H5 C5B Development Boards

[danboid]

Great work Icky! This is what this project needs to increase confidence for people like me who wanted to see something like this before shelling out.

What's left to do before you can boot it?

[JezC]

Great work Icky! This is what this project needs to increase confidence for people like me who wanted to see something like this before shelling out.

What's left to do before you can boot it?

@danboid it's worth looking in the Atari remake section too - quite a few people have built up the various versions of these boards (including a few H5C builds)...

I'll post a link later (when not on my phone) but it's probably worth mentioning whether you have a donor system or not as that can be as much or more work to harvest for bits than building the board itself.

I've got a few H4&H5 boards at various levels of build so do ask any specific questions and one of us should be able to answer.

Certainly worth building at least one in my (probably very biased) opinion!
;)

[Icky]

@danboid it's worth looking in the Atari remake section too - quite a few people have built up the various versions of these boards (including a few H5C builds)...

I'll post a link later (when not on my phone) but it's probably worth mentioning whether you have a donor system or not as that can be as much or more work to harvest for bits than building the board itself.

I've got a few H4&H5 boards at various levels of build so do ask any specific questions and one of us should be able to answer.

Certainly worth building at least one in my (probably very biased) opinion!
;)

Agree @JezC a lot of builds going on here viewforum.php?f=121

This one is for a Development board so even though it helps to read, it will have slightly different setups such as the picture below.

What's left to do before you can boot it?

There is quite a lot to do as it's a bit more involved being a Development board. I need to build out the plug in BLITTER, GLUE and MMU boards as well. It's also a slow build as there are items that are not quite normal of the Dev board. This is 1 board done with the headers, I have 2 more to sort out like this.

Example is the header sockets below in the picture are a pain to fit as the contacts are slightly wider on one side so have to file them down to fit in the PLCC68 pins holes.

IMG_1661.png

[danboid]

Agree @JezC a lot of builds going on here viewforum.php?f=121

Oh rly? I asked on this forum about a year ago and I'm sure exxos said he was the only person he knew of that had fully built the latest non dev H5 board.

Yes, I do have a full STFM that I violated the mobo of that would be suitable as a donor.

How many people have built a H5C5B and documented it? Direct link?

[Icky]

Next up putting the reset switch in and as @exxos mentioned there was a problem with the drill / footprint of the reset switch anchor tabs. viewtopic.php?p=125026#p125026

I thought I would try a slightly different approach to @exxos as I didn't want to start scraping the top layer down to get to the GND plane.

So I went with putting some solder on the smaller holes so I could anchor the reset switch with solder too them. So soldering some blobs where the circles are before placing the switch in.

IMG_1639.png

However I had to clip off the tabs level with where it would touch the board and then solder the side of the switch to flow to those pads. Trick is flux to help with the flow. Pliers show where I cut the tabs and the arrow shows the blob of solder on the side of the switch that is in place. There is also a rear blob as well.

IMG_1638.png

[Icky]

A few more components / pieces of the puzzle added. Didn't put an arrow on the CPU as I think the printed label on the chip gives it away :)

IMG_1666.png

[Icky]

So to create individual plug-in boards for each chip BLITTER, GLUE, and MMU for the H5 C5B development board I already had these boards from a while back. These boards were supposed to be a plug in for all 3 chips in one go but it became clear we needed individual boards for each chip.

With a bit of time with a hacksaw and making sure there is no connectivity between the top and bottom planes (2 layer board) I made 3 boards from that 1. I'll spin off a design for each board so there is no need to hack. I'll post the files on the PCB section on the forum.

EDIT: added files here viewtopic.php?f=74&t=8230

IMG_1673.png

Below is a side view of the plug-in chip boards. The GLUE one has longer header legs as when using our Phoenix BLUE boards they would clash in between GLUE and BLITTER. I think the difference is 6mm vs 15mm for the connector height.

IMG_1674.png

[Icky]

So below is a shot of the three boards populated with their respective chips

IMG_1672.png

And in place as a stock ST i.e. using all three original chips

IMG_1679.png

[Icky]

Ooo shiny, well almost the MMU board is a little grubby as I havent finished putting the headers on and cleaning it up.

Here are the Phoenix BLUE (BL)ITTER and GL(UE) and Phoenix MMU boards

The Phoenix BLUE is a two in one chip board. It can be configured as a BLITTER or GLUE chip by two jumpers and a different FPGA core. Unfortunately, I wanted to get all the three chips into one but the MMU pinout is a lot different so we have a stand alone board for the MMU.

IMG_1675.png

And in place as an original chipset FPGA layout. i.e. not an ST in a single FPU but the replicas of the original chips in a single chip.

IMG_1676.png

[Icky]

So this is the reason for the DEV H5 board. It allows many combinations of chips to be tested.

E.g. testing a Phoenix BLUE as a BLITTER with the other chips (GLUE/MMU) as originals:

IMG_1678.png

E.g. testing a Phoenix BLUE as a BLITTER and Phoenix MMU with the GLUE chip as original:

IMG_1677.png