exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Yeah, pretty much everything mail order from now on here in the UK. Not a lot of change for me :)

Had quite a good day Atari wise.

My most recent ST arrived undamaged but dirty in the post earlier in the week, and though it powers on and everything works, it got stripped down and the case had a thorough washing with soap and water.

I don't retrobrite these days, I think the case colour is part of the machines history, but it came out nice and the case is in great condition. Not only that, it has the metal inserts in the case rather than plastic, which means the mainboard is very well mounted.

I pulled and cleaned the MB, and being a CO70789 it has free slots waiting for the upgrade to 1MB. I have the chips, capacitors and sockets ready to go in tomorrow, so that's the first job of the day.

Then I need to work out what I'm doing with the KB, which has 2 broken keys, but is otherwise nice, so I will either replace the keys or the whole thing with a spare. I would like to keep the original keys TBH.

Last thing will be a floppy drive clean and reassembly. I'll keep this one as Atari intended, no Gotek.

Managed to get my 2 IDE boards parts kits nearly sorted, so fingers crossed will get those at least part assembled tomorrow too.

Last but by no means least, I tested Midi in and out on my H4and it's all looking great :)

I might be socially distanced, but I'm not Atari isolated :)

:girldance: :girldance: :girldance:

rubber_jonnie wrote: 16 Mar 2020 07:57 I'll post the results once I have built.

RJ, looks like a number of people have successfully built PP's IDE board. A guy just posted his efforts on FB and looks like it was a strait forward build.

PaulJ wrote: 22 Mar 2020 14:48
RJ, looks like a number of people have successfully built PP's IDE board. A guy just posted his efforts on FB and looks like it was a strait forward build.

@PaulJ Yeah, still waiting for my boards to arrive, should be this week. I seem to be inundated with IDE interfaces at the moment, I have my original 2 beta devices, 2 V1.1 boards that are mostly built, and all the parts on the way for 2x PP IDE boards.

Lots of stuff done today, 2x V1.1IDE interfaces built as far as possible, and then upgraded my latest acquisition to 1MB. Here it is before


And after:


Though I did have a minor oops in that two of the decoupling caps were accidentally shorted, so first I had just a black screen, so back to the magnifier to see what's what. One short cleaned up and all working fine with 1MB, and diags all passed.

Needs reassembly, so I need to finish up the FDD cleanup before it can go back together. A Blitter would be nice, but perhaps down the line a bit.

A couple of things about this board though. The board had unsoldered spots for the extra ram, but a lot of the holes had blue 'stuff' in the vias, as below:


I was wondering if anyone else had encountered this, as I've seen it on a few boards now. It pops out easy enough, but I'd beinterested to know if it has a specific function.

This board also seems to have a couple of bodges:

so I was wondering if anyone had seen either of these before, and if so what they're for.

I have also seen the blue "stuff" on some boards. I always thought it was leftover from the solder mask process.

DoG wrote: 22 Mar 2020 19:30 I have also seen the blue "stuff" on some boards. I always thought it was leftover from the solder mask process.

I'm assuming part of the production process too, very odd and looks like tiny pieces of wire insulation.

rubber_jonnie wrote: 22 Mar 2020 19:45

DoG wrote: 22 Mar 2020 19:30 I have also seen the blue "stuff" on some boards. I always thought it was leftover from the solder mask process.

I'm assuming part of the production process too, very odd and looks like tiny pieces of wire insulation.

I think it's just the residue of the PCB lacquer.

exxos wrote: 22 Mar 2020 21:32

rubber_jonnie wrote: 22 Mar 2020 19:45

I'm assuming part of the production process too, very odd and looks like tiny pieces of wire insulation.

I think it's just the residue of the PCB lacquer.

@exxos Yeah, that would make sense, but why blue and not green? Weird.

rubber_jonnie wrote: 22 Mar 2020 23:33 @exxos Yeah, that would make sense, but why blue and not green? Weird.

I know this was talked about before a long time ago, but don't remember the conversation anymore.. or even if it was discussed on here or not :(