Basic Troubleshooting - Diagnostic Cartridge advanced troubleshooting

[rubber_jonnie]

For those of you who have the Atari diagnostics cartridge, you will have realised that there are some options that won't work, such as the serial, parallel, Midi, joystick/mouse and ACSI port that don't work.

The reason for this is because they require loopback cables in order to properly test these functions, and without, there is simply the report of a failure.

The sad news is, that such a solution was available from Olivier at his web site, Gossuin.be, but sadly he has closed his store :(

This is what you get:

Loopback_Cables.jpg

So what you see is:

A central loopback testing hub.
A 25 pin serial port test dongle.
A 9 pin serial port test dongle.
2x 9 pin joystick/mouse port testing cables.
An ACSI test cable.
A Centronics/printer test cable.
A Midi test cable.

I also opted to buy a 2nd diagnostic cartridge to make a little kit up, which can be seen on the right.

To follow will be examples of testing using this kit, and showing the results for the standard ST range of machines.

I hope you'll find it useful.