~ with toggle switch, bad soldering and lots of electrical tape
Or
"Why I'm Still Up At 7am" [Up-up-update] Just to thoroughly disrupt the sequential order of this page, I'll put this final(?) update at the top, running in reverse order.
Phase5 Blizzard 603+ PPC 240mhz 68060 50mhz 96mb RAM visible through the hole on the right-hand side. Note the A500 power supply on the floor to the left - grabbed
at an ungodly hour of the night from a friend due to the higher wattage output. The A1200 PSU only puts out about 22 Watts and I think the 060 just pushed things
over the edge. The 060 took a mammoth 18 hours to get running with a lot of help from d0pefish who, at one point,
put together this excellent emergency bootdisk, designed to coax the Blizzard Maprom into kicking the 3.1 ROMs using BlizKick.
'Course, this thing's fucking hot. Seriously fucking hot. I had it on what I thought was good authority that '060s generally ran cooler than older '030s and
while this may be the case, the PPC kicks out so much heat that the whole board just cooks. After initial tests and setup with the trapdoor pretty much forced on,
I employed these crude means of cooling things down again so I could swap between the 060 and the 030 for fiddly library copying and version checking in my
HD Workbench install. The first one's a large tower deskfan, in case it isn't immediately obvious. Note the sticky-out 60.000mhz crystal oscillator, which makes
shutting the trapdoor extremely problematic.
Now you'll observe my Amiga computing solutions becoming ever so slightly less professional-looking. Pretty obvious, here. Gaffer tape to hold on a standard 3.5"
hard disk cooler, with a single big fan (over the PPC) which exhausts to the side. This happily holds the extremely loose 60.000mhz crystal oscillator in place -
an issue that'd been giving me serious headaches. I think I'll buy a spare to keep on hand, just in case... The 060 sports some self-adhesive blue RAM heatsinks
and keeps extremely cool.
A couple of quid in Maplin got me something that not even Maplin can make a fucking mess of - four 2cm-high rubber speaker cab feet. 2cm is just the right height:
the Amiga is still very comfortable to type on, airflow underneath is facilitated and the 060's not taking any weight. (Obviously I'm nowhere near stupid enough
to let the 060 take any weight, but still - it's nice to be sure).
[end of update]
May't please you enjoy A1200 pix omg!!11
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Problem: IBM 2.5" HD that gets canny hot (sometimes two...and maybe also a Delfina soundcard...so we'll see how that goes)
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Solution: Cool it down with stuffs
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Stuffs: An old AMD 60mm CPU fan, late of a venerable server
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Oh, and: UV light, because it's sitting there and I have this compulsion. I can't morally justify having UV light in the PC case, so I'll be damned if I can't have it in my A1200
This fan blows directly, or sort of directly onto the IDE HD and the ploy will be rounded off in the future when I cut an exhaust on the left where I can flush out air after it's cooled the drive. The Blizzard will go in the trapdoor when it arrives, so I reckon it can't hurt to keep the temperature down.
BUT...OMGZ
Yes, of course I don't need it on all the time. Hence the rather fetching case-mounted toggle switch! Hooray for Maplin! And so we begin our journey...
Rough phonecam shot from my Sony Ericsson Ksomething7thingy. This is a quick throw-together-and-pluggy-in, to make sure my splicing of the internal floppy drive's
power supply went well. Fan turns, we have blowz, so far so good. Although I suspect we actually have suckz. It depends which way you look at it.
Closeup of the fan, fairly boring. The grille is visible through the blades and at this point, I wasn't sure if it'd have to come out. After all, this mod was meant to be 50% cosmetic anyway...and 20% to make use of the cute little fan...and another 20% to plan for the future under Blizzard's dominion... Note the enticing cherry red of what is actually a fairly gold-coloured hologramatic representation of AMD's corporate logo. I'm keeping it because it goes flashy flashy when it spins.
More of the same.
Much Dremel (or rather my cheap, no-brand imitation) ravaging later, the grille is cut out beneath the fan (an easier job than it looks), a perfe- that's PERFECT hole for the toggle switch and some rough startoff-holes from the back for the casemount self-tapping screws of which I chanced upon an entire blister pack in my room. What luck.
We see here, in its natural habitat, stupid racerboy UV light - three LEDs actually, pointing in a variety of fascinating directions. Since this A1200 will only be seen by Other People when I'm playing live, it'll hopefully emit a pleasantly ethereal glow (if it isn't drowned out by the garish 90's disco effect of all my other equipment, half of which was manufactured by camp Germans, the other half of which...I chopped up and filled with UV LEDs). Note the fucking clean job of the toggle switch, m8! issittt!lolz!!112
Switch is safely in the OFF position, hologram is visible in its full glory, fan blades aren't spinning and light isn't radiating. Now I'm reminded of the brutal pain that was inflicted upon my person by a similarly haphazard casefan on my PC and so I must remember to figure out some sort of cage/grille arrangement to protect my talented digits.
Another money shot, legs spread wide open, gagging for cum etc. I'll stop, before this gets picked up by the wrong sort of spiderbot. To drag the metaphor further, it does look really good from the back too. I just couldn't be arsed to unplug everything again.
And a screenshot, just to remind us of what we're fighting for! That ChipRAM count will increase soon, as will the 020 designation. Despite my modest 2MbChip and 8MbFast, though, Scalos/MUI/everything run like shit off a stick and the machine's handling fancy backdrops, right-click menus (not by default a part of AmigaOS, for the Windows-brained amongst you) and lovely (highly customisable) icons without worrying. Tooltypes are sorted, filetypes linked to appropriate apps, DirectOpus is on the go, making life a bit easier, my fucking CF/PCMCIA is working a fucking treat as is my LAN... It's all good! The camply-coloured-but-deeply-tremendous gradient effect in the window backgrounds *looks* impressive, but is really thanks to the copper, or coprocessor, graphics hardware that's always been standard on the Amiga and always lent it a significant edge. You appreciate the comparative power of the Amiga's graphics when you throw windows around, see amazing GUI draw times, drive multiple screens... the usual before-its-time stuff.
OMG WHAT HAVE WE LEARNT???"?2/
Well anyone who raised an eyebrow at the amount of frivolous stuff I was soldering to a few splices in the FD power supply will be glad/miffed/indifferent after I report that as a result of good soldering/luck/God, flicking the switch on and off while the system is running causes no problems, the FD works when the fan/LED are in either state and seems to enjoy pleasant and uneventful diskreads no matter *what* I do. I even got my supposedly knackered external floppy drive working, so if it were 1993 again, I'd be floppycopying my way across the seven seas in a bubble of blissful contentment.
[UPDATE-UPDATE]
Just to round it all off, there's now some pretty luminescence along the case grills from some striplighting whose excess is coiled up beneath the fan. Hopefully it won't fuck with the airflow too much. I also fitted a 60mm chrome fan grill to protect my poor little fingers - I'd have preferred black, but I was lucky enough that Maplin had any 60mm fans/grills at ALL, the useless bastards that they are.
Also, the Blizzard 1230 MKIII arrived, with 32 lovely megabytes, and it gets nice and toasty in the trapdoor slot. The general cooling influence of the fan keeps it *slightly* cool; like literally, a few degrees less hot-cup-of-coffee-like (I didn't do well in Chemistry GCSE). If intensive use makes it any hotter, I'll have to invest some effort in cooling from the bottom, or from one side, as well. So here are a few poorly lit camera photos of dubious quality:
