-R's

[Harrison]

True, but I want to keep things simple and stick with 3.1 if I can as I just want the A1200 setup to run classicWB along with the KGWHD sets and a few other things setup on there for easy ADF work and a few other things.

At a later date I might add a card reader to the system with the card accessible from the rear of the system. Then I can have different WB installations on different memory cards for quick swapping between them.

[Harrison]

Now that I've got classicWB installed it is showing all of the correct partition sizes and free space in Scalos and DOpus, so that's good enough for me.

I'm now just copying over the complete KGWHD set to the HD and then it will be ready to stick back in the A1200 and fire her up.

I've already copied IDEFix onto the HD ready to install it once its back in the Amiga, so once that is done it should be nearly complete. I will then just need to cut and mount the CD drive into the rear of the case.

[Harrison]

I've finally got the last bits to complete the A1200 project.

I couldn't find a y-splitter power cable to split the power from the floppy drive header to power the CD-rom and floppy drive at the same time. I knew I had some cables somewhere so didn't want to start buying more, and going through all my boxes of bits I finally found one.

Just powered up the A1200 and everything is working perfectly. So the final stage is to mount the 2.5" HD, buffered IDE interface and the CD-Rom drive inside the case properly. I'm thinking of creating a kind of tray that all three devices will be attached to that can then be sat inside the case on top of the shielding for easy removal. Time to get planning and designing it.

I will post pictures once it is complete.

The completed project has:

Hardware

• A1200 with KS3.1 roms
• Blizzard 1230 MKIV with 32MB Fast ram
• Buffered IDE interface
• 40GB 2.5" IDE HD
• 24x slimline laptop IDE CD-Rom drive
• PCMCIA Network card

Software

• ClassicWB (WB 3.1)
• Registered WHDLoad key
• KGWHD game and demo packs
• IDEFix'97
• Network card software (still need to set this up)
• Partition on HD containing contents of my original A1200 HD (loads on that HD to go through and rediscover including hundreds of PD games)

Future additions (these might be added in the future)

• Internal flicker fixer (too expensive at the moment)
• CD drive audio output (either root cd audio to rear phono cables and mix externally, or look into mixing audio internally using the hacks available online)

[Harrison]

Just performed an optical drive upgrade.

The 24x Teac CD-Rom drive in the A1200 was quite noisy when spinning up to read discs and during access. It worked fine though. However I had a dead laptop with a nice 8x DVD-Rom/24x CD-RW combo drive in it... so I pulled the laptop apart to retrieve the drive, swapped the drives over in the A1200, booted it up and ran the IDEFix device detection utility and the new drive showed up ok. Rebooted and it works perfectly. Much quieter and access times and read speeds seem faster too.

Now... can I actually utilise the DVD part of the drive in an Amiga?

[JLPedro]

Shure you can, i used an Pioneer A110 16x DvD-RW drive on my A1200 and it reads dvd's with IdeFix instaled (if the dvd is full, it takes a bit f time to preview the contents...).