Basic Troubleshooting - Diagnostic Cartridge advanced troubleshooting

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rubber_jonnie
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Basic Troubleshooting - Diagnostic Cartridge advanced troubleshooting

Post by rubber_jonnie »

For those of you who have the Atari diagnostics cartridge, you will have realised that there are some options that won't work, such as the serial, parallel, Midi, joystick/mouse and ACSI port that don't work.

The reason for this is because they require loopback cables in order to properly test these functions, and without, there is simply the report of a failure.

The sad news is, that such a solution was available from Olivier at his web site, Gossuin.be, but sadly he has closed his store :(

This is what you get:

Loopback_Cables.jpg
Loopback_Cables.jpg (195.07 KiB) Viewed 8000 times

So what you see is:

A central loopback testing hub.
A 25 pin serial port test dongle.
A 9 pin serial port test dongle.
2x 9 pin joystick/mouse port testing cables.
An ACSI test cable.
A Centronics/printer test cable.
A Midi test cable.

I also opted to buy a 2nd diagnostic cartridge to make a little kit up, which can be seen on the right.

To follow will be examples of testing using this kit, and showing the results for the standard ST range of machines.

I hope you'll find it useful.
Collector of many retro things!
800XL and 65XE both with Ultimate1MB,VBXL/XE & PokeyMax, SIDE3, SDrive Max, 2x 1010 cassette, 2x 1050 one with Happy mod, 3x 2600 Jr, 7800 and Lynx II
Approx 20 STs, including a 520 STM, 520 STFMs, 3x Mega ST, MSTE & 2x 32 Mhz boosted STEs
Plus the rest, totalling around 50 machines including a QL, 3x BBC Model B, Electron, Spectrums, ZX81 etc...
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