After a short respite (time spent finishing the SIDE driver), I'm back onto the 1200XL and pushing ahead with the PBI connector. Wiring the 50 way ribbon cable was less difficult than plain fiddly, but the tinned wires seemed magnetised to the solder cups. So - reasonably neat by my lowly standards:

It would be easy to get into knots with regard to pin numberings and signals, so I checked, double-checked and triple checked Mapping the Atari, Bob Wolley's 1200XL PBI instructions, and my own verificational findings with a multi-meter on the IDE Plus 2.0. Despite all this, something tells me it's all gonna be connected backwards...

When I reattached the wired connector to the bracket, the folded-under ribbon cable was bulkier than I'd expected and was placing a lot of strain on the motherboard (bending it, in fact). So the whole lot had to come off again so that I could mill away a quarter of an inch or so of the board to make more space for the cable to snake underneath:

This did the trick, and the whole thing fits together snugly:

Here you can see the underside of the connector:

Next job, of course, is to connect the other ends of those wires to the CPU and other hook-up points. Only EXTSEL is connected thus far.

Until next time...