A bit late, but ....

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SolderGirl
Posts: 31
Joined: Tue Aug 07, 2018 4:03 pm

A bit late, but ....

Post by SolderGirl »

After writing here for a while, i think it is overdue to introduce myself.
Some users here alreasy know me from the german atari-forum, but anyways.

My introduction to Atari was a total accident. It happened a few years ago, when i was offered a "box of electronic garbage" for recycling/harvesting parts from. And in there was an Atari Portfolio. After a bit of googeling, i found out that this was John Connors computer, and i was amazed. Without a second thought, i decided to mod the heck out of it.
So i searched for every howto and schematic i could find, and combined all of it into one. Replaced the original 4x32kB SRAM Chips with a single 512kB Chip, added a CF-Slot in place of the original Card Slot. Replaced the Quarz to overclock the CPU from 4.7 to 6.5 MHz. And modified the schematic of a memory card to make a RAM-Disk, adding another 1MB-SRAM Chip and a bunch of logic chips, all glued to the Board and handwired.
I posted this on the german Atari-Forum, and some people were quite impressed and interested. So i made a PDF explaining it all, with pics and schematics.
And this led to someone sending me a broken MegaST with only half a case and a lot of stuff to work with.
Initially, i failed at repairing it. I put the CPU on a socket, re-soldered the PS/2-Simm socket and glued it in place, replaced the Glue & MMU sockets, but i kept getting memory errors and it never ran stable.
After a while of working on it, another Atari made it to my place.
Someone gace up on his collection, and i got this nice 520 STm. In original package, but without floppy, and so i could not do much with it.

Then i got busy with other stuff and basically dissapeared for quite some time. And this year, i returned to the Atari stuff.
This time, starting with the 520. I decided that i did not want to modify the case, so i used a small PC-Tower for addons and power supply.
And lately, i finally fixed the MegaST mainboard by running a lot of copper wires to replace semi-broken traces in the PCB.
I modded a PC-Desktop case to fit it, and it is almost(tm) finished.

And here i am now, left with nothing to do because i can't afford the parts to go on.
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