exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Can you direct me to a list of the necessary mods/upgrades I need to perform on my 1040stfm preparatory to the TF536? THANKS!

Best,

Jeff

Technoid6502 wrote: 15 Feb 2021 18:17 My goal is the fastest and most capable machine I can make for use with MiNT (a BSD derivative). Gaming is of no interest.
At present I have only a floppy drive to boot from and I read here that floppy I/O is broken with the TF536? If this is so it could explain some things, as well as the fact that I have TOS version 1.4 (Rainbow) installed in the machine. I intend to upgrade to 2.06 to get around that.

Best,

jeff

I also have a similar project on the go, you definitely need to make sure your motherboard has all the mandatory fixes as Exxos said & you'll need a dual tos switcher and rom decoder board. But yeah don't forget you, like the rest of us are pioneers in new ground when it comes to this. Keep us updated with how you go... Currently I have my tf536 booting to tos 2.06/emutos, haven't got much further yet.

Actually MiNT has very little to do with BSD UNIX other than the library borrowing the function calls and the system calls echoing the BSD UNIX arguments. A lot of these were second hand via the SunOS 4.1.x manual pages, so even they aren't directly BSD 4.3 derived.

In the early 90s I did write a BSD-style init process, which is still used, and ported a number of the BSD 4.3 daemons and other programs over to make the MiNTOS "release", but most of this has been replaced over the years by the FreeMiNT community.

Technoid6502 wrote: 15 Feb 2021 20:02 Can you direct me to a list of the necessary mods/upgrades I need to perform on my 1040stfm preparatory to the TF536? THANKS!

Best,

Jeff

Well, all you really need is to upgrade the ST RAM, add TOS 2.06 decoding and replace the CPU with a socket really. You'll not be able to fit the keyboard and case top back on though with the TF536 fitted so you may like to look at building an external keyboard housing and cable.

My machine worked fine with the stock pull-up resistors as long as the UltraSATAN wasn't plugged in. Even then it worked like that initially with the UltraSATAN but gradually became more unreliable, as if the UltraSATAN was degrading it. Swapping the DMA chip seemed to fix it more than changing the pull-ups from the stock 10K ohm to 4.7K ohm. I did try 2.2K ohm pull-ups but that stopped both the floppy and UltraSATAN from working properly at all.

Technoid6502 wrote: 15 Feb 2021 20:02 Can you direct me to a list of the necessary mods/upgrades I need to perform on my 1040stfm preparatory to the TF536? THANKS!

https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/forum/viewt ... =17&t=1585