Denial

So, these arrived today:
For most of the people that hang out here this is old hat, but I've never done anything like this before. I've hardly ever soldered.

To me, these things look beautiful! Creating a Vic-20 cart is kind of a bucket list thing.

Great...
A bit of advice: tape the sockets into position before you solder them, or else they will be crooked.

Nice!

Looks great, cheers!
Which PCB CAD do you use?

Brad

Radical Brad wrote: Which PCB CAD do you use?

None, I just used the file created by norm8332 from this thread:

http://sleepingelephant.com/ipw-web/bul ... =11&t=8724

I uploaded the file to DirtyPCBs, and voilà, the above appeared in my mailbox.

Floopy wrote:Great...
A bit of advice: tape the sockets into position before you solder them, or else they will be crooked.

I bend pins 14 and 28 instead.

Excellent! They look really snazzy, love the black.

If you're interested in designing your own PCBs, Fritzing is a decent (free, open-source) entry-level PCB design package. http://fritzing.org/ Doesn't have pro features, but it works well enough and is easy to learn.

Schema wrote:Excellent! They look really snazzy, love the black.

Yeah! I was going for sleek.

IT WORKS!

The last component I needed, solder of all things, arrived from Amazon today, so...

I soldered an IC socket and capacitor to one of the new boards. Then I dl'ed Attack of the Mutant Camels from zimmers, deleted the first two bytes and burned it to an eprom with a cheapo eprom programmer. Plugged the eprom into the socket, stuck the card in the slot and turned on the Vic-20. The game loaded right up!

Every piece of this project is something I've never done before. Many thanks to norm8332 for providing the PCB files and all the steps to get them ordered. Thanks also to others who gave tips and advice, I used all of it. I learned a ton from this and it was very satisfying.

Congrats on successfully making your first cart!

Yes, very cool!
I should do this too... where did you get your eprom programmer?

Kweepa wrote:where did you get your eprom programmer?

It's a TL866CS from Amazon, $49.90 with free shipping:
http://a.co/3B31g71

The software is simple to use. I did it in a Windows 10 vm on my Macbook, worked great. I had to manually re-attach the USB device from the VirtualBox menu during the firmware update before it timed out, took me awhile to figure that out. Otherwise, painless.

The software will let you load a file or it will read from a chip. So you could also make copies of a chip with it. Although it programs a ton of eproms, from my reading there's a lot it won't do, but for me it did all I care about so it's perfect.

These boards would look great in a clear cart case. Great job. I've always wanted to do this, but lack the knowledge in doing so.

How much were the pcb's?

cobracon wrote:How much were the pcb's?

It was $40.95 including shipping for 10 boards, 2 carts per board (they break apart). These are ENIG. HASL is cheaper but a raging debate about HASL had started on the forum when I was ordering so I went with ENIG. Gold plating is even more so I stuck with ENIG, they're for my own use anyway.

toby405 wrote:

cobracon wrote:How much were the pcb's?

It was $40.95 including shipping for 10 boards, 2 carts per board (they break apart). These are ENIG. HASL is cheaper but a raging debate about HASL had started on the forum when I was ordering so I went with ENIG. Gold plating is even more so I stuck with ENIG, they're for my own use anyway.

Schyyy, don't mention HASL