Re: Couple amiga questions
Running an IDE cable out of the case was the original way of doing it years ago before slimline laptop drives were easy to get hold of. I saw loads of full sized CD-Rom drives hooked up to A1200's that way. Ugly, but it did work.
But these days you can find a slimline laytop style CD or DVD drive for next to nothing, or pulled from a dead laptop. Fairly easy to setup too. You will need the following:
CD/DVD drive
Buffered IDE interface
IDE cables
Power supply Y-Splitter cable
A copy of IDEFix software
And of course, an A1200.
As shown in Zetr0's picture most people rear mount the laptop drives inside the A1200 and cut a square out of the plastic casing to allow it to fit through and be accessed from the rear of the case. To mount the drive inside the A1200 I use adhesive Velcro strips so the drive can be easily removed later if needed.
A buffered IDE interface is needed to connect the drive and a HDD to the A1200 at the same time. You can be cheap Buffered IDE interfaces for about £11 and they work perfectly. Take a look at Amigakit.com as they sell them. To hook it all up you connect the Buffered IDE interface to the A1200's existing internal IDE HDD port. You then connect a HDD and the CD/DVD drive to the buffered IDE interface.
And finally you have to provide power to the CD/DVD drive. This is where the Power supply Y-Splitter cable comes in. You can take power from the A1200's internal floppy drive power connector, but you will normally also want to keep power to the floppy drive as well, so you replace the existing power cable between the motherboard and the floppy drive with one that has two cables to run to the floppy drive and to the CD/DVD drive. Make sure you check what sort of connectors you need for the two drives so you have the right connectors.
Once that is done and the drive is hooked up to the IDE and power and mounted inside the case, the last thing to do is make it work. To do this you need to install some software called IDEFix'97. You can download a free unregistered version from aminet to get this to work, but when unregistered you will get a register message every time you boot the system. And it is worth registering the software if you can. The installation of IDEFix is fairly easy as the installer walks you through the process. And once installed and the system rebooted it should load CDs to the Workbench desktop.