exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Ok, so it seems that that reason my 64K upgrade wasn't working was because I totally misread the image in the upgrade guide!!

Good job I went back to stock, thanks for the prod folks :)

There are two sets of 4 vias either side and just below U14, one to the left of centre and one to the right, and you need to pick off two vias on the left hand grouping, only numpty here picked off two vias from the right hand grouping!!

Here is a view of the correct wiring:


And I now have a 600XL that appears to all intents and purposes to be an 800XL.

:girldance: :girldance: :girldance:

I corrected it by reviewing an upgrade video by flashjazzcat on YouTube, and felt a little better when he realised he'd made the same mistake and ended up with a dead 600XL and needed to go back and correct it too :)

I will add a proper post as to how to do the upgrade for clarity, rather than adding it here in the midst of a repair thread.

Yay! :cheer: :dualthumbup: :yay: :girldance: :cheers:

So, now the repairs are done and we're upgraded to 64KB, the upgrades can begin.

I'd decided on getting this machine that I was going to extract all my nice upgrades from the 800XL and stuff them into the 600XL, because I wanted the same nice stuff the 800XL in the much smaller 600XL form factor.

So, the 800XL has now been returned to stock (Yes, of course I kept the parts I removed when I upgraded it :) ) and all that remains now after I've run a few SuperSalt tests on it, is to reassemble it. I have a 65XE that is specced the same with U1MB, VBXE and PokeyMax, so it made sense to return one machine to stock, and since the 65XE has some foibles that make its return to stock a bit harder, plus it has the VBXE rather than VBXL, which are slightly different in fit, the 800XL was it.

As for the 600XL, I have removed the modulator, since the short board and compact case wouldn't otherwise allow the VBXL board to fit:


I've also swapped out the Pokey for the PokeyMax as the stereo output goes via the 13 pin ST style 1088XEL connector the VBXL uses, so it makes sense for them to go in together. Since it just plugs into the socket in place of the Pokey, it doesn't make the VBXL installation any more difficult.

I've also got a lot of the wiring in place ready for the Ultimate 1MB , but that'll go in last as it's really probably the easiest now I have the majority of the wiring in place. The VBXL also has a few wires to pick off the board and ICs so it makes sense to leave the U1MB off to make it easier to do that.

Looking forward to having this lovely little machine pimped out :)

*SO* many wires!!!!

stephen_usher wrote: 13 Mar 2022 18:11 *SO* many wires!!!!

Indeed there are, a sad side effect of shoehorning fancy tech into a machine that was never intended to have it. I do intend to neaten it all up, and actually the majority are already connected to the 13 pin video socket. It looks worse than it is :)

OK, so I finally got round to finishing off the wiring for the VBXL and had some very strange activity whilst testing, such as a brown screen (Again), weird RAM errors and the LED on the VBXL just sometimes going out.

Bit of a head scratcher until I noticed that the wire that goes to pin 4 of Sally (CPU), the IRQ Req line, had fallen off the VBXL!! After plugging it back in it all became stable again, so I proceeded to add the Ultimate 1MB.

The end result is this lovely pile of stuff:


The SIDE3 is plugged in here too, so it's not quite the mess it is in the pic, so next steps are to remove the 5 pin DIN video connector and fix the new 13 pin DIN in it's place and find a way to stuff it all into the really small (Compared to the 800XL) case.

With the old modulator removed, there is a bit more room, so the U1MB may fit there, but we'll see!! Once it's all decided where all the parts are going and the video DIN socket is in place, I'll look to have a big tidy up of the big mess o wires a bit like I did on the 65XE with the benefit of hindsight from the 800XL installation.

I've also found my Ape Warp 32 OS adapter, so I've decided that the 800XL can have that installed.

At least for now it all seems to work as expected, so pretty happy knowing that at least.

Well, weird stuff going on here.

I closed up the 600XL, after doing a bunch of tests to make sure everything worked fine, but came back to it later and no audio.

So hoping that my PokeyMax hasn't died, I tested it in my 65XE that also has U1MB and VBXL/E. No sound and some weird lockups.

Pop the PokeyMax that was originally in the 65XE back in (Bear in mind I'd tested it before doing the swap) and no audio from that either and weird lockups. What, surely both of my PokeyMax' haven't died at the same time!!!

Very strange, so back to basics. Opened up the now stock 800XL and both PokeyMax' test fine. Self test is good, SuperSalt is good (Both from a keyboard and audio perspective) and games have sound and music, so WTF.....

So they behave as you would expect of a normal Pokey.

Next I'll hook up to the scope and run something that outputs normal audio, then stereo, see what's going on at the PokeyMax outputs. I can't imagine the cable has failed, but it could be the tv so I need to check that too.

Very odd indeed.

Looking more & more like another 'Mega' adventure here @rubber_jonnie

:(
Hope you sort it soon.

JezC wrote: 17 Mar 2022 10:13 Looking more & more like another 'Mega' adventure here @rubber_jonnie

:(
Hope you sort it soon.

You read my mind!!!

My testing thus far shows that both PokeyMax are good. Phew.

I've lashed them both up in my 800XL and hooked up to a set of desktop amplified speakers and I get stereo out just fine. Annoyingly the first stereo phono lead I picked up had a bad left cable, but once I realised and swapped it out all was good.

That's a big relief as PokeyMax aren't cheap. At least I now have an idea of where the problem lies, which is either the wiring to the 13 pin video socket (I can't see it being broken on BOTH machines), the SCART cable (This is common to both) or the TV SCART socket (also common to both).

I am also wondering if there is some sort of interaction going on with the U1MB and PokeyMax because of the weird locking issues. I haven't used them much since I last upgraded the firmware on the U1MB so it could be a problem that I haven't seen, and the 800XL doesn't have one.

I can at least flash the U1MB easily or even roll back to the last version I had that I know worked well, and there may even be a later revision too..

Oh, very strange!

Good luck! :-)