So I've been trying all day to get one of my 800s to work but I'm encountering problems I've never seen before.
I connected the computer to the TV and to the powersupply, scanned for a channel and got one. However it only displays a black screen, very strange since the LED is lighting up and everything seems right, however, no memo pad just a black screen. I put in a BASIC cartridge, no change still black screen. I change to a "Basketball" cartridge and now it lights up! Everything looks right and I can start a game by pressing "Start", however I don't have a joystick handy so that's as far as my testing goes. But it looks great. So I turn off the Atari and puts in Qix, black screen..... Centipede, black screen, I try about ten more games and they all give me a black screen apart from Basketball which seems to work great. I have, of course, cleaned all the games thoroughly but that hasn't helped. Eventually I take off the top of the Atari to take a look at the memory modules. As expected there are tre 16K Ataribranded RAM cards but where I usually find an Ataribranded ROM card there's one marked "Atari 800S1" and "Elektroniktjänst Åkersberga" bland annat. I suspect that's a swedish ROM and that it's failed for one reason or another since I get no memo pad? The big question in my mind is why doesn't any games apart from Basketball work (or to a lesser degree, why the heck does Basketball work? )?
Is it possible to run the 800 on a single RAM cart (or does all the slots need to be populated)? My thought was that you could run the computer on a single module to see if one of the RAM modules are malfunctioning.