What have i gotten myself into? A1200 in the making...

Well, this is another Amiga 1200 tower conversion. The catch is that I'm fairly fresh with Amiga computers. Have owned a 1200 and 500 for soon 15 years, but never really got around to tinker much with them. If anyone have suggestions, please come with them. I'm still learning and trying to do my best. Yes, I am also fully aware this is a quite hefty system to start with. No pain, no gain. :ninja:

So this autumn I got the brilliant idea that I should put together an awesome Amiga 1200. The goal is to expand it a lot, that's why I landed on a tower conversion. It is to be loaded with games and demos, as the demoscene is something I find really fascinating. It should also run some more challenging games, like Quake, Doom or whatever.

I searched high and low for a computer cabinet that would fit the A1200, but all the stores seemed to be sold out. Managed to come across a tower at my country's number one advertising site. It is an old Elbox E/BOX 1200 cabinet, it came with a CD-ROM, floppy drive, motherboard, PowerFlyer (FastATA), Mediator 1200 and Voodoo3. Got a mouse from a friend and dug out some old PC keyboard I found with AT connection. I discovered this site in my search for an accelerator card and bough a Blizzard 1260 with 64MB RAM and a SCSI kit for it with 128MB RAM. I soon realized my PowerFlyer were crap and bought a new FastATA MK-IV CF/SATA from Elbox. I also bought a new motherboard which is fully recapped by a nice chap on this forum.

The current specs are:
E/BOX tower
Amiga 1200 rev 2B motherboard
Blizzard PPC - 68060 @ 66 MHz, PPC @ 330 MHz, 256MB RAM, SCSI controller
Mediator PCI 1200
Voodoo3
Fast Ethernet network card
Sound Blaster 128
CD-ROM (secondary master)
160GB hard drive (secondary slave)
4GB CF card (primary master)
Amiga OS 3.9 with Boing Bag 2 and ROM update
Classic Workbench v28 for OS 3.9
PFS3 filesystem on all disks

I'm sure you're eager to see some pictures now, so here we go!

This is the front and back of the tower:

http://i1218.photobucket.com/albums/...ps19d9f98e.jpg
http://i1218.photobucket.com/albums/...pscfa123c4.jpg

Really a big mess, but it is my computer and game console experimentation area after all... You can also spot my LaserDisc player in the background, so it is the home cinema room as well. :lol:

http://i1218.photobucket.com/albums/...ps2b7f67cb.jpg

I'd love to get a proper Amiga keyboard for this computer, but they're just impossible to find...

http://i1218.photobucket.com/albums/...ps18dab987.jpg

And some shots of the inside as well. Don't mind the makeshift cooling solution. I'm going to improve it soon... ;)

http://i1218.photobucket.com/albums/...ps053da7d4.jpg
http://i1218.photobucket.com/albums/...ps4c032f6f.jpg

I had a long battle getting the Voodoo3 to work, but I finally got it to display a picture on my PC monitor. It is 1440x900.

http://i1218.photobucket.com/albums/...ps9d8a2fca.jpg

Last a picture of the new and fresh FastATA MK-IV!

http://i1218.photobucket.com/albums/...pscf59f587.jpg

I have ordered a Indivision 1200 AGA MK2cr and Mediator 1200TX from AmigaKit, these will probably be shipped over the weekend. So more pictures to come soon when I pull apart my Amiga again. :p

Very nice :)

One day I would love to do an A1200 tower project.

Got slightly bored trying to get the Sound Blaster running, so I thought it would be a nice brake to tinker with Doom. Downloaded DoomAttack and copied the WAD file from my MS-DOS computer. Didn't get the music working, but the sound effects work. Guess it is a matter of configuration. I chose the native screen resolution in the preferences and fired up the game.

http://i1218.photobucket.com/albums/...ps68b2f428.jpg

As you can see, the screen became a small post stamp on the monitor... Not only that, it ran really, really slow. You could see the screen scrolled one frame per second when moving. I then proceeded with using the fake native resolution option. It filled the screen and actrually ran quite smooth.

http://i1218.photobucket.com/albums/...ps0dcbc355.jpg

I then went back to trying to figure out what is going on. For some reason running the graphics though the voodoo3 is really sluggish and using the on-board graphics ran quite smooth. Strange... I also noticed I get graphic corruption in DirectoryOpus when moving my mouse pointer over the buttons.

http://i1218.photobucket.com/albums/...psf21b14c8.jpg

I started searching the web again and found several posts about some WarpOS/Warp3D thing to set up the 3D portion of the voodoo3. This software is supposed to be on the Mediator Multimedia CD. I checked my files and couldn't find any software like that. Then I realized that what I downloaded from Elbox is just an update pack, not the full CD. No wonder I couldn't get things to work properly when I'm missing a lot of software... Not really my day when it comes to Amiga 1200 expansions I guess, and the punishment of buying second hand stuff. Hopefully I can find the full CD somewhere on the web so I can get up to speed again.

Elbox tower is the best! Very nice project. Why do you want TX model?

The Mediator I have is the very first model, and also a discontinued product. The TX is 10 years newer and is slightly more updated. Also see now that it comes with the Mediator Multimedia CD which I need.

I tested first model versus TX few years ago and there was no speed difference (I tested 2D and 3D on Voodoo3 plus overclocking). TX will just give you 2 more PCIs. But anyway buying a newer HW with warranty + supporting Elbox+Amigakit is good reason ;o)

Indeed support is a good reason. Actually impressed that someone still develop and make hardware for this old computer. Warranty is also nice to have. :cool:

I do believe that there isn't any speed difference. I guess the hardware around it is the bottleneck. Although the extra PCI slots probably won't be used, it is always nice to have the possibility for further expansion. Could probably put in a TV card and buy a Spider II USB card and put in. Just to fill up the space. :p

Got some thermal pads today that I ordered from eBay. So I grabbed my hacksaw and cut off a portion of the heat sink I strapped on with rubber bands. Cleaned off the old thermal paste and mounted the heat sink with the thermal pads. I mounted a Noctua fan I bought (NF-A4x10 to be exact) and turned on my Amiga. The fan is running on 12 volts, and the small size made me expect it to be noisy, but were pleasantly surprised! It is practically silent. Not only that, the CPU is now running really cold. Almost can't feel any heat at all when touching it. This modification is probably not necessary, but I like to be on the safe side. Included a few pictures of the outcome:

http://i1218.photobucket.com/albums/...psc0bb45df.jpg
http://i1218.photobucket.com/albums/...ps536cdcb8.jpg
http://i1218.photobucket.com/albums/...ps98024e2c.jpg

Got a few parts today. Upgraded the CF card from 4 to 8GB. Using PFS3 filesystem and OS 3.9, so no issues with that. Were hoping I could fit all the games onto the CF card in one partition. Would guess about 7GB should to the trick. The system it self has 500MB.

Also got the new Mediator 1200TX and scandoubler. It was a tight fit, but managed to squeeze everything in. :D Had a few issues. First it wouldn't recognize the 060 card, when that was reinserted it wouldn't recognize the SCSI adapter and had to reinsert that as well. When installing the software from the mediator CD I also got an error saying the mediator wasn't found. Turned out I forgot to set one of the jumpers... :roll: Anyhow, got that installed and set up picasso96 again. Now everything seems more stable than before. The workbench start up correctly every time now. Before it would sometimes have a big mouse pointer, missing the FastATA etc...

When I installed the Indivision scandoubler, I put an anti-static bag over the part that would be covered by the FastATA. Probably not necessary, but better safe than sorry. The FastATA is lifted by adding two extra sockets for each chip. I also turned the cable between the Gayle and FastATA around to give it some tiny extra clearance from the mediator. The bracket for the DVI output from the scandoubler is borrowed from some old graphics card I had lying around. Would say everything turned out nice. :)

The next thing now is to figure out how I get the 3D part of the voodoo3 working properly, getting sound output from the SB128 and networking up and running. I'm also really considering getting a PPC card and just be done with it. Have to do some more reading on the subject first I think.

http://i1218.photobucket.com/albums/...psa6001999.jpg
http://i1218.photobucket.com/albums/...ps594e6750.jpg

Hey, nice project - reminds me of my old Tower project :D

Here's a couple of links to help you out. First one, unless Elbox have fixed it in new versions of MMCD (probably not knowing Elbox lol) the wrong version of the Warp3D driver is installed by the install script, the A4000 version! So you might well need to replace some files, see here:

http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=...&postcount=119

Now, for 68k/Warp3D I found you had to choose the 'MMU' option during the Mediator install, look out for that when you're doing the 'Mediator Config' bit (this is what set's the envac variables)

PM me if you need the Warp3D version of Quake to test, I can send you the files you need save you messing around trying to get it to work.

There's a 68k Warp3D version of Quake II as well but you need to buy this from Hyperion, it's very slow (unplayable) on anything less than 75mhz 060 though.

If you got for a PPC then you might need to go through the Mediator Config again and uncheck the MMU option, I don't know why but PPC/Warp3D never worked for me with the same settings as 68k/Warp3D.

If you have problems getting sound or networking going try another PCI slot. They're setup via the Mediator Config as well and is pretty straight forward, of course you need a TCP/IP stack to go Online, I use MiamiDX but you can use whatever one you like. I stick with Miami as it has a nice Wizard GUI to setup your connection.

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=52235

I think that will help you a bit for now. By the way, there's no need to use fake native modes for Doom, grab ADoom, it will run in RTG, just create a screen mode of 320x240 and edit the Tooltype to use this mode, it runs nice and smooth like this.

Quake68k (the non Warp3D version) supports 320x240 RTG as well, but you're better off with the Warp3D version (BlitzQuake)

Have fun!