After a long gap, here's the last (or possibly penultimate) part of the 1200XL upgrade story. In the last part (well over a year ago), I'd fitted VBXE and Stereo Pokey, and finished the PBI and power mods. Since then I've added Ultimate 1MB and one of Dropcheck's excellent GTIA PAL adapters. This means that the 1200XL is completely "PAL" in the very strictest sense. Legacy video output now works on my 1084S monitors, and for hard disk storage I've been using Ultimate 1MB/SIDE (in PBI mode), and latterly SIDE2 in the same configuration.

Of course, SIDE blocks up the cart port, so I figured I'd use the IDEa HDD interface which has been lying around here for two years or so looking for a home as an internal storage in the 1200XL. Previously, I'd mounted the 50-way PBI connector on the IDE itself on the back side of the PCB, resulting in the correct pin assignments for a straight IDC cable to the back of an 800XL. I had also replaced a few other headers on the IDEa for convenient and sturdy placement of an IDE to CF card adapter.

Surprisingly enough, the IDEa is very stable indeed when used with the highly upgraded 1200XL - even with a SIDE2 cartridge simultaneously connected (and with the U1MB / SIDE PBI enabled, data transfer between partitions on the IDEa and SIDE works without error). So I finally got around to fitting the IDEa inside the 1200XL this evening...

I decided to run another 50 way ribbon cable straight off the back of the PBI connector I'd already fitted. This seemed the neatest solution. The ribbon cable doubles back under itself so that the IDC connector has the correct orientation. The soldering was rather tricky, but the thing fired up first time when I turned the machine on. The most time-consuming part was separating the strands of the ribbon cable and poking each individual wire through the already dense bale of wires leading to the PBI connector from underneath the 1200XL's motherboard.

Anyway: here are a few pictures of the finished article.

The IDEa is secured on three corners with plastic pylons bolted to the motherboard.

An overview of the now rather crowded 1200XL mainboard:

The only minor (but fun) job left to do is to connect up the HDD activity LED header on the IDEa to one of the programmable LEDs on the 1200XL's keyboard.