Bird Box

Text by Mark Branson
Photos by Derryck Croker

My introduction to Atari was back in 1988 when I bought a 520 STFM Summer pack which came with some excellent games. I extended this when a friend of mine sold me his SIMM memory board. Unfortunately he had no instructions and just pointed to where it should go and luckily it all worked and I had a glorious 2.5 MB machine. 

Some years later I was offered a 520 STE. I jumped at this but was disappointed as it had the annoying TOS 1.06. This prompted me to to acquire a TOS 1.62/2.06 upgrade. In addition I bought 2 MB of memory. This added to 2 MB that I pinched from my STFM left me with one of my favourite machines. This was further improved when I saw a 105 MB hard drive in the "For sale" section in my local paper.

It seemed that I was succumbing to that PC disease - the thirst for more performance. Visiting the first of the Stafford Alternative Micro Shows I had a close look at hard drive and HD floppy upgrades. When I added up the cost I found it was probably just as cheap to buy a Falcon. It would give everything the upgrades gave and a lot more.

I eventually tracked down a Falcon via the Atari Computing/ST Applications small ads. Taking delivery of my "Bird" I found it only had TOS 4.02. My first job then was to get a TOS 4.04 chip. I also decided to add a FPU although I doubt I had much software to use it. I also swapped the 127 MB hard drive with a 1.3 GB that I bought from ASP at a late Stafford show.

I looked arround at the the accelerators available but they were either not available (I didn't have internet access then) or were too complicated for me to fit. I did go as far as purchase a Power Up 2 device but it was never fitted. I had by now joined the ever helpful Cheshunt Computer Club and around that time the CT60 was first mooted. The idea that it was just plug and play really appealed to me so I placed my order.

The idea of the CT60 is brilliant but nothing is ever that simple. There were two main problems to overcome, one simple and one not so simple. The first was my machine had a 14 MB Falcon Wing and this was easily replaced by a board that took a 72-pin SIMM. The second, although not absolutely essential, was to re-case my bird. Thus started my search for the perfect box!

The one problem that has always bedevilled the ST(E)/Falcon was the size of its motherboard. Unless you go for a DeskTopper, MKX or a rack you are basically confined to using a PC case. Most standard PC cases are just not large enough to fit an Atari without cutting into one or more drive bays. If the case is deep enough you may just squeeze the board in without cutting but it would be tight. You could of course cut a section out of the back and make a plate with the right cut-outs to fit.

Neither of these solutions appealed to me. I then remembered seeing an advert of an extra-wide case in an old copy of Micro Mart. Luckily I throw precious little out and rooting around I found the magazine and the advert. By now I'd got internet access only to find the company selling the cases had gone bust. For months I trawled the internet looking at cases but nothing suited me. It was just as well the CT60 was taking longer than expected in being developed!

It was not untill I looked at the advert again that I noticed it said it was the official importer for Song Cheer Group. I'd seen that name elsewhere so after a quick search I found the manufacturer and the case! Although much of the site was in Japanese the technical information was in English. There was a huge disappointment when I found the case was not tall enough! Now it pays to have a full look at each site visited as in this case I found something better in the Song Cheer TQ2000. Hoping to find an importer to the UK drew a blank. At the point of trying to order from Japan I had another break. I found that it was marketed in the UK as the Sam Cheer FS020. Hopes were dashed when every dealer I contacted didn't have it in stock and the message came back it was discontinued.

Further searching revealed an interesting article on modding. This time it was a Lite-On FS020 and the article gave the name of a dealer. I couldn't believe my eyes when checking its web site it stated they were in stock!

Now for every up there's a down, and this one was that the dealer was in Colorado, USA. American prices are a lot cheaper than the UK but the air freight cost was more than the case itself. The sting in the tail was the import customs duties. I e-mailed the company, Outside Loop Computers, Inc, Sunday night and got a reply Monday evening. I faxed the credit card details to them Tuesday and received the box Thursday morning 11:00. Not bad service at all.

Opening the package revealed a very impressive (and heavy) box indeed featuring a total of ten drive bays! Externally there are four 5.25" and two 3.5" drive bays. There are a further four 3.5" bays internally, two at the front underneath the external ones and a second pair at the back suspended under the power supply. The whole case is several inches taller and wider than a standard ATX case. The extra width was all important as it would allow the Falcon to sit easily to the side of the dive bays.

Close inspection of the case showed it to be very well made with all internal edges nicely rounded. Life is never that easy and looking deeper into the case I noticed that the motherboard back plate had a dog-leg in it that bent back to meet the side of the drive bays. This blocked the exact place the Falcon was to go in! To say my heart sank would be an understatement. Well for the last couple of years I'd been attending the Cheshunt Computer Club (a mere 180 mile round trip). I explained the problem on the club news board so when I arrived at the next meet the legendary Steve Sweet was there waiting. He had the top, front and sides off in seconds and then produced a Bosch 850 W power drill and had rivets flying and freed the back plate...

That weekend I visited the local industrial estate and found a metal working factory just finishing for the day. Explaining what I required they took the plate, bent it straight, guillotined off the offending piece and filed the edges down. To top it all they didn't want any payment!

Now a handy hint I found was to take the Falcon apart and make an accurate cardboard template of the motherboard marking where all the sockets and mounting holes are. This way we could fiddle around to our hearts' content deciding the most appropriate position to mount it without any fear of damage.

As the conversion became a club activity all the main work was to be done at our monthly meetings. All the work would be concentrated in those three hours per month. I must admit I was relieved as I just don't have the skills or the confidence to do this myself. My main duties were to acquire the parts for the next meet!

First off was to get a power supply. I specifically wanted one with a switch. The CT60 was still some time away from being delivered and I wanted a means of powering down without pulling the plug out. A local shop provided me with a meaty 420 W unit with twin fans and a switch. I also raided Maplin (one of several visits) to get other components.

As my NVRAM battery started to die we decided that now was a good time to re-case the Falcon. Steve removed the old chip and put a socket in. The new chip, a Dallas DS 12887 was donated by Derryck Croker. The transfer meant we had to connect the power supply, floppy, keyboard, serial and parrallel ports to get a basic working system.

Steve attached the ATX power supply to a Falcon connector as a temporary measure. Next we took a keyboard connector from one of my STFMs and attached some 6-way cable to extend it and then connected an RJ12 (6P6C) socket into which I plugged my Mega STE keyboard/mouse. The wiring diagram for both the power supply and keyboard was found from Robert Schaffner's DOITF030 archive, an early version of which was held by club member Derryck Croker. Steve had also prepared PCI/ISA backplanes with both serial and parallel sockets extending those of the Falcon.

The one thing we didn't manage to get working was the floppy drive. I simply hadn't checked how it was connected and found out that it was soldered to the motherboard. What I needed was a cable extender. Club member James Haslam suggested I contact Chris Crosskey (Abingdon Synthesis Projects) as he had provided him with a cable. I did and he agreed to provide the extender. I also got a SCSI cable and 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter. When the package arrived he had also thrown in a PSU-Burster F! A nice touch but unfortunately Steve had already cobbled a temporary connection.

Then late July 2003 the CT60 arrived! I can't explain the elation to finally having it there in my hands especially when I'd been waiting so long for it. I was also totally surprised by the quality of the manufacture. It's hard to believe that such trouble would be taken for a production run of 150! Well my hat's off the guy.

Getting the CT60 immediately prompted me to get a memory module which to be honest I'd been putting off (credit card overheating). I'd been recommended to get either Crucial or Kingston. I decided on the former and ordered the maximum the CT60 could take, a 512 MB PC133 CL2 stick, getting it direct from the manufacturer. To some it may seem stupid to get something so large particularly when it is highly unlikely I would ever need that sort of memory size. Well the cost wasn't significanly higher than a 128 MB stick and at least I could have a huge grin at the idea of an Atari with 512 MB of memory!

I also wanted a JTAG cable. The one mentioned on Rodolphe's site was quite expensive and had to be adapted for the CT60. Then announced on DHS' CT60 forum was the answer. Andreas Pettersson was to make a small batch specifically for the CT60. Not only was the price cheap but I couldn't resist giving a fellow Atarian some business so I duly registered my interest.

The August club meeting soon came. In my exuberance a good deal of time was spent just showing the board to everybody around. Steve was then set to installing it. With all the wiring checked the machine was fired up to be met with the glowing red of the CT60 graphic to be then followed by the boot screen confirming all that RAM! Although it booted OK there were problems. It was late in the day when I realized that I hadn't updated the software (this was something I was supposed to have done) so we called it a day and I'd do it at the weekend.

That weekend I set about replacing the MAGIC.RAM and XCONTROL files. For some inexplicable reason things went pear-shaped and this forced me to reboot. However, on the reboot, try as I may I could not get any video output. On boot up I could hear the floppy and hard drive do their usual chatter and the keyboard responded with clicks when pressed. Changing monitors did nothing nor did reverting back to a basic Falcon. I even tried running it through a TV!

I went through all the advice given and all drew a blank so desparate times call for desparate measures. I booked a day off work and packed the whole lot up and paid Karl Brandt at Systems Solutions a visit, booking a "Pro Job" same-day repair. After an hour or so Karl couldn't fathom out what was wrong and suggested a swap with another Falcon board which he demonstrated worked OK. He started to transfer components across the boards. When my NVRAM chip was put in his machine it wouldn't work! Then when his chip was put into mine it sprang into life to our great relief. We knew now that the VIDEL and COMBEL chips were both functioning. Each has an awful lot of pins and takes many hours to replace. The stange thing was that with all swapping of chips around that my NVRAM chip suddenly gave output. Karl ran a program, BOOTCONF.APP, that showed all sorts of multiple selections (16 and 65,536 colours, PAL and NTSC...). When this was corrected all was back to normal!

Now I'd already dangled the bait and Karl could't resist the temptation to see the CT60 running. We soon had it all conected but no CT60. The penny soon dropped that I'd left in standard Falcon mode! With a full demonstration given it was now well past closing time. I left a very happy person though somewhat lighter in pocket.

The JTAG cable had by now been ordered and recieved so I turned my attention to getting an Eiffel adaptor from Lyndon Amsdon. Both items were delivered within days of ordering. 

With the JTAG cable it was now possible to consider the firmware upgrade and the possibility of boosting the bus speed. Steve wanted a quiet environment so we agreed to do this at his gaff. The first job was to solder the resistor to the CT60 so that the ABE60 and SDR60 chips could be flashed in situ. This completed, it was now an easy job to flash both the chips using the neat program in the software update package.

The next part, the increase of bus speed to 20 MHz, was not so successful as all we got was a white screen. I left the machine with him to ponder some more or put back to its original state. Alas, when I returned to pick him and my machine up and go to our next club meet the news was still that it wouldn't work at the higher speed. One consolation was that he had removed the floppy cable from the Falcon and soldered on a proper socket (something that Shiuming had been nagging me to get done).

At the meeting, fellow club member Peter West showed me how to edit SHUTDOWN.PRG so that I had the third "power off" button. I don't know why an English version wasn't prepared as there must be a number of people like myself who generally don't have the skills or knowledge to do this.

Now over the next months Steve added extenders for the microphone and headphone sockets, added a power supply card, a switch on the back to revert to 030 mode. Lastly he mounted an Eiffel PS/2 adapter onto a PCI/ISA backplane so I could use a PC keyboard/mouse and enable me to return those for the Mega STE to their rightful place. The big problem we found with the Eiffel card was that there are no mounting holes! Steve managed to craftily adapt it. Maybe Lyndon could look at this for a future improvement?

At present I'm experiencing read errors or disappearing files/folders on my SCSI bus. This may have to do with the cable, termination or the Falcon itself. Something to tackle no doubt at a future meeting.

Now that the box has its lid back on doesn't mean this is the end of the story. I eagerly await the Nature graphics card and am on the lookout for a half-decent LCD monitor to go with it. I've already got two 3.5" IDE and two SCSI drives to go in. I'd also like to get a Microtech PCD-25BH card reader, a CD re-writer, possibly a DVD re-writer and an EtherNEC card. Hopefully I'll also get the bus speed up to 25 MHz and one of those Rev 6 100 MHz 68060s. After all this I'll no doubt find something else (blue LEDs, Shiuming?).

MyAtari magazine - Feature #4, June 2004