An Amiga 500 Tower conversion

[bugsymalone666]

So I been asking some questions about building one and now I'm starting my A500 Tower conversion.

Why am I doing it?

Well I wanted to go beyond the original Amiga 500 I had as a kid, I built a Raspberry Pi Floppy drive replacement to start with, then I got an A590 Scsi HD, Got a Gotek, got a second one and modded it to HxC then I got hold of a caddy CDROM. At this stage some stuff wasnt super reliable, so I ended up with the Amiga in bits constantly and had like 3 power supplies separate cases so decided it would be far better in just 1, with 1 modern PSU.

What exactly am I doing?

An Amiga 500 put into a tower case, CDROM, Scsi Harddrive, disc drive, HXC drive into something that looks highend/authentic product.

So I went hunting for a cheap case on ebay, the cheapest tower I could find to work with was a LianLi all aluminium case that was missing a couple of fixings for the mother board (the panel you mount it on) and part of the back of the case. £17 delivered and its a nice case, still been debating if I should have found something more rubbish to do this project with! My plan is to try and have something a bit like the equivalent of a CDTV type finish.

So first thing I did was some mock ups to trial how the A500 will fit:






Added the ram and a DVD drive and that just about seems to clear ok, the next step was to look at adding the A590 thats going to sort out the DVD or CD drive and Hard drive:



This is a problem I will need to overcome:



I am thinking of moving the motherboard up a bit and making some sort of PCB adaptor from scratch here (never done PCBs before so learning experience even though I muck about with matrix board and making things regular) you cant get the 86pin connector the Amiga uses easily, but you can get 100Pin ones in the right pitch, so just neatly cut the connector up I think.

This is probably going to be one of the more involved parts of the project itself as I was looking at maybe adding a Zorro II slot as they are 100pin I believe and can be added to the A500 slot. Also on the list for this 90degree board I plan to make is maybe an IDE68K, as far as I know you get all the lines you need on the Zorro Bus to do it and its easier than putting something under the chip, unless you get something nice like the TF530.

So at the front I did some test fitting of my Gotek before my multidrive turned up and also the DVD rom I already had:



so as you can see above the optical drive there is actual an aluminium optical drive bezel to go in front of the drive, which I am probably going to use over the drive unless I use the caddy one. which will leave me one drive blank short. What I plan to do here is try taking a cast of the Amiga logo from my A500 case, then using that to make a blanking plate that has 3 buttons a small OLED display hooked up to my HxC and the Amiga logo, spray it silver then bobs your uncle!

I then have this disk drive:



Tested the drive with one of the Amiga driver adaptors and that works lovely, going to plug the card reader part into the USB port of my HxC as I believe you are supposed to be able to use almost any USB based storage device with them, sticks, card readers and hard drives.

Another something I am going to build is going to be some sort of Keyboard adaptor to allow the use of a PS/2 keyboard, as my Amiga Keyboard is kinda shot (lots of keys not working like the Amiga Keys along with some others), which in the slot at the bottom of the front of the case I as going to make a panek that had 2x DB9 connectors for Mouse/Joystick, 2 PS/2 and 2USB port basically for mouse and keyboard, because apparently PS/2 USB can be the same for some compatible keyboards.

Other things for this project may be some sort of video adaption, which I have been thinking about stringing some adaptors together to go from scart,HDMI and to VGA to get me some sort of Video Scaler for under 20 quid.

This is probably going to take me some time to get together as I am basically doing it at my parents during my lunch times with a sandwich in one hand!

I have started on the motherboard mounting rails, but havent actually fixed anything in place yet.

[AwoLStill]

Originally Posted by bugsymalone666

Another something I am going to build is going to be some sort of Keyboard adaptor to allow the use of a PS/2 keyboard, as my Amiga Keyboard is kinda shot (lots of keys not working like the Amiga Keys along with some others), which in the slot at the bottom of the front of the case I as going to make a panek that had 2x DB9 connectors for Mouse/Joystick, 2 PS/2 and 2USB port basically for mouse and keyboard, because apparently PS/2 USB can be the same for some compatible keyboards.

This may help:
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=90664

[bugsymalone666]

Originally Posted by AwoLStill

This may help:
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=90664

Good spot, I need to upload some more pictures as now the Motherboard is installed in the case, but something I need to look at doing is mounting the Scsi controller that is the A590.

I found it easier to work on AutoCAD (as I use it at work) as I wasnt getting on too well with most of the PCB design software, going to have a go at making some PCBs myself as adapters for the project, using the toner and acetone transfer method on copper clad board. When I get round to it I'll have to post some pictures.

[80'$_Barbar1an]

Very interesting post, I too intend to embark on a similar project, just the time to get my hands on a functional A500 motherboard. Any news about your project?