A little project I built to help my Amiga Along :)

[bugsymalone666]

I am not as skilled as some of the people building from scratch hardware for their Amiga, but over the past couple of weeks I have been building an old looking piece of equipment and recycling into something for my Amiga.

Wasnt sure if this was the right place to post, but thought I'd start here!

So I have been mucking about with my old A500 for a few years at my parents on weekends since I moved out, initially I brought it back into life when Raspberry Pi's had only been out a while and a guy built a replacement diskdrive using one. Needless to say I built a pidrive but it has its limitations, like limiting how many extenal drives the A500 can use!

So next up I managed to bag myself a rather sorry looking A590 hard drive unit, an add on I had always wanted, screws all missing, LEDs not working with original 20mb scsi! It worked, but needed work!I got a 1gb second hand drive and played with that,I had also upgraded the rom chip to 2.04 and managed to get WB2.0 on it, but once I had that is when I found out about the limitations of the pidrive in my Amiga. I thought I know I'll install Workbench 2.1 on the hard drive and be really cool. This didnt work well as it was all ADFs on the pi drive, 5 of them in a system that didnt like changing that many! So I didnt really bother with it much for a while after that as generally my own wedding got in the way (dam life stuff stopping me retro gaming!)

So about maybe a year ago I came across while disposing of equipment at work a SCSI CDRom drive, the type that took the old CD caddys, so saved that from death and thought cool, I can probably hook it up to my Amiga at some stage,it was an internal one from some sort of document scanner that also contained a 486pc, well saved some of that and stuck it in a box.Then much time passed!

Then I got even cooler and bought myself a Gotek drive with an Amiga Firmware already installed and even came with a DVD with about 1600 adfs on it! That was cool but I soon hit the snag of not wanting to damage my Amiga case, but not being able to access the buttons without the case off, this is where the project begins......

[bugsymalone666]

Years ago I did work experience at a firm who built scsi type stuff when I was at school in the late 90's, while there they were throwing some older kit out and I showed interest, bagging myself a 640mb hard drive (external) that took up 2x 5.25" bays! and a weird optomagnical drive (88mb!) that also took up similar internal space.

I realised recently that the 640mb hard drive would be great if removed to take my CD rom drive as it was scsi, had room for more too, it appears I must have disposed of it about 5 years earlier leaving me with this funny optomagnetic drive that didnt really function anymore, took it to bits and heres what it looked like:

outside:



Inside:



You'll note how it has a second PCD mounted inside and buttons and an LCD too and I thought I wonder if my Gotek could be put in here as well as my CD drive?!

The styling totally fits in with the Amiga too

[bugsymalone666]

So I looked at the LCD in my 'Dynatek' case and found although its 90s, its actually the same drive chips as all LCDs on the market today, although this is Japanese made!

Researching on here and google I found out actually its a simple process ordered a chinese Gotek for £12 so I didnt ruin my Amiga on and also an adaptor for the LCD. got this stuff and started the process of getting new firmware, not realising you also had to buy a licence for the HXC stuff! Not a problem though only a couple of quid and worth it

rigged it up on the case with the case LCD and it seems to work!





Stage one, I was surpised it worked and the little I2C just needed some contract adjustment!

The next stage was to mount it properly, I was going to just hotglue it in but after some checking through all my rubbish, I found proper 5,25" to 3.5" drive adaptors, meaning it fitted in the bottom of the unit lovely! The usb extension cable with its many ferrites came from some other scanner thing, turned out to be just the right length!

The other thing making the project possible was that on ebay I managed to get a very sorry looking PCB and cable from an external Amiga disk drive, cleaned it with vinegar, washed and dried it, left it in the airing cupboard over night and it was a different board by morning

In the back of the unit chassis there was a little hole which you normally find device id selectors in, this had a blank which I removed and thought it would be perfect for my cable to come through, but the holes so small!

I found a solution to that, cut a hole fro a usb port directly under it like so:



I had to take the 23pin end of the cable apart, but it slid through the hole just, and then seated firmly:




Then to keep it from moving, add a USB port:





With it all in place I then had to add in a 'floppy' power connector as the case only came with 2 hard drive molexs.

With it plugged in it almost looks like its meant to be in there:

[bugsymalone666]

So I put the CD rom in which needed new holes drilling for the installation, not sure why the case didnt have any to start with, it had one set of lower holes for the optical drive which had been 'modified' when they built it, the gotek was fine with it though:



The upper 4 holes are ones I drilled for the CD rom, looks like the spacing was all right:




So then I hooked it up to see if my hard work had paid off, using both mouse buttons together lets you select a boot device, which was showing up:



DF2 is the new drive, so at least the PCB I cleaned still worked!



Looking good, the unit could see the name of the file and use the buttons to select up and down + enter, then I let it do its thing:



sure enough it worked how its meant too.

I was pleased with the outcome on this as I did some modify, recycling and old case to be something that almost looks like it was always with my Amiga. The fan in its pretty loud so I need the change that though.

The next job is to try getting the CDRom working, but I dont know how you get CDs to work yet!

Thought I'd share what I'd done

[DamienD]

Nice work indeed bugsymalone666, well done!!!

[Zetr0]

A really nice piece of work and retro-realization!



Thanks for sharing - very inspiring - it looks great and has some of the classic lines of the Amiga computers!

As a thought if you wanted to get shot of the dynatek badge - there is a really talented chap on eBay Marstickers that makes brushed aluminium case badges amongst other things quite pretty -

But even if you choose the keep Dynatek log it still looks great!

Again thanks for sharing this wonderful project!

[seuden]

Awesome stuff!!

[Daedalus]

Excellent, I love these builds. Well done!

[Amiga1992]

Very good idea, this! It looks great.

[LuMan]

Brilliant. What a fantastic project! Excellent work