exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Hi all,

Lately I've been slowly building-up @stephen_usher's brilliant STFM accelerator relocator and ROM board in order to put it in my short-ST.

There are a couple of reasons I needed something like this board
- There aren't any other TOS decoder/selector boards for a short-ST, except Agranlunds version which only works on the last revision that had the rom-bank-select areas on the motherboard.
- Moving the CPU socket to the edge of the board might be nice for the VOFA graphics adaptor, making more space inside the unit.

Thanks so much to @stephen_usher for making this possible & helping me with it.

Some photos of fitting:

General board over-view

Going to need to chop a little bit of the cartridge area plastic

The external floppy port is blocking the board, luckily this is just blank PCB board area I can chop off

Wow that's a tight fit!

Epic fail for the Vofa board though... :(

It's a 4 layer board with power and ground planes. Check that your cutting away of that corner on the PSB hasn't caused a short.

Okay, thx

Is there any reason you cant change those IDC connectors with 90 degree versions? (So they face to the right of the machine instead of up).
You might JUST fit it in the case then!

@mrbombermillzy I don't quite follow, could you elaborate? Thx

Well, unless Im mistaken, in the last posted picture, you have from the bottom up:

The ST mainboard---Stephen Ushers relocator board---the VOFA card.

The VOFA card has the 2 sets of ribbon cable coming out from a set of connectors pointing up.

So can you solder in some 90 degree connectors so the ribbon cables protrude rightwards (instead of the upwards protrusion that they are currently in and preventing the lid from closing)?

I think Steve is referring to the fact the pins do not fit/align in the socket more than the height..

OMG! I overlooked that! :shock:

Sorry @Steve ... never mind then.