Re: IIe case, PC motherboard

[no_spam@my_house.com (creslin)]

In article <3725AC9E.4C5E@fz-juelich.de>, pa.schaefer@fz-juelich.de says...
>
>Darkstar wrote:
>
>> Second, has there ever been a circuit designed, even prototyped, to make an
>> adapter for the AY-3600 keyboard decoder to work with a PC keyboard BIOS?  
>
>This does not make any sense. Of course you can build a parallel to
>serial converter (circuits for the opposite direction can be found in
>literature), but I would take a cheap pc keyboard, break off the part of
>the pcb with the electronics and re-wire the rest using the //e's
>keyswitches. You will need a lot of wire, but after two hours this WILL
>work.

Okay, maybe I was a little overzealous.  Sounds like a solid idea.  A headache, 
too, but workable.  :)

>You will have to use an ISA main board, therefore you are limited up to
>486DX100 cpus. Should be fast enough for a fun machine.

<<snip>>

>left and two on the right. If three slots were enough for you, you could
>use the space on the right for a hard disk.

That's what I'm planning on doing, right now.  CD-ROM gets a cut-out on the 
right side, with the hard drive mounted on top of it.  But I've actually found 
a small enough PCI board I want to use, with onboard video and sound, as well 
as U/DMA controller.  That way, I don't have to worry about expansion cards.  
Just stick with an external modem, and everything should pan out.  The board, 
because of the size of the power supply, will have to mount under the keyboard, 
where there is NO room for expansion cards, even a riser card.  I'll just wire 
the ports to the back panel with expansion cables.

>PC power supplies differ in their circuit layout. Some of them have a
>very small pcb (3"x4"), some fill the whole case with electronics. A
>good idea may be using the power supply of an external SCSI unit. These
>are much smaller than the usual AT style (and then you can keep the
>metal box, this makes the thing much safer).

Good idea, which I basically took.  Ripped a pwr supply from an old mini-tower, 
and hard-wired it to a rocker switch mounted on the front panel.  It's 
sufficiently small.  Could be better, but it works okay.

>The floppy must have a seperate case. Perhaps you can combine the
>electronics of an usual 3.5" drive with an unidisk mechanism? 

I think I found a way around that.  I mounted the floppy (which is conveniently 
shielded completely with metal) to the removable lid, so it sticks directly 
through it.  A little hacksaw action an a couple screws did the trick.  It 
actually looks pretty cool that way, too :)  Another way to go would've been a 
drive similar to the DuoDisk, with the CD-ROM and a 3.5" drive built into the 
same 5.25" module.  That way I could've avoided hacking the lid, but I don't 
want to spend any more than I have to.

>This url is from a japanese guy who has put a 7500 powermac into a //e
>case:
>http://www.oud-japan.com/worksh_e.html

I'll check it out.  Thanks for the advice!