I made the built-in APE for my 130XE

[Rybags]

After contemplating for weeks, I bit the bullet yesterday. Build time was about 6 hours but I was doing other stuff as well.

 

I based my work on the 7x7 breadboard plan shown here:

 

http://www.fonck.nl/atari/#sio2pc600xl

 

I didn't buy a breadboard, as I had previously pulled apart an ancient serial PC mouse and found the board in that to be near perfect for the job.

 

All that was involved in preparing it was desoldering the IC and other components on the board, and cutting some of the traces.

 

The board even had the capacitor and diode that the project requires, so I used them. All I had to supply was the IC, socket, resistor and lengths of wire.

 

The board has a little 6-pin header which is the same style as a PC floppy power inlet so I used it as the connector to the RS232 9-pin female plug, which I mounted in the Atari 130XE above the SIO port.

 

The board also has a hole in near perfect position so that I could sit it in the Atari, held in place by the plastic post in the upper case piece (I had to shave a bit of the plastic off the post.)

 

 

There's plenty of free space left on the PCB. Initially I was going to trim it down to a minimal size but then decided to leave it as is. I only had to remove about 5mm off the side which is adjacent to the joystick ports. It sits firmly held into place by the plastic post, and I used a heat-glue gun to insulate the solder joints and the RS232 connections.

 

I soldered the wires directly to the base pins of the SIO port, at the back of the motherboard.

 

At the right of the first photo you can see my first mod, which was adding an S-Video and 3.5mm output.

Edited November 26, 2005 by Rybags