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The Micro A1-C

After much debating as to which version of the AmigaOne to get I finally decided on a Micro A1-C, persuaded by actually being able to hold a uA1-C motherboard at the Big Bash in October- so small yet so nice! I ordered my board from Stellar Dreams shortly after the show and it arrived swiftly with OS4 and RAM. I also purchased a small case from Micro Direct which also arrived soon after ordering.

A look at the board...
The board's build quality seemed quite good and considering its size is packed with features! On the back plate we have:
  • Keyboard / Mouse ports (PS2)
  • Network port (RJ45)
  • 2 USB Ports
  • Printer (Parallel)
  • Graphics (VGA, S-Video and Composite)
  • Game port and sound sockets
Which are arranged to coincide with ITX form factor backs which all seem to have this layout (or similar) hence there is no blanking plate provided for the back of the case. The front sound pinouts are positioned near the rear sound ports and can be difficult to connect, you may find tweezers useful!

The processor is socketed onto the board and comes with heatsink and fan. The switches used to adjust the processor speed and voltages are covered with a piece of plastic to prevent tampering but I'm sure it will come of if you need to remove it.

Installing the uA1-C
Installing the uA1-C in the case (a Samcheer SC-102) was easy enough and I had the motherboard fitted, connected up and linked to the drives in a matter of minutes. It is important to remember that you can only use two 3.5" drives on the uA1-C without converting the IDE connector to a 2.5" version (44 way cable) so my system set up is:
  • Master : Hard disk
  • Slave : DVD ROM

Don't use cable select, set the master and slave settings via the jumpers on the back of each drive and make sure your Master device is on the connector at the end of the cable.

OS4 vs OS3.9
No contest really, OS4 wins hands down, its customisability and speed is much more impressive than previous versions of the OS. The OS structure and use, however, is unchanged in most aspects so will be instantly familiar to users of previous OS versions with only a few new prefs programs to learn. There are some new commodities that are worth a mention and all the originals are also included.

Context Menus is a commodity that applies different menus to different objects. For example right clicking on an icon brings up the Icons portion of the regular menu, right clicking on a disk brings up disk relavent options and so on. The context menu also adds a copy and paste function for directories or files making file copying a lot easier than previous OS versions
In OS4 it is possible to resize windows from any side by holding down Ctrl and Alt. Using Auto Border Size: you can resize windows without having to hold down Ctrl and Alt and then use any part of the window border to resize the window.

Another advantage of OS4 over OS3.9 is the addition of the Grim Reaper whose sole purpose is to prevent system wide crashes. The Grim Reaper will allow you to kill a task before it crashes the system but, unfortunately, leaves the crashed program's window on screen. A tool to remove this is called KillWinGUI and can be found on OS4depot.

Conclusions
What a board! All things considered, especially its size, I'd highly recommend it. With the exception of the RAM dislocating near the beginning I have had no problems with it at all. Some cases, or rather their Power Supplies, don't provide a stable enough current for the uA1-C but the Samcheer SC-102 hasn't caused me any problems yet. Also the Sereniti 2000 and Morex Cubid 3688 are tested and work fine. Other Morex cases and Travelex / Travla PSUs have been reported to have problems.

Written by:
Jonathan Haddock (GiGa)
Email: giga@intuitionbase.com

Published: 11th November 2004
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