So I had a few hours to look at the Falcon I bought several weeks ago.
I'd been putting it off as I was dealing with other machines and thought this old bird might need a bit of work to get going again but with my SGI Indy now gleaming and working A1 I decided to make some space and pull apart Atari's last stand...
The first thing I noticed was an extra port someone had added to the back above the DSP port:
FullSizeRender%2039.jpg
I had noticed this in the original ad, and could have sworn there was a black rocker switch there...
But it's not there now and the fact the plastic around it hasn't yellow has me firmly believing the seller removed something in the week between me contacting him and actually picking it up. What would be worth removing from an old machine you have't used in nearly 20 years? Hmm....
After pulling it apart I took a good look at the motherboard and my eye jumped to this:
FullSizeRender 43.jpg
FullSizeRender 42.jpg
FullSizeRender 41.jpg
That cannot be factory can it?! I mean, I know Atari love their production line bodges but this would take the bakery, never mind the cake...
Anyone know what this is?
EDIT: I checked and found it's the clock patch.
I then had a look at the capacitors and they all looked ok with the exception of the area near these two under the PSU, specifically where 1 of their legs attaches to the motherboard, looks a bit ratty but then soldering at Atari's factory was never that good...
FullSizeRender 40.jpg
FullSizeRender 38.jpg
Plus this component in the PSU?
FullSizeRender 36.jpg
Everything else looked ok, the hard drive was completely dead so I replaced it with an IDE->CF and a 4GB SanDisk Ultra card.
HDDriver 10.02 found the card, I created 8x 512MB partitions, rebooted, it found them again, installed HDDriver to C and rebooted and....
HDDriver didn't seem to run as the machine was determined to boot only from floppy...
So booted again from floppy with HDDriver and drive and partitions found again...
Then I accidentally noticed that
if I went to Desktop Info to get the GEM dialog about box up, the machine crashed with 2 bombs and some floppy activity.
Rebooted with floppy, tried again and same thing happened.
Tried rebooting with the HDDriver floppy but no IDE device connected, same problem.
Tried rebooting with IDE device connected but
no HDDriver, just a bare boot, no problem.
Thought maybe there was an issue with the CF Card adapter etc so grabbed a known good 2.5" 10GB drive from an old iBook.
Exactly the same behaviour, 2 bombs when trying to to Desktop Info
This leads me to wonder if there is a problem with HDDriver 10.02?
It works fine on my TT though...
So I wondered if there was a memory issue, but YAART runs through fine.
So I wondered if there was an issue with the ROM chip? But Gembench does all its stuff calling routines just fine.
So finally I'm left wondering if a dead NVRAM can cause these issues?
i.e. the not booting from HDD?
Not sure how the HDDriver causes a problem with the Desktop Info box mind...
The NVRAM must be dead for sure, after all it sat unused for 20 years and I was thinking the NVRAM is where the referred screen res is stored?
Although I can switch out from low to 640x480x256 no problem, it doesn't remember it on reboot, although granted I didn't save the desktop...
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.