exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

First up there was a short on the TTram buffers..


But after removing that short, the TTRAM was still not working. So I just fluxed-up the pins and reflowed them all and TTram came right up afterwards!


There was also a few "solder splashes" and "flux crud" on various places...


For some strange reason the 3.3V JTAG pin was cut off :shrug: I had to solder the pin back to let me flash the latest firmware which solved EMUTOS not working and the reset issue. Those problems already documented before and been fixed in the latest firmware.

Lastly the board appears to have been cleaned with IPA and left that white gunk stuff between all the IC pins.


So I un-buried my ultrasonic cleaner and left it in there for a hour..


I know a lot of people favour IPA, though I personally stopped using it a few years ago because of such issues. You just don't know if it's going to be corrosive or cause shorts later down the road.

I didn't test the IDE, not enough time.. But Ultrasatan worked copying and deleting 100's of files with the alleged "Good DMA". I left it running GB6 for about an hour and seems fine. Of course it maiden voyage was in the previous post video..

Ok thanks, so a combination of needing a new firmware (in my defence I did flash what I was told to flash :?, just not the 'slower' ROM version since you were going to look at it anyway) bad factory soldering on the RAM, one short on the buffers, and using IPA for cleaning. I only used IPA because I don't have an ultrasonic big enough :(

PS, reason 3.3v was broken off, is because it's dangerous to connect the 3.3v from a raspberry pi xilinx flasher. Since 3.3v is already provided to the booster. And It's not wise to have the FPGA draw it's 3.3v from the Pi's GPIO.

exxos wrote: 29 Jul 2024 13:56 Fixed up @Steve's STe536. Will document what I found later.

:cheer: :dualthumbup:

Well done!

Looks like a couple of nasty-to-find little sneakies in there.

BW