jsoper

I bought a bare 2600 jr, no add ons from www.4jays.com a couple months ago for $25. You don't need the add-ons if you have other versions. Collector's House is good too: http://www.collectorshouse.net/ Regards, John

One time I was playing at level one and got the 2600's king in a checkmate. It made a buzzing sound, but still let me kill it and the game kept going after that. Kingless chess, gotta love it. John

If you say pong sold well, I guess we should believe you. Sure seeing it marked down like crazy though. Picked up one new for $7 in a mall store. John

Pretty much all the 5200 games were good, it's my favorite system. Get the multicart, you'll be glad you did. The worst that could happen is you don't like the multicart and sell it on ebay for almost as much as you paid. JOhn

A lot of the failures came down to software also. What if the 7800 and Jag had launched with games that used the full console potential but also had the addictiveness and gameplay of Mario, Sonic, Final Fantasy and so on. I read the last couple FF games had teams of 200 or so people working on them. Game creation was becoming a business requiring huge investments with the chance of huge rewards. Atari should have invested more in software then marketed the hell out of it. Just MHO, John

Albert took some preliminary pics of it at CGE. Will post some myself after it's finished and painted (in a couple weeks hopefully). Wasn't planning to make any extra to sell though. Kinda wanna spend my time on other projects: a 2600 500+ multicart (for the portable, hee-hee) an all-in-one classic console with common controllers, power supply, and AV for ten different motherboards. Took a break from this for awhile, it has 7800,5200,02 so far Build a portable intellivision into a jaguar controller. Do you think it would fit? Need longer days, John

My portable is almost done and it's about half the size and half the price of his. I think I'll stick with it instead of ordering one John

I just checked my 3 incompatible 7800's and they all have color coded caps for C64. They actually look like green resistors. Kinda unfair for the colorblind I'd say. John

Albert, Thanks for the edits, gonna start a webpage sometime and get more net-savvy. Another item on a long to-do list. It was nice talking to you at CGE as well. I was the guy in the Secret Agent line with the portable 2600 in a dreamcast controller. John

Might be the TIA, the IC that reads the paddle lines. It's the closest one to the front edge of the 2600, not the 6507 or 6532. They are socketed on all 2600's except the juniors so it's easy to swap in another one. It might also be the capacitor that connects the paddle line to ground, C219 according to http://atarihq.com/danb/images/vcs3.gif A really quick fix is to swap it with the one for player 4 if you never plan to play any 4-player games. Regards, John

I sent this to RGVC last night, but really wanted to post it here. If the graphics are too scrambled, save as a TXT file and look at it with a fixed font editor. The postings about 7800 compatibility got me interested in revisiting a fix I first made a couple years ago. Thought I'd write it up as a new post so everyone would see it. An expansion port 7800 has the following circuit: code: _____ 11 | | 10 10 |} D2-----|D Q|-----------| } (6502) | | | } 8 | | 9 | }----A12(cart) |> | A12----| } |_____| (6502) | } |} 74174 7408 Flip Flop AND A later model 7800 has an extra flip-flopish circuit between the two pin 10's above: code: ,---------------<-------------, | | | _____ | | | | | P10 ----+-| | | 74174 | | |---, | |_| | | | | | | ______ | |_____| | | | | | | | | `-->--| | 4 | _____ | |-->-+-->-- | | | | 7408 Phi2 -----| | ,-->--| | P10 (out) | | | | | | |---' |______| D1 via ---| | flop | | |_____| 7402 NOR gate (ALL THREE) The fix I did was as follows: 1. Cut trace coming from 7408 P10 with an exacto-knife 2. Verify cut trace with ohmmeter 3. Wire up a SPDT switch so that 7408 P10 can be connected to 74174 P10 (expansion circuit) or 7402 P4 (later circuit) After I did this my space shuttle and robot tank carts started working, however decathlon still wouldn't. I then added a 1uf capacitor to ground onto the line and decathlon came up fine. In my final assembly, I used a second switch to connect the cap but decathlon worked even without the cap. Seems like the loading of the switch itself was enough. If you do this mod, you do so at your own risk, yadda yadda yadda. If anyone wants to put this into a FAQ, go ahead. I've seen posts that dark chambers sometimes doesn't work on the expansion 7800's (which prompted the circuit change) and that player paddles 3 and 4 are not connected in some units. Have not seen any evidence of this in the 4 7800's I own. Had a supercharger go bad in my expansion model 7800, and wrecked two others modifying them for 8k games (even had one working for a night). Got so sick of buying new ones that I don't experiment with them anymore. You're on your own there. That's about all I know. Wanted to fix the color problem in my new portable 2600 but this ate up the whole evening, grumble grumble Sure hope these ascii drawings don't get garbled, John Soper [ 08-23-2001: Message edited by: Albert ]

Yes, you can do stereo out of a 7800. In fact, if you provide a separate output for the external audio (ballblazer and others) you actually have 3-channel audio. Send 2 to a stereo and the third to the TV. NOTE: this can be done for intellivisions also. I believe Turmoil is the game with the great stereo effects. Threshold may be good too. John Soper

This came up on usenet awhile ago and someone posted: "Isn't that how atari's mate?" Got a chuckle out of it. John

Hi Everyone (my first post), Everyone seems so fired up about 5200 paddle conversions, that I wanted to mention another way to approach the problem. You can make a little breakout box with a 5200 controller cable and DIN15 socket. Wire it up first as a pass through and verify that a regular 5200 controller plugs into the box and works normally. Then add a DIN9 socket and wire it up for a 2600 player-one paddle. Fire, ground, and pot common can be wired in parallel to the 5200 controller. Put in a switch to select either the paddle pot or the 5200 controller pot signal. The only gotcha is the 2600 paddle moves in the reverse direction from what you want. You can open it up and solder the wire to the other side of the pot (leave the center terminal alone). Or mount a switch in the bottom of the paddle to select either 2600 or 5200 mode. I like this because the 2600 paddles are more comfortable in my hand and you don't need the second fire button anyway. In fact my box also has a masterplay-type circuit in it for genesis/2600_sticks. However, that's another story. Regards, John