exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

exxos wrote: 27 Dec 2018 00:18 Same here. I learned eating 6 satsumas gives me stomach ache! :lol:

Ouch - too much citric acid :(

I had a brainstorm that my old development board would be a ideal thing for the IDE project.

It already has the PLD wired up and a few spare IO pins for the IDE control lines. The address bus and bus control lines are already wired up to the PLD. It also has most of the CPU lines on header pins to make wiring up / testing, external stuff a lot easier.


So once I get it to behave as a stock system, I will send it to Icky for the IDE project.

exxos wrote: 27 Dec 2018 14:06 So once I get it to behave as a stock system, I will send it to Icky for the IDE project.

Thanks Exxos that will make things a little simpler.

Ok. I had first power on. ST worked fine no smoke or explosions. Went to desktop.

HDD hasn’t spun up there isn’t enough voltage. I know something is not quite right so am just tracing all the connections.

hopefully its something simple.


The dev board has been running for a few hours ... So it seems OK . will try and send it Wednesday...

exxos wrote: 27 Dec 2018 22:18 hopefully its something simple.


The dev board has been running for a few hours ... So it seems OK . will try and send it Wednesday...

Looks like it was something simple but painstakingly annoying to find. The IDE 40 - 44 convertor block is broken it was not providing power correctly and a few other pins were not working.

Am currently rewiring another IDE cable in place. I probably will find something else wrong with it knowing my luck.

We went through enormous pain on the TF328 to make every CF card work. You can use the code for that

https://github.com/terriblefire/tf328/b ... /rtl/ata.v

terriblefire wrote: 29 Dec 2018 18:07 We went through enormous pain on the TF328 to make every CF card work. You can use the code for that

https://github.com/terriblefire/tf328/b ... /rtl/ata.v

Thanks terriblefire I'll take a look.

Icky wrote: 29 Dec 2018 18:04 Looks like it was something simple but painstakingly annoying to find. The IDE 40 - 44 convertor block is broken it was not providing power correctly and a few other pins were not working.

Am currently rewiring another IDE cable in place. I probably will find something else wrong with it knowing my luck.

Ahh that sux :( the joys of testing stuff I guess :)

exxos wrote: 30 Dec 2018 01:54

Icky wrote: 29 Dec 2018 18:04 Looks like it was something simple but painstakingly annoying to find. The IDE 40 - 44 convertor block is broken it was not providing power correctly and a few other pins were not working.

Am currently rewiring another IDE cable in place. I probably will find something else wrong with it knowing my luck.

Ahh that sux :( the joys of testing stuff I guess :)

Indeed. This is what happens when scavenging old kit for parts. There is often a reason why it stopped working in the first place.

A small update as not much Atari work was done over the Christmas period.

Thanks to Exxos for sending the dev-board to help with testing this out. Have been working with Exxos on the PLD and other items and last night I finally finished off the wiring of the board and it is a lot neater than that big mess-o-wires of a breadboard version.

First switch on and the drive spins up, the ST is alive and there is no smoke.

The ST drops to the desktop and the floppy is not read. Attempting to read the floppy comes up with the retry dialog box.

Well this was the first attempt so I need to check the circuit, PLD and other things out.