exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

The purpose of this board is to alleviate the problem of having to physically twist the cable and using a more modern MPF920 1.44mb floppy drive. It also solves the problem of having to dismantle the drive to alter the drive ID select such as shown HERE. You can simply drop in a PC drive and it will work! also as noted HERE in the mandatorily fixes that the 1772 needs pull-up resistors to function correctly and these are also included on this board! So you no longer have to do but resistors on top of the inverter chip as it is all included on board!


NOTE - While you can use a 1.44 floppy drive, this board does not add 1.44 support. You need a kit like THIS ONE to add support for 1.44 floppies.

NOTE - This board is intended to use the MPF920 drive only. In theory any drive should work, but the physical location of the power connector will likely be a issue. As such, I do not officially support any drives but the MPF920.

NOTE - You have to pass the power through the board because the resistors need the 5 V rail for the pullups to work.. So you cannot simply connect the power direct to the floppy drive as before.

THE KIT

1 PCB populated with SMT pull up resistors. 2 x connectors.



STORE LINK

https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/atari/store2/#0208

INSTALL GUIDE

MPF920 is the drive which should be used and is available in my store HERE

Place a tough piece of card or ideally thin plastic as illustrated below. The strip should go a little more to the left than illustrated in the image, to go over the PSU connector as well.


Cut your floppy power lead Leaving about 1 inch of wire still connected to the connector itself. Then strip and tin the wires as illustrated below.


Solder the connectors as illustrated below.

The other black connector solders on the back of the PCB, forgot to take a image sorry!


Solder the motherboard power cable as shown below..


Then simply plug it all in and done!



STE MODIFICATION

The STE has DRIVE B: select on the internal cable, so pin 12 track needs to be cut... (track is the one which goes to the via hole)

Think the only issue I can think of this this is for those of us with an STe (or other systems with both drive selects on the internal cable), who'll no longer get asked to insert disk B: into drive A:

DaveC wrote: ↑Tue Jan 12, 2021 7:15 am Think the only issue I can think of this this is for those of us with an STe (or other systems with both drive selects on the internal cable), who'll no longer get asked to insert disk B: into drive A:

Never thought of drive B being on the same cable...

Oh the fekers it does have B: select on the STE pin 12 ..


Doesn't on the STFM..


EDIT2:

So on the STE, I verified that the contents of B: were reading from A: . So that would be a issue on the STE.. so I will cut the track..

EDIT3:

Yeah that was the problem!

Does the Falcon also need the cable flipper to use the MPF920 drive ?

theSPY wrote: ↑Mon Jul 01, 2024 11:22 am Does the Falcon also need the cable flipper to use the MPF920 drive ?

The falcon already uses a 1.44 drive, the "flip" is because of moving from 720K to 1.44 drives.