Building the Checkmate Amiga 1200 Plus Computer

Greetings and welcome to some LGR Amiga! Specifically, we'll be putting a Commodore Amiga

1200

in this fantastic looking case, the Checkmate A1500 Plus. A self-proclaimed “stylish, versatile and expandable”

computer

case that is designed to house any of half a dozen different systems, from Amigas to PCs, Raspberry Pis and more. Aesthetically, it's based on the classic 1990 Commodore Amiga 3000, but its roots actually go back even further, to the Checkmate Digital A1500 from 1989. A topic well covered in this video on the RetroManCave YouTube channel, so check it out if you want to know the full story. But the gist is that Checkmate made a nice desktop case for the Amiga 500 in '89 and Commodore said "no!" Proceeding to the spiteful launch of the Amiga 1500 in 1990, it rained heavily for both Checkmate Digital and one of its designers, Stephen Jones.

And this brings us to the modern Checkmate A1500, courtesy of iMica Limited and Mister Steve Jones himself, who sent over this special LGR review unit. That being said, this is not sponsored and there is no revenue sharing. Steve offered me this review unit out of the blue and I said yes because dude, look at it! An off-white horizontal desktop

computer

case manufactured in the current year, this kind of thing doesn't happen anymore. And although I thought about putting a computer with MS-DOS inside, hey, I did a lot of those and was in the mood for something different.

So today we're going to build a custom Amiga

1200

computer system using a variety of new and old components. A PAL region system, no less, since many of my favorite games are designed for it and switching between NTSC every time I want to start something gets annoying. Enough of the contextual foreplay though, let's move on and delve into this lovely package. First, we have a brochure advertising the case and showing an aspirational example of a complete Amiga setup. And below we get directly to the good stuff. The Checkmate A1500 itself, wrapped in plastic, begging to be unsheathed and put into action.

At the top we have a couple more sheets showing the black version of the case and some ordering information that is unfortunately now outdated. However, more are being built at the time of recording, with new batches taking 10-12 weeks to produce. Then there's this delightful spiral-bound manual packed with interesting information, but we'll get back to that. Because right now, ahh, just look at this beige beauty! One that is made with UV resistant materials, so hopefully it won't yellow over time. I can't remember the last time I saw a new horizontal desktop case, let alone one so delightfully beige and relatively compact.

For comparison, here's what it looks like sitting next to an IBM AT built in 1988 - it completely dwarfs the Checkmate. Of course, in the mid-90s most desktop PCs were shrinking in size, like this Packard Bell Legend 486, but the Checkmate is still noticeably smaller. That doesn't mean it skimps on drive slots and bays, with two 5.25" bays on the front, a PCMCIA slot on the side, and all sorts of cutouts and openings on the back - mine is pre-configured to use with the A1200 and 600. And this is a big part of the case's modularity, as this entire backplate can be replaced to suit the I/O needs of different systems Speaking of which, the case isn't the only thing. that arrived here.

These additional back panels were also shipped for Checkmate, one for the Amiga 500, a PC motherboard with vertical slots, and PC with horizontal slots. The latter two are designed to fit half-height expansion cards, and the. case is designed for Micro ATX and Mini ATX motherboards, and these latest cases include a variety of great extras: a drive bay assembly with some wiring and such, two front drive bay covers, one to accommodate 3 devices. .5" and another for a slot-loading LG optical drive, and one of my favorite features. of the case: the keyboard risers. Yes, actually, screw them into the bottom of the case to lift everything up so you can fit a keyboard underneath.

Something I've always admired about the Amiga 1000 and yes, having it in a new case is just fun. One item we won't be using in this build is this A500 ATX power supply and Zorro 2 interface card, but they were included anyway, so here it is. I would like to install an Amiga 500 board just so I can use this. Instead, all we will need for the A1200 is this ATX power adapter kit that is already installed in the case. Oh, and one more thing, check this out! These keyboard cases are also available, allowing you to use the original Amiga keyboards inside a metal case that matches the Checkmate.

So, all you need are the guts of the keyboard, some adapters and wiring to connect it to the motherboard, and yes, this will be amazing. I love a great metal keyboard case. As for Amiga parts, it's up to me to supply them, and I have a few spare parts and systems to choose from. I have a nice A1200 keyboard set, a very yellow Amiga 1200 parts system from France, and an accelerator card. I'm not entirely sure which of these I'll use yet, but there are definitely a number of promising components to try here. That is, this Blizzard 1230 Mark IV from 1995, an add-on that plugs into the hatch slot and provides a real-time clock, up to 128 megabytes of RAM, a 50 megahertz 68030 CPU, and in this case, also a FPU 68882.

This was all generously donated by a viewer named Maximillien, so thanks again for this and other Amiga stuff you sent over! And in case the parts machine doesn't work, I also have this spare A1200 motherboard. Like the other machine, this one is also a PAL system, just from the UK instead of France. It was also completely recapped a couple of years ago, so it's a solid solution if I'm having trouble. In terms of power supplies, we'll be using a 300-watt BeQuiet SFX Power 2. And yes, the Checkmate case needs an SFX form factor power supply or the smaller, full-size ATX supplies are too bulky.

And finally, I have some mice, adapters, cables and other parts and accessories. Some of this will be necessary, like a Keyrah V2b and a Sum 1200 USB Keyboard Adapter for the external keyboard, but others are more optional or just fun. Stickers, badges, spare ROM chips, disk labels, an Amiga ruler. Yeah, I don't know, they were going to import a package for me anyway, so why not? Okay, let's take a look inside the case, which opens by removing these two screws here. The top of the case just slides on and... Well, this is different. You can't just keep sliding, you have to tip the thing over an edge and slide it down.

If it's lying flat on a desk, there's no way to open the lid of the case, and the same goes for putting it back down. According to the manual, this so-called "feature" is due to the modular design, although that doesn't make it any less annoying to handle. Once inside, it's quite nice, with ample space and all kinds of brackets ready to mount things. And with this review unit, it came prepared for my particular build with this PSU control board to connect the SFX power supply to the A1200 motherboard. And on the front is a small PCB to connect the hard drive and power LEDs, with support for PC and Amiga system.

I also appreciate the names embossed there, with "Father of the Amiga" Jay Miner and Commodore engineer Dave Haynie adorned with respect. So yes, at this point we are ready to start

building

! But before we start screwing things together, let's test the hardware first, because it's been years since I last booted this up and you never know with these things. Yes, that's promising! After some DeoxIT on the power connector, it started right up. The hard drive spins and the floppy drive receives power, although both make some worrying noises here and there. Still, it managed to boot into Scalos, a desktop replacement for the regular Amiga Workbench OS.

This was something that was already set up and running on the hard drive when I bought this machine many years ago, filled with all kinds of applications and games. Copyright 'Satanic Dream Software'. I love that '90s feel. And yes, while it seemed to be working at first, I quickly ran into issues where the system would stop reading files from the hard drive, eventually resulting in a software crash that required a reboot. The floppy drive fared even worse, refusing to even move the read/write head, let alone recognize a single disk. And considering the age, dirt, and unknown wear of these records, I can't say I was too surprised.

Luckily, I also have this IDE to CompactFlash adapter that I can use, something I had actually planned to upgrade anyway, so this saves me a step further down the line. It connects to the same 44 pin header as the hard drive, as it is IDE compatible, it doesn't get any easier than that. And yes, this works even better, at least so far! This time it runs Classic Workbench Green Amiga Alien Edition, an optimized version of Amiga Workbench, packed with WHDLoad drawers to simplify loading floppy programs from the hard drive. I don't even know how many games are here, but it's absurd, with about a gigabyte of games and demos ready to go.

Excellent. Unfortunately, I couldn't run much of anything, with or without memory cards or accelerator cards installed. Most started loading and then froze the system or refused to open it completely. So I put it aside for the moment and took out the spare motherboard from the UK, installed an eight megabyte memory board and voila! Success! Great Giana Sisters charged on the first try this time, without freezing or blocking at all. And yes, here I am using an Amstrad Mega PC gamepad, with B assigned to shoot and C assigned to press up to jump. To do that, I have this little Mega Drive adapter that allows safe use of the pads on Commodore machines, along with button remapping.

Highly recommended, especially for... well, most Amiga platformers, like Shadow of the Beast here. Pressing up to jump with a small joystick never felt right to me, give me a gamepad and a jump button any day. Anyway, yeah, the last thing I tried here was Gods, since the other A1200 board refused to boot this one. And again, it works perfectly and looks and sounds as good as expected. Man, this game, I swear. The magic of Bitmap Brothers is pure sorcery. Well then! Before I get carried away with quote-unquote “testing” every Amiga game I own, let's get down to business and build Checkmate!

Fortunately, the manual is quite comprehensive, walking users through every step of the process for each of the intended systems and configurations, and even more exotic things like water cooling and PCI-X GPU placement. But the first step for the A1200 board here is to remove the metal shielding underneath as it is completely unnecessary and will only get in the way. To do this you have to unscrew all these little ones from each port, one by one, since this is where the shield is fixed to the motherboard. With this done, I can now place the board inside the case to see where the standoffs should be screwed.

Turns out there are only a couple of mounting holes, so it's not too complicated. You could screw in more standoffs to provide a little extra support, but if you do, it's best to use plastic ones so you don't short out anything underneath. Plus, those I/O port screws on the back end up doing a lot of the work holding things in place. The plate was quite loose before that, but once it's all screwed together against the metal back plate, the A1200 is securely and comfortably where it needs to be and won't fall over. Next up is the energy situation, something that was a little stranger than I imagined.

Checkmate uses this adapter cable to connect the Amiga's 5-pin power socket to the internal power supply board. This connects externally, passes through a hole on top of that and just sits there on the back of the case, all exposed. It's a pretty complicated solution, but I honestly don't know how else you could do this without desoldering the old power connector and adding something new inside. And while there is a 3D printed cover available, I don't have it yet, so I'll just put some electrical tape here and move on for now. Next are the front panel connections, with the power button connected to the power supply control board here, and the floppy drive power and activity LEDs connected to the motherboard here.

And now it's time to install the SFX power supply. A full modular power supply would be better, since you don't need 90% of these cables for an Amiga 1200, but hey, this will do for now. Four are screwed herescrews and that's it. It doesn't rest on any kind of shelf or anything, so I had to hold it in place somewhat clumsily while screwing it in, but it's solid once installed. Now it's just a matter of connecting the 24-pin ATX connector to the power supply board and you're done. Please note that not all SFX power supplies have cables this long;

I've seen reports from other Checkmate owners that they need an extension cord to reach the other side of the case. Another thing to keep in mind is that with all this setup, installing a hatch expansion card becomes difficult. Or even almost impossible in the case of this Blizzard card, unfortunately, since there is no longer a hatch underneath, just solid metal, so you have to install it beforehand or from above. If the Checkmate were an eighth of an inch wider, it would be doable, but as it stands, it's too tight. Other cards, like this eight mega memory card, have enough space to fit there.

But still, it makes it unfeasible to easily swap hatches on the Checkmate. Another minor annoyance is the floppy drive situation. Or more accurately, the floppy drive cable, which I completely forgot about until it was too late. Not only is the original ribbon cable too short to reach the front of the case, but the motherboard connector is directly under the new power supply. Poop. Oh well, the floppy drive needs to work anyway before installing it, so for now I'll boot directly from the CF card and see if we have a working system. Hmm. So it's good that it's on and all, but I can't boot the CF card anymore, it just goes straight to the Workbench floppy screen.

In fact, the LED on the adapter board doesn't even light up now. Actually, neither do the LEDs on the front panel of the case, it's strange. Fortunately the latter was an easy fix, it turns out the cables to the LED panel were installed backwards. But the CF card? Yes, it turns out that the old flat cable had broken and snapped in half after years of use. The annoying thing is that I don't have a direct replacement on hand, so while I wait for one to arrive in the mail, I'm using the cable from the old 2.5-inch laptop hard drive we saw earlier.

And yes, it works fine now, although with lots of strange cables that disturb my soul. Other than that, everything looks great and seems to work perfectly! Well, everything except that poor floppy drive. This thing has never worked since I've had it, so it's about time I did something about it. On the one hand, the record is simply disgusting inside and out, filled with decades of enough dirt, dust and grime to have any record on its knees begging for relief. Relief that kindly comes in the form of cleansing, and lots of it. Of course, there's no guarantee that this is the problem, but it may be surprising how often this is all a dead floppy drive needs.

A little isopropyl alcohol on the read/write heads, a little magic erase on the plastic eject button, a little lubrication on the rails and other metal mechanisms, and you're done! I also noticed that the extension spring on top seemed a little tired, and I mean, don't we all? But the result was that the disc ejection was weaker than it should be. So I replaced it with a new spring of the same general size and yes, much better. And since I don't have a long Amiga floppy cable yet, I have to leave it next to the floppy drive header back here, just for a few minutes to test things out.

And what you already know: success! Workbench now sees no issues with floppy disks and I was able to read, write and format them as if it were a new drive. He still makes the occasional irritated noise, but who can blame him? Functionally it's one hundred percent better than before, so I'd call it a win. Unfortunately, screwing the device into the drive tray isn't all that fun. You have to turn the entire case over and unscrew the tray from the bottom to get to the mounting holes. It wouldn't be so bad if I did this sooner, but I was following the manual step by step and this part was listed as one of the final instructions, so...

Yeah, maybe I'll do this a little earlier in the process. And then once I screwed the floppy drive into the tray? It ended up sitting too low and didn't fit into the front of the case! I triple checked the manual to make sure I wasn't being an idiot, but no. I guess certain drives don't have the right height for the drive covers, bad luck on my part. So I added some spacers between the drive and the tray to raise it higher, hopefully to the point where it fits into the case. And after too much time playing around trying to screw everything back together from under the side, yes!

In the end everything went well. I'm not exactly in the right place yet, but I guess that's what you get with a "one size fits all" case design. And with that, the Checkmate build is complete! Or like, 98% complete, I'm still waiting for those replacement ribbon cables for the different units. And naturally, the keyboard still needs to be assembled, so let me take care of that real quick. Fortunately, this is a fairly simple process, even with the Amiga 1200. My Checkmate kit included several cables and connectors for the A500, but with the 1200 here we won't be using any of these.

Instead, I needed a couple of homemade devices that I bought online: the Keyrah V2b from Individual Computers, which converts Commodore keyboards to USB, among other things. And the Sum 1200 7-bit adapter, which adds USB keyboard support to the Amiga itself. The Checkmate keyboard case has a pre-cut opening for the Keyrah, which conveniently screws on right here. And now it's just a matter of dropping the keyboard! I'll be using this spare A1200 board here because it's in pretty good condition, all things considered. Yes, the keys are starting to turn yellow at that predictable, unpredictable rate that all Amigas do, but it's much better than the others I have.

Ahh, the warm marigold tone of stale urine. So until I can back shine that, I'm sticking with this one. The whole assembly slides neatly onto rails on the sides of the box, and a couple of nuts and bolts hold it in place from the top. Then the top of the box falls here looking very elegant. There are four white plastic screws that go into each of the four corners, an interesting choice, I thought, considering how complicated they are to work with. I would prefer metal screws painted the same Oyster White color as the rest of the Checkmate, but hey, it still looks good and holds things in place as needed.

Next is the Sub 1200, which is a small PCB that connects to the U7 controller chip. The USB interface then plugs into that, with the port hanging out, there's no specific place to put it. I wonder why the A1200's backplate has a place for the A500's keyboard since it doesn't use it. And the screw holes don't match those on the Sum 1200 either. So for now I taped it on the inside, ran a USB cable, and ran it over to the keyboard. And it looks very good! I wish it had a set of LEDs on the top right though because otherwise it would just be blank.

The case is actually designed for the Amiga 500 keyboard, so once again my choice to build a 1200 means I'm left out of the fun. You would have to cover or remove one of the LEDs in order to fit the two cutouts into the case. And even then, there's no mounting area on the inside to screw this PCB into, so until a better third-party solution comes along, I'll just deal with the empty holes. Plus, the LEDs on the case work great! And despite the drawbacks, I think the overall aesthetic of this case is fantastic. As much as I enjoy a classic Commodore wedge, I've always coveted their desktop computers like the Amiga 3000.

So having something reminiscent of that design while breathing new life into some old A1200 components? Ah, it's a beautiful thing, and the Checkmate A1500 Plus does a great service to the hobby community by its mere existence. Now, the retail price is currently £179 or around $220 for the case with a single backplate, with additional plates, covers, adapters and the keyboard case costing extra. So would I recommend purchasing one? Even with its questionable quirks and odd design choices here and there, absolutely. Furthermore, if you put an Amiga 500 in there, it seems more geared towards that than the 1200. Sure, it costs more than mass-produced PC cases, but I mean, it's not a mass-produced PC case.

It is made by a small company in limited batches, so the price reflects that. And considering all the possible configurations and the quality of the materials used, I find the price reasonable considering the cost of other Amiga boxes on the market. And in the end, there simply aren't many options to choose from when it comes to new horizontal desk boxes in a beige color scheme. Personally, I hope that enough of these are sold for the price to drop in the future and for a 2.0 model to be developed that addresses some of its less than ideal design aspects.

However, as for this particular version, as long as it runs Fire & Ice and Another World, I'm pretty happy. However, I plan to change a few things and install some updates. For one, I didn't use the keyboard garage because the A1200 board is too tall and wide to fit underneath, so it would be fun to build a USB mechanical keyboard with custom Amiga keys. I'm also going to replace the keyboard cable with a right-angle USB-B connector, this long, spindly one just won't cut it for me. I would also like to use the PCMCIA port, with a network card and a CompactFlash adapter.

On that note, I also have a cable-free CF adapter board on the way so I don't have to worry about IDE cables. It would also be nice to have a CD-ROM drive, although it's not a necessity for me, at least not with an A1200. However, there is definitely a ROM update on the agenda, probably the 3.X update to take advantage of more software. I'd also like to make use of this little area at the front at the bottom, maybe I can add a USB port or a memory card slot or I don't know, something interesting since it's already there.

And a physically smaller memory board would be nice, perhaps one with an FPU and a real-time clock. Or just an accelerator card that actually fits in the case, like the ACA-1233n. As much as I appreciate the Blizzard 1230, it's so tight and so hot that I don't feel comfortable using it here. And lastly, I really want an Indivision AGA MK2 if it's ever back in stock. Or some other internal flicker solver to be able to use other monitors. I've been using this amazing Microvitec CRT that I imported from the UK, and I specifically looked for it because it supports 15kHz horizontal and 31.

But I'd love to have the option to be able to more easily use slightly newer CRTs and LCDs without relying on external video adapters and climbing boxes. Anyway, yes, I have ideas, but let me know in the comments if you have any ideas too! I'm no Amiga expert, but the home scene really excites me and I love hearing about what's possible. If nothing else, I hope you enjoyed watching this project come to fruition. If you did, maybe check out my other build videos from the past, or stick around, there are new videos on all kinds of things every week here on LGR.

And as always, thank you so much for watching!