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R.Cade

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Posts posted by R.Cade

  3. Posted · Edited by R.Cade

     

    To be honest, I really only care about reading right now, because my primary purpose in trying this in the first place was to attempt to recover 6 boxes stuffed with disks without risking shipping somewhere and them being lost or destroyed in the process. If someone near me had 8" drives, and I could cruise there with disks in hand, I'd abandon this whole idea. I've purchased two drives and a power supply, but they arrived basically destroyed.

     

    Also, it looks like about $60 for the nice professional looking board, $80 for a modern power supply that doesn't take up an entire room in my house and cause the entire town's lights to dim when I hit the power switch, and god knows how much I'll have to pay for an 8" drive that actually functions. $50 for one nearest me, but the guy insists on $30 to ship, and I'd have no clue if it even works. Good times. I should be buying car parts instead! :)

     

    --Todd--

    Find a local or semi-local vintage computer club. :)

    There must be someone near Austin.

    • Like 1

  4. Posted

    Thanks! From what I am seeing, there is no other circuitry involved other than to wire the pins from the 50 pin connector to the 34 pin connector, and if I'm understanding correctly, all of the odd pins are essentially just grounded together while the even pins are carrying the various signals. As for the ATR-8000, there is no magic to that. I recall at one point experimenting with a 3.5" floppy drive connecting to it, but I couldn't actually afford to keep the drive at the time, as I had borrowed it from work, and I had to return it. I just bought a 5.25" bare drive as well, so I might try that out first. I was just wanting to double check, that I won't be risking anything if I connect that drive to a common PC power supply and connect it to the ATR-8000. Someone once, many years ago, had some serious concerns about that, but I'm not sure I see the difference between that and this industrial-sized 24v monster sitting on my dining table I'd be doing the same thing with. This thing has no case even...

    Only if the drive does not need the TG43 signal, or the ATR-8000 generates it and you connect it. Otherwise you cannot write properly to the upper tracks where write current must be changed.

  6. Posted · Edited by R.Cade

    That actually sounds right to something I got over the phone before off an escalation that got a thinking American rep. If someone whines and wants a return because or not satisfied, they have to pay to return it and you can even hit them with a restocking fee too. But if they can create a case where it looks like it is your fault by not including things (condition, missing bits, etc) then they'll stick you with the shipping bill.

     

    Perhaps what you can do is offer a return, but tell them they have to pay shipping and there will be a restocking fee (say like 15%) to cover ebay/pp fees since they're not satisfied with what you mailed them despite giving them exactly what was described and shown.

    Unfortunately, you don't control that. You don't "offer" a return... it's all automatic. If they say "not as described" then you pay shipping. I guess you could call eBay and argue about it... they are counting on your time being more valuable than that, which it should be. It can't cost more than $3.50 to ship that cart First Class, and $7 for Priority. Not worth the time...

     

    You can report the buyer for violating eBay policies, for what that is worth. Nothing happens that I know of, but if it makes you feel better... (That's likely all it is for).

  7. Posted · Edited by R.Cade

    nah. Even if I posted pics of the exact item and blacked out the background, under eBay 100% money back guarantee rules, he could have asked for a return anyway. He just used that as an extremely weak excuse.

    True, it can be returned for any reason at all, including "changed my mind" or "found a better price".

     

    Which is complete BS on an auction site, but who are we kidding- it's not an auction site anymore.

    post-4629-0-32206600-1548770335_thumb.png

  8. Posted

    Unless you're suggesting I was expected to ship my desk to him as well, (it is clearly visible in the background) then no - that's not how any of this works.

     

    This was nothing more than buyers remorse.

    Agreed, and I understand, and you understand. The issue is you allowed for doubt. :)

  9. Posted · Edited by R.Cade

    No, they got you. You took a picture that included things you didn't ship...

     

    Others are selling around the price you sold for that come with the box and SD card full of games, BTW. Illegal or not...

     

    Like I said... Don't get mad, just suck it up and resell it and learn the lesson. Put it in an old game case with a nice printed label and include a "blank SD card". :)

    • Like 1

  10. Posted · Edited by R.Cade

    This is a fact of life selling on eBay, and I don't get mad about it anymore. Some buyers will send a wormy e-mail about how something isn't like they thought it was, and I feel like they are just fishing for partial refunds (if I didn't make a mistake). I don't do this, so I simply tell them I'm sorry that happened and to go through the return process and send it back to me if they aren't satisfied.

     

    Probably 80% of the time, they never return it. The few that do, I just test and relist it at a higher price to cover the shipping loss, or else sell it on the forums.

     

    Luckily, I haven't ever had someone go so far as to send me back something broken or swapped out... yet.

  11. Posted · Edited by R.Cade

     

    There may be some confusion here. Zellers was just a retailer; they never manufactured anything. I still have a Zellers store-brand sweater in my closet, for example.

     

    Zellers was one part of the Hudson Bay group -- current stores include The Bay and Home Outfitters. As far as I am aware, they have never had a presence outside of Canada.

     

    The original source (the developer and/or manufacturer) where Zellers obtained these games is unknown.

    I had something to add here, but when I researched it I was incorrect. I knew Zellers was owned by a USA company, but apparently they sold it to HBC in 1976, well before Atari would have existed selling cartridges.

  13. Posted · Edited by R.Cade

    Wow, that is a lot of dupes. That's like buying out the used bookstore...

     

    Is there actually more than about 20 unique games there?

     

    Friends don't let friends drink and eBay!

     

    EDIT: Wait, sorry. Stupid eBay showed another auction "like" yours. What you got is OK, just in rough shape. You overpaid some... a good bit maybe.

  14. Posted · Edited by R.Cade

    This is what I did for my 600xl... It is super simple: soldering two wires and a third one not soldered used as a jumper. I like it because it requires no change to the PCB. I went for this method since I am bad with the soldeing iron and I was scared of damaging the motherboard, and this method if you do something wrong you can destroy the ls158 or the ls375 which you can still find very easily in eBay.

    It can be performed in 10 minutes if you go slow and carefully.

    I think is similar to Mathy's one, but in this one I just took off the U18 and save it for later, if need to go back to stock.

    AFAIK, all different versions do the same: first find A14 and A15 in some point and feed it to the pair of ls158 (which originally have their A14 and A15 pins connected to GND, so you need to lift those pins)

    And finally bypass in some way the U18 since that logic is not needed anymore to route the CAS signal.

    ah! and obviously change the memory DRAM chips.

    The way I do this is very similar to this photo, except I don't solder to those pins on U15 (?) directly, but on the 2nd two pads of the 4 pads below U14. Cleaner...

    • Like 1

  18. Posted · Edited by R.Cade

     

    I'm a big fan of S-Video, so I'd definitely like to have that as an option, both for the televisions and the Commodore 1702s. Composite is certainly better than RF, but S-Video is nicer still.

     

    An SIO2USB and/or SIO2SD would be nice.. I don't mind using a cart solution (which I expect is fastest), but being able to connect to the computer would be nice, rather than having to futz with an SD or CF card every time you want to load new software that's not already on the card.

     

    ..Al

    I have a little USB to serial board that I glued into an SIO shell, so it just has a USB micro port right on the plug.

     

    I plug in my phone charger on my desk to the 600XL and fire up RespQT and it's ready to go... Eight drives point and click. :)

     

    I think S-Video onto the 600 XL is just a couple of resistors more than I have... should be a 30 minute add-on. As it is now, I just tapped onto the composite signal going to the RF box and amplified it a little with a transistor.

    • Like 1

  19. Posted · Edited by R.Cade

    I use a (homemade) composite-modded and RAM-upgraded 600XL with a dual-switched stock ROM and Hias hi-speed ROM for the OS. It's the smallest and most compatible. It could be further upgraded to S-video, but I haven't done that. The composite is pretty clear as it is on a Sony PVM.

     

    For storage, either a SIO2USB, SIO2SD (the newer Max version using the Arduino sheild) or my old compact SIO2SD someone made me a long time ago. With the hi-speed OS, I never really saw a reason to go to the cartridge storage solutions. I imagine they are faster... I had a first-gen MyIDE cartridge, but it was very unstable for me.

    • Like 1

  20. Posted · Edited by R.Cade

    I can't imagine all the chips are dead. That just doesn't happen... It's more likely you have bent pins or put the chips in backwards. I see way too much solder in your original pictures with blobs and bridges.

     

    Do you have a friend you can take them to that knows something about electronics and soldering? :)

  21. Posted

    Okay, I just went through all my Atari consoles and could have sworn I had one with an "odd TIA"... but turns out, it may be a little more odd than I thought. lol

     

    I threw all the typical suspects at it (game wise like He-Man, Kool-Aid Man, Thunderground, GI Joe, etc.) and it displays all of them properly. BUT, here's where it gets interesting... on certain games where there is supposed to be a single solid line, it displays dots instead. And the Harmony menu looks like crap as well.

     

    Attached are a few pics:

     

    attachicon.gifIMGP8439.jpg attachicon.gifIMGP8440.jpg

     

    attachicon.gifIMGP8442.jpg

     

    ...and no amount of warmup time corrects this. Is this a funky TIA issue or do I have a component that's going bad you think? System is an unmodified 4-switch woody. RF out.

     

    I've seen this on some composite mods with certain televisions. Is this a composite modded unit?

  23. Posted · Edited by R.Cade

    I hate owning things that are broken, so in the last month I fixed my Atari 520ST (corroded traces on board in floppy drive) and PET 8032 (bad ROM and some bad "fuse" resistors in the monitor board).

     

    Next, I just got an Amiga 3000T (tower) that has battery damage. It powers up, but black screen with occasionally blips of grey. I suspect the acid has taken out some of the traces under the battery that seem to go from the ROMs to some vias near the FPU, so I will start tracing there...

  25. Posted

     

    I bought a 32GB microSD card for one of my RPi boxes a couple months that was DOA. It appeared to format fine at first, by my Pi was crashing after an hour or two. Then after the second or third attempt to format and re-write the Raspian image Etcher said it had encountered too many errors and aborted. Bah.

    There is a lot of fake and junk media out there... and it's difficult to identify the fakes.

    • Like 1
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