keyboard issue

I've just dug out all my old Amiga stuff (I never knew I had soooo many disks!) and found that my A600 (it was cheap when I bought it....that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it) is defunct. Closer inspection revealed that the power supply socket was cracked from the wear and tear of plugging and unplugging the supply over the years that I had the machine.

Having loads of old PC hardware around I dissected the A600 and slung it into a PC case and used a PC power supply to run the machine - which it does admirably. The only problem is the keyboard. I can't find any way of rigging the keyboard so it is external to the case. At the moment I have to rest the old upper half of the A600 shell (with keyboard attached) on the opened PC case in order to use it. I remember there being PC keyboard adapters around a few years back but I also remember them being machine specific and that the A600 wasn't covered.

Am I wasting my time trying to get this to work? I could leave it as it is - but it is a real PitA. I would prefer to box it up and leave it in my stack of PC machines.

While I'm trying to sort this out I could do with some help getting some disks converted to ADFs

[RetroMan]

Hmm, the only solution for that A600 Keyboard would be this : http://us.aminet.net/pub/aminet/hard...arKeyboard.lha

You can connect a Keyboard into the parallel port, but there seem to be some slight problems, read it yourself

Another option would be to cut off the flat cable of the A600 (in the middle) and wire some cables onto it, so that it is long enough to get outside ! The only problem here is : I really don´t know how long this wires could be exactly, might be some signal lost if too long ....

Now onto the adf question ! Did you allready read this : http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?threadid=3239 ? If so go ahead and post where your problem is ....

[jmmijo]

I've seen them around too, I just found a vendor but they only have adapters for the A2000/3000/4000/1200 Check them out and see if anything will work for you.

http://www.jschoenfeld.com/indexe.htm

It's the Lyra adapter!

I've tried a 1200 keyboard adapter in the past (a good many years ago) and found that it just locked the machine up solid. It was someone disappointing but not entirely suprising.

The parallel keyboard solution looks promising though - not quite what I'd had in mind, but a whole lot better than what I have at the moment (nothing).

The matter of the ADFs was just me being a bit impatient (I don't actually have the machine to hand otherwise I would be using it - even in it's current state). I've converted several discs in the past but I mostly have to rely on finding "cracked" adfs on the web as most of the discs I have aren't convertable through normal means. The disk2fdi system is something I hadn't seen before - I'm going to look into it a bit further as it might solve all of the problems....

I tried the Disk2FDI system over the weekend after shredding my hands in the process of fitting a second FDD to my usual PC.

While the software claims to be running I can't actually get it to do anything at all. The only sign that it has run is the creation of a 0byte file.

Are there any tricks to getting the tool to work?

[jmmijo]

The other option is to get the ISA version of the Catweasel board, also from

http://www.jschoenfeld.com/indexe.htm

It requires an ISA slot in your PC then one or two floppy drives connected to it, any combo of 3.5" and 5.25" drives then use the software to read Amiga formatted disks!!!

The whole system has DIED twice in 24 hours.

First of all the PSU went with a bang (big blue flash - lots of noise) which wasn't too much of a problem as I had a spare that I could rig up.

Then this morning it started acting strangely, two or three attempts to recognise the HD and then lots of errors reading it. Pulled the IDE cable off the MB only to find four of the IDE pins had came off with the cable (might explain the errors....)

I could continue to use the machine old style but without an external/2nd FD I'm more inclined to put the whole thing to rest...


...and find myself a nice healthy A1200


RIP A600HD

[ElectroBlaster]

I have 2 of those amiga/pc keyboard adaptors and they rock!!

they fit into where the keyboard ribbon would normally fit and a header cable with the 5pin din can be mounted anywhere like in a tower case etc... they work with any amiga/pc keyboard, the board has 1 logic chip and a crystal and thats it!!! best design of all as others ive seen had bugs and stupid problems or design flaws!

im not sure about this working on an a600 but i do remember seeing the ad and it said a600/a1200 so you might be lucky if your 600 isnt dead m8!

try Eyetech or Power Computing for the keyboard adaptor

I will keep an eye out for it as it is EXACTLY what I've been looking for.

I've arranged to buy a S/H 1200 already which I will play around with but that will need to be towered as I find the original case frustrating (having been spoiled by building PCs for 10 years). Even managed to find a couple of 2.5" drives at work, one 1.3Gb, one 4Gb (actually just over which is why I bothered with the smaller one). It also means my IDE buffer card isn't wasted....

I was sorely tempted to just buy all I needed off the shelf, but my other project has to come first

and that needs all the cash I can spare!