A600: A604 received! Case change and more

Yesterday I received the wonderful A604 Chip RAM Expansion from AmigaKit.
What an awesome designed product! It's so small comparing it with the A603 and offers a lot more things.

• 2x clockports (instead of 1)
• Custom clockport extender 2nd clockport for mounting Subway (special driver required)
• The second clockport reaches a 60% higher transfer speed than the first, which makes Subway a lot faster!
• Angled Indivision ECS socket that makes Indivision ECS co-exist along with the floppy!
• All the usual stuff like 1MB Chip RAM to max out A600's Chip RAM to 2MB total, and RTC.

Getting a new A604 also gave me appetite to re-case my A600 into a spare that I had which was more white (near mint) and didn't have any cut on the case. Keeping the floppy on the case was a nice thing to have.




My spare A600 is really awesome but required removing of the TV Modulator and a good mobo bath!!!
Modulator was an easy task to remove (done it 4-5 times in the past) and a good bath is always nice for my Amiga mobos :)

This time I decided NOT to remove the stock power connector since I got some time ago a nice PSU from MechWare.



Since I wanted to minize the cutting on the new case I decided that except from the replacement of the TV Modulator with the VGA connector for the Indivision ECS, I'd also make a small hole for the Kickstart switch (that simultaneously disables ACA on Kickstart 1.3).





You can check the internal mod of both the VGA connector and Kickstart switch that gets it's +5V from a nearby resistor and Ground from the nearby RGB's connector ground :)



As you may have seen I'm using Mika's angled CF2IDE adapter since for the time being I didn't want to make a hole above PCMCIA (waiting kipper2k's rev.2 CF2IDE adapter in the following days since I had issues with his rev.1 in my previous setup).

You can check some photos of the so far re-casing. I really loved the way that Indivision ECS's cable can go under Indivision and Subway making it look really clean:





Looking good doesn't it? The mods are looking a lot cleaner without the extra cabling that existed in my previous mod. Only need to see now where am I gonna put the USB headers, although I will use for sure the headers I used on my A1200 as well.

Just before I close this post, I thought it'd be nice to include 2 more photos of the A600 in use... Enjoy :)

A1200: Playing Crysis... :)

Some time ago I thought of doing something cool cause I was curious how will it look :)

I got a clip of 1280x1024 of Crysis and based on it I made the following steps:

• Exported pictures from video (527 pics for about 1min of video)
• Downsized all pictures to 640x512 (Original /2)
• Converted all pictures to 16 color IFF format including Floyd-Steinberg dithering (using ImageStudio and Rebel's Palette). For not doing that 527 times (not a good way to suicide) I created a script in ImageStudio and all was great :)
• Putted all pictures to an 527 pictures animation file under PPaint (one-by-one. Ok that suxed a bit but it wasn't so painful)

Result is really cool if you imagine that is only 16 colors!!!

OFC don't expect for it to run ok on 030. You can see that even in my 060@60MHz it's a bit slow (despite loading the animation file to RAM!)

File size of the animation file is ~54MB for 1.07min of video LOL!
I uploaded the anim to my Dropbox for anyone's wanna check it out on WinUAE or 060 Amiga.
Link here.

I hope you like it :)

A600: Kickstart refresh day

I love Saturdays not only because I don't work, but because I have more time to tinker my lovely Amigas :)

Today I refreshed a bit of my Custom Kickstart OS3.9 for my beloved A600 since I have done some changes recently due to Peter Keunecke's Icon.library and Cosmos SCSI.device.

What modules I have so far in my Custom 1MB Kickstart (except the normal Kickstart 3.1 modules) are the following:

• Exec 45.24 (instead of 40.10)... [OS3.9 BB4]
• BootMenu 44.7 68020 (instead of 40.5)... [OS3.9 BB2]
• Card.resource 40.5 (instead of 40.4)... [OS3.9 BB4]
• Console.device 44.10 (instead of 40.2)... [OS3.9 BB3]
• Datatypes.library 44.48 (instead of 44.47)... [OS3.9 BB4]
• Filesystem.resource 45.10 (instead of 40.1)... [OS3.9 BB2]
• FastFilesystem 45.16 (instead of 40.1)... [OS3.9 BB4]
• Graphics.library 42.8b11 (instead of 40.24)... [Cosmos]
• KingCON-handler 40.4 (instead of Con-Handler 40.2)... [Cosmos]
• Icon.library 46.4.220 (instead of 40.1)... [PeterK]
• RAM Handler 44.24 (instead of 39.4)... [OS3.9 BB3]
• Ramlib 40.3 (instead of 40.2)... [OS3.9 BB4]
• Romheader 45.21 (instead of BlizKick module)... [OS3.9 BB4]
• SCSI.device 43.46b8 (instead of 40.5)... [Cosmos]
• Shell 45.27 (instead of 40.2)... [OS3.9 BB3]
• Trackdisk.device 40.2 (instead of 40.1)... [OS3.9 BB4]
• Workbench.library 45.131 (instead of 40.5)... [OS3.9 BB3]
• BBlank... [For Black Borders]
• HRTModule 2.30... [HRTmon using ACA630's NMI header]

Everything seems to work just fine :)

And you can check the correct versions from CLI:

A1200: Subway USB mounting

One more nightly upgrade

I thought of mounting at last my Subway to it's permanent location. After fiddling around for some time, testing it where I liked it better... I decided that the only place that suited my needs best was under the DVD-RW!






The space available is indeed minimal but I don't need much After all, under the DVD-RW the only thing that exists is the awesome Auto AGA/RTG Switch by Ratte.
Well you can take a look at it:



Ok the only thing left now was the extension cable that needed to be routed and joined with the original header that I put some time ago (on the lower part of the case).
So... I routed the cable under BVision and hotglued left from BPPC. Then I joined all 8 pins with the old cable and voila... It's mounted now on DJBase's Clockport expander and rock stable


I hope you like it