exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Rather than starting a new thread for every old computer related thing that crosses my threshold I will do a collective one. As a bit of background, I have the following computers which is definitely not a collection and I only keep ones that I am likely to do a bit of tinkering with/I had when I was young and need further exploring:

Apple IIe
Spectrum 48k
BBC B
Atari 130XE
Spectrum +3
Atari 520STFM
Amiga 2000
Amiga 1200
Apple Power Mac 7200/90
Compaq SFF Pentium 3 for floppy disk writing duties etc.

I also have a load of consoles but they are for another thread if I get any more.

Atari TT030/2

Latest acquisition is an Atari TT - I saw one of these in probably a Speccy magazine when I was a kid and was in awe of the performance specs and its serious appearance. Fast forward 30 years and I got one sold as seen on eBay with "battery leakage that has destroyed wires" and "hard drive module removed". No keyboard but I bought it and it arrived next day.


As you can see it's a TT030/2 that is a bit yellow and grubby and the hard drive module is indeed removed - more on this later. Just after it turned up the seller listed the keyboard, so I bought that as well, and while waiting for it to arrive I dismantled the TT to see what I have:


It's an early one with a ridiculous amount of twisted-on bendy sharp shielding. No sign of any battery leakage from the 1998-era battery that still holds about 1V of charge. Going deeper..


See the very shiny (I have never seen a polished one before) 68030 CPU on its daughterboard. No TT RAM unfortunately but has a 2MB STRAM expansion (not pictured). I blew out all the dust (it appears well used judging by the amount of it and the 1998 battery) and dismantled/inspected for cap leaks/dusted the PSU. Powered up sans keyboard, mouse and hard drive and:


After a long wait on a plain white screen (I am used to this from my STFM) it gave me the disappointingly-like-ST-version desktop. I gave the top casing a good scrub while I waited for the keyboard to arrive and let it dry overnight. I have not used an ST with a hard drive before so lots of googling in the meantime to figure out what I am doing.

Very nice. I'd just recommend to re-cap the PSU to keep it running nicely (exxos sells kits)

I'm more than a little envious as a TT is my holy grail, but so far only managed to get an MSTE.

lilwashu wrote: 23 Jul 2022 10:35It's an early one with a ridiculous amount of twisted-on bendy sharp shielding.

Is it really a feature of the early models only?

Because yes, I was quite surprised to see the amount of shielding there! Mine (basically the latest revision) has nearly none of it so I'm wondering whether it got removed on my side or is it default for later models.

@mikro later models have the red (metal oxide) coating on the inside of the case, which removed the requirement of shielding. I actually had to sand away the inner-coating of my hdd-bay-lid because it was blocking WiFi signals to my internal wifi adaptor.

@Steve that's a pretty hilarious story :D Thanks for the clarification!

TT Continued

The TT keyboard arrived so I plugged it and an old third party mouse I had knocking about in, and everything seemed to work OK. In the meantime I had downloaded the AHDI driver and connected up my SCSI2SD and Gotek - it picked the drive up straight away but didn't seem to like 256MB partitions much so I put 2x128MB ones on there after formatting, then figured out how to install the driver etc to get it self booting.


Once the case had dried I reassembled all the shielding and had a closer look at the hard drive cover with the "battery damage" - it was limited to the area with the LED, which had disintegrated, and I am told is due to breakdown of the grommet releasing corrosive gas (The other LED is located in the top shielding and shows no sign of issues):


I tried to fit the cover into the top case with no luck, only to find that I appear to have a later model cover compared to my case - it had two extra tabs in the middle which my case has no holes for. A quick trim with some snips and I was in business:


And I reassembled everything - here it is with a Gotek in situ which fits pretty much perfectly in the holes for the floppy drive running MulltiTOS:


And the obligatory Frontier screenshot:


I've got some EPROMS on order so I can upgrade TOS from current 3.01 to 3.06 and am looking at options for fixing the wonky display on VGA monitors/data transfer, on which topics forum member stephen_usher has been very helpful.

That's an awesome machine indeed, and it looks like it has found just the right home to provide the care it needs for a happy welcome to the 21st Century.
Lately, I've been taking keyboards apart to clean out the gunk, grime and hairs. The hairs of unknown origin are really creepy. :mrgreen: I suggest you give your TT keyboard a cleaning, and maybe replace the rubber "springs."
Good job!

My EPROMs arrived and I wanted to upgrade the TT from 3.01 to 3.06, if only to get rid of the annoying white screen on startup. Finding this in burnable format was a bit of a challenge so after a lot of searching I:

Obtained a copy of TOS 3.06 UK in .rom format;
Copied it and ROMSPLIT onto the TT via the Gotek;
Split the ROM and put it back on my PC again via Gotek;
Eyeballed the four different bits (they are named TT01-03) compared to a copy of US 3.06 and named them appropriately (EE,EO,OE,OO);
Flashed them onto the 4 27c001 EPROMs using my TL866 and installed them.

The old ones took a good amount of force to remove but with the new ones installed, it booted up fine:


I've attached the TOS 3.06 files to this post to hopefully save other TT owners (such as there are) a bit of time in future.

Bargain, £254.50 for a working 4MB TT with Keyboard.