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BigO

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Everything posted by BigO

  1. BigO
    Anybody around Phoenix interested in a Dell Precision 610? Dual PIII Xeon 500 Mhz, 100 Mhz USB. 1 GB RAM (supports ECC, but this is non-ECC). 2 SCSI HDs 9GB, 18GB. Originally marketed as CAD workstation. Have run Win98, Win2K. Currently loaded with Win2K server. Pulled video card for another project after reloading. Take it before it goes to the recycler. Heavy beast. Local pick up only in Phoenix, AZ. (Admins, please delete if it's wildly inappropriate for this to be in this forum)
  2. BigO
    I second Thomas' recommendation. Albert pretty much is AtariAge. He would call the shots on all of the pieces of production that you listed. I'm curious about what your non-game program is.
  3. BigO

    5200 Trackball Issue

    BigO replied to gbag's topic in Atari 5200

    It could be mechanical. You can operate these controllers with the top removed so it would be easy to see if the encoder wheel is actually rotating when spinning the ball to the left. You likely played around with this while messing with the bearings so would probably have noticed this problem. I suppose there's some small chance that there's lint or something in the channel of the optical encoder that gets dragged into the optical path only when spinning in one direction. So it wouldn't be a bad idea to clean those encoders up. Seems likely to be a bad chip. They're socketed so it's generally an easy repair. I'd say that if the on-screen player token moves smoothly to the right, the optical encoders and LM339 are probably okay. The d flip flop decodes the spin direction and gates pulses appropriately. I tend to think that if the failure was there, it would move to the right even when rolled left. I'd be willing to bet on one of the NAND gates (4011b). On the other hand, one of the XOR gates of the 4030b is used to enable movement to the left (inputs tied together to make an inverter). That being so specific, I'd likely start my testing there if I were working on this. The chips are commonly available and inexpensive. Given the relative cost of product vs shipping, just get replacements for all of the chips if you have to order them online.
  4. BigO
    It seems plausible that it could be a ribbon cable connection. Per the schematic, it looks the keyboard is implemented as a 6x8 matrix. If it could be confirmed that an 8th key didn't work that would make for a more solid guess. I didn't find the layout of the key matrix with a quick search, but that could be used to confirm that one row or column connection has failed if all of the affected keys are served by one line.
  5. BigO
    Interesting that there doesn't seem to be a disassembly yet of the "killer app" Space Invaders. I'd like to peruse a well commented disassembly of SI. Unfortunately, I happen to be terrible at figuring out what assembly code is doing if I didn't write it.
  6. BigO
    It's so you can build a robotic cartridge handler and watch it insert the physical cartridge into the console when you select the game from a menu screen. Obviously.
  7. BigO
    Heh. But it would be a ridiculous/fun-for-five-minutes mashup of technological eras. Got me thinking about an electromechanical add-on for my heavy 6'er. Alexa doesn't play in my house, but such a device could be built with network controllability in case one is inclined to implement such a weird combination. ?
  8. BigO
    "Alexa, reset the Atari."
  9. BigO
    Single Pole Double Throw. The 4019 ic is effectively the 4PDT switch you mention. It is controlled by the SPDT switch.
  10. BigO

    I misread a 2600 game listing earlier on Facebook and wondered how the game Bowling Combat would work.

    1. Show previous comments  4 more
    2. GoldLeader

      GoldLeader

      OOOoooh,  I can picture it!   It'd be like Dodgeball, but with bonus points for hitting the pins instead of just injuring opponents! You could have circular islands on the screen containing extra balls, and maybe some small maze pieces.  Other than that, knock down opponents AND pins, and hit other balls to throw them off course so you don't get taken out.    Damn I wish I knew how to code!  ATTN:  PACMANPLUS, THOMAS JENTZSCH, ANDREW DAVIE, or DARREL SPICE, or someone else...Free BEER if you get this done!!   (Everyone reading this comment will pitch in!)

    3. GoldLeader

      GoldLeader

      PS:  The 7800 probably has more Horsepower for this game so use that!

    4. zylon

      zylon

      a charachter defends the lane, and you have to charge him and check him out of the way, long enough to take a shot down the alley

  11. BigO
    Keypad is a fairly common expression in American English used to refer to such a device. People are probably just applying a familiar term. I reflexively think of them as keypad controllers without considering any official names.
  12. BigO
    I found these desoldering irons to work significantly better than the squeezy-bulb type. Not terribly expensive.
  13. BigO

    Kinda liking "Resident Alien".

    1. LS650

      LS650

      I think the show would be very ordinary, but Alan Tudyk is great at playing an alien "fish out of water" character.

    2. BigO

      BigO

      Agreed. It's his acting talent that makes it work.

       

      The voice he uses in the narration is extremely familiar, but I can't place where else I've heard it. Not sure it was him but very similar. Somewhere.

  14. BigO
    Sheesh. No wonder I didn't have one back when I was free-school-lunch eating, poor rural kid. That would have been multiple summers' worth of picking and selling wild blackberries and "pop bottle hunting". I have three of these things now. I have arrived!
  15. BigO

    Since I last flew, I've had titanium implants in my neck, my right knee, then my left knee. Will be interesting next week when I fly.

    1. Show previous comments  4 more
    2. Rogerpoco

      Rogerpoco

      I have titanium implants in both ears-I actually have two cards I keep in my wallet, one for each, and they are "passes", so to speak, I believe my Doc said they *might* help me out, but not guaranteed.

      Had cholesteotomas in both ears, they burst open, their enzymes "melted" my ear bones, ugh.

      Still, the implant itself isn't a "structure", it's a "machine"(a "bell", with a pin that hits it), so I insist that I am bionic!!!

      :D

      (Not too concerned with ID theft[could only help my credit...], and I don't think there's anything too revealing here).

       

       

      imp.jpg

    3. BigO

      BigO

      Those tiny little bones were replaced with titanium? Interesting.

       

      I knew a guy who had been deaf in one hear for many years. Then they fixed it by, as I understood, replacing the bones. This must have been what they did. 

    4. Rogerpoco

      Rogerpoco

      Haha, yes, @BigO -

      I had hearing difficulty my whole life, but the problem actually really surfaced when I was playing guitar with a Friend one day, got dizzy and tried to stand up and just fell over, my equilibrium was shot.

      So it was almost, but not quite, "emergency surgery", the enzymes were gonna eat their way into my brain(my left cochlea had to be "patched"), which would have really sucked, I suspect, but yes, it destroyed my ossicles in both ears, was odd to have it bilaterally, at the same time, but is how it happened.

      Yes, it's like a tiny cone, with a needle inside that vibrates, and I guess it emulates the vibrations one would get from real ear bones-TBH, I really don't notice ANY difference whatsoever, I just "don't hear that well", never did, never will, the titanium replacements are perfectly fine really, I CAN hear.

      I just don't like to listen.

      :D

      (Kidding).

       

       

  16. BigO
    I had a lot of mechanical drag and roughness in the paddle control on one unit. It was due to wear and crud between the knob and the other piece of plastic that the knob passes through. Cleaned the area and applied a very light coat of silicone grease to fix the issue. I've seen at least one other person post the same issue.
  17. BigO
    That isn't what I meant. I know it's a matrix. I'm talking about which face of the glass the zebra strip is contacting, not the polarity of the connection. I should have used the term face instead of side, I suppose. (As a matter of trivia, according to my research, the polarity of the connection is reversed frequently under normal operating conditions to prevent damage to the display. There's a specific pattern/timing fed from the processor to the controller that causes the controller to reverse the polarity of the signals.) If the reflective material were attached to the wrong surface, then the conductive traces would be on the top faces of the pads instead of the bottom side when the LCD is installed with the reflective surface down. I think the symmetry would let that happen. I don't have one of the LCD's in front of me at the moment. Again, it's a very unlikely scenario. But, it's not expensive to check.
  18. BigO
    A really dumb, far-fetched, out-of-left-field question: did they assemble the LCD backwards, with the reflective surface stuck on what should be the front? If that were the case, I believe the symmetry of the display would allow it to be physically installed. It's pretty hard to see those transparent conductive traces, but held in the light a certain way and watching the parallax as you move the display does let you see which side they're on (at least on one of the OEM displays that I de-installed and other bare glass LCD's I've tinkered with). However, if 5-11 tested every unit, then this unlikely scenario would be rendered un-possible.
  19. BigO
    Got mine swapped out today. Nice, crisp and clean display. Functions perfectly.
  20. BigO
    No, the one in the Atari paddle is 1,000,000 ohms The one in the Microvision is 10,000 ohms. Okay, technically it would electrically function and wouldn't hurt anything. But for every degree of rotation you would get 1000 times the movement that you would get with the original. It would be unplayable. The pot in the Microvision is probably okay, or salvageable by cleaning. I use Deoxit that is made for cleaning and lubricating potentiometers.
  21. BigO
    Got my screen today. Hoping to have time to open it and swap it into my main unit this weekend.
  22. BigO
    https://www.amazon.com/Analog-NTSC-Tuner-Demodulator-Output/dp/B01KC03BQ2/ Not an endorsement of this unit, but I have a much older analog "demodulator" that works great. Connecting it between my 2600 and Sharp Aquos 60" composite input yielded *a lot* less lag than connecting the 2600 to the NTSC tuner in the TV. I think mine may have been made by RCA. Using the TV's tuner, I was completely unable to play Circus and Kaboom due to the lag. Using my external "demodulator" (because it sounds more important than "tuner") hooked up to the TV's composite input I was able to play both games. Still some visible lag, but much better than the direct option.
  23. BigO
    It seems like, according to my email notifications, I miss everything. I've been in a couple of times and there was no visible activity. But I get emails that tell me what i missed. Then i read the emails of disjointed pieces of conversations and realize I'm still not missing anything. Gotta figure out how to shut down those emails so I don't know about what I'm not missing.
  24. BigO
    Kind of off topic but, "This site contains technical information about the Atari 260 game system." S/b 2600.
  25. BigO
    Just stumbled across this old post while looking for something else. Since the OP didn't report back, I thought I'd comment with my experience for anyone looking at this down the road. The outputs of the 4538's would be equivalent signals to what trackball joystick emulators use as joystick signals. I tried to pick these signals off to add joystick emulation capability to a CX53 enhancement kit I built years ago. The attempt was essentially a failure. The retriggerable one-shot configuration results in a minimum pulse width that is too short compared to a typical JS emulator, so the movement is choppy and you have to spin the ball really fast to get it to steady out. If you want a workout, it might be fine. Otherwise, you'd have to change the RC timing component values in the circuit to get it to behave as a workable joystick emulator. If I recall correctly, I looked into externally paralleling in some components to change the timing and I found that I'd have to actually break into the circuitry. As I was going for easily reversible, no-solder adaptation, I bailed on that idea. (I don't like playing JS games with a trackball anyway).
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