ironeagleuk

Interesting, so this article is wrong?

I was lucky enough to win a small haul of Atari 8 Bit stuff on Ebay a few weeks ago (I've been using 8 bits since the 80's), which included a Atari 65XE, 800XL and some cassette drives. My first observation of the 800XL was that it had a knob on the back....strange, never seen that before. So I plug it in and all I got was a blank screen. I tried the knob in both of the available positions and it didn't make any difference. So opened it up and saw a bunch of yellow wires going to the knob as the back from under the RF shielding. Took the RF shield off, and there was a daughterboard with 3 chips on it. I quickly established that one was the OS chip, but no idea what the other 2 are. It looks like one says "Ultra Speed" on it. There was also a piece of paper in there that had a small wiring diagram that looks like it was of the SIO port. But apart from the yellow wires, there are 2 blue and white wires that aren't connected to anything, and I believe the wiring diagram is related to them. Anyone know what this is?...it's a very elaborate bit of soldering on the board. I have removed it from the computer now, and put the OS chip into the socket on the mainboard, and now the 800XL boots up just fine. Any info would be great....and I guess someone here may even recognise it

Sorry for bringing an old topic to the forefront, but was hoping maybe the OP might still be around, although not posted in nearly a year. I have the same trouble with my XC11 (which I bought to replace a dead 1010 about 30 years ago) The black washer/cap bit of mine isn't cracked....but just keeps popping off after a couple of uses of rewind. I've pressed it on, but it doesn't seem to hold onto the spindle, and springs off. Did you put superglue on both the black wheel (then put the spring on) and also glue on the black cap, then pressed down and hold? Looking at the amount of plastic available I would have thought the glue would have stuck to the spindle also, thus not being so easy to turn. This is my last resort unless anyone else has any ideas. The XC11 is a great tape device, and very solidly built, and I am reluctant to discard it....my XC12 drive seems quite flimsy in comparison