spacedmonkeys

Yes I had long forgotten how bad typing on this 400 keyboard is. Not helped by it bubbling due to a tiny split near the ":" . So are we concluding Antic has gone bad, and not RAM? I have a quote from "Best" for this one and one for my XL.

I have got a quote from Best (relatively painless process so far) for some 8bit items, notably my 2 x Antic chips that seem to have failed (plus a new 400 keyboard while I'm at it). His recommendation is to ship to a "freight forwarder" on the east coast USA, to then get cheaper postage to the UK. Sounds reasonable. I have found one forwarder (Stackry) which doesn't require a membership fee. Anyone done this and used this company? Or recommend another?

Video results of this one: 20240417_072906000_iOS.MOV

Video results of this one: 20240417_070029000_iOS.MOV

This... but, what we did when kids was - team up against the computer ninja guy, to make Bruce's life easier ... or more often than not in my case, make the Green Yamo stand there making that noise constantly

I will type the original program back in when I get chance, with a graphics character in line 40.

Antic buggered then?!

Ok. Just changed it. I think on that screen, the actual corrupt character still appears.... and again, in this new version, the corrupt character recurring down the right hand side -1 position. 20240415_141613000_iOS.MOV

Weird result with lots of corruption... 20240415_140104000_iOS.MOV

Donkey Kong is fine too.

I struggled to find an action game which didn't have corruption (Dropzone did, Fort Apocalypse did, Blue Max did) I tried Air Support which is vertically scrolling and this one looks ok:

Results of the BASIC program: 20240415_095828000_iOS.MOV

The corruption remains in fixed position at the same column when the screen scrolls in Boulderdash. I am thinking Antic got damaged whilst diagnosing my 800xl

Not conent with my 800xl playing up, my 400 now decides to play up too.... although to be fair this may have always been an issue as I've barely used the machine since I bought it in 2015 as I have an 800 with Incongnito as main machine. Best described with pictures, some games have corruption at the right hand side of the screen. It actually stops Bruce Lee being playable as you can't exit the room! I thought it might be the version of the game, so I've tried a few different XEX and ATR's but all the same. Some games are unaffected, must be the certain graphics mode. What would this be, GTIA, ANTIC?

But .. this XL has the C014887, when I opened it up. Been working ok with it for years. When I was reading around this yesterday, it seems some early XL's had this version Antic and it was problematic. I think I may have to source an Antic, looking expensive

Seems like Antic might be the problem. Got my 400 out and took it apart yet again. This time swapped chips from XL to 400. 400 with original chips = working. XL GTIA + 400 Antic in 400 = working. XL GTIA + XL Antic in 400 = not working. 400 GTIA + XL Antic in 400 = not working. 400 GTIA + XL Antic in XL = black screen. 400 GTIA + 400 Antic in XL = blue screen with cursor. 400 GTIA + 400 Antic + XL Sally in 400 = working. Weirdly my XL seems to have a C014887 which I understand was a small early batch of PAL XL's?

Update: RAM chips arrived. Swapped all old chips with new chips. Powered up fingers crossed.... Black screen. :( While I was there... Took out Pokey, powered up = black screen. Replaced Pokey. Took out BASIC, powered up = black screen. Replaced BASIC. Took out Antic, powered up = black screen with some moving/flashing lighter band across middle/bottom of screen. Replaced Antic. Took out GTIA, powered up = no signal. Replaced GTIA. Cursed a bit, and remain grumpy. Tested with Star Raiders cart, still black screen. Left the machine on for about 20 minutes. GTIA, Sally, Basic and OS chips slightly warm. All other chips cold to the touch, inc the RAM. Any clues anyone? Next step I will have to dig the 400 out again and dismantle it, and try the chips from this XL in there. My worry with the 400 is the keyboard ribbon is looking ridiculously fragile and pulling and pushing it many more times is going to destroy it. Really disappointing when stuff you have looked after for a long time just randomly breaks like this 😭

I was able to take some pics of the motherboard. It is indeed a Hong Kong version 800xl. Also a pic of the blue screen after swapping antic. I did try swapping both antic and gtia, and with this it was a black screen with a brown/flickering bar at the top 10th of the screen. https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjBkmiz Memory chips ordered and on the way.

Ok, I will just order full set of RAM to rule that out, I can see on ebay some fairly cheap. Yes, some of my computers have a good history, they were bought from someone who worked for Maplins back in the day when they were Atari specialists, down in the south east of England. The 400 was modified by him to have a monitor cable output with a din port. I had alot of other stuff from him too but over the years have had to sell as needed funds.

Yep it's my own machine, had it for many years now, been working fine. Use of the machine was supervised (kids are only young) and the C64 that i do have was up the loft and no other power supplies have been near it nor would fit. Like I say was working fine before Christmas, its just been in a box in office for a few months. I will get the 400 (or 800, if it's easier to access the chips?) back out, and try the suggestion, putting the XL chips in the 400 and see what I get. 400 was a chore to dismantle. Also in response to @Beeblebrox there are no colours, just black screen, which is actually coming from the machine as the tv reverts to "no signal" if it's not getting anything. I'm just using an old flatscreen digilogic with SCART connector. Works fine with the 400, same scart cable. As mentioned, when I switched the Antic chip, it becomes blue screen with fixed cursor. When I switched the GTIA chip, there was actually a flickering/brown bar at the top of the black. I will post up pictures of the motherboard when I can. Will also check the manufacture location. But it is definitely fully socketed.

Hello, long time AtariAge lurker here. Been happily using my 8-bits over the years with little to no issues. Unfortunately life gets in the way and they mostly stay packed away in the loft. We had the 800xl out last September, and the kids were enjoying playing the old games in the lead up to Christmas. It then got packed away in dry storage and we dug it out again last weekent. Unfortunately we were met with a black screen on power up. I have read through some of the similar issues on here and tried a few things. I don't have access to an oscilloscope (probably beyond my skills anyway) but I do have a multimeter and a 400+800 in order to swap chips. The 800xl is UK PAL, and fully socketed which is good, and therefore I'd quite like to keep this machine and get it back up and running. So far I have done: - tested power supply, 5.24v is present and seems stable. Power supply is the large black finned one, not the ingot. - pulled and reseated every single chip. still a black screen. - tried the "invisible diag screen" test, could not hear any musical sounds, could not hear any keypresses. - took my 400 apart and tried swapping a few chips across (gtia, antic, cpu, from the 400 daughterboard). - swapped the chips one at a time, the only one which made any difference was swapping the antic. With this swapped the xl booted to a blue screen with cursor fixed in top left of screen. Having read through other threads, I'm leaning toward Pokey being the issue (typical as it looks like the most expensive to source)? I have a few questions for anyone who'd care to chip in, any advice gratefully received: - why would any of the chips randomly die whilst in storage when been working fine? - can I use the Pokey chip from my 400 or 800? - I watched a video of a repair and the presenter was saying there are there different varieties of the custom chips that must be paired together due to timings, is this true? if so pairing my 400 gtia chip with my 800xl cpu chip may not have worked anyway? - where to next?

Any chance of putting this c64 archive back on google drive, seems to have been removed? Also, eagerly following this thread for more lost gems!

Question - followed this thread for a long time, and at one point Diaperboy was putting cracks in here too as well as CSS ... not been back in here in a good couple of years and admittedly I am being lazy but without reading through all the topic pages, are Diaperboy's cracks included in CSS-Cracks downloads?

FJC thankyou for clearing that up. Looks like keeping the SIO2SD for multi-disk games then, and the CF card in the Incognito for everything else

Got my new (Lotharek) Incognito installed in my 800 and have been loving trying out all of the "new" games, Manic Miner, Pang etc etc .. so good being able to play Bounty Bob on the 800 too. The Incognito is running what I believe is the latest FJC firmware 3.02. Couple of things I am stuck on though, and I've even resorted to reading the manuals! 1. Loading multiple disk ATR files through SIDE Loader. I can tag them fine, they show as D1: D2: etc (For example I'm trying to load Phantasie which is 4 Disks). Press RETURN to reboot with those disks in the respective drives. But then when I've rebooted, the game will ask "insert disk #3" .. doesn't seem any way to move that disk to D1:/D2:? I can see that CTRL+S swaps the disk order, but it only does that in the SIDE Loader menu which I don't see the point of at all? How can I do this in the game? I guess the only way is the hard wired swap ATR switch option? Unless there is some key combo to flip between the SIDE Loader and the game, without rebooting, so I can CTRL+S? 2. AtariBlast! is one game I'd liked to have had a play with... can't seem to find a version that works with the Incognito. They all seem to crash after the menu when about to start the game. Other than that I think I've done ok!