I got a Power Tower

[Stephen Coates]

Yesterday, I obtained (at no cost) a Power Tower. It already came complete with the following:

A1200 motherboard with 3.1 ROMs
PC Keyboard adaptor
Four way IDE splitter
CDROM/Floppy
AT PSU
AT-Amiga PSU adaptor
Clockport based ECP parallel port
And some device that connects the tower's 'Standby' switch to the amiga. I am yet to figure out what this does.

So, all I had to do was transfer my Mediator and cards across, and the HD.

For those interested, this was the A1200's state before it was towered: http://stevecoates.net/photos/lag12/w3000.jpg

I had to get the tower (along with a big rucksack full of amiga gear) all the way from Lincoln to Rotherham using public transport and eventually got home at about 10:30PM, so I havn't had chance to set it up properly here but I will soon.

I will post plenty of pictures when I a) get some colour film for my film camera or b) charge some batteries for the digital camera.

The graphics card was working fine yesterday after being a bit temperamental, but I am still yet to get the sound and network cards working (not sure how to do this).

Steve

[Tiago]

Cool !!!!

[Harrison]

That sounds great. How do you manage to get that for free?

I look forward to seeing some pictures. Maybe you could take some detailed pictures, then we can feature it in the wiki?

[Stephen Coates]

Michael got it for free off someone and said I can have it (he already has enough amigas).

[Puni/Void]

Congratulations with the Power Tower, Steve. Didn't you have any plastic for your Amiga 1200 before the tower?

I remember a guy I used to trade with in the past. He had an exposed system as well (no tower or plastic). Looked crazy. Eventually his cat put an end to his hardware and that was that. So, be sure to protect your hardware.

[Stephen Coates]

Congratulations with the Power Tower, Steve. Didn't you have any plastic for your Amiga 1200 before the tower?

I remember a guy I used to trade with in the past. He had an exposed system as well (no tower or plastic). Looked crazy. Eventually his cat put an end to his hardware and that was that. So, be sure to protect your hardware.

No tower or anything before that. Unfortunately it was difficult to buy a Mediator system AND a tower. I could only afford one, but then this one came along for free. I did think about perhaps mounting it all on a piece of wood but never got round to it. The exposed Mediator system did attract a bit of interest at LAG meetings .

I bet I looked a bit daft carrying it through Lincoln Central (some guy did say I should get a laptop) and sitting with it in Sheffield Interchange and on the X78 bus. It was slightly worrying for me as there were a few nutters on the train (as there has been every time I have used it in the evening) and on the bus.

Unfortunately I am having problems with the system. There may be a bad connection somewhere. Sometimes the computer will not recognise the graphics card and hence not change into the VooDoo screenmode. It is also not recognised in Picasso96Mode. The PCI cards do however show up in PCIINFO. We wern't sure as to whether the values presented to us by PCIINFO under such conditions were correct or not.

However, sometimes it will all work fine, but last time I tried it, I couldn't get it to work at all.

And sometimes, the amiga just randomly froze.

I'm guessing that there may be some sort of connection issue between the Amiga and the Mediator (I have ruled out the possibility of Motherboard and graphics card faults).

[Stephen Coates]

I havn't really used this system much since i got it, as it is in the loft which is currently very untidy.

But I had a fiddle with it the other day and I managed to get it all to work properly when i pulled slightly on the Blizzard, so there must be a bad connection somewhere. I'm sure that will be fixable.

Does anyone know how to set up PCI soundcards and network cards? I have been told that it is easy but I am not really sure what to do.

[Puni/Void]

I havn't really used this system much since i got it, as it is in the loft which is currently very untidy.

But I had a fiddle with it the other day and I managed to get it all to work properly when i pulled slightly on the Blizzard, so there must be a bad connection somewhere. I'm sure that will be fixable.

Does anyone know how to set up PCI soundcards and network cards? I have been told that it is easy but I am not really sure what to do.

Hi Steve!

Have you checked out the support section for the Mediator at the Elbox website?

Maybe you can find something here: Elbox Support

You can find everything from drivers to product manuals. Good luck mate!

[Stephen Coates]

Turns out it was all in the ReadMe file. So getting on the internet was as easy as just making sure FastEthernet.device was in DEVS:Networks and pointing Miami to FastEthernet.device. I've still no idea how to go about connecting to other machines or printers on the network, but that is something I wasn't sure about when I used PCMCIA networking.

Everything seems OK at the moment. I have taken a few pictures of the current setup and will post them as soon as I put the PC on.

[Harrison]

Thats great you managed to work it out, and it turned out to be fairly easy. Just goes to show "read the manual!" is true!