Dreaming about an Amiga 600 casemod

I barely use my A600 any more, but I didn't want to sell it give it away because it's such a lovely computer! It's so cute and small, and it has a decent keyboard (important for me). Then I thought, why not fit the A600 case with some modern innards?

I had several ideas, including taking an old thin-client or something like that, but then I heard about the BeagleBoard. It's a single board computer that's about the size of a floppy disk and has an ARM processor running at 750MHz. Onboard is 512 megs of RAM. It consumes so little power that it can run off the current a USB will provide!

I was dreaming about putting one of these inside, maybe two, and maybe an FPGA board or something, but...

This is my first problem to overcome: is there something that will accept the plug for the amiga keyboard and provide a USB connection to it?

Secondly, would this be seen as ruining an otherwise fine Amiga computer that still works?

It is a bit of a shame to gut a perfectly good working A600 Amiga to fit a low powered PC inside. I would be very sad to see that happening. :(

However, what you want to do is perfectly possible, and you could sell the working A600 motherboard and floppy drive on ebay or amibay.com easily and they are both very sort after. Worth about £15-30 for the motherboard and about £10 for the floppy drive.

As for tacking your project idea. For the keyboard, yes there is a solution. It is a hardware device called Keyrah Amiga and can be purchased for £29.99 from Amigakit.com here. And it infact offers a very nice solution because in addition to interfacing the keyboard to a USB port, it also adds 2 digital 9 pin Amiga/Atari joystick ports that you can plug any Amiga joysticks into for use in emulators.

I've actually been thinking of a similar project using an A1200 case and keyboard. Fitting a mini-ITX motherboard inside the case. You can get motherboards that small that take Core2Duo chips, so you can get a fast PC out of it too.

To show you an idea of what is possible have a look at some of the projects over at mini-itx.com, and especially ones like the C64 one here.

Originally Posted by Harrison:
It is a bit of a shame to gut a perfectly good working A600 Amiga to fit a low powered PC inside. I would be very sad to see that happening. :(

Hmm, I'm not so sure I want to now... well I'll think about buying a broken one and using that one. Are broken A600s and empty cases with keyboards easy to find?

Cases and keyboards can be found quite easily. Equally working A600's can be found fairly cheaply. Around £10-30.

Sorry but,
why ?!?!?

why to transform an Amiga in a PC ?? I dont get it...
If you have a spare case and you what to do something with it... ok, but "killing a miggy" ... to put a pc in it...
it's a crime !!
Buy a a600 case on ebay... they are cheap

Exactly Tiago. My feelings too.

Using an A600, A1200 or even A500 case and keyboard and putting a PC inside is however a cool PC project. A PC in an A600 case would make a great compact and portable PC for sure, and would be great fun for emulation. Especially using the original keyboard and a keyrar interface so original Amiga joysticks could also be used. great fun. :)