It actually hit me that I had enough ATX cable scrap left over from a prior MDD G4 ATX adapter rewiring project and one of those ATX jumper connectors that come with water-cooling kits (or in one case, the PSU itself) that I could whip up my own crude little Amiga ATX adapter - so I did.
It fires right up! Kickstart 1.3, red power LED on the keyboard. But alas, I don't have any Amiga floppies to run in it, or the means to write new ones using my PC or vintage Mac floppy drives. Gotta love non-standard disk formats with proprietary drive controllers.
Also, I opened it up. Revision 5 motherboard, type 2. I was hoping for a revision 6 or later for a number of reasons, but oh well, I'll take what I can get.
Next up: doing something about that RGB port, because grayscale video from the mono video port leaves a lot to be desired. A simple DE-15 pin adapter would be enough for the PEXHDCAP to capture it, as it handles said mono signal over the component Y line just fine. (I'd actually be pretty hosed without this card, considering it's a PAL system in NTSC land now!)
bjwil1991 wrote:The other thing to replace when changing the keyboard layout (swapping the QWERTZ keyboard and QWERTY keyboard) would be (I digress) the keyboard ASCII ROM (I have no idea if that's the case or not).
I figured that'd be part of the keyboard itself, but who knows... I'm still reading up on this thing, like finding out that I actually need to replace the Fat Agnus chip if I want to turn the trapdoor RAM expansion from Slow RAM to Chip RAM (of which I'll need a full 1 MB for WHDLoad, apparently).
andrewreader wrote:She's beautiful. Congratulations.
The funny thing is, this one is actually a bit busted up and cracked here and there, mostly on the bottom half of the case. There's a particularly big chunk missing above the side expansion port, and the rear corners are a bit cracked.
It's a big part of how I got it for a not-so-wallet-reaming price, knowing that there's a project to make new A500 cases soon (from the same guys that made reproduction A1200 cases and keycaps recently). Even if I don't take that route, the fact that the case is all damaged anyway lowers my hesitance to actually consider cutting it up a bit to fit switches and new I/O ports into that gap behind the floppy drive.
I was also told that some of the keyboard keys don't work, though I'm in no position to verify that without a Workbench disk at the very least (fire up a shell and start typing). Even if it did have problems, it's not the first time I've had to repair traces before.
All in all, it's like buying a "mechanic special" car that's missing some stuff - it's not a good value if you don't know how to work on it and get it up and running again, even if that means buying some parts. Fortunately, computers are much simpler machines to work on than cars, and I know where to get the obscure parts required or fabricate my own for basic operation.
Too bad that, like exotic cars, Amiga parts are exotic enough that you'll pay through the nose to get compatible replacements. I'm still shopping around to see what route I should take on PS/2 mouse adapters (maybe going for one of those auto-switchers with a USB and a DE-9) and RGB cables.