Monthly Archives: October 2017

Retro Computers

Amiga 1200 Tower Project – Continued #2

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Sooo… My Amiga 1200 Tower has finally found it’s proper place on my desk next to my beloved Speccy and it’s Russian ZX Evo comrade.

But there is a huge problem (which was kinda foreseen); being inside a boringly ordinary PC cabinet it is totally void of bringing the Amiga funk I’m thinking bringing the classic Amiga art in form of stickers of sorts; either bought online or home made (if I have to).

… and I got these in the mail today 🙂Still waiting for my 4xIDE’99 buffered controller, though

 

To be continued…

(Click Here)

Retro Computers

Amiga 1200 Tower Project – Continued

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(for higher resolution photos visit: Zhixy’s Gallery)

Next up… I’ve added a ACA1233n accelerator daughterboard.

The top-left circle… that’s a modified Jerry+ Joystick adaptor which splits joystick port 1 into a PS/2 compatible USB mouse and… well a joystick in port 1. I have replaced the LED with a jumper so I can connect it to one of the LEDs at the front.

The circle at the bottom is where I’ve added a jumper on the motherboard for the reset switch.

… and the remaining circle is a custom made adaptor PCB to convert the A1200 Power, HDD and floppy LED connector so I can connect them up to the LEDs in the front. Those 3 resisters are 47 Ohms.

The idea of the those four 10-pin connectors is simply to link cables like above together in order to replicate joystick port 1 and 2 out to the front. The PCB will obviously need to be fastened in some way.

Got the screen hooked up to HDMI via a DVI scan-doubler with a to-HDMI adaptor on it. I’ve had some problems trying to create the RGB-port to SCART and VGA cable. I don’t quite understand why yet, as I have made many of those cables in the past. I’ll give it some time come back to it and try again. For now I’ve just pulled a SCART cable I bought to the insides. Probably going to use the HDMI for the most part anyway.

I’m still waiting for a 4 EIDE adaptor daughterboard, so I can connect up the DVD drive. But the Gotek emulator and floppy drive are hooked up and working. That is an actually Amiga external drive at the bottom (the old ones are the best). It was very yellowed and the front plastics have gotten a coat of black spray paint to match the cabinet.

Here… I did a video of my first real test run for you. Sorry about the poor sound quality. I guess I just spend more money on my retro computers than on cameras. That old second hand Prosonic TV isn’t the best either.

To be continued…

(Click Here)

Dungeon Siege 1

Dungeon Siege on Windows 10

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Getting Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna to run on Windows 10

To my surprise there are still people out there who think that you need WindowsXP to play Dungeon Siege these days.

This is simply not true. Over the past years I have installed it on Windows 7, 8.x, and Windows 10… and all of them were 64 Bit versions.

You don’t even have to tweak the compatibility settings. All you need is to install DirectX 9.0c (from June 2010) and choose the correct settings with DSVideoConfig.exe

Check it out:

(View on YouTube)

Retro Computers

Amiga 1200 Tower Project

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Building a spare Amiga 1200 motherboard into a PC ATX Cabinet.

(for higher resolution photos visit: Zhixy’s Gallery)

A Commodore Amiga 1200’s motherboard doesn’t just by default (and for good reasons) fit into a standard PC ATX form factor cabinet and even though I’ve found a fairly large cabinet, it still wouldn’t fit without some modifications to the cabinet.

First turning the power supply 90° and mounting it “wrongly” while still making sure can “breathe” seems to be the obvious solution to the problem.

It’s not really that complicated to modify a PC’s PSU to power an Amiga 500, 600 or 1200.

But I wanted to be able to change the PSU without having to do all the modifications again so I chose to butcher an ATX adaptor cable instead. The commodore power plug actually comes from my old C128’s power supply (it had given up) which is very similar to the Amiga’s.

Notice that the green wire is shorted with one of the blacks in order to force the PSU to turn on. Later I am going to connect those two to a on/off switch on the front of the cabinet.

Thanks to MsMadLemon for your brilliant YouTube video 🙂https://youtu.be/DMxNH-PCYew

A custom made back plade was needed in order to replicate some of the A1200’s plugs out the back.

The serial and parallel ports were the easiest as I just bought some standard flat cabled plugs, cut them to size and crimped on the matching DB25 plugs.

I have a daughterboard which snaps onto the Lisa chip, giving me a digital DVI (HDMI) port. That’s what the extra hole is for.

The RGB port is going to be represented by a VGA and a SCART plug. The Audio is split into the standard RCA’s, a mini-jack and obviously the SCART plug too. The RF gets a “modern day” startard RF plug.

Any extra floppy drives are going to be mounted inside the cabinet, so the external disk drive port doesn’t need to be replicated.

I’m also going to add a PS/2 mouse splitter-converter and replicate the joystick ports to the front for easy access.

Now for some mounting brackets for the motherboard (cut from aluminium plate like the backplate)

So far it looks real nice and neat on the inside. I’ll soon fix that 🙂

More aluminium plate to cover the gaping hole at the top.

Those are not true USB’s, the top one can only handle a PS/2 compatible USB keyboard and the bottom is for the PS/2 compatible USB mouse previously mentioned. Later on I will probably add real USB’s to the front plugs via a daughterboard on the clock port.

A RJ45 coupling will server nicely for replicating the LAN plug for my PCMCIA network card.

An old working DVD drive and a Gotek SD floppy emulator (for DF0) already sits ready and waiting to be connected.

To be continued…

(click here)