So it’s been a while since I did anything major. I did do another spin (My third so far) at the laser cut Microbee case, which revealed I needed to refactor parts of it.
I tried to make a fastening system so the upper half and the lower half could be screwed together, but I was too clever by half, and it was never going to work. Thinking about the problem, I came up with a new solution which is dramatically simpler. Back to Artifactory on Wednesday to cut more MDF.
I do look forward to finally being able to cut this from acrylic. I think it’ll look awesome.
Mail Delivery
So I was work from home for a week, and, of course, everything I’d ordered for the last few months finally arrived last week. The last two packages trickled in today.
This will mean I am much more able to continue with some projects. I’m a little limited on free spending money right now, but the components I need should be local and cheap.
By the way, none of the following was sponsored. All purchased with my own $$$. If any one feels like sending me stuff to review, reach out! 😀
This first item is an External Floppy drive adapter for the Amiga. I plan to use this to add a second drive to my Amiga 1200 when I finally laser cut the box for it. I plan to use the drive that was the internal drive as the second drive. Purchased from Sordan.ie via ebay.
Next up is a pair of PCBs from JLCPCB. The blue one is my own creation. If it works, It’ll plug into a ROM socket on a Microbee and offer 16 different ROM addresses. No idea if it works yet. The theory is pretty simple.
The purple one is an MSX Floppy Drive interface. Can’t wait to get this one assembled! Loading software into the MSX via tape is an exercise in masochism. I will drive this one from a Gotek.
Next up are a pair of Floppy disk controllers. These are for the MSX PCB above. I ordered two in case one was a dud. Now I’m hoping both work. More on that in a bit.
These are 10 27C256 EPROMs. They’re 256 Kilobit roms. 8 KB each. Also purchased for the MSX project. I have no doubt I will find uses for the other 9.
Finally we have the star of the show. This is a Microbee DRAM Core board. These will clip into one of my existing Microbees, upgrading them from 32K to 128K, and also (once populated) add a floppy drive port. This particular core board is out of a Star Network Workstation, so is missing all the floppy drive logic. Guess what? The key chip is the WDC37C65C Floppy drive controller. Have we seen that anywhere? 😀
All in all, there’s only a handful of chips that need adding and a mess of passives. I need to catalog exactly what is missing but i’m hopeful I can either get it all locally.
Once I have it working I plan to add a Gotek to it. After that I think my stash of Goteks will be dry. Oh well. I’ll have to order some more. I got a good run out of the last order of 5.
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