exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

I'm sickened with envy :). Just reminds me I need to do something with my Stacy. Won't turn on, bad caps probably. I have thought about doing a color mod on mine for along time now. Nice work, very inspiring

Umberto1st wrote: 29 Jul 2020 19:05 I'm sickened with envy :). Just reminds me I need to do something with my Stacy. Won't turn on, bad caps probably. I have thought about doing a color mod on mine for along time now. Nice work, very inspiring

Really this was only supposed to be a colour mod when I started, but things seem to have gotten out of control. I blame @terriblefire. :lol:

derkom wrote: 29 Jul 2020 19:06 Really this was only supposed to be a colour mod when I started, but things seem to have gotten out of control. I blame @terriblefire. :lol:

Ya @terriblefire has opened a can of worms. I have 3 TF536's and 1 TF534. To bad there is not enough room in there for a modified Vofa card. OR IS THERE???

Not guilty your honour

I got one crash to the desktop and one spontaneous reboot yesterday evening. In particular because of the reboot, I was cautiously hopeful that it was just a power issue, so I soldered the extra power header onto the TF536 and stuck one of the floppy power leads onto it. To my admittedly mild surprise, GEMBench ran just fine overnight. :shock:

Onward and upward. :D

@derkom good tip that, may help with other random crashes. I will probably solder those headers on from now on.

PhilC wrote: 30 Jul 2020 08:02 @derkom good tip that, may help with other random crashes. I will probably solder those headers on from now on.

Worth a try at least. The TF536 ran just fine in my H4 (although I never put it through any serious stress tests), and since I did see one spontaneous reboot on the Stacy even with just the 68HC000 plugged in to the relocator, I think the problem stems from the motherboard just not being able to provide enough juice to light up the relocator board and something else plugged into it. I have a feeling that the stock Stacy was operating barely on the edge of stability anyway, so just about anything can perturb that.

I'm going to stick an extra power header on the next revision of my relocator, and probably fatten up the VCC traces a bit. In my intended configuration, one component on each end of the relocator has its own extra power input (Lightning ST on one end, TF536 on the other), but a central power header on the relocator will make it more useful generically, and is a bit tidier.

Test file copy between two hdd partitions with 1000 files and more. Use kobold for it.

My TF520 is faulty by doing that. The Atari ST hangs or bombs.

frank.lukas wrote: 30 Jul 2020 08:43 Test file copy between two hdd partitions with 1000 files and more. Use kobold for it.

I'll check that out when I next have the TF in the H4. The Stacy doesn't even have any mass storage at the moment. :D

Tonight I wired up a 74HCT157D according to the schematic for the garlic switcher, hoping to use that to be able to switch between 68000 and 68030....


It looks like a bit of a science project, but the wiring passes check and double check. I cut the traces on the relocator for E and BGACK for the right hand (TF) socket, but not for the left, because I still want those for the TOS206/IDE board. So those pins are bent out with wires soldered on on the 68000 on top, although it doesn't really show very well in the photo.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work. With the "switch" (just a wire to GND in the breadboard setup) in either position, I get a very dark (a very analogue looking dark) screen with some garbage when I boot in mono (heh, with colour timings once again) and a white screen with green and pink garbage if I boot in low res.

I verified that the multiplexer is doing what it's supposed to do, by pulling out the 68000 and verifying it'll boot off the TF (and that it acts like no CPU is present when "switched" the other way), and also that it'll boot the 68000 if I pull out the TF.

I was initially surprised that the garlic design switches only E and BGACK, where the old PAK switcher linked by @czietz was switching E, BG, and BR, but I figured I'd try it out anyway. I probably could have saved myself some time (okay not really, because I would have built this anyway) by testing this on the H4, because sure enough, if I put in two CPUs, and bend out E and BGACK pins on one of them, it won't boot. Bend out the BR pin in addition and it boots fine.

So it would seem that the Amiga is tolerant of two CPUs with BR connected, but the ST is not. This is a quad-input multiplexer, so I think it can do the job, although I'll need to change from switching BGACK to switching BG, due to directionality constraints. But that is a job for tomorrow. :coffee: