Upgrading/Refurbishing an A1200
 

Hi folks I recently got gifted an A1200 with a 1084s-d1, the owner wanted to throw it away...!! Can't believe it.
The Miggy is working, though I'd need a new harddisk because its very loud and makes funny noises. I'm thinking about an SSD or SDCard solution, but it has to be internal, since I need the PCMCIA port for an ethernet card. I also doubt that there are SSDs as small as 4Gigs available anymore (if they ever were). I know there are controllers that use SDCards, but for all I know they go into the pcmcia slot. Any recommendations?

I already found a list of compatible ehternet cards. Thought about WiFi but since its impossible to get it WPA2 compatible, I quickly dropped that idea.
I also got myself one of these Jerry+ thingies for USB-mice
Propably need a new floppy drive as well or just clean it thoroughly.

What badly NEEDS cleaning anyway is that CRT Display. Its yellow (not only Commodore hardwares typical sun tan but NICOTINE as well) it stinks and the interior is so dirty that I despise touching it with bare hands. It works but I have to clean it before using otherwise I'll never get that stench out of the room the next few months.

What do you recommend for achieving it? I got 20 litres of distilled water here. Maybe that and a toothbrush or even soapy tapwater and then rinse with distilled water afterwards? I wouldn't hesitate to do that to any modern electronic parts, but I'm afraid this old bugger would keep some moisture inside of some parts and then rotting away or even short circuiting, despite looking dry.
Aaaaaaaand: The mains switch is broken, it won't snap and stay on. Anybody knows of a specific rocker switch that might fit into that hole?

Last question... is there a way to bleach the plastic case of the CRT (How do you remove the front plastic part holding the tube? Can't get it off...)

a CF card and IDE adapter seem to work well for internal HDD's, very cheap. You can use SD too with a different adapter.

Replace the floppy with a Gotek perhaps, lets you read disk images from a USB.

Have you heard of 'Retrobrite'? you can make your own for brightening plastic, look it up:)

Unfortunately it's very hard to get rid of the smoke smell as it goes far deeper than just the case, the inside of the monitor will stink too. But to get rid of the gross waxy coating just use a brush and soapy water. I bought a Commodore 1942 a while back that I thought was yellow from degradation, 90% of it however washed off!

If its possible, then I think I'll go the SDcard route. There are already so much of these flying about here, might actually put them to a good use after all.

The Gotek sounds intriguing, however I think I'll stick with a real floppy drive for sake of retro feeling. Critical games could still be played from HD (Indiana Jones 4 anyone? :D )
Heck I even have a BIG CRT television in my basement, saved for a purpose like this. I'll still refurbish this Commodore display though, maybe can find a C64 to accompany the miggy.

I never heard of 'retrobrite' but I looked it up. Seems pretty easy to do, you can get Hydrogen peroxide in the local pharmacies. Hmm I'd still need an UV lamp. I wanted to buy one anyway to find cat markings (urine is supposed to glow under UV light... sorry for derailing :P )

Thats good to hear, will make bleaching easier. However I *was* talking about the monitors guts in my opening post too. I already opened it up, the back went off nice but I can't seperate the tube from the front plastic. There is some sticky dust coat over everything, its really disgusting. I don't know if I can just brush its guts off with soapy water without damaging something.

Most people just use the sun, a cold sunny day or two in northern europe might be perfect as the solution won't dry out as fast. GL with that cat-piss thing btw. :laughing

Hopefully you know this already but be careful poking around inside a CRT monitor, massive electric shock risk!

Yes from my various retrobrite experiments I agree weak direct sunlight is best, around October or April. In the height of summer the sun is too hot and just dries the solution out too quickly.

Yep, know of the high voltage. I let it sit cut from mains for a day before opening.

I presume its too late into fall for sunlight. Constantly cloudy/raining here for a week...

From what I've heard, CRT's can hold charges for considerably longer periods than a day. I don't speak from any sort of authority, just passing along anecdotal evidence. I'd recommend getting a proper device for discharging the CRT, though.

Thanks for the warning, I knew that they can hold high voltage chargings but not that it was that long.
By the way I once got zapped by a faulty TV set. It was on, were watching as usual, wanted to turn it off at the main power switch at the front. When my finger touched the knob, I saw a trail of sparks running from the bottom part of the tube over the plastic frame into my finger. That considerably hurt. Was afraid of these things for months after that incident :)
(It was propably just the usual static charge, but it was a big enough amount for my finger to tingle for an hour)

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Kingspec-P...oAAOxyeZNTUNkO

£15 for 4 Gig
or
you could go for a MicroDrive (Hitachi/IBM/Apple)
in an IDE to CF adapter.

I myself have gone the IDE to SD-Card adapter route.

I want to get one of those for an old Pentium PC, but for Amiga you don't need that disk on module, mainly it has a much higher transfer rate than a CF or SD, way more than you need:

Sustained Read
43MB/S
Sustained Write
21MB/S

Amiga will do what? 3mb/s at best?

Plus seeing how it plugs directly into the port on a motherboard, you'd need an additional cable to make it work, one with a male and a female end otherwise it will probably prevent the case from closing and the keyboard from sitting properly.

You can get 4gb of storage plus the adapter for a third of that, hard part is getting a genuine sandisk or whatever, and one which is compatible.

I once read someone put their boards in the dishwasher and put through a rinse cycle. providing you allow the boards a few days to dry. Sounds dodgy to me so try at your own risk

I use a cheapo Transcend 4GB CF(133x) which works perfectly well. cost me about 3 quid from eBay some months ago.

The adapter was the same, cost about 2-3 quid. I'd recommend buying a wifi card just to ease the annoyance that is file transfers. The only expense I don't know about is the short baby IDE cable. the one in my A1200 has been in 3 different '1200s over the decades

I heard about the dishwasher too. While I can recommend washing with water, you must be cautious with big ol' parts like in the CRT Display (potentiometers, main switch etc).
I personally would never put any electronics into the dishwasher due to the agressive cleaning agent.

I'd also refrain from hogging the miggy into wireless lan, there's no potential way for a stock A1200 to support WPA2, at least thats what I have been told. Without a blizzard card it is too slow since the encryption is handled by the cpu for most if not all pcmcia cards.

what works great for me: 2 CF cards, one on the internal header and one on a PCMCIA adapter (mainly full of whd load games and to backupdata off the internal) , if you have a pc with a card reader then its real easy to copy around as the external card can be FAT95 formatted and read by both machines. I also ran a wired network adapter off the PCMCIA, but it rarely gets used.

If you're interested in WIFI WPA2/AES cards have a look here:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=77831

or

http://www.amibay.com/showthread.php...ighlight=zyxel

Also there's great tutorial done by Tenleftfingers.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/k7yF340BwUM9z3bVBLW

He doesn't have the turbo board yet. Still, he uses WPA2/AES PCMCIA WIFI card with his Amiga to transfer files via FTP.

105k sounds terrible but its propably no issue when only using it for transferring adf files. Think I'll order one and just try.

Well, it's great that I don't have to swap anything. It saves my PCMCIA slot. I can download a lot of things via FTP, e.g. EAB has a great FTP server, scene.org as well. Apart from that I can connect to my OSX or Ubuntu servers and download things from there.
If you want to go oldschool you can use Telnet. IRC seems to be fun from my Amiga as well :)

Is there any reason you're limiting your capacity to 4GB? I have an 80GB hard drive in my A1200.

No, no specific reason, I just had this number randomly floating around in my head, thinking OS3 was limited to that. Wasn't there a 4gb partition size limit?