.Markku Reunanen.

Le Thomson et le HxC

January 6th, 2013

Another victory for HxC, even if a narrow one this time. I managed to connect the floppy emulator to my Thomson TO8 and even load some files. The plug is a bit problematic big 14-pin DIN, but luckily the same connector was used on Atari ST for external floppy. Thus, I bought an ST cable off eBay and butchered it for a good cause. The original instructions can be found here, but in case the forum disappears I’ll mirror them here together with the ST cable colors. On the left the Thomson pin numbers and on the right the flat cable:

• 1 (green) – 16
• 2 (yellow) – 24
• 3 (blue) – 2
• 4 (orange) – 32
• 5 (purple) – 26
• 6 (red) – 22
• 7 (cyan) – 30
• 8 (brown) – 18
• 9 (black and white) – 28
• 10 (black) – 20
• 11 (brown and white) – 8
• 12 (pink) – 12
• 13 (white) – 34
• 14 (gray) – 10

In addition the odd pins of the flat cable should be grounded. Like the original author, I used the ground of the audio output, since in my setup the audio is transferred through the SCART cable anyway.

Some images work, some not. I’m so green with Thomson that I can’t really pinpoint whether it’s a question of the HxC, a bad cable or the image conversion. The normal tool seems to convert .sap and .fd images, but not all of them are created equal. For example, one .fd I found seemed to be double sided. Need to dig deeper into it at some point.

Filed under: laitteet,retro