rodcastler_two

Hi everyone, I was watching this video from CBS: Special Report: Video Games Atari Headquarters Behind The Scenes 1982 These colored cases on the Atari 800 caught my eye. Jerome Domurat used a nice-looking red unit (see attached image), and there's also a green unit with a black cover on a prototype star fighter game. I presume they were custom painting these computers for personalization, and also for experimenting potential products. I remember seeing a previous post of a black unit that belonged to the Engineering Lab: Rare Black Case Atari 800 Computer Used In House Home Computer Division HCD - Atari 8-Bit Computers - AtariAge Forums I'd love to learn more about what's behind the coloring, I can imagine Mr. Domurat spray painting his customized 800 or maybe programmers and designers received them already colored, who knows. Have you found any further info about them?

I know it's an old thread, but since these 9V AC power supplies are getting harder to find, I did some research: 1) 1010 Power supply and 1050 Power supply both deliver 11.5 VAC measured (9VAC Nominal) 2) After rectification, 1010 operates at 15.2 VDC (measured). 3) If I power the 1010 with a 16V DC/DC supply, the same 15.5vDC make it to the circuit, and it works just fine and there's no need for a 9vAC power supply anymore. Am I missing anything or should a 16VDC power supply be a suitable replacement for the 1010? (This does not apply to the 1050, which does require AC voltage).

a bit more from the South. I hope it all goes well soon! Best, Rod

Oh really? well that's interesting. I'm glad to hear it's up. I'll have to check what's with my ISP's DNS. Now that I take a closer look it does state ERR_NAME_RESOLUTION_FAILED. Weird. Thanks for checking and coming back to me so quickly! Rod

Homesoft's site is down again (http://www.mushca.com/f/atari/). Do any of you know if there's a mirror site somewhere else? Thank you

Well, that was my first thought: just someone who glued that plate there, but then I realized that 2700 was a prototype model, so it doesn't make a lot of sense for someone to do that. Could it be that Atari found an alternative use for those plates and save some extra cents by repurposing them for the 8 bits?

Someone brought this to my attention. It seems to be a plate that belonged to an Atari 2700 remote joystick, on a 600XL machine. I wonder if this was a common practice at some point... first time I see one of these.

Agree. Although I was hoping to just slow down the entire machine with an external clock instead of replacing the Antic chip (or adding two selectable antic chips) but it seems it's not that simple as just slowing it down with an external oscillator.

I am thinking beyond FPS, it's also about the game music. See, this all comes down to the gameplay speed and music speed difference perceived by European and American users. My intention is to play games at the speed the developer and composers designed their games at. Emulator is the easiest way when simply selecting PAL/NTSC emulation, but I keep wondering what can be done with the hardware to slow down NTSC clock speeds to match PAL experience.

I bumped into an interesting project from Adrian Black where he hacks a Commodore 16 with a programmable oscillator and some micro controller wizardry to enable swapping between PAL and NTSC. It made me wonder if there's a way to use a similar setup and change the clock speed on an Atari 800XL NTSC machine so I can slow it down 17% and simulate PAL speed. I'd like to be able to enjoy european games at their intended speeds on my NTSC hardware.

a bit of silicon grease on those rails will get you where you want to be. This sound of yours is very normal but when greased it gets far more pleasing. I did that greasing thing when I first got mine 30+yrs ago and sounds charming to this day. Just be gentle with the amount: you don't need much really.

Just make sure there are clean and solid 12V and 5V coming out of each of the regulators on the board and you should be good to go from the power supply stage of your troubleshooting. You can actually measure these at the molex connector that plugs into the mech. I admit that when I had these issues I was feeding 12V into the 12V regulator, so the drop in voltage was preventing the head from reading correctly / writing or formatting the disks.

After 25 years far from atari, I thought of coming back to playing some games and program again in Basic. Programming in basic had such an influence in who I became as a professional. But when I came back, it was with a strong force towards using real/original hardware for some reason. Also after so much time I now have way more knowledge about the chips, the design, the architecture the people and brands behind the HW and the company history. This sparked an increased admiration for the hardware, including the models I did not own when young. That’s how I ended up with a complete XL line and complete XE line collection. with several machines of each model but I always go back to the 800XL to revive simpler and easier times.

I had all of these symptoms once, the power supply was the culprit. voltage was below spec. Make sure your 9V AC supply is up to spec.