Friday, November 4, 2016

A600: Paula NMI Piggyback adapter

Hi my friends.

Recently I got a message from my friend highpuff that he created an NMI adapter for A1200 that piggybacks to Paula!
I was amazed since I didn't knew that the IPL0, IPL1 and IPL2 signals that were needed for NMI header were also available on Paula as well!

Yesterday I got a package on my mailbox out of the blue sky...



OMG, I was really happy that Highpuff sent me one kit for testing it on my beefy A600!
After all... Paula on A1200 and A600 are the same so why wouldn't it work?

Here's the adapter on it's full glory...




Really simple design but elegant and effective!
Time to remove my floppy dual drive combo, and plug the adapter to Paula.
Once it was ready, and switch was put in the adapter header it was time to give it a spin!



Hohohoho! After some custom kickstart fun, just pushing the button gives us HRTMon 2.36 (even from Early Startup Menu! Awesomeness!



For some people who will simple say... WTF is that, it's an Action Replay clone that can give some info and alter some address in RAM for hacking some stuff.

ACA630 had an NMI adapter by default that I showed in the past as well, but since Vampire doesn't have an NMI header the only solution to get the signals so far, was to get the signals from Vampire's Piggyback 68k socket (not something for the fainthearted doing).
Getting the header from another IC is a really awesome solution without affecting at all the rest of the setup. Good thing also is that the adapter is really low profile and doesn't mess with the height of the floppy drive (even my dual drive combo sat really well) and case closed just fine :)


Thanks a lot highpuff my friend... You rock!