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Mini-ITX PC in an Atari 800
tgeller writes "As case mods go, this one's not the weirdest, But it has its own retro charm. Musician and geek Andy Hutson slipped a Mini-ITX motherboard into an Atari 800 case... and used an old cartridge as the mouse! Too bad the original keyboard's not functional." This almost makes me want to tear apart my old Apple //c and see what I can make. Almost.
Man, as if using an Atari 800 to house your ATX wasn't bad enough.. but to use a game cartridge, Star Raiders nonetheless, and transform it into a MOUSE? MY GOD MAN, I'm dripping in geek just reading this page!
At least nobody will steal your computer! Well, at least not after they find out you ruined an Atari and put all the modern crap inside! ]:3P
Pretty Pictures!
For old machine cool case mods, surely you'd have to go the OTHER way.
I mean get an old PDP-11, gut it and put boards and extensions everywhere, imagine rebuilding the PSU as a set of USB access points, or as a beowulf cluster of Mini-ITX systems
Or put an old IBM Mainframe in the basement, wire up the lights and away you go.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
...so the graphics may be prettier, but it'll still run at the same speed.
Karma: Oldschool
Man puts ITX MB in old plastic box.
Sorry, but I would have been more impressed if he'd restored the Atari 800 to working condition.
Ok, so putting a modern PC in an old computercase is cool and all, but running modern style software on the actual old computer is much cooler! Check out the Contiki operating system for such old computers (including the Atari 800): it is a multi-tasking graphical operating system with full Internet access (web browser, telnet client, web server!) that runs on a a bunch of different old computers. They even have a web server running on a real Commodore 64.
http://mini-itx.cx ... guess where the mini-itx pc will be! ;o)
'Scuse my ignorance, but I'm curious as to just how incompatible the original keyboard was...
Would any of the people that know about hardware care to enlighten me on how hard a keyboard translater would be to build - something that would read the output of the Atari keyboard and spit out equivilent input that the Mini ITX's keyboard controller would understand?
There's a lot of really cool looking old gear out there (well, specifically, under the desk here) with built in keyboards that would make pretty nifty little machines for those of us who want to relive the days of sitting crosslegged on the loungeroom floor 3 inches from the TV screen tapping stuff into a machine like that, but with all mod cons...
You know they call 'em fingers but I've never seen 'em fing. Oh, there they go.
This is what I love to see. The hardware hackers. Sure it goes above the old Amiga hacks, but is great to see the creative mind put to use. Now all we nee is for someone to do a C=128D and use a bootable C=128 emulator like the Knoppix-thing. ;-)
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
The guy did not even bother to break out a multi meter and figure out how the oldkb worked.... btw all the good stuff is at www.mini-itx.org
Everything Zen;
Everything Zen;
I don't think so!!!
Even if you don't think the Atari 800 is a very pretty box, I think this conversion deserves full points for originality and style.
My only question is usability.
Does anyone know of a source for 10" or smaller VGA input flatscreens at reasonable price? I want to convert a Mac SE/30 into a mini-ITX Linux server, with built-in display, but I can't find a source for the things.
Simply sticking a modern computer into an Atari 800 case is a little sad. Surely there are more fun mods to do... for example:
- mod a C64 disk drive to hold a full PC, with HDD, and talking IEE844 correctly to the C64.
- mod a C64 printer to become a network interface, allowing the vital print-to-slashdot function
- mod a game cartidge to hold a PC running Linux, then allow the original system to act as a console for the Linux box
Just modding hardware is skillfull, but modding software is true art.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
Wow, seeing that old atari case sure takes me back to before I was born. Actually my first was the Atari 7800.
-Look lively. LOOK LIVELY!!! --Mr. Shmallow
Mini-ITX site has a lot of links to similar projects:
http://www.mini-itx.com
I had one of these.
;).
Load SCRAM into the cassette drive, and go ride the BMX bike (with mag rims!) around for 45 minutes while it loaded, return and scram the core
Seriously though, has anyone considered putting a PC into *gasp* a PC chassis?
This almost makes me want to tear apart my old Apple //c and see what I can make. Almost.
Why not just keep your old Apple IIc and spend the five bucks or whatever buying one on ebay? There are tons of "classic" computers on ebay that you can get for rediculously low prices (well, considering...) A while ago I almost got a lot of five sparc ipx's for $20. The winning bid was something like $25. Stuff like that is up there all the time.
Of course, I have some sort of weird ethical qualms with gutting old machines. Someone else usually has to throw them out. Why not try this mod on a nice toaster or even a cuisinart (double props if the thing still works without ruining the mobo)
just my two cents (adjusted for inflation)
The finished product. I installed it with Windows 98SE, APE (Atari Peripheral Emulator), and WinDVD. Also, for fun, I installed "drempels" for a psychedelic desktop.
Forget dremples, Geiss 2 just came out. Thanks for the heads up.
"Please remember to look away every 15 minutes."
my associative arrays can kick your hash - TCL
at least his work bench is cleaner than the NES PC guy's.
that's what (one of) the guy behind jackypc.com did.
This website is the reference french-speaking site for moding PC.
Here you can see it (it is a 600)
#include "coucou.h"
Gosh I did love my first (as in computer) C64 and a romance with an atari followed soon after. In fact I think I had both of them at the same times... But with the article, lost my interest after "cool to retrofit an Atari 800 to be a full-fledged Windows PC". Jeez-Maan! How can you treat a loved one with such disrespect!
Step right up! Find the link to the right site in the story body and win a prize!
On an on-topic note, as a person who's a bit of a NES-aholic I'd I've always wanted to toss a modern computer into an old NES casing. It'd look a thousand times cooler than those crappy windows case modders put in their computers (literal windows, although I suppose the Redmond option would be as as crappy). Plus it'd make those long nights in front of NASM trying to get something to work in FCEU a bit more tolerable.
I'd also like to modify a beer keg so that you can house a computer in a back compartment while allowing the keg to still work. Hot damn, would I be the envy of the LAN parties!
...do we really need *another* story about some idiot cramming a crappy PC into a crappy case that wasn't designed to hold it?
It's not like this wonderful conversion will actually do anything a normal computer can't, except it will look crappier and work worse. And quite frankly, if people have money to spend on this type of bullshit maybe they should consider joining Greenpeace or World Vision and putting their money somewhere where it will do someone some good.
Alternatively this individual could use the money to get some life counselling sessions and work out why doing something this pointless is meaningful to them. Of course we must ask... who's sadder, the sad-sack who builds the PC in the Amiga case or the sad-sack who voluntarily reads about it and then writes a diatribe about how it is a pointless waste of time and money...
Read Pynchon.
I think it's sad to see old hardware ripped apart like this. It's just as sad as people ripping nice old cars apart to make butt-ugly hot rods...
Martin
Ummm isn't it a bit sad that a C64 can handle a minor slashdotting better than many commercial sites ?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
... someone did it with a C64, so someone else had to do with an Atari 800.
;-)
...)
Some things never change
(btw. the Atari hack ist of course *much* cooler than the C64
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
The Atari I/O chip (POKEY, for POrts and KEYboard), was fed a row/column matrix from the keyboard, and then read directly by the CPU.
In order to make the keyboard compatible with a PC, you would need a microcontroller that scanned the row/column matrix and then generated the serial data stream that a PC's 8042 keyboard controller wanted to see.
Not really a very difficult task for a hardware guy - a PIC would probably do quite nicely.
I wonder if the guy was able to use the interior potmetal shield of the Atari - the 800 was designed back when "Class B computing device" MEANT something - Atari took no chance that the computer would fail to pass FCC regulations. The 800 was the quietest (in the RF sense of the word) computer I'd ever seen - ANYTHING that could generate RF was on the inside of a eight-of-an-inch thick metal box.
But using a Star Raiders cart as a mouse?!?!
BLASPHEMER! SINNER! YOU SHALL BURN IN HELLFIRE ETERNAL!
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I'm dripping in geek just reading this page!
If you're dripping in anything while reading Slashdot, it's either geek, foodstuffs, or that other thing.
The coolest voice ever.
I've been fooling around with a mini-itx board for a while, and tried to fit it into an Apple IIc. It will fit, if you forego a cd/dvd drive, full size hard drive, and use a laptop-style power supply with an external AC/DC adaptor.
My current plans are to put it into a wood box I purchased at a local artsy fartsy store, which will have plenty of room for a slot loading DVD drive, but will still need a laptop hard drive and the smaller power supply. DivX player, here I come!
-Ryan
ditch the non-functional keyboard and put a cherry g84-4100 in there!. it's even available in black. check their keyboard catalogue here : http://www.cherrycorp.com/products/US/keyboards/pd f_file/gen_purpose.pdf (pdf, scroll 2/3 down).
I am not trying to be a jerk, just expressing an honest opinion that in 2000 years time archaeologists will not look back at our time and gasp in awe at our ability to take the insides of a computer and place it in the case of another computer.
Look at the number of comments... people are voting with their mice and not even bothering with stories like this one, of which there are far too many.
Lousy case-modding star wars figurine-collecting Buffy-watching foreign country-invading negative moderation-giving sons of...
Read Pynchon.
I want to find an old TI-99/4A Peripheral Expansion Box. It's not unlike the standard PC case, but it's built like an Abrams battle tank. Even the cards were in small metal cases.
I think with some creative use with the Dremel, I could re-use the power switch, put in the hard drive/power LEDs where the card ones were, and improvise on the cards in back.
It would truly be a 1980s-lookin' PC>
Too bad this has been on Mini-ITX.com for a week now. I hardly think this is slashdot worthy news. People put Mini-ITX boards in everything and submit the idea to Mini-itx.com. If we posted every new mini-itx idea on slashdot we'd have to have a page devoted to Mini-itx designs. But wait, that already exists, it's called Mini-itx.com
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
could be useful with a happy hacking keyboard. . . :)
somebody like lowriders in the mod pool perchance?
Well, if I had a IIc, I'd make a macpack and ditch my regular ol' backpack.
"A good conspiracy is an unprovable one." -Conspiracy Theory
as someone who has owned every production 8-bit Atari sold in the US (800,400,1200XL,800XL,600XL, 130XE, 65XE, XEGS... other models that are out there that I haven't owned include the 1400XL, 1450XL, 800XE...) this is just WRONG. WRONG, I tell you.
The 800 is one of the very best of the Atari 8-bit line. Funky seventies industrial design, lovely keyboard, great video and audio quality out of the box (Atari boogered the video and audio amplifiers on the XL and XE models)...
They're built like tanks, too. Remember, the MSRP for them in 1979 was something like $2000. In 1979 dollars. 1/4" and 1/8" aluminum shielding in there to pass the old FCC regs from before Apple paid off the FCC to get the Apple II series passed... We used to joke that the 800 could probably survive the EMP from the inevitable nuclear war that was going to happen in the eighties...
About the only "case mod" I could understand on an 800 is gluing the Star Raiders cartridge into the slot, and even then, I'd use a 400 for that...
As for the comment "it's a shame they couldn't get the original keyboard to work", ya know, that's the only thing I didn't like about my 800. The keys didn't follow a standard layout, and I wasn't very fond of their feel.
:)
:)
The long nights I spent poking display list interrupts into the 1536 memory block, and making the 8k Atari basic do things it wasn't meant to do. Good old 6502 assembly language. My first tape drive. My first floppy drive. A geek's first love.
Any chance you still have the Microsoft Basic cartridge hanging around? I have mine. Oh the memories.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
... looked really high tech. I wasn't fond of the machine's interior, but the brushed steel case was just downright pretty.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
it took 30-45 minutes to load a big program
Huh? The very longest programs I had for my 64K 800XL took less than half an hour to load, and even that was bad enough..
Of course, factor in
*** LOAD ERROR ***
*** Try Other Side ***
(in scrolly rainbow letters) and... yeah, I've seen games take over an hour to load on multiple retries.
Why the #@^$ Atari didn't bother improving the tape interface speed for the XL line beats me... guess the US-market was mostly cart/disk-driven by that time.
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[[ I think that all it needs is some working joysticks. I would like to play Star Raiders again. ]]
...but it's easier than dragging your old 800XL out of the basement.
You should consider downloading and installing the latest Atari 800 emulator designed by Darek Mihocka (sp?). At the moment, I only know of a Wintel version that works with Windows 95 and up.
How ironic. I play more Atari games on my HP notebook than I ever did on my VCS (Z26 Emulator), 800XL, and my 5200 put together.
...NES in a Cheez-It box.
The Human Cow - bringing you scrumtrelescence since 1995
I know that a lot of MAME home arcade hackers use just the same technique to make input controllers for their cabinets. You might even have enough extra inputs with a 104-key keyboard so you could wire up the joysticks!
I mean, come on man, if you're gonna do it, do it right!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Taking an old PC case and putting new hardware into it? Boring... been done before... and this one isn't even fully functional. It's little more than an attempt at something visually cool, and even then it has no visual appeal whatsoever.
Now the Telefunken 2003... a 45 year old radio upgraded to Internet Radio... that's a nice hack with unique artistic appeal!!
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Does anyone have any Alan Aldas?
Damn the 70's/80's were freakin' Weird!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I have a background in electronics, so I'm competent with DMM, scope, etc., BUT, there were really 3 reasons for my shortfall: 1. YES, I was too lazy to hack the Atari KB, BUT 2. The Atari KB is missing way too many keys to be useful in a Windoze box. 3. The Atari 800 KB is effing HUGE. Would have left no room for CD-ROM drive underneath. I probably will fix the KB one day, but I really don't care THAT much. It was fun.
Amen, my brother. If only you could get a TB-303 on eBay for $25
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
My idea is to write a piece of software for the Atari that turns the keyboard into a serial-port-driven keyboard for the PC.
That way there isn't any hardware hacking.
I have not been able to find any modern keyboards that feel as good as an Atari 800 or 1200XL keyboard. I don't like the clackity clack of mechanical IBM keyboards. The 800 and 1200XL have IBM selectric-type keyboards that are smooth and quiet and NOT mushy.
If you could have An Atari running as a keyboard for the PC you could keep your existing keyboard online for keys you can't easily hit with the Atari, and do most of your basic text entry with the Atari.
Anyone know of a starting point for writing custom keyboard drivers?