Thursday 31 March 2011

Networking to Windows 7

My next job success is to stop using the floppy drive. See below. Yes it was great in its day. But I hate swapping floppy disks. Even if you can mod the 720kb dive to 1.44MB


Unfortunately my TT030 is a very early one, and you can see this by the "Atari 32 MEG Daughter Board / PGA". No idea what PGA means?!


So I did do a floppy drive mod to make it 1.44MB. You can see the solder wite bridge added here, and I had to short two pins on the floppy drive. 


The instructions are:-

Grab a Mitsumi D359T6 floppy drive from a PC to use it on an Atari (ST/TT/Falcon). The Mitsumi drive is the cheapest and most widespread floppy drive used nowadays in most OEM, brandless and homebuilt PCs. 

To change the drive ID, this unit has no jumpers, however, on the connector PCB you'll find a small area with 3 rows of 4 tiny solderpads. You have to make 2 solder bridges, like this (viewed with the connector 
to the bottom and the front of the drive facing up) - see the bottom circled red area on the picture above!

o o o o 
o o=o o 
o o o=o 

With this, the drive will be detected by the Atari, but you may experience problems with the Media change: when you swap disks, the Atari can ignore the swap, and writes to the new disk using FAT 
information of the old disk. This usually corrupts all the data on the disk, and makes it unrecoverable. 

The enable the media change detect, you can solder together 2 pins of the write protect/media change switch (top left of the drive, marked WP and MC). Bridge the MC and middle pins like this: 
|_____| 
W | | | M 
P | |=| C 

To ensure that it reads as HD, then you'll find that pin 2 of the mitsumi connector does not output +5V when a HD disk is inserted, as it should. A way around this, is to run a wire directly from the HD detect switch 
to pin 2 of the connector. The HD switch is the one opposite to the WP/MC switch, and has a pin marked HD. You should solder one end of the wire to this pin, and the other to the connector PCB, where the pin 2 is 
soldered to the board. 

I suspect that the HD detect and Media Change settings can probably be changed from the "4x3 solderpads" area, but I was unable to find a way to do so. Maybe someone else has some better information. 

Some of this information was from "The Atari ST Quick FAQ" by Nick Bales and was very useful!

Finally to modify the drive button on the replacement drive with a diamond one like the Atari.


So a bit of tinkering with a square file and you are done. Replace the drive and you have 1.44MB, and as luck would have it, the Atari TT formats to MS-DOS compatible disks (ish).

Next Ghostlink!

1 comment:

  1. PGA means Programmable Gate Array and this board just boost CPU speed from 16Mhz to 32Mhz

    ReplyDelete