atarifanboi Posted January 24, 2016 Share Posted January 24, 2016 Hi Everybody :-) I've been wanting to upgrade my Atari STE to 1.44Mb fdd for a while now, and was mostly thinking it not possible without using aftermarket add ons. Having done some reading about the Ajax floppy disk controller on the Best electronics web site, I decided to pull the machine apart, and to my surprise discovered not a WDC controller, but an Ajax. This to me begs the question, of is it possible to make my STE run with a 1.44Mb fdd, since the board has the E6 jumper and also TOS2.06. If anybody is able to comment, I'd be grateful. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
exxosuk Posted January 24, 2016 Share Posted January 24, 2016 You need a floppy upgrade kit such as this one http://www.exxoshost.co.uk/atari/last/floppy/index.htm IIRC the jumper just enables 1.44 option on the format screen in GEM. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atarifanboi Posted January 24, 2016 Author Share Posted January 24, 2016 (edited) Having set that jumper, I can see the option in GEM as you say, but no 1.44Mb compatibility, even with a replacement modified drive, so looks like the kit is what i need. However my only concern is that I already have the Ajax controller, and the article seems to mention the WD1772 exclusively. I guess I will have to reach out to see what difference this can make. Thanks :-) Edited January 24, 2016 by atarifanboi Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
exxosuk Posted January 25, 2016 Share Posted January 25, 2016 AJAX is just a newer floppy controller, its better to have that one than the WD1772. My kits will work with either IC. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ParanoidLittleMan Posted January 25, 2016 Share Posted January 25, 2016 Having set that jumper, I can see the option in GEM as you say, but no 1.44Mb compatibility, even with a replacement modified drive, so looks like the kit is what i need. However my only concern is that I already have the Ajax controller, and the article seems to mention the WD1772 exclusively. I guess I will have to reach out to see what difference this can make. Thanks :-) Ajax is better in that, that it will work surely at 16 MHz well. With WD1772 it's matter of luck. But most of will do it. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atarifanboi Posted February 1, 2016 Author Share Posted February 1, 2016 Order is now in for the board :-) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atarifanboi Posted February 5, 2016 Author Share Posted February 5, 2016 Board has arrived, but I'm too tired to be getting out the soldering iron tonight, so it's going to have to wait for the weekend, so long as I'm not too busy! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atarifanboi Posted February 7, 2016 Author Share Posted February 7, 2016 (edited) Took an hour out this morning to get the board assembled : Next stage is to desolder the Ajax controller from the STE, VERY CAREFULLY . As I have no experience of desoldering from STE's, does anybody have any advice on this to avoid PCB damage? Once I've done that, I'll get some pics of the install uploaded. As I have Alan H's dual IDE adapter installed, I have a clip on wire on pin 10 of the ASCI socket which might get in the way, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it, it might be a non issue. Edited February 7, 2016 by atarifanboi Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
exxosuk Posted February 7, 2016 Share Posted February 7, 2016 (edited) Looking good I have lots of desoldering toys here, but I would suggest desoldering braid, a good quality fluxed one, then you can suck up solder from the top and bottom of the IC. Using a solder sucker tends not to work to great and can easily damage tracks. Also the MCF pad should be soldered Edited February 7, 2016 by exxosuk Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atarifanboi Posted February 7, 2016 Author Share Posted February 7, 2016 Yeah, I have a solder sucker and have encountered pad damage on other projects, so I will probably run down to the Maplin near work tomorrow to get some de-solder braid, thanks. As for the MCF pad, I was going by the image online, and it's not 100% clear, so thanks for the spot, I will do that before I install the board Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atarifanboi Posted February 10, 2016 Author Share Posted February 10, 2016 Ok, so stepped a little further forward tonight and got the Ajax FDC desoldered from the mainboard as below: I took my time, using a mixture of desolder pump and desolder wick, and got a good result with no pad damage Ajax is now fitted to the board: and I'll hopefuly get a chance to fully fit it soon. Note, even though it's not visible here, the MCF pad is now soldered! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
exxosuk Posted February 10, 2016 Share Posted February 10, 2016 Ok, so stepped a little further forward tonight and got the Ajax FDC desoldered from the mainboard as below: I took my time, using a mixture of desolder pump and desolder wick, and got a good result with no pad damage Ajax is now fitted to the board: and I'll hopefuly get a chance to fully fit it soon. Note, even though it's not visible here, the MCF pad is now soldered! Great job, looking good! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atarifanboi Posted February 13, 2016 Author Share Posted February 13, 2016 So, soldering iron has been out again, and I'm close to finishing, just got to finish modding the floppy drive now. Here it is overall, you can also see Alan H's dual IDE interface: Here's the board installed: The 16Mhz connection: And it all fits nicely under the FDD: As soon as I get the FDD modded (Just needs the HD sel wire, DF0 is already done), and testing done, I'll report back on functionality. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atarifanboi Posted February 16, 2016 Author Share Posted February 16, 2016 (edited) Moonsweeper, I'd appreciate your sagely advice please. I plugged in to do some testing today, as for me, it's a fairly big mod, and I want to know I haven't just screwed up a perfectly good STE! When connedting the original ST 720Kb FDD, everything works fine, and I can format disks, and move files around, delete them etc, which seems to suggest that the Ajax FDC is working as expected in the mod board. I swapped out for a 1.44Mb FDD, which I'd tested pre mod, and it worked fine as a 720Kb unit. I connected it up both with and without the HD select wire connected, and I'm not getting any head seek activity at all (it does twitch on power on, but after that nothing). The drive motor rotates, and the disk spins, but the heads sit static. The drive is D0 select modified, and I have rotated the cable 180 degrees, and the busy light illuminates exactly as per the working 720KB drive during boot, just no head activity. I have another STFM that I will try the 1.44Mb drive in to test if it works as a 720Kb drive in a stock machine, but if you have any thoughts in the meantime, I'd be very grateful. Edited February 16, 2016 by atarifanboi Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atarifanboi Posted February 20, 2016 Author Share Posted February 20, 2016 I tested the drives in another ST, an STFM, and they all work, including the 1.44Mb drive as a 720Kb drive. As of last night, none of the drives (2x720Kb and 1x1.44Mb) worked at all in the modded STE :-( despite the original drive working the previous night. I'll have to revisit all the solder joints that are visible in case there is a dry joint somewhere, I'd be grateful of any troubleshooting advice from anyone with experience of this mod please. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atarifanboi Posted February 23, 2016 Author Share Posted February 23, 2016 (edited) The good news is that after poring over the solder joints to the mainboard, with a bright light and magnifying glass tonight, I identified some questionable soldering, and after a clean-up and re-solder, things are looking much better. If I ground the D0 and D1 pads, as suggested by Chris, who created this mod, the original 720KB drive runs as it originally did with no issues, and if I hook up the 1.44MB HD floppy, it behaves as a 720KB drive also. If I remove the ground for D0 and hook it up to the 1.44MB HD floppy media detect, I can format HD floppy disks as either 720KB or as 1.44MB. This suggests to me that all of the component parts of the upgrade are actually working as you intended. The one issue that remains however, it that media detect is not working, and since the previous troubleshooting proves that the D0 part of things works, then this can only be down to the floppy disk drive, which is quite a bit different around the media detect switch than the Sony ones on Exxos's site. So, in order to go for max chance of success, I've ordered one from Chris, so we'll see how that goes when it arrives. I can at least start to reassemble the ST in the meantime, as the D0 pad is accessible even with the shield fitted. Proof of the pudding is as below: With multiple formats runnings smoothly, copying to and from Disk A, file movements on Disk A and also file deletions all working as expected. Edited February 23, 2016 by atarifanboi Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atarifanboi Posted February 24, 2016 Author Share Posted February 24, 2016 (edited) Well, I'm a very happy bunny :-) The modded Sony drive arrived from Exxos today, and is tested, and everything is working as expected!! The drive recognises 1.44Mb and 720Kb disks, formats both happily, and works with file operations perfectly. It was worth persisting with and troubleshooting, now all I need to do ia reassemble the machine and mod the case for the new drive front. Thanks to Exxos for all his support, I'd certainly recommend him, this is a well made add on, and his support is excellent! I will put up some final pics in the next couple of days, plus I'm planning on building in the mouse adapter I have, so I'll probably add in some pics of that too :-) Edited February 24, 2016 by atarifanboi 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
exxosuk Posted March 4, 2016 Share Posted March 4, 2016 Great you got it all sorted out Always better to get the drives from my store rather than faffing about with other stuff Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atarifanboi Posted March 6, 2016 Author Share Posted March 6, 2016 Yeah, your drives are the way to go :-) I guess there is such a wide variety of drives, guaranteeing it will work as expected is difficult, so a known good drive takes the guesswork out of it! Everything is working and all reassembled, case modded and one happy camper! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atarifanboi Posted March 20, 2016 Author Share Posted March 20, 2016 Further update, I dragged out an old laptop that has a 1.44 Mb FDD installed, and the ST happily reads and writes floppies formatted and written to on that, and the PC can happily read and write to floppies formatted on the ST. What does that mean? Well, the original aim was to be able to easily copy files downloaded on PC over to my ST, which has 2 internal CF cards for hard drives, courtesy of Alan Hourihane's dual internal IDE interface. So I can say mission accomplished, and thanks for all the support along the way!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
exxosuk Posted March 20, 2016 Share Posted March 20, 2016 Could be the PC drive needs heads cleaning , or the drive is going bad. That fault is not really uncommon. I have similar issues with old Atari 720K drives not reading 720K formatted disks on the PC sometimes. There can be other faults, but I would try a new PC drive to start with. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
atarifanboi Posted March 20, 2016 Author Share Posted March 20, 2016 Exxos, I think you may have mis-read my post, it all works fine, 100%, and I've also just tested on my main modern laptop with a USB 1.44Mb FDD, and there is also full compatibility there too, with disks reading/writing/formatting across 2 PCs and the STE with no issues at all. In fact I downloaded ecopy and fcopy from your site, to my main laptop, popped a 1.44Mb disk formatted on my STE, into the USB FDD drive, copied them over to the disk, then put it straight into my STE where the disk was read with no issues and I copied over the files right onto my STEs internal hard drive :-) So it's all great, and a top notch upgrade, that I'd happily recommend to anyone, it's certainly going to make the transfer of downloaded files much easier. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
exxosuk Posted March 20, 2016 Share Posted March 20, 2016 Exxos, I think you may have mis-read my post, it all works fine, 100%, and I've also just tested on my main modern laptop with a USB 1.44Mb FDD, and there is also full compatibility there too, with disks reading/writing/formatting across 2 PCs and the STE with no issues at all. In fact I downloaded ecopy and fcopy from your site, to my main laptop, popped a 1.44Mb disk formatted on my STE, into the USB FDD drive, copied them over to the disk, then put it straight into my STE where the disk was read with no issues and I copied over the files right onto my STEs internal hard drive :-) So it's all great, and a top notch upgrade, that I'd happily recommend to anyone, it's certainly going to make the transfer of downloaded files much easier. oops, being attacked constantly by our new kitten not really helping me lately Glad its all working fine for you 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ParanoidLittleMan Posted March 21, 2016 Share Posted March 21, 2016 Great that it works fine. I just wonder why not doing transfers on/with CF cards self ? Yes, I see that it's internal adapter, but can not solve that cards be accessible from outside ? I don't know how that IDE adapter is solved, usually it's possible with shorter cable and some drilling of case. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ParanoidLittleMan Posted March 21, 2016 Share Posted March 21, 2016 Great that it works fine. I just wonder why not doing transfers on/with CF cards self ? Yes, I see that it's internal adapter, but can not solve that cards be accessible from outside ? I don't know how that IDE adapter is solved, usually it's possible with shorter cable and some drilling of case. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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