Re: IIe case, PC motherboard

[Patrick Schaefer <pa.schaefer@fz-juelich.de>]

Darkstar wrote:

> First, where can I find a useful cooling solution? 

Use a 80 mm fan and install it behind the case's cooling slits. Or take
two of these, one on the left, pushing the air in, and one on the right,
pulling it out.


> 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.

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.
Riser cards for PCI are available (you'll have to mount the expansion
boards horizontally, the case is too flat!), but their reliability is as
bad as their price.
A five slot riser card should be fine, these have three slots on the
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.

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).

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


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


Nice idea, have fun!
Patrick