what they used to say– when you go Commodore, you’ll by no means depart by any door. Nicely, they won’t have stated that, however given the prevalence of initiatives nonetheless utilizing Commodore-branded methods many years after the corporate’s demise, maybe somebody ought to have. A working example is [Jit06] with this writeup on his Final Amiga 1200 — or “Amiga 1232 Storm CD”– which crams nearly each improve you would possibly consider into the Nineties wedge pc.
After all it has the PiStorm 32, with a CM4 offering supercomputer efficiency, a minimum of by A1200 requirements. That’s fairly outdated hat, although, and it’s all the pieces else crammed into the outdated Commodore that takes the rating. For one factor, there’s a slot-loading, slim-form DVD drive from an outdated laptop computer that’s been integrated so easily it nearly seems manufacturing facility. Ditto for the compact flash card slot, which can be on the IDE bus. The 2 share a customized IDE cable– sure, children, we did used to roll our on 44-pin cables again within the day, however you’d higher imagine nobody did it until they actually needed to. With the area constraints contained in the A1200 case, [Jit06] falls into that class.
The optical and CF playing cards set off the drive LED on the Amiga case by default, however [Jit] wished to see entry on the PiStorm’s SD card as nicely, so he wired a few pink LEDs to the default lightguide to get a colour-contrasting flash. That SD card can be damaged out with an extender for simple entry with out opening the case– and as soon as once more, it seems nearly pretty much as good as inventory. So does the modded-on VGA port, which is stealing area that when belonged to the Amiga’s RF modulator and fed by a ScanPlus AGA board.
The one factor that basically stands out as modded is the quantity knob on the floppy-drive aspect of the case; that controls a mixer that sits between the CD audio and Paula, the Amiga’s customized sound chip. This lets him use the A1200 as a CD-32 system, and may be very helpful to have as CD-32 video games used CD audio tracks that apparently weren’t nicely combined with the digital audio within the video games.
With all of the chopping and soldering, this isn’t a reversible mod, one thing individuals are turning into way more involved with as these machines slowly enhance in rarity. Nonetheless, as a quality-of-life enchancment, this kind of improve is perhaps value it if can hold the outdated A1200 related for an additional three many years. For anybody else who by no means received over the Amiga bug, he’s additionally revealed a linux-native SD-card creator known as emu68 bootstrap on github to assist with making photographs for the PiStorm.
Because of [Jit] for the tip! With the straightforward OS-swapping he’s enabled with the SD-breakout, there’s no motive to not strive the rediscovered Amiga Unix. In order for you the identical with out chopping right into a classic case, the PiStorm is usually a sidecar.
