Level42

I'll have to establish a price once I have everything here. I will offer sets of parts only (so you have to solder the connectors yourself) and sets with the connectors soldered by myself. I decided not to go with having them soldered at the PCB factory because it raises cost significantly. It does mean I will need to do the soldering of the complete sets myself so naturally these will be a bit more expensive than the "parts only" sets. Currently the flex cables have arrived, connectors and PCB's are still on their way. I'll post as soon as they are in.

Yes. My solution uses an even smaller flex cable but that's not very relevant. At this moment I have new flex cables arrived and PCBs and the connectors still on order. I have adapted the PCB so that it could also be used in XE's, mostly this meant there are now two break-outs for the keyboard-connector so that this can be hooked up as a 2nd button for any joystick/pad that offers that. This is very useful for games like Dropzone etc. where keyboard is a "bomb" option....also the new Scramble f.i. Sets will be available as soon as I received the PCBs and connectors. I decided to do the soldering myself. Having the connectors installed is making things way too expensive.

Really like these !

As I have learned by re-capping a Vectrex the past few days: you are absolutely correct. I even had one track coming off....fixed it with a piece of capacitor "wire".... The worst thing is that the cap-kit didn't solve my problem....

Exactly what I need,awesome....e-mail sent !

It's not a regular solder job for sure. It is a SMD sized connector. There are several techniques to do it: 1) Hot air soldering. This requires a dedicated hot-air soldering station. They are quite cheap to get from Asia these days. This is how I did it. The positive thing about this method is that it's cheap. The negative is that you are running the risk of overheating the plastic part of the connector and it melts. This happened to my first PCB set a bit, but it still works fine. 2) (Dedicated) SMD soldering oven. These are quite a bit more expensive if you get a dedicated one. There are also many hacks of regular electrical ovens to be find on-line. The trick with oven soldering is that it reaches a certain temperature, keeps it just long enough and then slowly decreases the temperature again. In other words, this is rather hard to do with a regular oven, but it can be done. 3) a traditional soldering station with a very fine tip and using a method called "drag soldering". All these methods require the PCBs to be cleaned with some pure alchohol before soldering, then applying flux and then applying (about) the correct amount of (fresh) solder paste. For all soldering methods: you can find loads of information and videos about all of them on the internet. It goes to far to explain them all in detail here. I have asked for a price to have the connectors soldered at the PCB factory and I will report back about that ASAP but it's clear that ordering bare PCBs is a lot cheaper. On the other hand I could do the soldering, but I have to say I'm no SMD soldering expert and it's definitely not my favorite pass-time I guess I would become better by doing more though.... LOL. OK, more info ASAP.

Well, to answer my own question...just in case anyone else might ever be interested: The diameter of the speaker is 7,7 cm. The depth of the speaker is 2,5 cm. There is about 1 cm. extra space between the rear of the speaker and the transformer but there is a round hole in the plastic that might spoil things for a bigger and better speaker, on the other hand...you could cut some plastic away if keeping the inside of your vectored 100% original is not that important to you....

Excellent, thanks ! Small update: I just updated the design a bit. Removed the unnecessary ground-plane and added a second break-in set of pins so not it is possible to use the break in for Space Bar generation on both XL and XE machines. So the PCB is now truly universal for XL and XE's.

OK that's 6 sets so far here, and I got interest on Facebook for 6 sets too. (let me know if you posted your interest there too). Anyway, enough reason to order new PCBs, connectors and flex cables. Let me get the materials first and we'll go from there. Prices won't break the bank...not doing this for money but helping out fellow Atari users. I'll post as soon as I have the parts here. Thanks for all the positive replies !

I just sold my last spare PCBs (and flex cables and connectors). if anyone is still interested in one or more sets, please let me know, I’m can order a new batch of PCBs if there is enough interest.

Nice but I agree that I never regretted getting my RGB Sophia and in fact....I see little reason to get Sophia 2 as I’m not really interested in DVI or higher resolutions etc. just MHO.

Mytek, did you try moving a finger near the Antics while the machine was running ? I had issues with it freezing because apparently my finger induced a signal into one of the clock inputs. So I think I grounded both clock inputs instead of just one. There is also one signal that I switched......that isn't used in XLs and XE's but IS in 400/800.

By the way, the schematics and documents are available for all ABBUC members, but I don't have a problem uploading them here. For now Fred and I have dropped the plans to have AntiX produced. There are in practice quite some issues to get the PCB produced.

Yeah, without looking into the details that is very close to what I did. I guess AntiX is history now.

Hey fellow Vectrex fans. i would like to know the size of the original Vectrex speaker, and no I don’t mean the diameter because wel all know it’s 3”, but how deep/high is it .....AND is there any extra space behind the speaker’s end and the transformer ? reason is simple: I’ll be cap-checking and definitely replacing some caps Soon and I’d love to replace the speaker with something better.... I searched around on the net and no info about it, not clear pictures etc. any help would be great, thanks !

Hey guys....I’m still alive....sorry for the black-out. well the personal issues are settled...(divorce, new GF and very happy now....) However, I’m still in the process of some home improvement which is eating up most of my spare time and worse....I switched jobs which turned out not to be the best of choice...(too many hours in the evenings). ANYWAY. Just when I’m about to gear up getting production done in China.....corona happened.... which i guess might slow things down.....however....I have every intention of getting some prototypes built over there, test and evaluate them and finally get them produced in numbers....so ....I’ll keep this updated....

Honestly, if I do find some time I will use it to finally get production of AntiX going...which is an idea I did get to work successfully.... (A8 stuff)

Sadly I never got my set up to work, and now I lack so much time.....

Will there be a 2020 ? Hopefully with more A8 machines ?

Yes the Atari Handheld Touch Me was sold after Simon BUT the idea for Simon was stolen by Ralph Baer from Atari’s arcade version of a Touch Me. So the original idea will always be Atari’s however, Ralph did improve it by using color lights and more pleasant sounds. thanks for posting about that video and indeed I had already seen it while searching but regretfully it doesn’t give a clue about how to open it without damaging it. luckily, I already found the problem. The battery connector was simply bad, a common issue I believe. This one looks like poorly resoldered. Maybe a battery had been leaking although I see no evidence of that. Anyway I spliced a new connector into the original wires and it works fine now, but I’d still like to open it to solder the wires properly to the PCB.

I just receive a little gem I always wanted to own in the collection. It’s Atari’s handheld version of Touch Me. Regretfully it is completely dead. I hope it’s a simple issue with the battery connector so I want to have a look inside but before I damage the old plastic case, does anybody know how this is supposed to be opened ?

Hey there, I have a loose cartridge Shadow of the Beast that feels very sad because I never use it anymore since owning the SD cart. Therefore it is looking for a better home.... let me know if anyone is interested, shipping from The Netherlands.

Please name which Atar arcade games in the 70s used POKEYs ? none did sir as it got out only in 1979. Further IMHO, Atari Coin-op never managed to pull very much from POKEY at all. Centipede is just a number of fairly simple sounds. The best they did was with Star Wars...but they used 4 POKEYS and a TI voice synth controlled by a separate CPU. But ven wth 4 POKEYs they didn’t think of creating true stereo but added a simple fake stereo phase shifting set-up. nah...POKEY was used meagrely by Atari coin op, but then again, how well was it used in the A8 machines in 1983 ?

Yes I think those resistors are only there for Apple chargers or something like that.

Yeah I understand what it means but not why it was posted....