themrfreeze

Congrats Al....you've lived and breathed Atari since well before AtariAge ever existed and I'm glad you're finally getting the recognition and opportunities you deserve!

I had a loved one who passed from cancer, geez, 7 years ago now. The doctors stopped feeding her, and when we asked why, they said all it was doing was feeding the cancer. We were like "on top of dying a miserable death at a young-ish age, you're going to make them die with an empty growling stomach?" and made them start feeding her again. Unbelievable.

If you're still looking let me know...I have a TI-99 I picked up a few years ago in working condition, complete with power supply, TV hookups, and some number of cartridges up in the attic. Bought it on a whim, have no real use for it, would be happy to see it go to a good home.

Hi all. This may seem like the weirdest request ever but I'm looking for two common 2600 carts, Circus Atari and Championship Soccer (or Pele's Soccer). My copies of these no longer work so I bought new copies from two different sellers on eBay, and BOTH OF THOSE CARTS DON'T WORK EITHER. Tested them in both my 2600 Jr. and 7800, tried cleaning them, etc. Unbelievable. I don't really care which labels the carts have, just as long as they work. If you have them and you KNOW they work (lol), please let me know. Thanks!

I'm the guy who most likely built that Black Box ? If I remember correctly the early Black Boxes used a 7-pin power connector but there were problems with people connecting them up wrong and damaging their BB, so we switched over to the 4 (or is it 5?) pin connector that could only be installed one way. Somebody mentioned a difference in the color of the PCB. Bob sourced the PCBs from two different companies, one in Chicago and one in Canada. The Chicago boards had thinner traces that occasionally caused us problems so he switched to the Canadian company who did a much better job in this regard. IIRC the Canadian boards were a darker, more matte shade of green. I don't recall ever using yellow LEDs on BBes...only red and green. As for the cases, the black plastic case had to be removed if you had a Floppy Board....there's not enough room in it if you have both. Producing a case that would hold both was not an option...the basic BB cases cost Bob a fortune and I'm fairly certain he sold them at cost. As for batches, there were a LOT of batches of BB/FBs. If you're looking for rare, the earliest Floppy Boards had a serial number sticker on them so I could tell what batch they were from (in case there were any tech issues). I don't remember exactly what nomenclature I used for the coding of the serial number but I'd love to see a pic of one after all these years! It's hard for me to believe that something I was involved with all those years ago is now considered an Atari "holy grail" item. Makes me wish I had stashed some of them away in my attic or something. ?

HI all. I'm thinning out my modest collection of vintage games/computers to focus on Atari stuff. As such I'll be putting a few systems up for sale, starting with my Colecovision. The system comes with the power supply, the Roller Controller accessory, and 16 loose cartridges: Carnival Cosmic Avenger Donkey Kong Front Line Gorf Ladybug Looping Mouse Trap Popeye Smurf Rescue in Gargamel's Castle Star Trek: SOS Time Pilot Slither Victory War Room Zaxxon Everything is tested and works perfectly (the Zaxxon cart's opening is slightly warped for some reason and you have to jiggle the cart a little for it to seat, but all the rest are "normal"). I'm happy to provide pics or even a video of the equipment in action, but given the age of this system, it's being sold as-is. Based on what I saw on eBay it looks like $175 plus shipping is a reasonable price, so that's what I'm asking. Payment can be made by PayPal or if you want to go really old school, a postal money order. I prefer to use FedEx for shipping as I have easy access to it at work, but if you provide a USPS or UPS shipping label I can arrange to drop off the package with them. Shipping is available to US addresses only...apologies to those of you outside of the US. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. Thanks!

Look who's here...my favorite BBS SysOp ever! I *think* only Bob and Moose ran his software. I used to work for Bob and (vaguely) remember how things were all set up. I seem to recall he had two phone lines (one public, one private) that dialed into his BBS system and two (maybe three) 800XLs connected together via the Multiplexer hardware CSS sold. It resided in a spare bedroom in his house and was the most disorganized pile of equipment I think I've ever seen, but damned if it didn't all work. For its day it was a pretty impressive system, considering he basically created all of the software and hardware himself.

The drives with the wide angular eject button were made by Chinon and known for their unreliability. Replacing faulty Chinon drives with something like an Epson (with the small rectangular eject button) was relatively common back in the day (I know I replaced a few myself). Requires modification of the top case though. I dug my 520ST out of the attic a few weeks ago and the Chinon in the SF354 external drive was faulty. I have a few Epsons that work, but wound up installing a Lotharek SD card floppy emulator instead. Works great.

The CSS office (when Bob owned the company) was in the basement of the family house...he lived upstairs. Bob's family was a close-knit religious family...he lived with his parents and possibly one sibling (I forget now) in their house when I was working for him. I believe his father has passed away, not sure about his mom....haven't talked to him in years. Regarding Bob as a person (and keeping in mind that I worked for him from '89-'93 or so and that's what I'm basing this on), he was a good guy. I can understand why somebody might say he was eccentric, as he was pretty religious and also certainly would be considered an introvert. That doesn't make somebody a bad person at heart though, which Bob certainly was not. I *never* had a problem with how he treated me, nor did I ever personally see him being a dick to anybody. You also have to keep in mind that back then, CSS was his sole source of income, so of course he would be protective of his work. I'm sure that might come across badly if he felt "threatened" by somebody and reacted accordingly, but I'm sure all small businesspeople are like that to some extent. As far as I know he's still self-employed, which may explain his hesitance to spend time trying to dig up old CSS stuff instead of tending to his current business.

The black modules contain some number of ICs, stacked on top of each other, with pins from some soldered to others and some jumper wires connecting others. Then there are the external cables soldered to other pins. I don't remember for sure, but I think the most complicated module had 4 ICs in it. Don't recall any discrete components being in there either.

The early Black Box PCBs (made for us by a company in Chicago) were more prone to this problem than the later ones that were made by a Canadian company. The Chicago boards had thinner traces on them...so thin that sometimes there would be breaks in them that couldn't be seen with the naked eye. We didn't find those until I had spent 2 hours building the BB and it failed testing. By the time the Floppy Board came to market, we weren't sourcing anything from Chicago, so there were no problems with PCB quality. As such, I blame your desoldering skills. And +1 on the suggestion to cut the pins and desolder them one at a time. Set the board on its edge, use a pencil-tipped soldering iron on the bottom side to melt the solder, and a pair of needlenose pliers on the other side to pull the pin out once the solder softens.

Not after all these years...it's been ~25 years since I built those Black Boxes, so anything along those lines has long since been forgotten. Folks like Mathy who have been using them for years know far more about their ins-and-outs at this point than I do (or ever did, lol).

The rubber feet were nothing special, but their height is important. They put the BB at the right height so it slides straight into the PBI port on an XL. Your other question would be a Bob Puff question...I was not involved in the electronic design of the BB, so I can't answer that question.

We were at the Chicago Show in '91(?), trying to hawk our tawdry warez. Good times! We brought all of our products for sale to the show with us on the plane, in suitcases. Try doing that now. I'm glad that so many Black Boxes, Floppy Boards, and other CSS products are still going strong all these years later. I really did put in a lot of effort to keep the quality of construction as high as I could, and it seemed my efforts paid off.

As I recall, Bob had received some requests for a BB case. He didn't want to make them, but he eventually hired a local plastics company to make some to meet the demand. They cost a fortune and the quality wasn't there (as you've noticed), but it was the best he could do given the expense, limited production numbers, and the fact that the BB was never designed to be in a case. I'm pretty sure he either broke even or actually lost money on those cases. I don't know what things are like now, but back then, the cost to have plastics and PCBs made was a lot more than you'd think.