Description of my Amiga workstation/"electronic brain" 2002-02-10 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I have built my Amiga 500 into a huge home-made teak wood cabinet(was once a "Wega" loudspeaker box and has the size a bit higher as a very huge,old IBM XT) with chrome sides and a small aluminum front in the center with 2 PC flop- py drives.Below these drives is a sort of tube-radio-style "tuning eye",con- sisting of a fake gold framed blue fake jewel with green LEDs for floppy write and a yellow one for SCSI access.(The whole machine(my "electronic brain"/ "final automaton") looks like from a Jules Verne SF movie.) The keyboard can be stored below the giant wood cabinet,because it is resting on 2 L-shaped aluminum profile bars ca. 5cm above the desk top(much similar to the A1000 cabinet,which was a great design). _____________________________ / /| / ______ / | ||||||||||||o -^- |||||||||||| | |o||||||||||o -^- |||||||||||| | |@|||||||||| |||||||||||| | |_|||||||||| (O) |||||||||||| | ||||||||||||______|||||||||||| / |/ |/ ' ' (my electronic brain's cabinet) The "electronic brain" contains an A500 with "Kickstart 1.3" ROM,2.3MB RAM, several 86/100 lead do-it-yourself soldered ribbon cables,a PC power supply,a heavily modified "Trumpcard 500" Zorro bus adapter with the SCSI card connec- ted to an IOMEGA Floptical 21MB diskette drive(for the OS;I only have 5 disks for it and 1 is faulty).In the Zorro adapter's 2nd slot is a Commodore PC2386 PC bridgeboard(386SX 20Mhz + coprocessor,4MB RAM) connected to a sawed-out piece of an old PC mainboard abused as a 4 slot ISA bus adapter.In this adap- tor is a 16 bit Trident VGA card and an 8bit XT harddrive controller connec- ted to an external,5 1/4'' triple hight,25 watts consuming 190MB Maxtor hard- drive from 1986.(The "Deskshaker",I've read in a magazine,this historical monstrosity costed 6700DM(3350$) when it was new.) The giant,vehemently vibra- ting and turbine-like humming,room heating harddrive is rested on the 5 1/14'' PC floppy drive that has a card box(the same material as the disks ;) ) as its case.The machine also contains a Multivision500 de-interlacer and an A570 CD- ROM drive(internally mounted with the CD slot on the cabinet's back,by a 60cm bus cable!);the Floptical glued below this.There are also lots of homemade cables,connectors and 2 small wire-wrapped PCBs with some 74LS stuff in it, those contains the PC diskette drive flipflops and(badly working) RDY signal emulation monoflops.(When warm it has similar problems with copy protected games like VisCorps technically badly redesigned A1200.) This machine is the most confusely wired electronic brain since ENIAC,has a MTBF of ca. 3 hours(sometimes it runs way longer) and virtually no serious repair takes shorter than 6 hours,because fixing one broken cable joint most- ly rips apart 3 other joints somewhere in the deep cable jungle within the ma- chine and often it needs to be took apart entirely to reach a bad connection deeply covered by the rest of the machine.Although I have spent already hun- dreds of hours with repairing(and upgrading) my "electronic brain",I still trust more in it(running via diskettes and writeprotected floptical) than in my PC,though everything important dealing with my spiritual developement(wri- ting religious texts,the Cy-Log(spiritual diary),composing musics etc.) runs still via this dinosaur made of ca.13 years old pieces of hardware. My monitor is a quite expensive "Nokia 417TV TCO" 17 inch monitor with built- in TV and the needed 15kHz abilities for the "electronic brain" and the lots of historical video- and computergames I collect.After my old "NEC 3d" died (orange flashes in CRT neck),it took me 3 months without being capable to use my PC to find and order this replacement monitor.During this time I fortunate- ly could use my terribly bad,old TOEI 15kHz monitor at the electronic brain again to stay capable to write my homework programs for the technical college where I study software-technics.The Nokia runs fine on Amiga and PC,but it on- ly goes up to 65kHz and when new it had ugly colours;bright colours were too red,medium colours too green and dark ones too blue.I tried 1 month to read- just the internal potentiometers without much success,because the RGB ampli- fiers are just too nonlinear/not widely enough adjustable.Though I soldered different resistors onto its CRT neck board to increase the adjustment range; now the colours are rather good,although likely modern monitors have an even better colour fidelity and are always user-adjustable. At the moment the SCSI card in my electronic brain has gone defective by a short circuit,though by the disrupted config chain everything on the Zorro bus and the A570 CD drive don't work anymore.The machine also suffers badly from bad contacts,though often internal plugs/cards/ICs need to be re-seated to prevent program crashes.Though I urgently need a new Zorro 2 SCSI card which is not much longer than its slot,because close behind it my handmade ISA bus adapter is in the way. Though I bought an Oktagon 2008 SCSI card,but it doesn't work at all (grey screen and no boot when it is activated). Also the A2386 bridgeboard is dead now(Janus complains "bridgeboard not found" or similar). I added now a switch and resistors to close the config chain in spite of missing cards.Though at least the A570 works again. I first thought its static RAM was defect,but I only needed to finish menu setting by pressing "enter"(not "return" nor ESC) to save settings correctly. I also bought a new "Vortex - Golden Gate" 386er bridgeboard,but I didn't dare yet to install it. I also backupped all my important Amiga works on a CDR (using "diskmasher" and my PC,for safety rea- sons and to get access to them by my PC). It is so said to say this,but nowadays the Amiga has indeed become a piece of history of that the fastest specimen of its kind now indeed has become a banal emulator on a PC.Oh my Amiga! Nothing is left from all your fame besides the pleasure of playing a historical game... MAY THE SOFTWARE BE WITH YOU! *============================================================================* I CYBERYOGI Christian Oliver(=CO=) Windler I I (teachmaster of LOGOLOGIE - the first cyberage-religion!) I I ! I *=============================ABANDON=THE=BRUTALITY==========================*