exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

I have been working on a new more compact Falcon memory expansion card. This one has the RAM soldered directly on. Generally I am against this because if the RAM fails because your power supply sucks and kills it, you have to buy a new card. My current boards have a simm socket so you can easily change the RAM, and even experiment with different simm speeds if you are using bus speeders etc.

When the current batch of Falcon RAM cards are sold (about 7 left in stock) , the price will be increasing to around £55 because they are actually very time-consuming to build (I have to pay someone else to build them for me these days as well) and the sockets are not exactly cheap either. I will build up about 25 more to use up my remaining stocks of stuff in the near future. With sales of the current card so slow, it is not really worth building up additional batches in the future. I have been building stuff up in batches of like 100 to keep costs down, but when like 5 sell a year... The problem is there are so many people making these cards now that the market is basically saturated to the point it is not worth my time in making them up anymore.

Meanwhile I hope to introduce the card as outlined below at a low as possible price. I will probably do small batches of 10 and see how things go.

It begins...

STM 4MB board almost done 8-)

Forgot I had these DMA mod boards for original machines.. could do with a couple of testers... @Steve @PhilC ?

@exxos If they can't (or you need more volunteers) I am back to having a work area (but I've now been relegated to the garage from the study) so would be able to offer support.

I've even started to repair my STE's that were broken (somehow...best to not ask for the grisly details), so hope to have other news once at least one of them is working again :? :roll:

Edit: Most of the ACSI devices I have are mechanical hard drives or CD-ROM/CD writers etc. but with a variety of ACSI interfaces (several ICD, a few Atari Megafiles amongst them).

@exxos yes happy to try them whenever you want.

@exxos yes I can test, recently got a new ASCI2STM to test for DMA problems!

Experimenting with higher quality "CPU DUMMY" 3D prints for the plug-in STE booster.. Left is the bottom side of the print which is solid, and more towards the right is done with 30% infill. Though the sides are far from straight under the microscope :( I have reduced the first layer print height which I think has helped a bit. Currently I have half the speed of the printing to see if that helps. My only other thought is to do a 100% solid infill to see if that improves the sides as they seem to be arcing as well a little bit :roll:


EDIT:

So half speed looked exactly the same :roll: It must be ABS this stuff ...


Trying 100% infill now..


:shrug: might be over extruding ..


EDIT:

Bit less extrusion... back to 10% infill...


EDIT:

Back to 100% and seems worse again :roll:


EDIT:

10% infill without the fan going. the top turned into a blobby mess, but this one looked a bit better.

Assuming this stuff is ABS, think I may give up with it.


Going to try a few more things. Like speeding the exterior shell print as currently I have slowed down..

Seems I am using PLA anyway :lol: :roll:

Leveled the bed and things starting to look a bit better...

I see where I was going wrong now, I just simply needed to use pink filament...