This project is something that I have wanted to do for somewere between 22 and 25 years. Possible way longer. I first heard about people putting their Amiga's inside PC cases, around 1996/97 or possible as early as 1994. And back then I was thinking that it was such a great idea. Yet the idea lingered in the back of my mind through a number of years, and I moved on to gaming on Playstation2 around 2002 or 2003. Then came a decade of inactivity regarding Amiga computers. Then I returned to the Amiga scene, and after getting a couple of Amiga's recently and expanding them, then I was thinking what to do now. And after looking at an 500 rev. 6a system board for a decent price on ebay and looking at an old Unisys case that I had under the table. Then the thoughts of doing a case convertion came right back to me again.
I did a closer inspection of the case, and the width and the dept of it, looked like I would be able to put in an Amiga500 board. I did some measuring of the case, and it was actually possible to use a 500 board. I bought the system board and after 3 to 4 month's I began to start working on this project. There were two things that I found quite interresting about the case. Actually three things. One is that the case had room under the original power supply. The second thing was that the case had design traits that were much those of an Amiga, the way Commodore designed them. The third thing, is that most people tend to use tower and not desktop cases, and they tend to have the board mounted in a wierd position inside the case. Then people usually extend the ports with homemade extension cables. This project are a bit different, as I will be able to have the boards own back-ports visible on the back of the case. This will in return, make a more unified result that do not look so much homemade or hacked together. Sure my result here below are not the beauty that you see on an official Amiga. Yet I think it looks ok. Plus. This is the first time in my life that I have ever done anything close to this type of work/mod/convertion. I was never a part of the early 00's PC casemod scene. And I have always thought that all these casemod's from that era, was a butt-ugly thing, with the cold cathode lights and so on. I guess that I am just from another era and time. I like stuff simple and not all that asian inspired fast'n'furious casemod RGB/cathode light stuff. It is like. Who looks at their cases when they are gaming on LAN? Hehe.
ChipMem Upgrade (512k to 1024k):
The first priority of this convertion, is to have a basic Amiga500, only with 512k mem expantion. Only in a case and not the original Amiga500 style case. (Upgrades of features, come later) So the first thing to do, was to give it an mem upgrade. And nothing is rosy-red so much, that it will be issuefree. And the issue with this case, is that in order to use the trapdoor expantion bay, then I will have to use some sort of ribbon cable or solder in a different pinrow-solution. (or what it is called). After some thinking and ebay searching, I found that the easiest solution, would be to give it an onboard ChipRam upgrade, and then add FastRam in a different way in the future. I found an ok priced kit on eBay that had everything and did the old standard upgrade. That means, cut trace between pad 2 and 3 on both JP2 and JP7, then bridge pad 1 and 2 on JP2 with a blob of soler. Solder in the sockets and the decouple cap's and finally insert the Ram chips in the sockets.
Preparing The Case:
Then it was time to prepare the case it self for installation of the Rev. 6a board. I was not sure how to do take out the original mounting standoff's. However I took notice, that they were mounted with some kind of washer or something, when looking underneath the case. And perhaps I was able to take some pliers of some sort, and just breaking them of. It turned out that this was indeed the way to go. I made sure not to just yank them, but to wiggle them gently, and at some point, they just snapped off. That was actually quite easy. Then I took my rotary cutter (dremel-kind-of-tool), made by skil and cut the horisontal hole in the back of the case. Finished it up with a couple of metal file's and grinded it slightly to fit the ports. The result are in no way professional, yet it is ok for my taste. After all. This is the first time that I have done this type of work.
Shield Want's Some Cutting:
I wanted to include the RF shield in this build. The reason are simple. With the RF shield, the end result will look better. Well.... At least that is what I personally think. Others might have a way different opinion, as I have seen people that do these convertions, have had a completely new a flush backplate created. Yet I want to do things the way I want, and I want to do things a bit different from what other people are doing. So I had to cut the RF shield in multiple places. As long as it can fit inside the case, and stabelise the board in some way or another, then I just had to get rid of as much surpluss material as possible. On the following pictures, you can see how much material I actually got rid off.
How To Mount The Board:
Now it was time to rebuild mounting points for the board. For this I chose to use a piece of cardboard at the right thickness. The board needed to be lifted up some millimeters, and the cardboard have another function, that is to stabelise the board from bending if I need to work with removing chips from their socket's. For mounting the board with screws, I used a couple of brass standoff's that I grinded off the screw part. Finally I glued everything in place with a generous amount of epoxy glue. Some people know this glue as two component glue. And after 48 hours of curing, the case was ready to recieve the system board.
Fixing Up The FacePlate:
Then came the time to take care of the front-panel/plate of the case. The face of the machine in other words. For this I used something that are called a melanin spunge. I suspect that it is the exact same thing as that magic erasor spunge, that can be found in America. Possible in England and other countries. It works by moistoning it slightly with clean water, and then scrubbing the surface of what you need to clean. The downside is that it takes off under a millimeter of the surface. Yet the plus side is, that I managed to get off a lot of the yellowing of the plastic. Not all, yet the case is from 1994 and I really do not want this to stand out as a "new" and fully restored case. I just want it to be free from the worst spots and marks. That the yellowing went away as much as it did, was just a plus and a positive side effect in this case. (In this case on this case, hehe, got it?)
Supplying Power To System Board And PSU:
Time to do a little mod to the power supply, and mod the board for taking power internally. Yes. I did not want to make any of those convertions with the power being supplied, using the original PSU cable and plug. I desoldered the power port on the board, and added wires with the correct colours. I took the wires from an old dead ATX PSU, and used both a female and a male 4-Pin molex plugs for this modefication. Soldered together the motherboard supply lines of the original power supply and this way, I managed to solve the power issue of supplying power inside of the case. What is not in the pictures, are that I gave the wires on the system board, some hot glue, just to stabelise the solder joints.
First Power In New Home:
Now it was time to mount the system board, and do a first power on of the board mounted inside the case. It went well, and I smiled all over the face. One milestone, and I was a happy man.
Putting It All Together:
It was now, a matter of doing a rebuild of the machine. I found a floppy drive that are modded for Amiga, made a longer floppy data cable, using the one that originally came with the Unisys machine. And I found a CD-Rom drive/burner. Actually my first ever burner that I bought back in 2002. I screwed everything in place and mounted the case cover to see the result. Then I did a 3 to 4 hour session of watching Amiga500 Demo's and gaming a bunch of games that do not recuire any keyboard input. For that I bought a six-pack of beer and had my fun with my "new" fake Big-Box Amiga.
Kickstart Upgrade:
Only thing that are missing now, is what keyboard to use, and how to hook it up. That is in the build progress of now. I have gutted an old dead AT keyboard from 1996, that I hope I can build the original Amiga500 keyboard into. Need's a lot of work and hacking, yet I have begun to do the convertion of AT keyboard to external Amiga500 Mitsumi keyboard. That has not kept me from actually beginning to do some upgrade on my Desktop Amiga. I have installed a kickstart switcher. It is not the usual switcher with socket's for two roms. Nope... It is a 4-Rom switcher. This device is operated by a turn switch, and is originally develloped for Roland MIDI devices or musical equipment. However, it is working in an Amiga. I have installed 3 roms as of now. One is Kickstart 1.2 then Kickstart 1.3 because I want as perfect compatibility with old games between 1985 and 1991. Then I have a Kickstart 2.0 version 37.350 for harddrive compatibility in the future. The switch it self, are mounted on the back of the case, in order to get it out of sight and because it was the easiest to mount it on a rear-bracket. I secured it firmly with some hot glue on the bracket. Then I did some cable management just to make it more neat and tidy.
Future Plans:
What are my plans now? Well.... I need to get some sort of memory upgrade (8mb or something), then an internal scandoubler, that I already have a bracket installed for. Then I need a harddrive for this baby. I will need to get the keyboard build, and make a hookup and finally have an USB keyboard adaptor installed, just to be able to have multiple choices in keyboards.
So far. The result looks like this below.
24'th of Sep. 2019 (IDE/Ram-Connectivity):
Well... I have been busy working some more on my machine for the last couple of days. I bought this IDE/Ram adaptor that simply just "sandwiches" between the CPU and the systemboard of any Amiga500, Amiga500-Plus or Amiga2000. There are something about the firmaware or some hardware design being not compatible with the Amiga1000.
I bought one of the v425 adaptors on the following seller's Amibay tread: Amibay Seller...
This little thingy, provides IDE connectivity for Master/Slave-Configuration and it has a total of sweet 8mb of Ram. Not bad.... Not bad.
The installation demanded me to pay some extra notice to the information provided on way different sources, linked to the tread-start. Yet I managed to eventually get it installed and running with KickStart 2.x (Version 37.350) that are in the Rom switcher. First I had to desolder the blobs on the systemboard. I have marked the solderpads out here on the first picture.
Then I soldered in a couple of pins that I got with the Adaptor. The seller was kind enough to add them and 3 jumper-wires for the two signals. For the adaptor to work on an Amiga500 board, then the adaptor need to be fed the signals /OVR and /INT2. Don't ask me what they are for exactly. All I need to know, is how to install and that it need's these signal's.
On the next picture, that are of the underside of the adaptor, then there are silk screened information on were to attach the jumper wires. Seen from the top, and going from left to right, then the two pins that are needed to be connected, are Pin4 and Pin5. On other versions of these adaptors, then there might only be 5 pins, or the layout of the pins varies. Again. I can only speak for v425 of these things.
After some fiddeling, and me choosing to use a couple of socket extenders (like in my Amiga 500 Turbo Edition project), then I have the socket firmly secured and in place. The two jumper wires are making their connection between the adaptor and the systemboard. Now it is time to reassemble and test out. Yes, yes... I had to disassemble the entire machine and remove the metal shielding in order to be able to work well enough.
Now it is time for me to test the adaptor out. First I ran Systest and had it go 10 cycles of memory test. No error, and rock solid. Sweet....
And finally, I had to figure out what drives it can handle. I had trouble getting any of my CF cards working in my machine. SATA harddrives, connected using a SATA-to-PATA adaptor, was not working as well. Yet I had this pile of old Seagate and Maxtor harddrives. They are all these old 7200rpm 40gb ATA-133 disks. And they all worked beautifully. Sure I can not utilize all 40gb of space. Yet do I need it? I am not planning any WHD-Loader, as I am using Floppy disks. Hence the 1.2 and 1.3 kickstart rom chips in the KickStart-Switcher. These HDD's all transfer just a couple of kilobytes over 900 Kb/s transfer. (905/914Kb) And thinking about how fast harddrives were in 1987, then it is fine with me and suits my needs well. It keeps well within my vision of this machine. That is: Stock 500 speed, with tons of features....
If anyone is wondering what I chose as HDD, then I setteled on a Seagate Baracuda. 40gb, 7200rpm and silent.
Creating Keyboard Connector:
A desktop Amiga is not complete without an keyboard, so I had to create a connector for a keyboard. I was really not sure what to do. Should I take the machine apart, and drill a hole, or should I mount the connector in a slot or mount it somewere else? Well.... I decided to create a custom plastic bracket and use a pre existing hole in the case. It was only a matter of removing two screw's and then use the metal plate as a template. I found an old 5,25 inch drive slot bracket to use as material. The taps were broken off anyway, so it was a perfect candidate for the custom plate. In the first picture, you can see the original metal plate.
Then I had to create a template that I would use for creating the custom plate. I took the plastic lid of a square container, and made 3 template, just in case that I would mess things up a bit. Two spare ones are nice to have.
I removed the excess material from the slot bracket, in order to make it ready for drilling and rasping, using files that are normally for metal. They work very well on ABS plastic. Here yopu can see the two parts that I made so far, next to the original metal plate.
After some drilling and filing I had made the hole in the custom plate. On the back side, it is visible, that this is a custom job. Yet the DIN connector covers it pretty well when you see it from the front. However, I am an amateur and I am not used to work with these materials.
Some more work, and some more fiddeling with the plate. Things are starting to go well. I did make a couple of mistakes, making the tiny holes for screws. However it is still only visible from inside the case, when mounted in place.
Without wires, it is not that useable. So I started by cutting off the motherboard connector from the Amiga-500 keyboard. With enough wire length, so I will not have to extend them with more wire. It would look horrible. I opened the Amiga-500 manual, and found the schematics in the back of the book. These are so good to have in this case. I wrote down the pin numbers and the wire colours.
I had to mount the DIN connector propperly, and found two decent looking small screws in my box of computer screws and stuff.
Then I soldered the wires onto the DIN connector, and made sure that I used the correct pin with the correct wire. Pin1 in my case, are Pin1 on the DIN, when looking from behind. And so on.... Going from left to right, seen from the back of the connector. I made sure to use some heat shrink as well. Not a great job. Continuity when using a multimeter, tell's me that the job is ok. There are connection and I did solder to correct wires to the correct Pins.
And this is how things are looking from the inside of the case, when the bracket is mounted and the connector is plugged into the header on the systemboard. Then I only had to use a couple of zip-ties to finish it up. If you look closer, then you can see that I am not using the wires for the Power led on the keyboard and I am not using the wire for the disk drive activity led. There are a activity indicator led on the Floppy disk drive anyway, and there are a power led in the case. So I will not be using those that are on the header on the systemboard.
Finally a shot of the new keyboard connector, taken from outside the case. I think it look's decent enough. Sorry about the hair. I did not see it when I took the picture.
The convertion is done (almost)....
The convertion is now done, in it's basic form. Meaning, that it is now usefull as a computer. Sure I need a keyboard, yet the machine inside the case, is now a fully operating machine. With a few expantions as well.
I have done some cable management and I have installed a fan in the front of the case as well. It has a controll for RPM's as well. So.... Convertion done and cable management is done. And so I have taken a new series of pictures. Not that much to say about them, other than I will post them in two parts. The first is with the case open, and the second part is with the cover on the machine.
And now with the casecover/shield mounted on the case....
Adding USB Keyboard Adaptor...
I have decided to add a USB keyboard adaptor as well. This will give me the option of using any type of USB PC keyboard on this machine. Sure I still need to make some kind of original-Amiga-Keyboard solution, yet more options are welcome, or usefull, I guess. Something like that.... Hehe.
The first thing was to locate the chip, that I needed to extract. The adaptor goes into the socket, and the CIA goes on top of the adator. Really simple stuff.
Here the ODD CIA chip is removed, and the adaptor can go into the socket.
The adaptor is inserted/installed and the CIA chip is inserted into the socket on the adaptor. On the adaptor, there is a wire, that needs to be on pin3 of the normal keyboard pin's. Then the plastic plug need to go on top of it. Well... Just slide the wire down on pin3 and press the original keyboard plug down on top, and it is allright.
Now it is time to boot up, and test it all. There is a small led on the adaptor that lid's up when a USB Keyboard is plugged in, and if there is no keyboard inserted, then it will flash. Simple and easy to understand. Reset by keyboard can be done by eighter CTRL+WinKey+WinKey or ALT+CTRL+DEL.
Adding USB keyboard port:
Yesterday I recieved the USB cable, and began to figure out how to install it. I came to the conclusion that I had to use the VGA/Serial bracket that were already mounted. The only problem that I faced, was that the holes for screws on the cable, were a tiny bit too wide apart for the bracket. So I had to use a round file in order to make a fit. After some 10 to 20 minutes, it was all installed in the machine.
Uh ohhhh.... Defect ChipMem :-(
The machine began to show some instability and other quirks, so I tested it through with Systest. When testing the ChipMem, it began to report a number of errors when testing the Ram. I was kind of lucky, as the chips that had error, were the ones that I had used for the ChipMem upgrade. As so they were in sockets. So the fix was straight forward. Popping out 4 chips with error from their sockets, and inserting 4 fresh chips. I guess these things happen. It is old technology, and if the chips that I got in the upgrade kit, were old stock, then most likely they were standing with one leg in the grave anyway.... After Systest cleared the mem, I ran a ton of software. Demo's and stuff, and the stability issue were gone.
I bought the Scandoubler...
Yes. I bought the scandoubler. Yet not before I had sold some old vintage PC hardware and saved up the money. That is right. I am retired before time, recieving retirement check each month, and bacuase of that, money is always an issue when it comes to vintage and old hardware.
Anyway....
I recieved an IndivisionECS-V2 (version two) in the mail yesterday. It came all the way from Germany. And before you ask why I did not get version one. Then let me just shoot straight and say, that money are not what I have the most of, and V1 have not been in production for years, will never be made again (Jens told me in an email, that parts for it are nearly impossible to source) and finally it have been sold out for like the last two years or something like that. And if I do find an version one for sale, then half of the times it is defect and when it is working, they tend to go for like 150 Euro or something. And my money situation does not exactly appeal to that.
Getting back to that Scandoubler. I recieved it yesterday, and here comes a small set of unboxing pictures.... I must say, that it was well packed. Kudos to Indevidual Computers, and it was rather fun that they had put some promo material into the box as well. High qaulity prints that is not only about Amiga hardware. Love it.
Installing IndiECS-V2:
This next part, is about installing the scandoubler in my machine. I ran into a couple of roadblocks along the way. Like I had to replace one of the wires for the IDE adaptor, and I had to remove the spacer under it. Then I had to find another slot bracket, in order to have both VGA and USB mounted on the same bracket. It took nearly half a day to get this going, as I had to think about lots of different options. So I will only post pictures of the final process, and not something that was not build anyway.
As of now. The machine is finished in the basic form that I wanted back in the early 1990's, so I am a happy champ. Mission acomplished. A case converted Amiga500 with tons of feature. And I an fairly happy with the result. I learned a lot during this journey and I might or might not do it again. It all depends, as prices on these things are on the rise in a big way these days. If this goes on, it will be a hobby for the rich people eclusively. And they would rather spend their time making the money. So I am afraid that this might be my first, last and only case convertion project with an Amiga. Well.... Better late than never, and better one machine than none.
The only thing that is missing right now, is the small parts. Like heatsinks for the chips and so on. A larger capacity storage, and perhaps some paint. I still have not decided on what colour I will give it. Or if I want to paint it at all. If something big changes are done to my machine, then I will update this blog. Yet as of now I see the machine as finished. Next job is the software setup. Ohhh... By the way... I did change the spinning HDD to a CF card. The reason was heat. It because too hot for my taste. And I have a 1 or 2 Gigabyte card comming my way from China.
Upgrading the harddrive...
I managed to get a fairly cheap brand new CF card from China. I made an offer, and it was accepted. Most Amiga users usually go for 4 Gigabyte of space, yet 1 is more than enough for my needs, and it is huge by 1988-1990 standard's. I have not encountered any problems with this card, and it runs stable.
CPU cooling...
I might have mentioned it previously in this blog. The thing is, that the RAM/IDE-Adaptor is making the processor and it self, running really hot. Not like in burning hot, yet I was not able to put my finger on the processor for more than max 30 seconds. So I went on eBay and purchased some heatsinks. They are kind of beefy, for what I am using them for. However they are extremely effective, and they just keep the temperature down. I am happy about these. I used 4 of them on top of the processor. They have 3M double sided tape, and on one of the pictures, I have a normal jumper for comparison.
I made a small tiny video about this build...
I kind of caved in, and made a video about my machine. I have always said that I would not make any, yet there have been a bit too many requests for a video.
Just be aware that my English is not that great, as it is not my native language (yes I live in scandinavia) and second I had been sick with a sewere cold for 14 days prior to the making of this video. I did it fast and dirty, no editing of any sort. (now you have been warned) 😃
Thanks for taking time to read it all...
(Stay tuned for more updates to this blogpost in the future)
