IDE interface to go for

[Wrathchild]

Joy of joys, my XL's internal myIDE interface does work

and the 2.5" hard disk works from the XLs power supply.

 

FYI: we used a meter to look at the current drain and this is what

we saw. Normal XL - about 0.8A. Bootup with HD, jumps to 1.5A,

drops to 1.2A during initialization and then drops again to 0.8A

once settled (maybe 0.9A, can't quite remember).

 

I have some 65XEs too, so I guess putting the I/F into these

would require a separate power supply for the HD as the

XE's 1.0A power supply would load up on initializing the HD?

 

My earlier problems were my fault - I'd put the IDE cable in the

wrong way around, the power goes to the pins towards the outside

of the drive, not those by the master/slave pins

 

The HD check programs appear to work OK so on Friday I intend

to partition and format the drive and start to transfer so software

to it.

 

Regards,

Mark

 

Aside question: I saw the insides of a 65XE for the first time yesterday.

There appear to be spaces for extra RAM chips, so can a 65XE be made

compatible with 130XE fairly easily by installing the chips?

[+rdemming]

Aside question: I saw the insides of a 65XE for the first time yesterday.

There appear to be spaces for extra RAM chips, so can a 65XE be made

compatible with 130XE fairly easily by installing the chips?

 

Yes, but aside the ram chips you also need a custom logic chip called CO25953 which drives the bankswitching.

 

I think B&C still have them.

 

Robert

[Wrathchild]

Finally I've got around to getting a digital-camera and so first things first... take a few shots of the MyIDE internal setup

 

One thing troubling me at the moment, perhaps someone can shed some light on it, I get some trouble with Player/Missile graphic corruption. It looks like a timing problem as they jitter about. If the cables are unpluged from the MyIDE board after a game has loaded from the drive, the corruption goes away. Just unplugging the HD is not enough. This makes me thinks its not because of where I am tapping the power for the HD from. Maybe something got buggered during the soldering? Any ideas what maybe causing this, interference?

 

The MyIDE interface itself sits to the right of the cartridge slot with cables coming from it which are then nicely folded and glued down.

 

The Hard-drive itself sits on top of the RAM chips. Note that the (smoothing?) capacitor previously bridging power and ground is de-soldered and put on wires to make space for the HD. This works quite well as the metal shielding case can still be installed before putting the keyboard and top cover back on.

 

I'm have also been pooling some <1GB drives found on Ebay so that, once a batch of MyIDE boards can be made, I can install them into other machines for re-selling, or maybe even offer an install service.

 

The alternative 2.5" adapter looks like it would work well in a 65XE as the HD can be mounted under the vents a the top-rear of the case.

 

Hope that helps.

 

Regards,

Mark

[Shawn Jefferson]

Cool! How do you have the hard drive mounted? Is it just sitting on top of the ram chips?

[Wrathchild]

We used a glue gun to put some blobs of glue on the chips in order to hold things down. But after my first attempt didn't work I had to separate them - hence the glue still on the RAM chips. In the end, all I had done wrong was to put the IDE cable on the HD the wrong way around and that was why it didn't work