Fire Button

Right, I was able to find their websites but things are not looking hopeful, indeed the B&C is listed as temporarily closed on Google but their website hasn't seen an update in a decade. Best Electronics does have some spare parts listed on their website but not the ones I'm looking for. I best look elsewhere anyway but chances look dim. If I want the real thing I guess I either get a different case or I try my my luck with a clean strip of metal myself. Anyway thanks again for all the pointers. Got some restoration work ahead of me...

Very clear, thanks. Unfortunately I already went ahead with the paint I have, and just now noticed the primer layer was a little too thick on some edges. I didn't think more passes were necessary but maybe I apply it too thickly, like you said. In any case I need to get my hands on a can of Rust-Oleum (this I think requires the most patience, because the overseas path is long and heavy border taxes start at low prices). I do like the color of the spray I have and it covers nicely but it doesn't stick without primer. Thanks! I'm not sure which shops you mean with B&C and BEST (Google searches end up with clothes stores or anything that calls themselves 'best'), do you have links to their sites? I'm guessing they're US-based, I'm in Europe. I might try my luck on making my own using a strip like Gunstar mentioned. I do have a Cricut (cutting machine) so I can cut texts out of vinyl stickers, and I think I've found a few fonts that come close to those labeled on the 1050.

Sorry for the late response, I should not pose questions and then go on holiday. I mentioned why I didn't do Retrobriting / Sunbrightening vs painting mostly because I expected that as soon as I'd say that I'm doing a paint job, people would suggest the alternative. I didn't mean to start a discussion on which is better, there are up- and downsides to both methods and for me it balanced towards a paint job. I guess it comes down to personal experience, preference and expertise. Besides those that I mentioned, several hours of bright sunlight aren't exactly in ample supply where I live, and alternatives I've seen involved having to buy a UV light and fit a cardboard box with tin foil for consistent exposure. On the other hand, paint, even spray paint, smoothens the original texture of XL case surfaces, which is my main thing 'against' it especially because you need primer too. Yes you're absolutely right, my recollection of things is a jumbled mess. Cheers. Heat doesn't do much, and I'm trying out pressure using a vise and some straight clenching bits without much noticeable effect. I think it needs both but I have not found an (easy) method to apply both at the same time. Maybe it just needs a lot of runs. A replacement original label will be difficult to get by, I'm sure. @Gunstar Great write-up, thank you for your elaborate response. Nice job on the custom 800 too (I won't ever be as nearly involved for such a project). I have heard of Rust-Oleum doing the job well before to get the XL colors back (probably some earlier post by you), but isn't really available around here, so I went for a RAL1013 spray paint and some PVC-compatible primer. The color looks about right (and in retrospect, I guess I've only ever seen the original color on day I took it out of the packaging). Not clear on the details, do you mean Rust-Oleum is a paint / primer mix? How do keep the original texture of the XL surface from being washed out by excess paint? And if I can't fix the label I guess I'll follow your example of creating my own strip, though a bit of luck in finding the materials seems required. Do you have any clue what font was used for the letters on the 1050XL? W.r.t. retrobriting or painting the keys of the XL (when I get there) I also cannot see any discoloration and therefore point. If anything, I need to touch up the white of the characters on the keys which are faded or rubbed out, any good way to do that? Thanks again!

Hi all, So I saw a lot of videos recently where some retro tech wizard takes some ancient retro hardware and do amazing repair and brightening cleanup. Quite inspired I took out my old Atari XL as well as my 1050 drive, and decided to try it out first on the latter. It had plenty problems - the master/slave switch was missing and one RS232 port was missing. Luckily I had a second broken 1050 and was able to (de)solder and replace those parts. The case being quite yellow, I decided I wanted to brighten it up a bit. I'm familiar with the Retrobrite stuff to basically ooze the yellow out using, I believe, a hydroperoxide mix and UV light, but the whole process seemed laborious to me and there is a risk the yellowing just creeps back over time. Instead, I decided I wanted to paint it using primer spray and then a RAL 1013, which seems closest to the original Atari white-ish (according to someone on some forum). So far so good. The problem is the thin metallic (aluminum) label bearing the Atari 1050 name on top of the machine. It would be in the way of a spray job so I decided to carefully remove it and clean it separately and get the scratches out. Bad idea for 2 reasons: - The metal strip is extremely delicate, even gently peeling it off caused bumps and creases that I can't seem to straighten out - The old trick of polishing aluminum (rough metallic sponge with some water) only dulls it, it doesn't make it shiny. See uploaded pic. So I turn to any of you for help, hoping some of you have experience with this: - How to get the creases and bends out of the strip? - How can I get a smooth shiny surface on the strip again? (the other, spare drive lost its strip long time ago, I have only this one). Thanks in advance for any help!

I don't know the history of it, but it's still very much alive: https://www.bandlab.com/products/cakewalk. I downloaded it recently to see if I could make my electric guitar sound better (turns out it's just a crap guitar). But it looks like you have the tools already, so don't bother. I wasn't suggesting you sing it by yourself, though. But there seem to be plenty of talented singers around the world and you don't have to be sitting in the same room with them anymore these days, what with all the cool audio recording and editing options. Surely there must be a few enthusiastic people out there who would love to partner on such a project? I know I would, if I could sing.

I like that last one. Never Been, also. I'll admit I'm more of a fan of the Pokey sound than these old 90s synths, it sounded fresher and punchier. But Gary, ever considered brushing the songs up with Cakewalk? The fully fledged version is free, these days. Would also be really nice with actual vocals.

That came out weird. What I mean is, I remember you and John usually being there as well as your sister and a few kids. I am trying hard to remember what it is that we did, but I think it was mostly playing games, agreeing how much C-64 sucked, and bragging about our development accomplishments (in my case, lack of). Hope you're doing well Richard!

Wow man, I was at your house back then. I'm Martin, I lived in Zaandam at the time, think I went by the name of Dexterity. Came all the way down to Eindhoven a couple of times to visit your club since there was nothing close by. I also visited John on a few occasions, and yes, he went by the name of The Unknown Base. Good times! Memory fuzzy, though. Must've been the beers. How's your sister?

Hello Gary, I hope you're still following this. Despite the great tricks you made the Pokey perform, I always thought your music transcended its electronic origins and could have been something that would have suited a full-on band, although I acknowledge that it is difficult to find instruments that convey the same feel as some of the outlandish sound effects you produced. I generally dislike remakes of game music because they're usually almost entirely instrumental and made up of synthesizers and, unfortunately, often an overkill of reverb. I know there have been a number of projects around to have 8-bit music hits performed by bands and orchestras (I once visited one dedicated to C-64 composers). Has there ever been a project like that to capture your music? Your AR music struck a note with me (ha ha, bad pun sorry) because they carried hit potential. I know you've been listened to by hundreds of thousands of game players, but a number of your songs would I think not have miss stood in the music charts if given the right kind of production. Ah man, I've ran into AR taverns just to listen to some music. In fact, for the City game it took me a long time to find that one song was only played in the exclusive entrance-fee-only taverns. "These are just moments in my life, That I've held out for you to see, Look at them, Look at them and tell me if, You see the real me, I have been waiting for you, I have been hoping ...". Damn, 30 years on, some of the lyrics still stick.

Yes, I've heard - I've already experienced this myself. I've understood that the sound latency can be up to half a second, and that realtime audio synthesis (which basically is what Pokey emulation is doing) is a bit of a drag to develop right now. I hope Gingerbread fixes it. Actually, it took me some time to figure it out. Advanced mode made sense to me once I understood how Droid800 stores configuration files, but at first I couldn't find out why some of the settings were being reset even so, at every restart. Then I found the 'simple mode' configuration panel at the startup screen, which overrides whatever you set in Advanced mode. I've got configured according to my wishes right now. Admittedly, I find the interfaces around this somewhat unintuitive. I'm not particularly fond of the 8-bit style advanced settings screens, as they're a bit of a pain to navigate. I'd like to suggest an alternative approach to storing configurations. Is your googlecode page for issues only or should we post wishes there as well? Visually, I can - especially with things are scrolling. A 1:1 frame rate is much, much smoother. I can understand, though, that a higher framerate comes at a penalty, but I'd like it to be variable if it can't quite make it. The speed currently fluctuates around the 100% but sound can make it drop somewhat. I'd prefer that sound is continuous by sacrificing a frame if necessary. But I'm unsure if you can anticipate on that. I can. We've got two electricity outlet frequencies in the world, which differs per country, one at 50Hz and one at 60Hz. This directly relates to the rate at which the television beam (good old TV tube systems) builds up frames on the screen. In a part of the world this happens at 50 frames per second (TVs for this setup were PAL systems), in another part at 60 (NTSC systems). The Atari machines, like most other 8-bit hardware at the time, used this frequency as a marker on when a new screen was going to be built up. Typically, anything that moved was synced to this refresh rate. That's one of the reasons why we have NTSC and PAL hardware setups. Broadly speaking, the two largest markets at the time (the U.S. and Europe) ran screen updates at 60Hz vs 50Hz respectively - in fact, other things happening at the vsync ran faster too, like music playback routines. Since most of the games were not programmed to account for this difference in frequency, typically the U.S. gamers had a somewhat tougher job to complete games than the European gamers. Another issue is that some software ran fine on 50 Hz but screwed up in 60 Hz because it was developed to complete things in a single frame, which is significantly shorter under NTSC systems. So the answer to your question is yes - either 60 fps or 50 fps, decided by NTSC vs PAL.

I've noticed that sound issues are proportionate to the inability of the emulator to run at 100%... (switching from NTSC to PAL worked well). Which makes sense, except that I would expect it to skip frames instead, which I think is less annoying than sound interruptions. Is there some way to prioritze sound output? What bit-rate and Khz is it playing at anyway?

Thanks for the feedback, got the config saving to work. Could never have figured that one out for myself. See the post just above yours - it all had to do with PAL vs NTSC. Sound still isn't perfect though. Ah, good - I was looking for that but couldn't find it. Will go there and file issues as I find them! Unfortunately, a bridge too far for me. :/ Cheers!

Scratch that one off the list - it appears that some games simply can't run properly under NTSC, and you have to run PAL. I'll change this into: 3. Sound emulation is not yet 100% perfect - there are still some clicks (short stops) in the sound playback.

Diggerbonk - can't tell you how happy I am that there's actually a mobile Emulator around for my good old trusted Atari. It's absolutely awesome - that big old black/white thing with its big hardware now running, very smoothly, on my Galaxy S even when set on 1:1 frames (gorgeous!). Excellent work, this can't be stressed enough. I update through the Android market - the most significant improvement I found in the last version was sound emulation, which was really choppy on the previous, although there is still some audible noise on for example International Karate. I ran into a few issues that I hope you can look into: 1. I'm unable to save the configuration file. It just says 'Error writing configuration file' when I try and doesn't explain why. I think the problem might be that it attempts to store it in a place it has no write access to. Needless to say, as a result all my configuration options are reset every time the emulator goes back to the start menu (most important one being having to switch from NTSC to PAL every time and configuring the ROMs, but I'd like all settings to be saved). It is however able to save something, as it remembers the last OS and File loaded since the previous run. 2. It seems that once the program or game starts up, it automatically triggers the fire button one or more times inadvertently. I kept my fingers off the screen as much as I could but for most games, the consequence is that for most games it skips the title screen, if the fire button was programmed to start the game. 3. Some games simply do not run well. I made sure to disable BASIC and try a few ROMs, but I can't get them to behave correctly. An example game that doesn't go down well is Warhawk. Thanks in advance for looking into this and once again, great work!

No, that's actually the 6th gauge (powerup count). My description could have been clearer, but the 5th gauge has nothing to do with it.