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Atari 850 - small question


mikesk8

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I have found Atari 850 for a good price and I was thinking to add it to my Atari 800 as a device which will power Lotharek SIO2SD independently of Atari 800. I just don't know if it's possible? :) For example, my Atari 800 is powered off; I switch on power on 850, which will power SIO2SD so I can select what I want to load. Once selected I power on the computer? Will it work?

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I'm fairly sure that any Atari peripherals that have the 2 SIO ports for passthrough don't actually supply power to them.

Generally the +5V is a low current supply from the computer that tells the peripherals that the computer is "Ready" and can be used for low draw situations.

Most legacy peripherals AFAIK don't use it though the tape drives do for part of the FSK decode circuit (?)

 

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The 850 does not use power from the computer as it has it's own 9VAC power supply for it's own use, but will pass-through the 5V and 12V power from the 800 for self-powered devices. The 850 has 2 SIO ports, so you can daisy-chain your SIO2SD from it. Even with the 850 powered on, the SIO2SD will power off when the 800 turns off, unless the SIO2SD also has it's own separate power supply?

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2 minutes ago, Nezgar said:

The 850 does not use power from the computer as it has it's own 9VAC power supply for it's own use, but will pass-through the 5V and 12V power from the 800 for self-powered devices. The 850 has 2 SIO ports, so you can daisy-chain your SIO2SD from it. Even with the 850 powered on, the SIO2SD will power off when the 800 turns off.

thank you; this I was looking for :) not much use for 850 then :(

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4 hours ago, Nezgar said:

You might want to look at this 4 port splitter from Lotharek - It can optionally supply the 5V itself to the 4 attached devices, separate from the computer:

 

https://lotharek.pl/productdetail.php?id=158

thanks! useful one indeed. I was looking for a good reason to use 850 :) but it seems its not so usable any more.

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Of course it's possible to "hack" the 850 to have it's own +5V be output onto one of the SIO jacks, but that runs a high risk of you or someone else in the future accidentally plugging the computer into the wrong SIO jack and pumping +5V back into the computer...

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12 hours ago, Nezgar said:

Of course it's possible to "hack" the 850 to have it's own +5V be output onto one of the SIO jacks, but that runs a high risk of you or someone else in the future accidentally plugging the computer into the wrong SIO jack and pumping +5V back into the computer...

I will leave it as is (stock) and will be looking for potential use :) maybe to connect to voice synthetizor or something cool via RS232. 

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