Jope's A1700..
 

I had a spare A1200 mobo kicking around that I originally bought "broken for spares" from a friend of mine here in Finland.

One day I remembered it and thought I might as well boot it up and see what happens.

Well wouldn't you know! It actually boots up..

The keyboard controller area looked rather bad + the keyboard connector was melted due to someone carelessly replacing the U7 CIA with a hot air gun..

Oh well. Plenty of broken A500s in my cupboard. Whip the motherboard out of one, and insert A1200 mobo?

After some knife work, I now have the A1200 motherboard fitted inside the A500 case. The motherboard is mounted down with copious amounts of rolled up duct tape. Duct tape is not as permanent as double sided, but I can take the mobo out easily if need be.

What next, thinks our intrepid protagonist..

Well a keyboard would be nice, I guess?

So I removed the LED + GND wires from the A500 keyboard connector and just stuck them in the A1200 motherboard's led pin strip. Power it up and hey I have power and drive leds.

It sure would be nice to be able to type on that thing too so I dig out some pin strip and wire and solder the remaining four connections (CLK, DAT, _RESET, +5V) from the pin strip onto the A1200's CIA and KBD controller. This way I can easily remove the keyboard later. :-)

What's this, just '''' when I type. Well, you as well as I know that CLK and DAT are reversed. Quickly desolder and swap them around, connect everything up, boot, and whee I can type legible text and reset the machine from the keyboard.

http://jope.fi/amiga/a1700/a1700_herro.jpg

Oh yeah I guess you want a picture too? Here it is, with a tall A4000 HD floppy mechanism on my very cluttered desk:

http://jope.fi/amiga/a1700/a1700.jpg

What next? I don't know. It has a 28MHz 020 turbo with 4MB ram and 3.0 ROMs.. I guess I might be arsed to burn some 3.1 or 3.9 ROMs for it and I have a bunch of CF2IDE adapters lying around, just need some CFs and a 44pin IDE cable. WHDLoad machine or what ever. That clock port also beckons me somehow on the motherboard .. what should I plug in there?

Oh, it's ever so fast..

http://jope.fi/amiga/a1700/a1700_speed.jpg

Good work m8y, a nice see indeed..

A1200 in an a500 chassis would be interesting to see an optical drive in there too!

can we all have a nice close up of the keyboard adapter and u7 soldering :D

If you've behaved nicely, you may see it. ;-)

I disclaim all SMD rework on this board! It looked like this (well, like shit really :-D) when I got it..

http://jope.fi/amiga/a1700/a1700_solder.jpg

ps. Binox, this is what the A500 floppy will be for. The case donor machine had lost its drive a long time ago. :-)

nice mod!

Agh! I knew I forgot something... sorry! my bad! I'll grab a box and pack it all up now!

u can put an mp3@64 on the clockport to play muzik! :p
a subway would be a waste, 030 is too slow for usb...

Hey don't worry about it.. We're not doing this for a living. :-)
Heh.. Perhaps I'll just forget about it.. An optical drive does sound doable, however..

I remember seeing some ancient laptop mechanisms with a 44pin connector at the local recycling center. Sounds like something suitable for a low-budget project such as this. :-)

Re-housing an A1200 into an A500 case - great idea - loads more room!

indeedy i have wanted to do this for some time...

in there would a be a rom, two hard disks (a 4GB boot and 120GB ) and an external CF backplane built into it some where.

an 030@50 with 32/64MB with a prelude sound card and a USB so i could network it with a dongle or two..... hmmm i wonder if there is enough room to add a simple zorro2 pass through an a right angle zorro2 adapter lol ...

a Complete two-tone respray and mmmmmm yummy yum yummy.. I envy you this build jope-a-licious! the ideas and posibilites should prove most read worthy :D

Jope! Please do stick a CD drive in there where the floppy drive would be and take muchos pictures. As I've postulated before if only there'd been a combination of the 1200 and CD32 instead of both of them and they could have kept the case look...

Wow!

That's really cool man, keep the project progressing :great

PZ.

Good work chap, what do the ports look like at the back as IIRC they're laid out differently on the 1200 are they not?! :D

@jope

we demand more quality pics. :D

please

Where would you like pics taken?

The ports at the back are now surrounded by one wide rectangular hole in the plastic.. I just used wire cutters and a knife to remove some plastic.. (I don't have a dremel)

I purchased the optical drive this morning. 10 euro from the local recycling center.. I got one with a 44pin interface, so I don't have to buy a separate adapter board for it. There's a huge pile of old laptop CD mechanisms there, so I just had to dig around a bit. I don't know how fast it is .. probably around 4x-8x. Doesn't really matter.

Now I'm waiting for some 44pin IDE cables with three connectors.. I decided I can't be arsed to crimp them myself, so I bought a set of four off ebay.

The optical drive is probably going to be installed on the left hand side of the machine. I want to keep the floppy drive inside the case too.

Nice, the optical drive will be the icing on the cake.

Do the ports just helpfully line up at the back or was there heavy modding involved... I could see EAB turned into a "Pimp-my-Miggy" Board soon.. what with that Blinged-up-A530 last week!!?!??! Now this baby!

:D

Pix Pix Pix!"!!!!

Heh, well I assume at least one request for pictures is of the ports at the back:

http://jope.fi/amiga/a1700/a1700_ports.jpg

Then a couple of macro shots.. I didn't really pay attention to making it look nice, as it was more of a "proof of concept" type modification than anything else.

http://jope.fi/amiga/a1700/a1700_old_and_new_power.jpg
http://jope.fi/amiga/a1700/a1700_uglyplastic.jpg

At least you can see how much the A1200 motherboard is wider. I had to elongate the hole at the back almost the width of the DB9 port and half the width of the power connector.

Looks like a rat gnawed his way out of it...

;)

Nah, looks good bloke, well done.