A fresh batch of ROMXc+ straight out of the oven, sitting in the stencil printer to cool. The stencil printer is a relatively recent aquisition and uses frameless stencils (which are much cheaper to ship!). It works well and we're getting some really good solder paste prints. In that panel just one of the flash chips has a solder bridge to clean up - the flash chips are 0.5mm pitch so if you have poor solder paste prints you can end up with a lot of bridging.

The stencil printer makes it much easier to work with double sided boards when it comes to applying paste to the second side. This is because the panel is suspended - soldered components on the underside don't interfere with anything while paste is applied to the top. When the panels are designed, we just ensure that there are tooling holes in the corners which locate over the corner posts on the stencil printer. There are also additional posts placed strategically on the grid under the panel to support it while applying the solder paste.

Top side we have the 4Mbit flash chip and battery holder and on the underside we have the RTC (real time clock) circuitry on the left, and the CPLD (complex programmable logic device) on the right. These ROMXc+ boards are awaiting installation of the pins, recovery jumper, ROM-Link header, MMU-Link flex cable, and programming.

Speaking of programming, the flash image is almost sorted (I just noticed that I messed up the position of the acceleration setting (&Ax) and system ROM link (&Sx) on the Memory Test in slot D when manually editing the flash binary image - I will fix this now!).

We defaulted to ROM 5X, but the stock image is there also, and you can easily change the default via the S)et Default Boot Image menu item. Plenty of empty slots for custom images, and of course you can totally customise the ROM image selection as you see fit. This is just a starting point to get you up and running :)