Bad floppy power supply or Pokey

[gs80065xe]

I have not connected my floppy drives in a few years. I tried today. The first XF551 had a frozen power switch. I used some contact cleaner to try can clear it. Took some effort but finally came unstuck. Hope I didn't break it. So I connected the power supply and switched it on. Nothing. Checked it with a meter. Seemed like wasn't reaching 9VAC. Tried the other XF551 I bought off someone else. But it uses a home made power supply. It appears to power on. But when I turn on the Atari, it did not run.

 

So I gave up and tried my Lotharik SIO2USB. Had a challenge of remembering how to make it work. Last thing was to use DTS for flow control instead of RI in the Aspect serial options. Are two drives or their power supplies bad? Or is it a bad Pokey?

[Kyle22]

First of all, use RespeQt. Make sure your drivers are all good on the Windows machine.

 

Make sure you have the Cmd line set properly. IIRC, Lotharek uses CTS.

 

If it works, then everything is good. If it ONLY works when you have handshaking set to NONE, then your Cmd line is not set properly, or your 6x2x PIA chip is bad. If it doesn't work at all, then look for a bad Pokey.

[+Nezgar]

Double check the drive number setting of the real drives. If they're set to anything other than drive 1, it won't boot from it.

[gs80065xe]

Both floppies are set for drive 1. I'm only trying to connect 1. Turns out the Atari power supply is dead. Not sure why But the second XF551 with the non Atari power supply works. Didn't work yesterday because one SIO cable doesn't work. And the other one is being flaky. But it does work if you wiggle it just right.

 

FYI, I double checked Lotharek's lair. The SIO2USB doc says to use DSR. So looks like I need a new power supply, SIO cables and maybe a power switch for the other XF551.

[Kyle22]

Both floppies are set for drive 1. I'm only trying to connect 1. Turns out the Atari power supply is dead. Not sure why But the second XF551 with the non Atari power supply works. Didn't work yesterday because one SIO cable doesn't work. And the other one is being flaky. But it does work if you wiggle it just right.

 

FYI, I double checked Lotharek's lair. The SIO2USB doc says to use DSR. So looks like I need a new power supply, SIO cables and maybe a power switch for the other XF551.

Thanks for the info. DSR it is.

[+kheller2]

Both floppies are set for drive 1. I'm only trying to connect 1. Turns out the Atari power supply is dead. Not sure why But the second XF551 with the non Atari power supply works. Didn't work yesterday because one SIO cable doesn't work. And the other one is being flaky. But it does work if you wiggle it just right.

 

FYI, I double checked Lotharek's lair. The SIO2USB doc says to use DSR. So looks like I need a new power supply, SIO cables and maybe a power switch for the other XF551.

XFs are notorious for broken SIO solder joints.

[gs80065xe]

Solder joints look good on the one that won't power up. Multimeter confirms the power supply is bad. But, I haven't looked at the solder joints for the SIO ports on the other one.

[Fox-1 / mnx]

If functionality is what you want, and you have the skills, you may consider using a PC-style power supply to power it all and drop the AC bricks. 1050's And XF551's will run a lot cooler when skipping the internal voltage regulators.

 

Wiring those directly without additional modification will disable the power switch so that's a bonus feature for the XF551 you have as it is right now :-)