1200 PPC voodoo3 tower project.

[Mendel]

Time to start preparing to plan for it now that the actual tower has arrived.

I will describe what happens and what went wrong here. I can already see the first problems even before I´ve done anything!

What I tried to do was to buy a 1260 for my desktop amiga 1200 for 350 euros. What I ended up getting an offer of: I´ll sell you that and I´ll throw in a free full Amiga 1200 tower system as well!

Of course there was no way I could refuse that... and this is where, as we say in Finland, the moped ran away from my hands. Now I had two projects: desktop amiga project and a tower project. So here it starts!


Goals of the project:
Confirm working state of the original hardware in the tower.
Add more ram.
Run scene demo: Lapsuus by mature furk.
Disasseble everything except leave motherboard in place.
Replace Micronik A-1200 busboard with a proper pci mediator.
Get the 1260 out and consider trying it in the desktop amiga.
Install Blizzard PPC accelerator of 060/66 and PPC/240
Install PCI cards such as ethernet, Sound blaster 128, Voodoo 3, possibly usb card.
Install flicker fixer
Replace spinning 3GB hard drive with a 4GB CF card hard drive
Possibly sell excess hardware. (don´t ask, will make for sale thread when time comes)

The tower

Box of 1260 turbo

This is what is the first sight that greeted me under the hood:
Micronik A-1200 busboard 6860 Rev 5.44. First problem I can see is that there is a screw in the top left part that is blocked by the white plastic bits. Have to think about how can I open it to remove the Zorro busboard.

Please don´t reply for a few minutes now, I need to make 3 replies to reserve space for future pictures.



---------- Post added at 00:21 ---------- Previous post was at 00:20 ----------

reserved.
edit: d´oh! It seems like I can´t reply to my own thread to create space for future pictures. Well, no biggie.

edit2: it´s just that often forums have limited number of pictures / post but don´t know if it applies here

 

[fitzsteve]

He he, you don't need to make reply's you can just edit the thread

I started my first Tower project about 2 years ago, it was great fun, hard work but very rewarding. Don't expect to make big steps at a time unless you are an expert with this hardware, progress can be a little slow but there is a lot to learn.

Above all have fun with it and thanks for sharing the pics/experience with us

Steve.

 

[Mendel]

Goals of the project:
Confirm working state of the original hardware in the tower. -Complete. Tried it and sure enough it boots to amiga os.

Add more ram. Commencing!

Yo dawg! I put an Amiga on my Amiga so I can assemble Amiga while I assemble Amiga.

1260 turbo detaced. It came with a very small ram simm so time to replace

Prepared a hair band to hold the 128MB simm and the turbo card simm slot together

Back in goes the 1260...

Would be time to test now but my primary tv is broken and secondary tv is now in use by family... no actual monitor either other than an apple monitor which won´t accept anything but dvi and my amigas can´t output that...

Family went to sleep, I went to test. It works and shows me now having enough ram.

Goals of the project:
Run scene demo: Lapsuus by mature furk. Complete!
The tower running scene demo: Lapsuus by Maturefurk

Now due to my request this setup came with this demo pre installed... but where is the pcmcia slot of the tower amiga? I want to transfer more scene demos asap!

 

[Mendel]

After 4 weeks of waiting for proper maintenance, my primary tv is finally working.

Has anyone ever played an Amiga game in stereoscopic 3d? I will just have to try this. though the weird resolution will prove a challenge for scaling and then 2d->3d conversion.

I´ll report back later...

 

[Mendel]

Just a slight heads up. I am currently making business with Stachu and we will see if we can or can´t upgrade my PPC turbo card to operate with a 330MHz PPC processor.

At least that wouldn´t be a bottle neck then. I am considering still whether the Voodoo 3 will be the final graphics card or if some Radeon card like something in the 9200 series might be betterer.