Path: news.weeg.uiowa.edu!news.uiowa.edu!hobbes.physics.uiowa.edu!newsrelay.iastate.edu!newsxfer.itd.umich.edu!zip.eecs.umich.edu!panix!MathWorks.Com!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!howland.reston.ans.net!math.ohio-state.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!ppuskari From: ppuskari@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Petar E Puskarich) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2 Subject: Build your own Tower GS System!!!! Date: 10 May 1994 15:16:00 GMT Organization: The Ohio State University Lines: 121 Message-ID: <2qo8fg$74e@charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: beauty.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu The already too late from me instructions on how I made my own Apple IIGS Tower 12.5mhz machine. First off. Get yourself a Full Tower case. I have yet to find anything smaller that will house the GS and all of its components in a case smaller than the Full size. At least in a Tower configuration. Next step. Grab your self a piece of medium quality plexiglass. I bought a piece about 10" X 12" and cut it down to I think it was about 9 1/4" X 11. The important part is that the plexiglass is about 1/2 inch extending around all sides. This is what you mount the motherboard to. The next step will be to take a marking pen and place the bare mother board on the sheet of plexiglass. Now pick a few ground plane holes where you will put in the mounting screws. Mark at least 3 good holes. I found one at the top of the Motherboard, one under one of the slots, and one toward the bottom of the mb to use. Now just drill out the holes in the plexiglass. After this step, you need to semi line up the plexiglass in the case on the side that you would normally mount the board in it and mark the holes where the standoffs go in the frame of the Case. Drill these holes out. Insert the plastic MB standoffs that should have come with your case. You kow the the ones that have the little knob on one end and usually just snap into the mb holes. Well these go in the plexiglass holes now!!! Grab yourself some nuts and bolts mount the Mother board to the plexiglass sheet and then the whole thing mounts to the frame. Kind a neat. I almost forgot to mount a GS mother board you need to make sure the slots are at the TOP of the setup sorta like this. ---------------------- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ----------------------- This makes sure there is as little stress on the slot connectors as possible You could mount the other way around, but the upside down configuration made getting to the ports again, almost impossible. Just do it this way, and it will work fine. That way the cables exit from the top of the board and out and you can get to them easily later. Now that the mother board is installed, you have to figure out how you are going to power the beast. I just cut off the connector to an old GS powersupply and resoldered into the P8 and P9 connectors of the PC style 250w powersupply that is in the case. More than enough power for your GS and many peripherals. To be honest, I did this by the hunt and peck method. Grabbed my trusty digital volt meter, found the +5,-5,+12,-12, and two ground lines and cut the ends off the pc cables and resoldered into the old GS connector then shrink taped everything up so nothing would zap anything and plugged the connector into the GS power conector. Note the standard cutouts for DB25 style things on the back of most PC cases work just great with the IIGS connectors. I however removed the back lower panel so I could run wires more conveniently. This part used to be the card cage that the pc would have used on the back part for screwing down the back of the cards, but only got in the way for me. BE VERY CAREFUL when WIRING your GS!!!!!!! Now just mount everything and install the proper scsi cabling and stuff. Mine contains: Slot one : empty Slot two : Ramfast REV D 256K Slot three:VOC card Slot four: 12.5mhz TWGS with 32k cache Slot five: Supersonic Stereo card Slot Six: Pctransporter Slot Seven: AST Enhanced Vision Plus Digitizer Card Mem exp: 4 meg Cvtech card So the setup WILL work, the project took me about 4 hours to complete and was performed mostly with a lot of luck and off the cuff. Hence the state of these instructions. Just think and it will make sense on how to do it in the end. Also, I have mounted in the Case front. Full Height 5.25 587meg Scsi Hard drive 1/2 Height Wangtek 5125ES Scsi Tape Unit 125megs Then also am going to mount a CD300i in the remaining space below all of this. The system is very stable now, after fixing the memory problem I had. I have had uptimes under GNO for 9 days before crash, so I think the conversion went nicely. Note also, that noise might be a little higher in this type of setup since the cage design of the Apple case is no longer present. My motherboard is touchy to noise to begin with. I can't use a ZipGS in my system at all without problems, but in my sisters ROM01 it works just fine. My TWGS just chugs right along at a blazing 12.5 and once for a while at 13.75 but I fried that crystal. Bummer....Serves me right for putting it in upside down... Good luck and sorry for taking so long to post this back to everyone!!!! If you have any questions at all please feel free to email me!!!!! Petar Puskarich ppuskari@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu PowerGS DSP assembler dude Home of the Tower 12 GS