ST536 STE EDITION

[exxos]

I managed to fiddle in three holes.. Though their location is a bit tricky because of components on the motherboard...

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[Steve]

Gonna flag this topic NSFW!

[exxos]

I spent like 4 hours looking for OSC's which were in stock somewhere. Now nobody stocks them! It's some sort of cosmic conspiracy this is!!

I'm not going to get back my "non-sterling transaction charges" either I bet !

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[exxos]

Finally got the sexy STE536 Alpha boards, mostly assembled.

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I only got five made. So only three or four will go into the store at some point and these will be sold as prototypes. They will be sold as is, and people will have to finish building them themselves. I don't know when this will be, it could possibly be even next year. I need to find time to solder mine up and do thorough testing, which isn't going to be a quick job.

It should use the same firmware as the ST536, but I don't believe anyone has tested that in the STE yet. So is difficult to know how it will generally perform. I did have mine running but I did not really have time to do extensive tests with it all. But there was not really much interest in the project to spend much time on it anyway. Though there is always progress, albeit very slowly

[Steve]

Don't forget to set one aside for me I am very keen to try this!

[exxos]

Don't forget to set one aside for me I am very keen to try this!

[Badwolf]

Looks great!

Maybe I'll have the time to try one around 2040!

BW

[JezC]

Looks great!

Maybe I'll have the time to try one around 2040!

BW

I still think you'll beat me to it @Badwolf - I would love to try it but time and money are both in equally short supply at the moment (and with my daughter hoping to start uni in just over a year as well as my Son having 3 years left as of this September, I suspect it's going to be around 2030 when the expenses start to drop off)

I'll be following the posts with interest!

[exxos]

Still half awake currently. So did a bit of soldering up

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I need to burn my TOS206 build into a ROM. Will likely put the latest EMUTOS in there as well, see what that makes of it all as well.

[exxos]

Got it all connected up and it ran several tests in GB6 then reset. It basically does the same thing over and over. Does not seem to matter if the cache or blitter is on or off. It might be worse with the blitter on but it's difficult to tell. EMUTOS doesn't even try to boot up, once it got some garbage at the top of the screen, but nothing else. So I am using my patched TOS206. (generic TOS206 makes no odds either).

But things were cut short because I connected the scope probe to the CLK8 which seemed bad and also to the CPU clock. Though I think my scope probe and gnd touched together and it shorted the CPU clock to gnd.. Now its not booting up and the PLD is getting hot so I think it's dead I didn't think these PLDs were that fragile to start with

I may try plugging in the ST536 with my adapter PCB if I can find it, just to see if that behaves any differently. It's basically the same as the STE536 as it was a direct copy (pretty-much) of the ST536 which worked fine from what I remember.

But in any case, I think this project unfortunately is just going to have to go on the backburner for now.. I don't really have much time at the moment to build up another board and start going down another rabbit hole.