This is my Atari 400 computer:I bought it in, I think, 1983. It was the second computer I ever bought (the first was a COSMAC ELF single board computer I got in 1981). Man! What a difference! The ELf only had 256 bytes of memory and the Atari had 16K. The ELF had crappy B&W graphics and the Atari had full blown color graphics. I was thrilled. Along with the Atari I bought a cassette recorder, a BASIC cartridge. and a Defender cartridge. I already bought a color TV the year before (a 12" TV from Sears) and so I was ready to hook up the computer as soon as I got home.Not long after getting the Atari, I performed my first hack. The long RF cable attached to the back of the Atari was getting on my nerves. Whenever I moved the computer around I had to wrap it around the case and I was constantly tripping over the damned thing. It was pissing me off. So I rummaged through my electronics stuff, found the right parts and got to work. I popped off the case, cut the cord and soldered it to a female RCA plug I mounted on the case. Here is the result:I connected a male RCA plug to the cord I cut and it worked, more or less. A little flaky but it was fine until I acquired another RF cable.During my first year with the Atari I was either playing cartridge games or hand typing programs from magazines and saving them on cassette. That all changed when I got a well paying job in the late spring. A month later I had enough money to buy a disk drive and I bought the Astra 2000 dual floppy drive. The thing is, a 16K Atari 400 doesn't do so good with a disk drive. Alrhough I had enough money for a disk drive, I didn't have enough money for a disk drive AND an Atari 800. So the best alternative was a memory upgrade. The thing is, a memory upgrade on a 400 isn't a simple thing like that on an 800. You can't just replace boards, you have to hack the computer a little.So, once again, I cracked open the computer case. After that the first thing I did was pull out the old 16K RAM board and put in the new 64K board. I also pulled out a 16 pin chip in front of the RAM and replace it with a socket connected, via ribbon cable, to the 64K board. I wasn't done yet. There was one more part connected to the board that had to be soldered to the other side of the Atari's motherboard:Click here to see image.I put everything back together, hooked up the disk drive and tested it out. It worked just fine. The memory board even came with a sticker showing the graphic keys on the Atari keyboard. I put it on top of my 400 and it served me well over the years:Click here to see image. My psuedo-Atari 800 worked pretty much like the real 800 except for one thing: the keyboard. With the disk drive in place I was typing in even more programs from magazines and I was getting pretty tired of typing on that crappy membrane keyboard. Heck, I was tired of it the previous year when I typed in smaller programs and saved them on cassette. Other then buying an Atari 800, which I still couldn't afford, I couldn't figure out a solution to the problem. That is, I couldn't until I found this book in the bookstore:"The Creative Atari" by the editors of Creative Computing magazine. The book listed the best articles about Atari computers culled from their magazine during the past few years. The best article in the book was the one about replacing the membrane keyboard with a real keyboard. At last, my prayers were answered. I bought a decent keyboard from Jameco Electronics and started work right away. The first thing I did was connect a DB-25 plug to the keyboard pins on the Atari motherboard. It was impractical to remove and replace the old membrane keyboard because the new keyboard wouldn't fit into the case. That's why I had the DB-25 connector and I would plug in the new keyboard only when I needed it. When I was playing video games on the Atari, the new keyboard would be in the way and I would simply unplug it and put it away.Here's a shot of the DB-25 connected to the keyboard via ribbon cable:I didn't like having to stretch the cable across the width of the case but I had no choice: there was no room on the other side.Here are some detail shots of the solder work on the connector and the keyboard pins:Lots of connections, lots of soldering and many hours of work.Wiring the keyboard was a lot of work too. The diagram in the book laid out the wiring in a complicated grid pattern and I spent a lot of time testing the connections with a multimeter.I still needed buttons for the START, SELECT, OPTIONS and RESET keys and I solved that qucikly by cannabilizing a keyboard I got from mail order house (I originally planned to use this keyboard for my Atari but the Jameco one was a better fit).I decided to improve the keyboard design by adding a keypad. I already had a keypad built for another project and it was a simple matter to attach it to the other keyboard.Here's a picture of the completed keyboard without a case:As you can see, for the keys that didn't match the Atari layout, I stuck on some masking tape and wrote a label on them. Crude, but it did the job.Here's what the underside of the keyboard looks like:As you can see, the keypad is hooked up to a printed circuit board (PCB) and it's connected to the cable via an edge connector. Before my Atari project I etched the PCB myself and soldered the keypad to it. I can't remember what I originally planned the keypad for but I'm glad I did; it saved me a lot of time when I had to type in line numbers for the many BASIC programs I entered. Unfortunately I didn't have enough of the blank PCB for the main keyboard and I was too cheap to buy more. So I just hand wired the main keyboard.The case for the keyboard was made out of some scrap styrofoam I found. I improved it's looks by putting some wood grained contact paper on it. The finished product looked crappy and it was pretty flimsy but served my needs for two or three years until I bought an Atari 800 computer.The styrofoam case is long gone because I decided to replace the case with something more substantial. I found a couple keyboards at Goodwill and electronic surplus stores, gutted them and tried to install my keyboard. I wasn't too successful and I eventually gave up when I got the Atari 800.Here's a shot of the keyboard in the case that seemed to fit the best:Someday I might finish installing the keyboard in a different case (or build one myself) but I'm not highly moitivated at the moment.Overall I am quite satisfied with my Atari hacks. They allowed me to get a lot of use out of the computer without having to spend a lot of money.