A600: Replacing internal HxC SD with Gotek HxC on my beast

Hey my friends.

Some months ago (and haven't found the reason yet) my internal HxC SD stopped working (LCD screen wasn't working and no sound was coming from buzzer.
After removing everything, I made a continuity test on whole board (comparing it with another HxC SD that I have) but still couldn't find anything wrong. HxC SD gets voltage but something is shortcircuiting and gives issues but I didn't have enough appetite atm to troubleshoot it more.

After seeing about Gotek and HxC's firmware adaptation by Jeff, I decided to give it a go :)

I ordered 2x Goteks (one in black and one in grey) and after getting the HxC licence from Jeff, I flashed both replacing the Cortex firmware.

Now it was time to give a spin on attaching a test 16x2 LCD screen (normal size) and an extra button to see if firmware was working as intended and Presto! The extra cheap I2C controller I got from eBay works lovely :)

In order to give a try on a test mini LCD screen I had once more to wire carefully from the ribbon connector to the I2C module (irritating job but someone's gotta do it).
After some time of soldering carefully, experiment was successful!

Now it was time for some case and Gotek modding. First of all my dear friend Dremel was used to remove the front fascia from the Gotek case...

Then everything was removed and the mod of slimming down the Gotek in order to be slim enough for the slim floppy drive to attach above it... started :)

After some time, the 2x caps were placed on the side, the board headers were removed, and also the USB connector and buttons were removed as well.
Good thing is that it still was working so yey! You can see it's more slim now :)

I also made the buzzer mod and glued it in place along with all the other components.
Drive was also attached above the unit carefully after many tried of measuring and testing on the real Amiga. I also attached the extra dual drive adapter in the best position I could.

On this detail view you can see in the lower left corner of the Gotek case, a cut I made with the Dremel in order to put the buzzer as far back as I could (including the needed transistor lol). Buzzer was also Dremeled a little in order for the upper motor of slim floppy to be as back as it should.

Here's the front side with the USB plug re-positioned in order to match the cut on A600 upper shell (where the original eject button was).

Just for means of WTF you can see the lower side of the whole mod (the cable coming underneath is the HxC buttons (Next, Previous, Enter) that are position on the lower A600 shell so I wanted a connector in order to remove the drive whenever I wanted.
The back dual drive adapter is attached via strong glue and some solid plastics

This is a classic overall mod on the internal of the case showing everything.
You can also see now the replacing of my Subway with a RapidRoad USB. Yes, you saw correctly that I'm not using the default mini connector of A604n's clockport as it wasn't easy to fit with the drive combo and also was really close to the HDMI connector of Vampire V2.
custom clockport cable was stripped and made rounded, in order to position RapidRoad a bit more right to the case and everything's now works as it should leaving space to HDMI connector as well!!!

Case closed for now. Everything's is now working as plan once again!!! Phew \o/

Last but not least, a screenshot of my loved A600 running latest SILVER5 core on Vampire V2 using a resolution of 1360x768 on P96. Awesome stuff indeed!

Stay tuned for more tests in the following days/weeks :)

A600: Mounting HxC & Floppy Internally (Part 4)

Hey my friends...

After my last article about my dual floppy internal mod I had two more mods in order to finalize this project.

The first was to do something about the slim floppy's eject button that was really small and didn't give enough room to press it. Also it needed some alteration to the case in order to be able to push it :)

So... I took the eject button and attached it to a spare beige floppy button from a PC drive that I had lying around. With some instant glue and hotglue for the rest... it was easy.

The result was really nice as you can see. This is how it looks when there is no floppy inside...

...and this is how it looks when the floppy is inside. You can see that the eject button is inline with the original eject button that now hosts the MicroSD card as you saw on my previous article.

The hard part now as always is to cut the upper case, in order for the eject button to be usable :)

Hard it was due to the fact that you can't use a dremel as the area is really tight and because there is the plastic from the floppys hole's lower part that gets in the way.

Lots of cautious cutting and sanding and this is how it went.

Not bad at all. After attaching the upper to the lower case this is how it looks when no floppy is inserted...

...and this is how it looks a floppy disk inserted.

From the side this is the whole picture of the mods. Both eject buttons one of which is the MicroSD slot and the lock switch :)

The first mod was done and the only mod in order for the project to be finalized was the LCD screen mounting.

I left this task for the end because I wanted to think about it a lot as cutting the upper case was always the worst thing as it's something that is always viewable. Something ugly or not properly mounted would cause me grief (LOL).

So... after measuring exactly where to put the LCD horizontal-wise (not to interfere with the lower side and the HxC-Floppy combo, I needed to find the best vertical alignment for best visual feeling.

My measuring showed that the cut I needed to do, had the same height as the A600 logo alas I thought about putting it EXACTLY at the same orientation verticaly! That was it :)

I made the necessary markings with a pencil...

...and then I begin cutting with a blade as dremeling was kind risky for melting the plastic as it's a 3mm height.

After a lot of effort... the cut was done. You can see the initial cut without any sanding.

Some may have noticed it, some may not... but as everyone makes mistakes... I cut by mistake a small area next to the upper right of the cut... You can see it by flash but still is annoying. I tried to cover it as much I could but still is noticeable with a flash or bright light. Not something too important but annoying nontheless. I might give it some try with a dremel and some soft brush but for now I'll leave as it is (Grrrr).

Anyway... in the meantime, I ordered a Plexi Glass from a nearby store as I wanted a laser cut of exactly 3.9x1.3mm (and 3mm thickness) as I wanted to fill the hole of the cut. The plexi glass was ready the next day so I sanded the cut as much as it required for the plexi glass to fit nicely! What a pain in the butt that was!!!
This was the final cut ready for the plexi glass to be mounted.

After applying some careful drops of instant glue I attached the plexi glass on the case and it fitted like a glove!

Because the LCD screen has a black frame by default, I didn't like how it would look underneath the plexi glass so I thought about spraying it with a light beige color. I had a spray ready from my A4000 custom bezel and this is how the frame turned out after 2 coats of spray. Of course I dismantled the whole LCD in parts (I didn't think it would play after this but I had a spare one so I had to try).

After everything was ready and the spray was dry, I hotglued carefully the LCD in place.

And VOILA! This is how the LCD looks now :)

I wanted to try it as soon as possible so AT LAST I wanted to close the case! The keyboard ribbon was put in place and then the custom LCD connector was attached to the LCD screen.

Case closed and I fired up the miggy!!! W00h00!

Everything worked like a charm and I was a happy man! Mission accomplished after a month of work :)
You can see now how it looks completed

Even the plastic protector had room for the Slim floppy's eject button (this was by pure luck as I was thinking to also mod the case). Awesome stuff!

This concludes this custom mod for fitting internally both an HxC SD floppy emulator and a slim floppy drive.

I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

HxC SD: Mounting a tiny LCD and slimming it down

Hey my friends.

Since a really long time (long before HxC Rev.F and Slim Edition), I wanted to take my Rev.C HxC SD Floppy emulator and slim it down as much as possible in order to make it moddable for my taste :)
The one thing I didn't like much was the big (lol) LCD screen that occupied a lot of space.

While searching the bay, I managed to get a really Tiny 16x2 LCD Screen that was really nice for my needs but instead of having pins, it had a ribbon as it's meant for embedded projects.

I don't mind though, as I also got a connector to wire it.
As you can see from the picture below... the size difference is definitely noticeable compared with the default 16x2 LCD screen of HxC SD :)

In order to use this LCD screen, I needed to short 2 of the opened jumper locations as I saw from the online   datasheet.

After carefully wiring the connector for the ribbon... SUCCESS I had :)

As I said before, I wanted to slim the HxC SD down so I decided to unsolder the PIC and IC sockets in order to gain some height space. It was a really boring procedure but nothing one man can't do with a bit o patience :)
Since I'm not the best in unsoldering with the El'Cheapo desoldering pump that I own, I managed to loose connection from 3 lines, which after a continuity test, managed to find from nearby lines so no problem at that! (Thank God to my 1st Rev.B to Rev.C HxC SD which helped me find the missing tracks.)
After unsoldering the LCD Header (after my successfull experiment) I soldered the wires from the tiny LCD connector directly to HxC and also hotglued a tiny pcb juts to hold the wires together not to get cut.
I also unsoldered the Drive selection jumpers and short the pins where a jumper for assigne DF0 would have been :)

You can see here the cable connection and the unsoldered PIC and IC :)

Ok, I was happy with the result, but more stuff needed to get out of the way to gain some height space as well. Obstacles were:

• The 34pin floppy connector
• The mini buzzer
• The LCD contrast trimmer
• The 3x PCB mounted buttons
• The molex floppy power connector

Ok lets get these things one by one shall we?

The 34pin floppy connector

First of all I removed the plastic rectangle that surrounds the pins as I didn't care :)

then I bent all the pins with pliers 90 degrees. Bending one-by-one was such a BORING procedure that required a bit of attention but had to be done :(

Once might ask... WHY haven't you desoldered the header and solder an angled dual row pin connector instead? Well... firstly because I was afraid of doing some damage with desoldering, but most important that I saw that the angled double row pins had more height that I wanted.

Anyway... after bending the pins, I soldered a dual row of pins to the bent pins and everything was nice and firm :)

The mini buzzer

The buzzer is rather small, but still it has some height I didn't like. I decided to unsolder it and attach it via hotglue to the back of the unit in the middle between the lower and upper part of the PCB :) That made it a lot lower than before.

The LCD contrast trimmer

That bugger has some great height due to big leg pins. I desolder teh bastard quickly and as I measured it, there was no need to reattach it elsewhere, so I just soldered a fixed resistor value that worked great with my LCD as there was no way of putting another screen than the one I currently own.

The 3x PCB mounted buttons.

Despite being ok, the position of these 2 buttons didn't suit my needs not to mention their height was out of the question as well, so they had to go. I unsoldered these as well, and rewired them to an external mini PCB that I can put whenever I want.

The molex floppy power connector

This was too easy. I just use pliers to remove the plastic insulation of the connector alas I got some exposed pins that I will use in the future with a flat female connector :)

After all this work I tested everything but the LCD screen didn't show much stuff :O WTF. I was really sad.

AFTER a long time testing to see what I did wrong, I found that one pin of the LCD screen wasn't making a firm connection with one of the PIC pins so I just wired a bridge underneath and everything was fine as well :) I so, unglued the mini pcb and resoldered the wires once again, hotgluing them directly to the PCB and now everything worked as it should without issues!

Here you can see some pics of the whole custom work.

Just as a comparison with the original unit, I'll present some photos from my 1st Rev.B to Rev.C HxC SD. Don't take in mind the custom PCB with the RAM module that converts the board from Rev.B to Rev.C just see the whole PCB and compare :)

Not bad aye? Just tested it by:

• Playing Hybris using Kickstart 1.3 + Disabled ACA
• Loading WB using Kickstart 3.1 + Enabled ACA

No problem so far.

Good to know I have a modded HxC SD for future mods... :)

Stay tuned

A600: Mounting HxC's LCD screen + buttons

Since I got some time tonight...

I thought about finishing AT LAST the buttons for HxC mod inside my A600.
Was a tough call since many spots were available but usability was something I really wanted without looking bad.

First of all I soothed with my Dremel some surface of upper case on the back after marking the spots needed. (Wanted to put screen even closer since I didn't like the previous long gap).



I also dremeled some of the keyboards metal backplate in speciffic area for the same reason as above.





Aye! It fitted like a glove! Hotglued the LCD screen plus the mini custom PCB with the buttons that I bought extra, and voila!




And some last exterior pictures...





Looking good doesn't it