exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

@PaulJ Yep, tonights the night for IDE finish offing!!

:girldance: :girldance: :girldance:

Very happy with the results of my attempt at PPs Megabus IDE adapter overall. Both interfaces I've built work absolutely fine, and now I have a patched TOS 1.04 which allows booting from IDE as you can see here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1ZtnMSxu8c

As you can see, the FDD is empty.

The version of TOS 1.04 had already been patched to show TOS version, RAM and number of floppies, though I'm not entirely sure how I came by it in the first place. Nevertheless it was useful because Christian states that the IDE boot delay in his patch is quite short and maybe not long enough for drives needing time to spin up, and the other patch introduces a delay in a similar fashion to the memory test in TOS 2.06.

Since I was also intending to use spare laptop hard drives, having the extra delay to allow spin up was useful, plus pressing the space bar does allow for it to be skipped if you want.

Christians patcher is excellent, because it also allows you to split the ROMs into a 2 or 6 set at the same time as patching, which is incredibly useful if you need to burn a new set once the patching is done.

Here is the installed adapter:


And the installed ROMs:


If anybody is interested in building their own, and patching the ROM, here are the links I used:

Megabus IDE: http://www.8bitchip.info/atari/megastide.html
TOS 1.40 IDE Autoboot Patch: https://github.com/czietz/ideboot/

Patching and splitting the ROM is easily achieved using Hatari, I guess there is another post in that :)

The only part you may find awkward is the Megabus connector. What you need is this: Harting - 09021642825 DIN 41612 Signal Connector Female 64 Pin Z2088

The rest of the parts are easily sourced. I ordered the PCBs from PCBWay, and they were very quick, arriving in 7 days, and the boards were high quality. Be aware they have a minimum order of 5 boards, though as a new sign up, I got a voucher that covered the cost of the PCBs, so I only had to pay for shipping. All told, 5 boards + shipping came to £22, which to me works out ok. It was good to get the experience of ordering the PCBs too.

You will need to figure out a power connection for the board and the hard drive, however the Mega does have a peripheral power pick off point, so it shouldn't be too difficult. The only other connection is ACSI pin 10, but that can be picked off the internal ACSI header.

Once the world returns to sanity I will probably build the 3 remaining boards and put them up for sale.

Well, overall a bit of a disappointing weekend....

Favourite soldering iron dropped and broken, though temporarily repaired and working and amazingly a replacement is available (And ordered!). Mega 4 is still broken, though I think I have the problem in hand, and despite not being touched for quite sometime, the 3d printer is mysteriously out of kilter, and I suspect my recent laptop and Cura upgrade may have left some hard won settings behind.

I wanted to get a test print done of these:


I spent some time designing these earlier, they're 2.5" Laptop floppy cradles that I intend to use in my Mega1, well at least one of them at any rate, they're all very much 'Alpha' and will be getting some tweaks over the next few weeks, but could I get one printed out? No, and some hours later I got to the point of the printer nearly ready to go, but then ran out of time to do it.

I guess when I upgraded laptops late last year, and reinstalled Cura, I missed something because I had a bloody frustrating afternoon and no prints to show for it. Fingers crossed, cura is sorted now, as the last one was very close to printing ok,so just some minor tweaks to do. Not entirely sure why the settings didn't import as before, but hey ho.

So, note to future self:

"If you upgrade Cura again, double check ALL the settings made their way across"

I've had hours of fighting with weird sh1t trying to 3d print my HDD cradles, and thankfully one is now running off. I had GCODE start and finishing blocks on my original install, which all got mashed during the upgrade, and some of my imported profile settings were off too.

I was getting the printer starting off heating up at the correct temps, and then suddenly the temps were changing to something different. :mad: :mad: :mad:

Hopefully the print will be finished soon, but I think the next run will have a slightly lower print temp for the PLA as it was stringing quite badly early in the print.

I guess there will be some more tweaking to do since it's a relatively new roll of PLA and I haven't got used to it just yet, and it certainly prints differently to my previous roll.

Try recalibrating your extruder and maybe increase retraction if the temp settings dont work.

PhilC wrote: 15 Apr 2020 14:21 Try recalibrating your extruder and maybe increase retraction if the temp settings dont work.

I certainly will, thanks. It's been a bit of a nightmare having to get all my settings sorted again, don't know why they got mashed so badly :(

Well, happy days, this just came off the printer bed and seems to work just nicely:

Cradle with 2.5" drive.

Drive fitted to cradle.


Even the screw holes line up nicely, so the old adage of measure twice, cut once paid off. I will probably make some minor tweaks, but very happy with the result for a first run :) I'll add the files to the 3d models section.

:girldance: :girldance: :girldance:

Nice :thumbup:

Happy days, bumper parcel opening today after they came out of quarantine!

Replacement soldering iron, H4 board no2, a bunch of 27C256 proms and a 44 pin IDE cable! Exciting stuff :)

I nearly forgot to add, big shout out to @exxos for opening the store and getting our parcels off as promised :)

rubber_jonnie wrote: 17 Apr 2020 12:59 Happy days, bumper parcel opening today after they came out of quarantine!
Replacement soldering iron, H4 board no2, a bunch of 27C256 proms and a 44 pin IDE cable! Exciting stuff :)

Rj, don't understand how you have so many issues with your iron, you drop it, it burns you, you drop it, it commits suicide.. Ya know knifes and other dangerious weapons have a lanyard. I'll bet you could use a leather shoelace and make a lanyard for that pesky iron.. maybe wear a leather glove to minimize any injuries delivered in anger by your iron.