13.4 Lighthouse Tower

The Lighthouse Tower

1st Published 1.2.1996
Author: Richard Elwell

Before even buying my Falcon 2 years ago I had a feeling that the 16MHz '030 and 4Mb of RAM wasn't going to be enough. I had been using a 4Mb ST for a number of years, so with the increased memory requirements of the Falcon 4Mb was effectively less memory than I had been using.

What has this to do with a tower case?

Last summer I found an advert for an 68040 accelerator board with RAM expansion. Due to the positioning of the Falcon's external bus, under the left hand end of the keyboard, very few upgrades are capable of being fitted in the existing 'ST' case. A quick 'phone call told me that re-casing would be required, and that the board wasn't available yet.

I decided to fit the Falcon into a tower case ready for the accelerator. The only one that I knew exsisted for the Falcon was the System Solutions Lighthouse Tower, it seemd big enough and not too expensive. So I ordered one. The parcel turned out to quite big and quite heavy.

First grumble. It's the usual one. The manual is poor. Most of the text is in German with a small English translation. On one page 26 lines of German is translated as 8 lines of English. There are quite a few diagrams most of which are annotated in German. After all the years of gripes in magazine reviews you would have thought the companies would insist on a higher standard of manual.

The basic components of the tower are a hinged frame, two covering panels and a plastic front. Grumble number two coming up. The hinged frame is a made of heavy stamped and bent steel plate. Due to the crude cutting out of these metal plates the edge can be quite sharp. I will warn you now that is incredibly easy to cut your hands on this. It is all to easy when moving the frame round to slide your fingers along the edges. I literally lost blood putting it together. So be very careful, please.

In the rest of this review, and the manual, the two halves of the frame are refered to as upper and lower. This is when the frame is in a horizontal position, like a desktop machine. It is possible to use the machine horizontally or vertically.

Anyway back to making this thing.

After having sorted out all the pieces and read the manual through several times (it won't take long) it is time to start assembling it. The first thing to do is to attach a set of 'clipped nuts' to the frame. This can be awkward because the holes are not always the right size and because the frame has been bent into shape the holes are sometimes near a radiused edge that makes getting the nut into position nearly impossible. A bit of filing is require on the holes and/or clips. If your hand slips while trying to push the clipped nuts into place with a screwdriver, as suggested, those sharp edges on the frame are never far away!

Next the nerve racking bit. Taking the Falcon apart. Switch off at mains and unplug everything. You are about to void the warranty, though most of you have probably done that already when unplugging the internal speaker. Undo all the screws in the square pots underneath. Take the case off and remove the keyboard and disconnect the speaker. I don't consider myself particularly good at this sort of thing but I am prepared to have a go, that said taking apart something that has the amount of time and money invested in it as my Falcon is alittle worrying.

The powersupply sticks out throught the shielding and case at the back so it to has to taken out. Take off the small shield above it, disconnect the plug. Unscrew the PSU's feet and lever the front up. This is tricky because the feet need to kept clear of the sheilding as they lift and the unit must be slid forwards to get the plug out of the case. The same sort of procedure is repeated for the disk drive, but is much easier.

All the sheilding has to come off, lots of little screws have to be removed and pieces of metal bent.

The instructions suggest removing the hard disk. I couldn't get the big connector undone and I didn't won't to cause any damage so I left it on. No problems resulted from leaving it there but I took extra care when lifting the motherboard seeing as it had the weight of the HD in the centre. Visions of a snapped circuit board are not nice.

The motherboard is lifted from the lower half of the Falcon case, still in it's underneath sheilding, and mounted into one half of the frame. It is supported on small spacer bolts.

Attach the new reset switch. This is to be fitted on the front of the new case. The old one, which is part of the circuit board, is still available at the back but it may be inconvient to reach round such a big case.

The powersupply is now replaced. Like the reset switch a new on/off will be put on the front of the tower. Unlike the reset switch the old on/off switch will be removed. The old rocker has to be either cut or desoldered from the powersupply. Cutting is quicker and has no disadvantages. It is at this stage that you realise there is no going back. The new switch must be wired to the powersupply. The wires are joined with 4 position terminal, a Lego brick with metal inserts. This means that is no soldering to do. Yippee.

Grumble number 3. A diagram is given to show you which wires, there are 8 in total, connect to which in the block. Fine. It's a good diagram with clear English/German translation. Probably the best diagram in the whole manual. The catch? Oh, yes the catch! The colours listed did not exactly match what I had in front of me. So it was a case of using a bit of common sense and logic to match each pair of wires. Not too difficult, but a bit annoying.

The floppy disk caused another grumble (no. 4). Extension leads are supplied to allow the drive to be mount somewhere in the upper half of the frame. The data ribbon cable extension was no problem. The power lead was. The end plugging into the drive itself was fine but the other end, that joins with the lead coming out of the circuit board just wouldn't stay together. It wasn't a proper connecting socket, it was the same type of plug. So you have two roughly indentical plugs to put together. Impossible. Except for a small extra joint supplied. This a block of plastic with metal prongs going through it. This had no grip on the plugs so I sellotaped the whole lot together, and it has not given any trouble.

If you bought the additional SCSI kit now is the time to fit it. There are few points to mention about this. The kit is basically an extra powersupply and a SCSI lead. The powersupply is fitted into the top half of the frame, above the normal PSU. In the manual it mentions bolting this down. There were no such bolts in my kit and the feet of the PSU had no bolt holes. Then I realised that there were sticky pads on the feet. Since I intended sitting the tower case on it's end this would mean that the PSU was expected to hang on to a smooth steel plate with four bits of sticky tape. I thought it must work or they wouldn't supply it in that way. So I took off the protective tape, lined up the feet round a hole in the frame to give the largest possible contact area for the feet and push it on. Of course the feet didn't go exactly where planned. I tried to move it a little, but there was no shifting the thing. It really was stuck. Wow. It has been in for more than six months and despite being on a vertical surface has shown no signs of moving. I was expecting to hear a clang as it fell off shortly after fitting it. The new PSU needs to be wired into the block used to rewire the on/off switch but this is much easier to follow. Only two wires and their position is obvious. The PSU has two other leads coming out of it, these a power plugs for two SCSI devices that can be fitted into the tower.

The SCSI link is made by a long ribbon cable with an external SCSI (1, not 2) port at either end and two internal SCSI plugs at even spacing along it. The idea is to bolt the two external ports to the frame so they are accessible from outside. The internal plugs can then attach to the hard drives. Of course the Falcon is not yet connected to this SCSI chain. This is done with a SCSI2-SCSI lead. This plugs into the Falcons SCSI2 port and then into one of the new SCSI ports. The other SCSI port can then be used for any external devices.

I have yet to fit any hard drives into the tower but I am not convinced that the ribbon cable is really long enough to reach two drives. Especially as ribbon cables are difficult to twist into position. Also the SCSI2 lead is 0.5m long and only has to link two plugs seperated by less than 30cm. Leaving another lead flapping around. With these two problems in mind I decided not to fix both SCSI ports to the casing and leave one lose inside. The SCSI2 lead is fed in through one of the unusd VME card holes and attched to the free end of the SCSI ribbon cable. This gives a much greater length of ribbon cable to play with and tucks the SCSI2 lead out the way.

The keyboard is straight forward, though a few pads shown in the diagrams seemed to be missing. I replaced the more necessary ones with bits of cardboard.

With all the above done I'm just left to attach all the external casing. The front section has plastic panels that are designed to have holes cut in them to allow floppy disk drive fronts to stick through. Two metal covers screw on each half of the frame and the plastic front keeps the frame from hinging apart. One advantage of this hinged arrangement is that at any time it is easy to pull the front off and open the machine up without even the use of a screwdriver.

To fit hard drives it is best to remove the top half of the outer casing, giving good acces to the frame.


Now the big test. Will the Falcon still fly?

I plugged in just the keyboard, power and TV output. There is no point plugging everything back in, e.g. printer, until the basics work. I switched on. The screen went white. Fine so far. Okay where is the Atari logo, the memory test etc? Nothing. What a horrible feeling. It was a hot day in mid July, but now I really am sweating. Think. The machine seems to be okay. No smoke. No funny noises. The hard drive powers up. It just isn't getting any further. A quick look round inside shows no obvious problems. Then it hits me, no not the top half of the frame falling. During the transplant I had a good look at the motherboard inparticular I studied the internal expansion bus. Where the accelerator board will go. I noticed a small piece of plastic over a couple of pins. A way of preventing something being plugged in? Well that's what I thought. The accelerator would be fitted soon, so I might as well take it off now, {silly boy! FFF}. I found this piece of plastic and studied it more carefully. Would you believe it a metal connector is in side it, {It's called a Jumper, FFF}. The two pins were deliberately joined. During the boot process the Falcon will go round various ports looking for something to boot. One of the things early in the list must be the internal bus slot. Any accelerator board will take over running machine from the '030 at this stage. The pins being shorted together informs the Falcon that nothing is plugged into the slot. Now all I had to do was replace the connector. Which pins was it now? I can't remember exactly. I try two that seem to be the right sort of place.

It worked!

The Atari logo. The memory test (never before have I been so pleased to se it), everything. Now I go back and tidy up a bit. Sellotaping a few leads to the side of the case. Rerouting a few cables.

I put the Falcon in it's new home. On it's end, on the floor next to the desk it has spent 18 months on top of. A nice clear desk, with just the keyboard on. Easy to reach power and reset switches and... a floppy disk drive near the floor. For some reason I put the drive on the right hand side of the case. The Falcon's floppy disk drive is on the right after all. I had not thought that once on it's end the drive would be at the lower end. A few minutes later and disk drive is at the top. Much better.

All in all quite an easy job to fit. No specialist skill required. The lack of clear instructions can slow progress, but shouldn't prevent the job being completed in couple of hours. Hey, you've already bought a Falcon so you must be inteligent. The case will not win any beauty prizes but that wasn't why I bought it.

One of these days, soon hopefully, I will be able to complete my mission. This was all done for a reason. Because at the moment it is just the Falcon as before, but in a big box.

All Text (c) by Richard Elwell