towmater

Votive candles? That's an altar!

So back on topic, there were no Jetsons overlays or manual accidentally placed in any of the other boxes, sorry. Goodwills in the Pheonix area are the "place you oughta be" because there's a large population of, well, old people. LA is the worst, the stores are picked clean like vultures and you'd have to be there within minutes of something hitting the shelf. Other than the occasional Sega Genesis there's been nothing worth noting.

3D Printing might be over-kill, but still some correct thickness of foam or cardboard or (?) that sits in the box's void might at least prevent "casual crushing."

I have a depressing hypothesis: our 8-bit generation is on the wane, and our children are not going to know what to do with our "junk" but will realize they can get a tax-writeoff donation receipt if they drop boxes like this at Goodwill. This gear was in mint condition and every box was kept with overlays dutifully in their sleeves, so whoever owned this before it was donated obviously cared about it and wasn't just playing with a toy. The extra mylar joypad inserts indicated that the original owner cared enough to keep the system running.

Yep, that did it. Note that nowhere in the manual did it say to put a cartridge in first. Any cartridge but the one I was using, Jetsons. Thanks for that, Lathe26. And thanks JaonLikesINTV, I had tried a long-press but had no idea it would be that long.

Reading the manual, Basic should just come up if no cartridge is plugged in, but I just get black. This is odd because I'm able to type in the Jetsons just fine with the qwerty keyboard. Also, how do you turn off this thing? Pressing on/off reset just resets.

I'm picturing something like this, It could be along the lines of those sports collectibles. But yes, I realize now I am probably way overthinking this. Some of the artwork is pretty retro-diculous-cool. (Not Spce Battle, that's why I used it as a test.)

This is my "haul" from Goodwill. I'd like to look at stopping box decay, and I'm wondering if there are any generally accepted methods for preserving boxes? My first thought is to carefully unglue the overlaps, flatten them to the original pre-folded state, and preserve them in some sort of large photo-album like hard page with a clear plastic cover.

I just picked up this shindig at Goodwill, and it came with a lot of stuff, I will gladly look for the overlays for Jetsons and let you know. Here's my question: I wanted to program the Basic for this thing, I gather it's not built in?!

I think I have Jetsons... The cartridge label fell off, and when I run it it says "The Jetsons Ways With Words." I tried playing it with no instructions, but I couldn't fathom what to do.

Go for it, I guess. You never know how cheaply things can be done in China, perhaps they have CNC-maching of injection mold tooling with a half-dozen slides, 1.5 inch draw depth and a large mold-tech texture coverage area "down" to a simple engineering process. The internet+false advertising? Do some due-diligence before announcing to a Kickstarter crowd what tooling will cost, or you may find yourself being unable to complete the project. I bet that sounded sarcastic, but really it's not. I would love to see a reasonably priced solution, if not for XL laptops then perhaps a more general-purpose re-housing of retro gear. It could be a generic, but good quality, screen that can take in hdmi, rgb, vga, & composite and a customizable keyboard with a set of modules that can be chosen to make the keyboard work with various makes of 8-bit motherboards, so one for Atari, another for TI, C64, etc. 9-pin connectors on the exterior could route to the existing ports, and some sort of generic port module could offer things like SIO. Perhaps a service could be offered that trim down motherboards to their minimum required size to fit in this beast, and the ultimate size of the laptop can be based on the smallest one is able to trim-down the majority of popular 8-bit machine types. The Sentry device is probably closest to what such a device might cost and could be modified to serve such a purpose?

There's no Injection-mold tooling that costs $2000, even overseas. One tool, for say the base alone, would be well into ten times that cost, and that's for the tooling, not a production run. You may be thinking of Urethane casting. These parts are far too large to cast without significant warping, and generally won't last long before cracking.

Now that it's powered by 5V, I've piggy-backed that voltage to a USB hub (off camera) that lays in the empty space in front of the controller tray recess. That 5V hub runs power (now regulated to 1/2 Amp by the hub) to the HDMI board sitting under the main board. The hub also snakes a power cable to a Flashback-to-real-Coleco controller adapter. (My originals were shot.) So now I have 64k of RAM sitting unused, can you think of an upgrade I could do with this? Is it possible to upgrade an old Atari 400 with these?

Well there you have it... The F18A, all ram removed, a small 2 ampere wall-wart, so the F18A is a combined five-volt mod and VGA output. Tucked underneath here is a VGA-HDMI convertor so the big lime thing is audio to the hdmi.

The 5v mod for the CV is just a set of 5v-only ram chips, so I imagine if one followed the directions for installing those (it involves removing some coils and cutting the non +5v lines going to the ram) I imagine it would work. Since the rams are socketed after the "upgrade" I imagine it should be easy enough to pop them out and see if the CV still runs - which I'll try when I have some free time. Besides ameliorating slightly the cost of the F18A, the real advantage here is being able to dump the CV power supply and use just a 2A 5V power supply of much smaller size. I'll let you know how it goes.

If the F18A, when used in the TI-99/4a, replaces the system RAM, does it do the same for Coleco? & if that's the case, can it be used as the equivalent of a 5V mod kit?

No, I just use a small +5v 2A wall wart to power the CV after the mod. All went well until I added the No-delay bios, now it flickers so I wonder if 2000ma was not quite enough juice. You don't need the 12V either, I think that leaves you without RF tv out, you should put an f18a in whilst you are already operating so that RF won't matter, imho.

Isn't the 2600's video an analog output? There's no "resolution" as such, then, because it is all about timing and how many times the cpu is able to change the output on the fly?

I fond I need one of these, if still available?

But the isolators are in the adapter because Coleco didn't provide a common ground. There isn't much that a microcontroller alone can do with that, and npn transistor switching requires the ground as well, in any case $1 isolators chips are a good way to protect the Coleco's io ic's.

The current Arduino sketch: at this point I have not found enough 3041's to finish the keypad translation. I've found about 1-2 chips at every Fry's I've visited. void setup() { //flashback pins also include analog 0-3 Serial.begin(9600); pinMode(2, INPUT_PULLUP);//B DB-9 Pin 1 pinMode(3, INPUT_PULLUP);//D DB-9 Pin 4 pinMode(4, INPUT_PULLUP);//C DB-9 Pin 8 pinMode(5, INPUT_PULLUP); //E DB-9 Pin 9 //db9 pin3 to v++ //output to coleco: pinMode(6, OUTPUT); //=Brown Coleco pin 1 pinMode(7, OUTPUT); //=Red Coleco pin 2 pinMode(8, OUTPUT); //=Orange Coleco pin 3 pinMode(9, OUTPUT); //=Yellow Coleco pin 4 pinMode(10, OUTPUT); //=Blue Coleco pin 6 pinMode(11, OUTPUT); //=Green Coleco pin 5 pinMode(12, OUTPUT); //=Grey Coleco pin 8 //defaults: digitalWrite(6, LOW); digitalWrite(7, LOW); digitalWrite(8, LOW); digitalWrite(9, LOW); digitalWrite(10, LOW); digitalWrite(11, LOW); digitalWrite(12, LOW); } void loop() { int A0; int A1; int A2; int A3; int D2; int D3; int D4; int D5; A0 = analogRead(0); //up DB-9 Pin 2 + 10k pulldown A1 = analogRead(1); //down DB-9 Pin 5+ 10k pulldown A2 = analogRead(2); //left DB-9 Pin 6+ 10k pulldown A3 = analogRead(3); //right DB-9 Pin 7+ 10k pulldown D2 = digitalRead(2); //B DB-9 Pin 1 D3 = digitalRead(3); //D DB-9 Pin 4 D4 = digitalRead(4); //C DB-9 Pin 8 D5 = digitalRead(5); //E DB-9 Pin 9 if (A0 > 500 && A2 == 0 && A3 == 0) { digitalWrite(6, HIGH); while (analogRead(0) > 500 && analogRead(2) == 0 && analogRead(3) == 0) //up and not LR { } } digitalWrite(6, LOW); if (A1 > 500 && A2 == 0 && A3 == 0) { digitalWrite(7, HIGH); while (analogRead(1) > 500 && analogRead(2) == 0 && analogRead(3) == 0) //down and not LR { } } digitalWrite(7, LOW); if (A2 > 500 && A1 == 0 && A0 == 0) { digitalWrite(8, HIGH); while (analogRead(2) > 500 && analogRead(1) == 0 && analogRead(0) == 0) //right { } } digitalWrite(8, LOW); if (A3 > 500 && A1 == 0 && A0 == 0) { digitalWrite(9, HIGH); while (analogRead(3) > 500 && analogRead(1) == 0 && analogRead(0) == 0) //left { } } digitalWrite(9, LOW); //diagonally if (A0 > 500 && A2 > 500 && A3 == 0) { digitalWrite(6, HIGH); digitalWrite(8, HIGH); while (analogRead(0) > 500 && analogRead(2) > 500) //up+left { } } digitalWrite(6, LOW); digitalWrite(8, LOW); if (A0 > 500 && A2 == 0 && A3 > 500) { digitalWrite(6, HIGH); digitalWrite(9, HIGH); while (analogRead(0) > 500 && analogRead(3) > 500) //up+right { } } digitalWrite(6, LOW); digitalWrite(9, LOW); if (A1 > 500 && A2 > 500 && A3 == 0) { digitalWrite(7, HIGH); digitalWrite(8, HIGH); while (analogRead(1) > 500 && analogRead(2) > 500) //down+left { } } digitalWrite(7, LOW); digitalWrite(8, LOW); if (A1 > 500 && A2 == 0 && A3 > 500) { digitalWrite(7, HIGH); digitalWrite(9, HIGH); while (analogRead(1) > 500 && analogRead(3) > 500) //down+right { } } digitalWrite(7, LOW); digitalWrite(9, LOW); //triggers if (A0 < 500 && A0 > 1 && D2 == 0) { //ltrigger digitalWrite(10, HIGH); while (analogRead(0) < 500 && analogRead(0) > 1 && digitalRead(2) == 0) //up and not LR { } } digitalWrite(10, LOW); String diagnostic = "A0="; diagnostic.concat(A0); diagnostic.concat("\t"); diagnostic.concat("A1="); diagnostic.concat(A1); diagnostic.concat("\t"); diagnostic.concat("A2="); diagnostic.concat(A2); diagnostic.concat("\t"); diagnostic.concat("A3="); diagnostic.concat(A3); diagnostic.concat("\t"); diagnostic.concat("D2="); diagnostic.concat(D2); diagnostic.concat("\t"); diagnostic.concat("D3="); diagnostic.concat(D3); diagnostic.concat("\t"); diagnostic.concat("D4="); diagnostic.concat(D4); diagnostic.concat("\t"); diagnostic.concat("D5="); diagnostic.concat(D5); diagnostic.concat("\t"); Serial.print(diagnostic); Serial.println(""); }

"They said it shouldn't be done" My original controllers were trashed. So I repurposed the Flashback controllers. There are just enough pins on an Atmega 168 to make one controller convertor, plus 10 3041 chips-thanks to Coleco's arcane wiring scheme, I couldn't just use a series of transistors - so at a minimum one could do this for about $30 if you already have an Arduino board to program the Atmega chip. (Assuming you didn't want to devote an Arduino board to this.) So I would likely have been better off just sourcing some reasonably usable original controllers.

Thanks for that, I love info like that. Feeling humbled by meeting Matt of F18A chip fame on the same day as posting my controller complaint (bizarro small world?) I have reverse-engineered the new controller, posted here: http://atariage.com/forums/gallery/image/12070-coleco-flashback-controller-csi/ That's half the battle, now I need to do the same for the original controller, hopefully someone has already done that and posted it somewhere. The good news is that the flashback controller only uses four analog lines, so a microcontroller translator dongle should be a piece-of-cake (assuming the original controllor port supplies some power.)

Actually that's the one thing I did understand. The reason I need to replace the original controllers is that the shafts broke and were virtually irreparable. The short shafts on the new design were not to save money, rather to save (er, well money) them from an unknown number of returned products. The new design will actually bottom-out the thumb disc against the outer case before even fully compressing the rubber between the stick and the switch contacts, so the new design would be extremely difficult to snap.