exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Unfortunately no two STs are the same and you have to be prepared to treat each machine individually. It can be very frustrating when chasing down problems, and the best advice I can give is to do one thing at a time, check the outcome, and if no change move on to the next thing.

Unfortunately with these old machines you are always fighting to keep things reliable, it's just part of the landscape.

Like @exxos said, using the ICD driver is not the best, and HD11 or PPs driver are the two I'd recommend.

Also, if you're soldering in the resistor packs in parallel then you need to be inspecting very closely afterwards to ensure there are no solder bridges between pins. Bridges can be obvious, but can also be very fine whiskers of solder that are difficult to see without magnification.

Looking after retro kit requires a lot of patience and it can be time consuming, so you do need to be committed, but it is also very rewarding when you can repair something, so it is worth sticking with.

rubber_jonnie wrote: 24 Oct 2023 11:06 Unfortunately no two STs are the same and you have to be prepared to treat each machine individually. It can be very frustrating when chasing down problems, and the best advice I can give is to do one thing at a time, check the outcome, and if no change move on to the next thing.

Unfortunately with these old machines you are always fighting to keep things reliable, it's just part of the landscape.

Like @exxos said, using the ICD driver is not the best, and HD11 or PPs driver are the two I'd recommend.

Also, if you're soldering in the resistor packs in parallel then you need to be inspecting very closely afterwards to ensure there are no solder bridges between pins. Bridges can be obvious, but can also be very fine whiskers of solder that are difficult to see without magnification.

Looking after retro kit requires a lot of patience and it can be time consuming, so you do need to be committed, but it is also very rewarding when you can repair something, so it is worth sticking with.

I ended up using the ICD driver due to instability with the PP driver in some games - for what it's worth, this corruption happens using both ICD and PP drivers. I was very careful fitting the networks, I checked every point after fitting... No shorts, expected resistances - my best guess is that there's some microscopic damage I've done on P100 (anything else I suppose would cause much further reaching problems) but I suppose it could just as easily be something else entirely that happened just from handling the board. Or it could be the ACSI2STM I suppose. I don't have a good way of debugging this and I don't really want to sink an indefinite amount of time into it.

I've had no end of problems with my two STEs, meanwhile all my other retro machines work great and maintenance is generally pretty easy. I've switched over to the MiSTer now and that just works, so I'll continue using the software and just draw a line through the hardware. It's annoying to not have a floppy disk drive, but I can do without. Apparently, I don't have what it takes for Atari ST hardware :P