atariman78

Hi everyone. I'm kind of new to these online forums and just created a new account on here. I occasionally check the atariage forums for info on various Atari/Intellivision/Commodore related stuff, very nice website and community you have on here. I've been collecting Atari 2600 stuff since 2001 although I have been a vintage computer/video game collector since probably the late 90's and have a pretty nice sized collection I have grown and added to over the years. I do have an important question that hopefully someone on here can answer or has experienced a similar problem like the one I have encountered. Some 3 years ago I had purchased an Atari Flashback 3 unit at Walmart (think I paid around 30 bucks for it) and I had tested it out for a few minutes and put it back in the box it came in and haven't played with it since until Halloween (10-31-15). I played a few games on it maybe an hour or two per day up until the morning of November 5th. Considering the light use it has had and the fact that its practically a brand new unit, the Atari Flashback 3 console suddenly stopped working while I was playing the game "Adventure". I was on the 2nd level when the dragon had eaten me and the bat kept flying us around the maze of rooms (which I thought was odd but interesting). When I went to reset the game, I saw the usual color bar pattern on the screen that it always displays during power up but it instead made a slight beep sound and went to a black screen instead of the Atari game select menu screen. I tried everything under the sun that I could think of to get it working again, including pressing the "START" and "SELECT" buttons at the same time to view the diagnostics screen (which everything checked out ok), unplugging the joystick, Pressing the power on and off multiple times and to finally unplugging the power to it for several hours. The results were the same....either just a black screen or I would get black and white vertical bars on the screen and/or it would make a continous tone or noise (ironically similar to how the original Atari 2600 would act when you put a defective or dirty game cartridge into the cartridge port). I have the unit hooked up to the composite a/v connections to a working and very reliable Commodore 1702 monitor. Everything appears to be functioning properly except for the fact that the unit will not boot to the Atari menu screen and is otherwise a defective unit. Not sure if there is a fix on this or if anyone else on here has had the same issues with a FB3 or any other Flashback console for that matter. That's about the most detail I can give at this point. If needed I can also take a few photos of the screen and upload them on here when I get around to it. Thanks alot guys.