| Power Tower |
| A1200 Tower Kit |
| 129.95UKP from Power Computing (01234 851500) |
| Amiga 1200 |
| Power Flyer |
| Fast EIDE interface |
| 55UKP from Power Computing (01234 851500) |
| Amiga 1200 (Tower recommended) |
Well, after much consideration, I finally decided to rehouse my Amiga 1200 into a Tower casing, and at the same time I also got a Power Flyer. I chose the Power Tower because it seemed the best available - certainly the best for my needs.
Note that although I am reviewing the Tower and the Flyer together here, I will consider them separately towards the end of the review, and rate them separately.
Firstly - why a Tower? Isn't the desktop case enough? There are plenty of reasons of course for a tower, and in the long run, it works out much cheaper as well a more convenient:
Is that enough for you? Well, there are downsides (but fairly minor). Firstly you lose the PCMCIA - or you need to spend 20UKP or so to get to use it again. This isn't a major loss, as most people would use the PCMCIA for things like hard drives or CD ROMs, the very sort of thing you want to fit in your tower via IDE or SCSI. Of course, there are now those PCMCIA Ethernet cards that you might want...
Secondly, you might decide that you liked the relative portability of the A1200. All A1200 Towers are rather large - although the A1200 motherboard is not that big, it is exceptionally tall, which means you need a big tower. But remember you no longer need to lug around an external PSU and things like external CD ROMs.
Setting it all up...
I sat down with my handy screwdriver, surrounding by boxes and a tower and various wires and bits of electronics... and set about ripping my Amiga to bits. It's fairly straightforward really ;)
Fitting the Power Flyer is most conveniently done whilst switching to a tower, as you can just do it when you've removed the motherboard, and before you fit it to the tower. If you have a tower already, it would just be a matter of removing the motherboard from the tower to fit it. Fitting the Flyer to a desktop would be somewhat harder - as well as having to open up your Amiga (including removing the metal shielding), you then have to put it all back together. More importantly, you may find that you haven't fitted the Flyer properly, ie, not plugged in hard enough (as I found - more later), so you'd have to strip the machine down again, where as it's much easier getting to the motherboard with a tower.
The Flyer consists of two boards, connected by a short cable. Fitting it involves removing the ROMs, placing one board into the now empty ROM sockets, and then fitting the ROMs onto the board. The second board fits directly over the Gayle chip.
Bare in mind that this is not an entirely straightforward process. To remove the ROMs, you should use a screwdriver to lever one side up, and then the other, until you can pull it out - they are quite tightly lodged in there. You have to be careful - I found I could only lift the ROMs up from one side, and in both cases, I ended up bending the end two pins.
Fitting the board into the ROM sockets is rather hard, as you have to push it right in. You tend to get it with one side pushed in, but the other side left out, so you have to push in evenly on all the surface. Make sure your motherboard is resting on a firm flat surface. Fitting the ROMs into their new sockets is no straightforward task either - at first it seems they don't fit. You should angle them in so that one end fits, and then slowly lower it down on both sides. It helps to nudge the pins into the holes with a small screwdriver, but be careful.
You have to push the other board that fits over the Gayle chip quite hard, so that it clicks into place, and comes into contact with the motherboard. I found it best to push each corner in in turn, and you'll hear a definate click each time.
Fitting the motherboard into the tower is fairly straightfoward from now on. I did have some trouble with the disk drive in that it is a tight fit, in that when you place it in the drive bay, it doesn't quite reach the front. You need to wiggle it about a lot, and eventually it will pop through.
There is the matter of the reset switch. The three-key reset works fine with the new keyboard, but it is possible if you wish to make the reset button on the front of the tower perform a reset. If you have a Zorro board, or a Power Flyer, there are connections you can make for this to happen. If you have neither, then you would have to do some soldering - ie, unless you know what you are doing, it would be best to forget the reset switch button, and just to use the keyboard in this case.
So now I was ready to turn the power on. As yet, I didn't have a CD ROM drive, and I just had my old 2.5" drive connected to the Power Flyer (NB - when connecting drives, make sure that the cables are the right way around. On a 2.5" drive, the red stripe should be to the right as you look at it from the rear). Upon switching on, I was faced with a red screen.
If this happens, then it is the ROMs that are at fault - either they are not plugged into their sockets properly, or the Power Flyer board they are on isn't plugged into the original ROM sockets properly. In the end I ended up taken it out, and then refitting it again, and it worked. This is what I meant about the hassles you'd have without a tower - having to open up your Amiga completely again to check the connections would not make me very happy.
I then installed the software for the Power Flyer - a progam called ATA3.driver which gets run on startup, and a prefs program. Here I had real problems in that the machine kept crashing. After lots of experimenting, I finally realised what was wrong.
There are three modes of operation - PIO0, PIO3 and PIO4. PIO0 is the A1200 standard, and the slowest. The point is that not all hard drives are capable of faster modes, and it appears that my 2.5" drive could only run in PIO0 drive. Upon switching the mode to PIO0 in the prefs program, everything worked okay. This is to be expected really, as 2.5" drives that you buy from an Amiga dealer would be intended for running on a standard A1200 IDE interface, and not a Power Flyer. Soon I will get a 3.5" drive, and I would presume that all 3.5" drives bought now would run in PIO4 mode. I do not consider this a down point, as the whole idea is that you use a 3.5" drive - they're faster anyway (even in PIO0 mode), as well as much cheaper. And a 2.5" drive doesn't fit properly in a 3.5" drive bay; it just sits there loose.
On the subject of hard drives, the Power Flyer has two 3.5" connections (giving four devices), but there is also a 2.5" drive, so you won't need a conversion cable to use your existing 2.5" drive, but you will need a longer 2.5" cable (the standard one they usually come with is way to short, as the hard drive would end up hanging in mid-air).
On the subject of cables, bear in mind that you'll also need to get hold of them to use 3.5" devices. You need a 3 way 40 pin 3.5" cable for each pair of IDE devices you wish to connect (Eyetech and Power sell them for about a tenner). I was a bit miffed at finding out I had to splash out on extra after I had bought the Power Flyer. That and having already spent another ten pounds on the long 2.5" cable - the hassles of switching from 2.5" to 3.5", but I guess it's worth it in the end.
There is the slight problem in the keyboard remapping - it doesn't quite fit either the GB or USA one. The solution is to get a program to edit your own keymap (try Aminet). Not too difficult, but it's a pain nonetheless.
And now for some final verdicts...
| Power Tower | |
| N/A | |
| Quite involved, but that's to be expected - 80% | |
| The supplied manual details all you need to know - 90% | |
| The only tower that really gets everything right - 96% | |
| The best tower system - at the cheapest price - 95% | |
Overall -94% | |
In theory, this is a great piece of hardware. I've often noticed that my hard drive has seemed very slow when copying large amounts of data, especially compared to modern PCs. You could upgrade your Amiga to the latest PPC and give it a BlizzardVision, but you'd still be left with an embarrasingly slow drive.
We usually regard computing speed as simply the speed of the process, but when it comes to everyday use, the speed of the hard disk is an important factor in how fast we perceive the computer to be. Okay, our efficient Amigas may be far less reliant on hard disks than Windows based sloths, but it's still important.
But! Since writing the rest of this review, I've got hold of a 3.5" hard drive and IDE CD ROM, and there are problems. When I'm not using the CD ROM (ie, I don't Mount it), it works fine, and I have a nice fast hard drive in PIO3/4 mode. But as soon as I Mount the CD, it starts crashing. The only way to get it working is to run both drives in PIO0 - and from newsgroups, I've seen I'm not the only one with this problem. Power Computing have been most unhelpful, suggesting it must be a problem with my drives (a brand new device capable of UDMA, and the CD ROM is a standard EIDE/ATAPI). If anyone else has had similar experience, then please contact me. Of course, there are people who have had the Flyer working fine - but I've also seen people experiencing all sorts of other problems. So until these problems are sorted (and it's difficult to know when that will be even if that does happen), getting the Power Flyer is very much a gamble, hence the Flyer gets a severly penalised score.
Another problem appeared when I tried to install NetBSD on my machine - it turns out that it won't work, because the Flyer isn't supported by it (the same is true for Linux). You might say that this is to be expected for a new product, but apparantely the manufacturers have been unhelpful in giving the necessary information needed for people to write a driver, so chances are we'll never see one.
Oh well, here's a quick run down on the Flyer's feature list just to tempt you anyway:
| Power Flyer | |
| Your IDE hard drives will never be faster - assuming it works with your setup - 50% | |
| Quite awkward, but that's to be expected - 75% | |
| A collection of printed sheets this time, and the details on installation could be a little more thorough - 88% | |
| If it works, nice, but otherwise a buffered interface for 55UKP? - 40% | |
| Depends... - 50% | |
Overall -50% | |
Mark