The Poor Man's 1400XL Part 7
Welcome to the final installment in the saga of the "Poor Man's 1400XL"! After rectifying some problems with the VBXE board, we're now all set to finish the PBI and realize perhaps the nicest Atari 8-bit imaginable...
PBI wiring wasn't quite as bulky as I'd expected, and although I wanted to leave plenty of "slack" in case I need to desolder components via the underside of the board in future, I think I could shorten lots of the wires:
Nevertheless, once I'd figured out my key mistake (wiring pin 35 to pin 29 of PIA instead of Antic - a result of momentary disorientation while working on the underside of the board), everything worked perfectly. I made a 1ft SCSI cable for the IDE Plus with a male Centronics IDC connector at the Atari end:
I was delighted and astonished when IDE Plus's internal SDX booted and detected the HDD partitions:
A shot of the BIOS settings as proof:
So there we have it - the "dream machine" which works with SIDE and IDE Plus, has the best keyboard, the nicest-looking case, the best-positioned cartridge slot, RGB output and 320KB of RAM. Future upgrades (hopefully soon) include Ultimate 1MB, Stereo Pokey, and an internal SIO2PC / RS232 connection.
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