tearex

No component video unfortunately, and S-Video was only added as an afterthought so doesn't work with all TVs... but yes it is nice.

I second that. All the CompPros are cool... except for the really old ones that didn't use microswitches for the fire buttons (easy to tell... they don't click). Those will break down eventually. The others are what we in Germany'd call "unkaputtbar".

In my unit the coil is adjustable from below as well (there's a hole in the board), maybe yours too? If not why not just turn on the unit without a cart in it? Just turn it off again if it starts making a funny noise, about half the time it seems to be "silent" when you do this... then you can adjust the sound to actual silence. Or you could plug in just the PCB of some cart, if you have one where the label is damaged anyway (screw visible) you can take it apart and just plug the PCB into the Atari, that should give you enough room to work.

OK I have to admit I never had a 4 switcher and they are in a bit different places than in those I know, but I'm 99% positive that you're correct about what is what. As for quality keep in mind that even a fully functional 2600 doesn't give you *that* great a picture quality so always compare to another 2600, not to the way an Emulator looks. If it's clearly worse than another 2600 then go ahead: My rule with caps is to replace all of them as all of them will eventually fail anyway -- all the electrolytical caps that is, the others age so slowly that they'll probably outlast us. I usually get 105°C heat-resistant caps as a replacement, they last much longer even in normal temperatures and they are only a little bit more expensive than the standard ones. If that doesn't help the semiconductors would be the next thing to try. So if you have another Atari you could try exchanging chips back and forth, maybe a chip is damaged too. The chips are the same in all 2600 models AFAIK. If the program as such works (if the gameplay behaves normally, and it's just looking bad) then the processor and the 6532 are pretty much proved to be working just fine, however; only the TIA might possibly be damaged. But be careful about the chip's orientation, in some Ataris the socket's orientation doesn't match that of the chip so mark pin 1 on the PCB before you remove them. Maybe it's just a rusty contact somewhere and it'll work after removing and reinserting any socketed chips. Or you could check if any solder points are broken. I'm risking being a smartass just in case: Having a schematic helps immensly IMHO by giving you a clue which components *could* actually cause a given problem. Makes the whole thing much more managable. I think there's one for download on the Atariage site. Even if you haven't dealt with schematics before it might help by giving you an idea which things on the PCB belong to which functional units of the console. OK that wasn't too helpful but I can't really say any more by now. Do you maybe have a screenshot of the best picture you get? Or one that shows clearly exactly what kind of distortion there is? Bye,

Sure why not? Haven't seen a schematic yet, though. But if you know a bit about logic it should be easy.

You could try adjusting the sound subcarrier coil (I guess that's what madblownaway meant). It can be reached through a hole in the metal shielding after you open the plastic casing (so you don't need to open the shielding). It's the hole in center-right if you look at it from above. Instead of some fancy key you can use the back end of a match to turn it. Just don't use anything made of metal as then you have to take it back out every time to see the result. Turn very slowly until the noise is least (it won't go away completely 100%, but almost, in my experience) If you know some electronics guy who's got an oscilloscope you could try to adjust it to exactly the true color subcarrier frequency of your TV norm, but even without that you can usually get it to a nice unnoisy setting. I drillied a small hole into the bottom of my light 6er's plastic casing so I could adjust it without opening the case, since this beast seems to have a tendency to get misadjusted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_tel...evision_systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC

I have a thing like that for a Commodore 64, saves you from switching around the mouse and the joystick all the time.

Generally if old electronics don't work it's often a good idea to replace all the electrolytical capacitors, as those are among the only components that truly age as the liquid inside them slowly evaporates (EPROMs age too but the Atari doesn't have any). Assuming you have a non-Jr 2600, before that, you could try adjusting the color pot and the sound coil, and also the HF coil inside the HF modulator (the little silver box on the Atari's larger PCB). They are all adjustable through holes in the metal shields after you remove the plastic casing. Before you replace the cable test the old one for conductivity. If it has no problems conducting electricity on either its core or its shielding (even when you bend it back and forth) there's no need to replace it. The Jr has those three adjustable thingies too but of course located in different places.

Just a little correction, A PAL console hooked up to a (non-multinorm) NTSC TV most likely won't show anything at all as the broadcast carrier frequency AND the sound and color subcarrier frequencies AND the color encoding (which are the business of the console itself) are different -- not just the screen refresh rate (which is the business of the individual game module). The voltage matters only for the power adapter, if it fits into your local electrical socket type it is almost certain to be the correct power adapter -- different countries have different electrical sockets. The Atari itself gets only 9V anyway from the adapter, no matter which norm it is.

If you're interested, it's online at: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?...5&RS=PN/4644495 It's partially pretty heavy "patentese" but it is certainly interesting.

I know at least of the following (German) Eprommers for C64: Rossmöller Vesuv64, Dela, Dela II, Rex Datentechnik Goliath, Rex Datentechnik Micro Maxi, Rex Datentechnik Micro Maxi II, and the "Tiny Eprommer" published in the 64er magazine. The "Tiny" does only 2764 and up though, no 2716 or 2732 as far as I remember. At least one American C64 Eprommer was also made. If you feel adventurous here is how to build your own "tiny eprommer" from Radio Shack (or similar) parts only: http://home.t-online.de/home/Birger.Hahn/i...rommer_tiny.htm Well it is in German (the 80s hacker language...) but luckily schematics are international.

Correct. You'll need some way to get the file on a Commodore disk, for example StarCommander from http://sta.c64.org or you can connect the systems with a Null-modem cable and download the file to the C64. Unfortunately there's no way to make disks that the C64's floppy drive can understand in a PC 5.25 drive. Otherwise it doesn't matter at all what system the data is for or from, all the burner wants is a bunch o'bytes.

I know and the point was - could you do *any* better with my idea than what you can do with a normal ROM-plus-bankswitch cart. I consider anything "fair" that plugs into an unmodified 2600's cart port and does not need external connections to anything else. Otherwise bankswitched carts are also not "fair" since they contain active components too. Maybe a power supply would be needed if this simply isn't possible given the maximum amount of current the cart port supplies. Of course the basic limits of the 2600 stay the same - the only limits that I could overcome are those that are based on the fact that the 6507 normally has to spend time thinking about just what to tell the TIA *and* also has to take the time to actually store it. So the question is, how much time do you lose in a well-written kernel for calculations, decision making, jumping around, etc. If the answer is "hardly any time at all", then of course my idea is of no value. Note: I neither have a game idea to go with this nor the needed microcontroller experience, or programming devices for that matter. Consider this a mental exercise at this point.

The idea was to do something that can work in a standard unmodified 2600's cartridge slot. How much current am I allowed to take from the +5V line by the way?

I've had this crazy idea, of building an "active" cartridge that does not have simply a ROM inside, but instead a cicuit with a CPU of its own (a microcontroller with built-in RAM, ROM, and I/O, most likely), that generates the opcodes on-the-fly and spoon-feeds them to the main CPU. I doubt that I'll do it any time soon, but what do you think, could you defeat some of the 2600's limitations that way? Like having more colors per line or so? The kernel could consist of mostly just "LDA #$xx; STA $yy" this way (as seen from the main CPU's point of view) , without any branching instructions or calculations, those would be done by the CPU in the cart. Also you could have large amounts of ROM and RAM this way without need for bankswitching; basically the cart is the computer and the console just acts as an oversized I/O device. Maybe you could even use two controllers, one that sends instructions to the main CPU and one that actually runs the game code in parallel. Only once in a while would you need to send a "JMP" to avoid overflowing the main CPU's program counter into the I/O area. Basically the idea is to take the concept of Pitfall II's in-cart sound chip a step further. I admit this is a bit sick, but sounds like hacker's heaven.

Maybe Data Age used EPROM chips instead of ROM, and bit rot is setting in by now? Or they used some component overly sensitive to static discharges?

CGA reads only two bits of color info per pixel from the on-card RAM, and the guy who designed it decided to read red and green from the RAM, and to have blue toggled via a register, effectively for the whole screen. So the choices were background - red - green - yellow (blue OFF), or background - magenta - cyan - white (blue ON). The foreground always has intensity ON as far as I know. Background (any color with intensity OFF) was also read from a register, most often black was used since it meant less flicker on the old 60-Hz monitors. Most CGA game programmers wanted white, so they were forced to select the with-blue palette. But there are a couple of CGA games that use the other, for example the rather cool (for its age) RPG "Legacy of the Ancients", which also uses blue as background instead of black.

There are no SECAM carts, this just shows what the PAL games look like when played on the SECAM console. The developers (except for ATARI maybe, see my post above) probably never saw what the SECAM beast made of their creations.

Reputedly, the old pre-crash PAL Atari games were arranged in such a way that switching them to black&white would give a reasonable palette on SECAM consoles. Did the SECAM Ataris actually have another third version of the TIA or did they use the PAL chip with different external circuitry? The latter case would explain the crazy palette as the PAL chip of course can't output a SECAM color signal, but you could construct the signal from the luma output pins with some external junk attached to it. That was probably cheaper than constructing a third TIA chip for the small SECAM market. Nowadays all French TVs sold can do PAL as well, as far as I know, maybe the switch was already going on back then and the SECAM consoles were just for those people with old TV sets?

Hi, grrrrr.... I just killed my six-switch PAL 2600 during a repair, I was finally going to replace all components in that sound circuit, and then I didn't watch out and I plugged in the connecting cable between motherboard and daughterboard one-off and I fried my TIA chip and I'm stupid and.... *10 more minutes of ranting* Well ya can't change the past, so my question is in which Atari's do I find socketed chips? I'd like to buy something cheaper than a 6-switch and then just swap in the chips, but I think in the 2600Jr. they aren't socketed, right? And desoldering them with a hot air gun is such a mess. Or is there any other source for just the chips? I only found "Best Electronics" so far, which unfortunately is in the US and thus means Air Mail fare and probably a long wait, German customs officials tend to be sooo sloooow. Thanks for any help,

A number of burners for older Computers (for example the Commodore 64) can be found cheap on eBay, normally within a week or so one should show up. I payed about $25 or so for mine, if I remember correctly. They were more widespread in Germany than in the US though, so maybe on the US eBay site it might take longer and/or be more expensive than over here. I don't know if there were burners for other systems like the Apple II or the Atati 8-bit series. The C64 had a couple of features, like AC voltage on the port, that made it very easy to build a simple, cheap, and reliable burner for that system with no need for external power supplies, memory or a microprocessor in the burner, or similar stuff. The software for the C64 burners is usually floating around the net somewhere, so even if you don't get a disk it will be possible to find it usually. A current PC based burner will probably cost you at least $100, more like $250 for a half-decent one. Although I didn't check the prices after I got the C64 based burner. Also don't forget that you'll probably want to get an UV eraser as well. Otherwise you can't reuse the EPROMs. The old burners normally all did the 2716/32/64/128/256 chips, but not much more. Most burners of today can burn dozens of chips, but they should all have lists which tell you exactly which chips work. the 27xx are so standard that few burners should have problems with them. Any *good* electronics store, where the people working there actually know what they sell, should be able to get one for you and answer any particular questions you might have. Hope this helps,

Too bad. Over here in Germany the first half of June was a mess - extremely hot and humid, lots of bad thunderstorms, even a tornado - that's an extremly rare thing outside the North American continent as far as I know. But now it's really nice, and sunsets around 10 p.m. are something I really like. Getting increasingly off topic I'll just shut up now.

Well since there should be enough 2600s to last for a good while from now, I don't see anything wrong with just getting another one. If you pay to have it repaired, just print out the schematics from the AtariAge page and hand them over to the repair guy, that might be enough for some experienced TV/Radio repair guy (preferably old enough to have seen 2600s during their heyday) to find the problem. Have a nice Sunday,