shoestring

Those single wipe sockets are bad news, the metal contacts lose springiness over time and there’s not much you can do about it except replace the socket.

The last Atari related item I bought from eBay was this NTSC 800. I recently upgraded the video with a Super Color CPU Card and bought a PVM to go along with it. She is in great condition and proudly occupies this space beside my... dare I say it.

Skool Daze to make the list even more perfect. Spent countless hours on this already

Yes the larger ones are too damn expensive. This one is 9” which still isn’t too bad.

I'm using a Sony PVM9041QM which can handle both PAL / NTSC and has vhold adjustment on the back, so that's always an option too if you can get one. Here is a really good review of one.

1.5A should be sufficient in most situations. The first one is just a generic power supply, personally I wouldn't use it and I'd be surprised if that could deliver 2amps, 1 amp maybe. The adjustable one should be much better, at 12v it's delivering 27 watts ( 2.25 amps ), so at the 5v setting I'd assume it would be more than sufficient.

I hear ya. Atari 8bits only pop up once in a while here too and c64s are a dime a dozen. But as mentioned earlier check the power supply since this is happening after 10-30 minutes. Is the supply getting hot to the touch ? A bad 7805 regulator perhap or bad cap used for filtering could be causing the memory in the machine to glitch. Thinking about this more and more so I'm leaning more towards power supply issue rather than chip fault. If the power supply is already weak then the heat would exacerbate the problem. Edit: Also take a photo of your power supply so we can all see what you got.

If it's heat related try some freeze spray on different chips until the problem goes away, then you've found the culprit. I bet on the ANTIC as well, could just be partially bad.

Ttl logic devices start to play up at voltages below 4.6 volts. So you wanna check the +5 voltage under load and make sure you don’t have too much cabling. I also check the filtering and +5v line for clear signal. Some of the cheaper crap is inadequate for filtering and will leak AC ripple into the DC and this is really bad for your computer.. sometimes you can hear it and see a rolling effect on the display if it’s bad enough.

An original PSP charger will work. I had a PSP-100 lying around doing nothing, so I decided to use it the other day. It delivers 5v DC at 2A. I just recently started using it with my XLs and XEs. The input voltage is 100-240v so it will work anywhere! Saw a couple of original ones on eBay for around 10 bucks. Watch out for the fakes out there though. All you have to do is cut the plug end of your old PSU ( leaving enough cable with the plug ) and solder the two of the wires to the end of your new AC adapter, taking note of polarity as well. Looking directly at the plug. Looking from the back of the plug ( or looking directly at the connector on the Atari ).

I don’t remember the C64 version playing that fast and sounding so crude, must be the NTSC version? It’s great that there’s appreciation for Ed Bogas’s tunes, I personally loved his work on Law Of The West. Is there any appreciation for this game though ? I personally spent hours playing it with my brother. It’s one of the best sports games out there.

Caps will drift a little over time but not to the point where they need replacing, especially in the low voltage stuff. I see a lot of these YT videos where people are randomly recapping their shit for no real reason. On the other hand I can understand people recapping old CRT monitors, replacing SMDs in their A1200s or overhauling Apple II power supplies but it's all gone a little overboard recently. As long as caps aren't leaking electrolyte all over the place, or budging then leave em alone ( it's an unnecessary expense ). My Atari 800 & c64 has never been recapped and both are dandy.

Not sure if it's been mentioned in this thread but Dolphin DOS was a very good hardware / firmware upgrade ( both the 1541 drive and the c64 unit ) It really shows how fast c64 loading can be when it's done right. The mod allows the drive to be connected via the parallel interface and the 1541.

I believe you mean one of the bank-switching modes via the 6510? Which basically allows you to turn off the I/O from $D000-$DFFF and turn on the RAM underneath it. Fairly handy trick that a lot of programmers used to store sprites and tiles.

I definitely remember Ozisoft. My understanding is that they were strictly a software publisher / distributer in Australia & NZ, just video games as far as I know. The other big publisher was Activision. I don’t remember Ozisoft getting involved in hardware distribution but I recall having a few titles on tape published under that label.

If I could go back and have my choice all over again then Id definitely have chosen an Apple //e, thats the machine I wanted originally but we just could never afford one. It was the first computer I ever used thanks to my school. I was into programming so this was the ideal machine to get started, with its open architecture, excellent manuals, powerful basic and built in machine code monitor. The c64 would be my second choice and thats somewhat based on demographics, thats the machine 90% of folks owned in my area and other platforms were virtually non existent spare some Amstrad CPC and TI/99 users. The Atari 800xl would have been a great choice but unfortunately they had really poor distribution in Australia so you couldnt even get a machine easily, software was hard to come by. My best friend had an Atari 400 and he struggled to find software, he would always complain about that.In the beginning Commodore and Atari used Futuretronics here in Australia as a distributor but both manufacturers ran into problems with them, Commodore quickly dropped them early on but Atari carried on using them until Jack bought the company. The ST had a very good presence in Australia they sold a lot of those machines here. I continued using the Apple IIs in school even though we had some c64s in our library. So I would spend many hours during recess and lunchtime typing in programs and learning how to code on it. Our Maths teacher would even take time out of his lunchtime and help us troubleshoot our programs. When I went home I just played games on the c64 because I could not find much information on assembly programming or knew which tools I needed to get started. Overall the c64 was difficult to program on due to its closed architecture. You needed tools or expensive hardware add-ons that simply were not available from retailers. I recall a freeze frame or action replay cartridge cost around $50-$100 which was a lot of money back then.

I don’t think there were any. There was a msdos simulator which could run some simple commands. But it was pretty useless as an OS otherwise

I was impressed when I saw the Plus/4 version of Mercenary, runs very smooth compared to the c64 and looks almost identical to the Atari version. The C65 which would have come a little too late in 91 but had they released something like a few years earlier I believe it would have been very successful. C64 compatible, dual sids, improved VICIII graphics and Microsoft basic version 10.

Not tested = dead, assume so and bid accordingly.

<fanboi mode on> </fanboi mode off>

Could have put more thought into some of its features but they were in such haste to get the machine done. The culture was cut throat, they had engineers working almost 20 hours a day then sleeping under their desks for the remainder with many casualties a long the way. This working culture carried on even after Jack left. The basic really sucked and I struggled to write any useful programs on it in the beginning. I always found it easier on other computers even though I wasn’t even an owner of those machines!

As an original c64 owner I recall my frustration as many others have of the perpetual swapping of joysticks between port 1 and port 2. Despite the warnings in the manuals most software developers did not facilitate an option to swap the controls. This encouraged users to swap joysticks with the machine powered on, eventually results in a blown CIA as your fingers tend to come in direct contact. This probably would have been less likely if the port was designed to be on the front of the machine like in the Atari 800. Not sure if this also lead to a blown 6520 in the Atari. But I dinstinctly remember blowing an 8520 in my Amiga 3000 after plugging in a mouse with the machine powered on.

In my experience, folks who sell vintage computer's fall into two main camps. 1. People who used them in the past and stored them for years or obtained them from a deceased estate. They usually no longer have the means to test the hardware extensively to list them as working ( red light comes on or whatever, power supplies missing ). I usually have good experiences with such sellers because I always get what I expected. 2. Hobbyists who have have a general love for vintage machines and may have collected them in the past and need to offload some to make room for whatever reason. Good experiences with those guys too as they list details very accurately.

Bil Herd and his team started working on the C128 without telling management, they needed a product to fill the gap whilst the Amiga was still being finished. Commodore only had so many chips and the C128 needed a hell of lot of them compared to the TED machine, so that might explain the hard sell. It still didn't do too bad having sold almost 6 million units. The Apple II design was great. Build a machine a simple as possible and leave it up to the user how he or she wants to expand it.

The joystick ports were different because the standard Atari style port could not fit, I believe Bill Herd explained this in a talk. It wasn't meant to be a games machine anyway, more designed for small or home business. The C116 was designed to sell for $49 as Jack first envisioned, an entry level machine to compete against the Sinclair. Which ended up evolving into a series of different machines after Jack left.