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The Stacy
Click on image for more detail
After you have opened the LCD screen...
...You need to unscrew the two pivot hinges. The one pictured above is the right hand one (looking from the back) that has a spring around it. Don't worry about the spring, its not under load. The left hand pivot hinge is plastic and has the screen's cables running through it. You should now have enough room to pull of the top of the main case and get to the sheilding.
What you see when you manage to get it open
You can see the keyboard, trackball, and drive assembly. The cables from the monitor pass through the sheilding to the motherboard. Be careful with those.
After you remove the shielding
Sitting on the motherboard you can see the power supply in the middle to the left, and the ACSI=>SCSI converter in the middle to the right. The long thin board that sits underneath the keyboard, has the keyboard interface, TOS chips and memory. See below.
The otherside of the keyboard interface
You can clearly see the keyboard processor (which is built into the keyboard in other ST models), the two EPROMS holding TOS 1.4 (which are on two 271001's), the exisiting 2MB memory, and the 30pin SIPP sockets to put in another 2MB.
The ACSI=>SCSI host adapter
This card converts the existing ACSI (Atari Computer System Interface) to the SCSI standard. The card however is limited in that it only supports SCSI 1, can handle only one drive attached at a time (and a low power one at that!), and only the first gigabyte of the drive will be seen. There is a modification you can do to be able to attach two drives, but this of little use in the Stacy.
Compare it to the MegaSTe's host adapter...
Apart from the dip-switches being different colours I cannot see a difference between the two. One card is a Rev 2, the other a Rev 3. I haven't tried it but I figure that they're interchangeable.
The Trackball
This has got to be the best engineered trackball in existence. The shafts and encoding wheels are steel not plastic. If my Stacy ever gets broken beyond repair I will take this unit out for use in my arcade machine...
The Batteries
The battery idea just didn't work in the Stacy - the machine eats too much juice... Originally it was intended that you would be able to run the Stacy off 12 normal dry 'C' cells, as well as a lead acid cell that was sold with the earlier units, which would have been great. I heard reports that the machine lasted about 15-20 minutes before it died. After that, no Stacys were sold with battery packs. The connectors for the batteries are still there on the motherboard. Pins 1,3 are +, 2,4 are - and 5 doesnt seem to be connected. Maybe modern battery technology will mean that battery operation is not necessarily a dead option. The Yellow bordered disk is a 3v backup battery for the clock.
The MegaBus
The MegaBus is an expansion connector that was first seen on the Mega ST range of computers. Early Stacys had a socket here for it, and I believe also an access slot in the left side case. On my motherboard the holes are there for it. I may fit a socket, if I can find any MegaBus cards that I could use...
Jumpers J12 and J13
I dont know what these are for, if anyone can enlighten me. (Anyone have Stacy schematics?).
Ability to have two Floppy Disk Drives
Instead of having 1 Floppy Disk and 1 Hard Disk drive you could have 2 Floppy Drives. I don't know how many Stacys were sold with 2 Floppy units, but I guess it wasn't many.
The SCSI => IDE Bridge
The first step in fitting a Compact Flash Hard disk. I bought this converter in the hope that it would work, but as its designed for ATAPI CD drives I wasnt that hopeful. Its a little bit wider than the 3.5" drive bay of the TT, but there should be enough room for it.
Testing with an IDE Hard Disk
This is one of two 10gb Hard Drives I have taken out of Xboxes, sitting on top of the Stacy's Hard Drive cradle. Its all plugged in and ready to go. The other drive has been working flawlessly in my Falcon for over a year. I know 10gb is overkill for the Stacy, but this is just a proof of concept test anyway. If this doesnt work, then its unlikely to work with a CF card. I did remember that the Stacy's host adapter does not like termination on the drive, so the IDE adapter has that jumper removed.
Close up of the converter in action
I found that the orginal Stacy SCSI cable has TWO notches on each plug instead of the usual centre one. I had to dig around in my spares box for another. Its either that or cut some holes in the converter's SCSI socket.
Did it work?
Here you can see the IDE hard drive ID from the CBHD tool. It shows up as ACSI because the IDE drive is connected to the SCSI bus through the converter, which is connected to the ACSI bus through the Stacy's internal SCSI adapter card. I did try AHDI at first, but didnt have any success, though im not sure I exhausted every avenue with the configuration.
After partitioning and back to the desktop...
Now we have a 32mb partition. Will it boot though? Well I didn't forget to copy the CBHD.PRG (as .SYS) to the C Drive before I booted, which is a common mistake.
And its boots...
Very quickly as well, a lot quicker than AHDI does on the 20mb drive. You can get it to boot even quicker if you turn off the search on each ACSI ID in the driver.
Hmm how many 32mb partitions can we get into 10gb??? :-S
Next step: Trying the CF card with an IDE => CF converter...
...I sold the Stacy so you'll have to try this yourself. HDDriver 8.2 recommended! :-)