Sticking an Amiga 500 in a tower case?

[bugsymalone666]

So I have seen a fair few people do it and have been thinking about maybe doing it myself because of keep mucking about with various things like Hard drives and CDROMs.

I have an A500 with 1MB onboard ram (0.5+0.5 modded to 1m chip ram) and an A590 with 2mb ram.

I figured a good place to start!

Ideally I wanted a super tall tower case like back in the day, but I havent managed to find one, instead I managed to score an incomplete Lian-Li all alloy case thats missing the motherboard panel, the switches/LEDs and the PCI card bit for£17 delivered - Perfect as I dont need those as such!

So I was thinking of actually making up a back panel plate and putting the Amiga main board further into the case so I dont have to do any cutting.

Then I was left with just a few problems to solve:

1)Scsi on the A590, if I remove the onboard termination will using a 50cm long cable and 2 devices be ok?

2) is there is a limit to the internal disk drive cable length? can more than one drive be connected to the internal connector as well as one on the external connector?

3)keyboard? I wondered what fairly inexpensive options were available that were cheap, DIY or both. I dont want to use the original amiga one because its not working 100% and isnt in a case.

So then I need to look at mounting things up and building a tower Amga!

I also planned to put an adaptor on the A590 to allow it to sit at 90* to the MB and was planning on building that adapter to have making an IDE68k and a Zorro(2?) slot for a Zorro card incase something interesting pops up.

Thoughts/Suggestions on some good build threads or parts I havent really thought about?

[solidcore]

Keyboard for a500:
I just found a 25 pounds adapter on the bay for my a500 mainboard, will test it when it arrives otherwise I'm not sure how else you can attach a USB keyboard. Also supports a Bluetooth dongle USB .

[indigolemon]

You can pretty easily make an adaptor to connect a pukka external Amiga keyboard to the header on the A500 mainboard. I know Daedalus did this for his test rig recently. Assuming you then have a standard din connector, any of the adaptors for the big box Amiga, as well as big box Amiga keyboards, will work

[bugsymalone666]

I guess on the keyboard front I was looking to use a more modern keyboard, either USB or PS/2. I have a PS2 keyboard knocking about here somewhere, or our IT department regulary gets older PS2 keyboards come out the woodwork

I am quite interested in making my own adapters if needed as its all part of the learning process adapting old tech to new tech

[indigolemon]

Basically you need a mini din socket, and you hook the correct pins to the keyboard header on the A500 Mainboard. Then you could use something like this to plug in a PS2 keyboard: http://amigakit.amiga.store/catalog/...oducts_id=1228 - or just plug an Amiga keyboard directly.

[AwoLStill]

When I put my first Amiga 1200 into a tower, I used an A500 keyboard externally, on a longer cable. The difficult bit was modifying the A1200 so you could wire it in, but it worked fine with a 2m cable.

I was separately thinking about this the other day, and have just posted a thread on here cos I'd like to try and make molds from either an A4000 or CDTV keyboard, primarily so it could be copied, and adapted to chuck A500 keyboards in.

When I was given an A2000, I used that keyboard, and when I was given a CDTV (long long time ago) I switched to using that keyboard. CDTV one was my favouite.

A4000 keyboards are expensive, CDTV ones are too, but if we could make a copy of the case we could use A500 keyboards externally with little hassle and hopefully lower cost.

Anyone got a dead A4000 / CDTV keyboard or case spare?...

[bugsymalone666]

I think Ultimately I am going to go down the PS2 keyboard route as they are still available. I guess part of my problem has been that there is actually a fault with my A500 keyboard, getting a used working one is about £25+ so actually making something to have a more standard keyboard would be advantageous.


I was thinking of looking in to making for my case a little front panel that had the DB9 connectors for keyboard/joystick, 2 PS2 connectors for keyboard and mouse and maybe a USB for the mouse linked to the ps2 connector.

Seems there are a few designs out there for PS2 to USB of various types so maybe include a double socket usb so keyboard and mouse have a variety of connections you can plug in.

Something I need to look in to is making my own custom PCBs and try building some stuff