exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

exxos wrote: 21 Oct 2018 01:58 Nice! Yeah the ram card was located flush with the front of the PSU.. Question really is if there is enough space in a real case for it to still fit under the keyboard.. Would assume so as I think its located lower on the falcon..

There is plenty of space. I just popped the board into an old case and even with the reset button pushing the board down about 10mm there is about a 5mm gap between the RAM board and the Keyboard.

Nice. I guess a normal falcon 4MB card would seat even lower.

exxos wrote: 21 Oct 2018 12:00 Nice. I guess a normal falcon 4MB card would seat even lower.

It would. I also noticed the board I had could be pushed further down so we have plenty of space.

That said would not fitting a SIMM slot directly on the STF board work and save space? I guess there have been discussions already around this.

Icky wrote: 21 Oct 2018 12:05 That said would not fitting a SIMM slot directly on the STF board work and save space? I guess there have been discussions already around this.

I don't think the sockets were easy to find anymore. But really it doesn't matter as when I get the FPGA MMU core running, it will use SRAM. Hopefully we can use 14mb ram rather than 4mb as well.

exxos wrote: 21 Oct 2018 16:20

Icky wrote: 21 Oct 2018 12:05 That said would not fitting a SIMM slot directly on the STF board work and save space? I guess there have been discussions already around this.

I don't think the sockets were easy to find anymore. But really it doesn't matter as when I get the FPGA MMU core running, it will use SRAM. Hopefully we can use 14mb ram rather than 4mb as well.

Makes sense. There is a balance here on what is still available and where we are heading.

Not much Atari today.

Desoldered the floppy patch cables I had from the board ready for the Floppy Un-f*ck board.

Patched the parallel port - thanks to PaulJ for finding

Tidied up the 16Mhz optional fix as its very visible on top of the board. Removed the resistor R910 and placed on the bottom of the board into the original hole and wired to the IC900. Now pretty much all the resistor type patches are underneath the board.

Removed the floppy power cable from the CN2 solder pads, ready for a break-out board been making that plugs in using a JST XH connector and has a few more XH connectors on top. That way I can plug in floppy, Gigafile and other accessories.

Icky wrote: 21 Oct 2018 19:02

Removed the floppy power cable from the CN2 solder pads, ready for a break-out board been making that plugs in using a JST XH connector and has a few more XH connectors on top. That way I can plug in floppy, Gigafile and other accessories.

Now thats a good idea.

Not so much luck for me. My STF is dead. I've managed to get it to sort of boot with the DiagRom but my serial appears broken, which is not helpful either, LOL.

Time to try the chips in a working ST and then try again.

Forgottenmyname wrote: 21 Oct 2018 21:13

Icky wrote: 21 Oct 2018 19:02

Removed the floppy power cable from the CN2 solder pads, ready for a break-out board been making that plugs in using a JST XH connector and has a few more XH connectors on top. That way I can plug in floppy, Gigafile and other accessories.

Now thats a good idea.

Was getting fed up of powering other things by my bench PSU and having wires everywhere :)

Forgottenmyname wrote: 21 Oct 2018 21:13 Not so much luck for me. My STF is dead. I've managed to get it to sort of boot with the DiagRom but my serial appears broken, which is not helpful either, LOL.

Time to try the chips in a working ST and then try again.

Oh no :shock: not good - I did think things were all over for me earlier too whilst moving everything around on the perspex base on powering up it was just the white screen or no signal. Finally sorted it out there was some excess solder flecks causing issues. This is part of the reason why I have mounted this as there is a lot of patches on the bottom etc and just moving it around on top the desk could catch or move things.

Lets hope you get it up and running again.

I'm going to tidy a few things up myself too and will probably mount it onto something too, as I'm sure one if the reasons it doesn't work is because the board isn't lying flat anymore thanks to the patches

Forgottenmyname wrote: 21 Oct 2018 21:46 I'm going to tidy a few things up myself too and will probably mount it onto something too, as I'm sure one if the reasons it doesn't work is because the board isn't lying flat anymore thanks to the patches

Yeah - Word of advice don't get carried away mounting it. I did today :oops:

Its amazing what you can do with a box of nylon mounts and sheet of perspex - it was like having my own Lego / Meccano set to play with.