DavidMil

I've been saving money (not easy to do after you're retired) to buy a $599.00 table top USB 3D scanner. Here is a picture of the drum that the rubber print head wraps around, and the casting I've made of it. If you look closely you can see a few indentations from air pockets in the casting material. I just ordered a degassing chamber to remove the air from the molding material before I make another cast. David Milsop

My wife has about 50 million pairs of shoes. So I started using shoe boxes to store the disks. I currently have three and a half boxes full. Not sure how many of them still work though... DavidMil

Are you talking about software to test the floppy drives themselves, or something else? Atari made a good diskette (Atari CPS 1050 Diagnostic Diskette #FD100690) to test the 1050 drives. Just be aware that the some of the test won't work right once you install the Happy Chip/Board. DavidMil

I vote for AR, but can the player data still be saved to a floppy? Would that make it easier or harder to do? DavidMil

Sadly yes, and it's very confusing and looks rather odd. David

Look for an RX80 F/T+ This is sheet or tractor fed. I bought a working one on ebay a couple of months ago for $80.00. DavidMil

A wealth of information. Thank you so much. I see that Best has the cartridge (if he still has any in stock). So I'll be ordering one next week. Thanks again, David Milsop

I've looked around and I can't seem to find a Repair Manual anywhere, so I'm wondering if Atari ever made one? I have schematics but no Service Manual. I asked this question on the A8 forum also. Thanks, David Mil

I'm going to post this question on the 7800 forum, but this forum has such a wealth of diverse knowledge, that I wanted to ask it here too. Did Atari ever make a Field Repair Manual for the 7800? I can't find one anywhere. I did find schematics but no service manual. Thanks, DavidMil

I've seen a lot of Atari's ( as well as many other companies PC's) with cold solder joints. That's another one of the things I look for on the back side of the boards; any joints that are not smooth and shiny, I resolder them! You'll especially see cold solder joints around anything with large or thick leads. I remember one HP color printer that had so many cold solder joints that the fix was to take the controller board out of the printer, take it home, preheat your oven to 450 degrees, and put the board in the oven on a metal cookie sheet for 15 to 20 minutes. It worked! I fixed two printers that way. HP got a little upset when they saw all the comments about this fix on the web. But it worked. David Milsop

Neither of the 130XE's had sockets on the Freddie's. I had to desolder them both and then install sockets for the chips. This is something I do on almost any XL/XE computer I work on. But I agree with you, the sockets are cheap and allow a lot of corrosion to build up around the pins of the IC's. David Milsop

I'm too old and slow for todays fast pace 1st person shooter games. And I've discovered that online games seem to be full of juveniles that think cussing makes them sound grown up or tuff. Besides, the Atari brings back a feeling of a long ago time of youthful memories (before my kids were teenagers). DavidMil

After reading all your feedback I decided to do some online research. According to Rockwell, the 6532 also has eight parallel lines (PA0 to PA7) which drive the printer port on the 850. I always thought that the RIOT chip only had a couple of I/O lines too. See below: I guess I'm still learning things... DavidMil

Was the 6532 chip (C010750) RIOT chip a version of the 6520 (C014795) PIA chip? The reason I ask is that in the 850 interface are two of the 6532 (Riot) chips (A103 & A104). The field repair manual calls them PIA chips, but the chips are clearly marked C010750 which are RIOT (RAM I/O Timer) chips. As usual, I'm lost and confused... DavidMil

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the 800 have a floating point math chip built onto the ROM board? Seems like I remember one, and then somebody came out with a 'Fast Chip' that wasn't really that much faster. DavidMil

The shame of this is that you KNOW who USPS is going to look at to make up for their looses (HINT: it won't be the government)... DavidMil

When you look at the caps, if any of them look swollen, or the top is not flat (domed up), they could be going bad. One other thing... I had a 800 that was doing just like yours, Memo Pad no matter what device was plugged into the SIO port. Turned out to be a bad POKEY chip. DavidMil

That's a good price! Is that French on the bottle? I bought a big Pyrex Lasagna dish (16" x 10" x 2" deep) to soak the boards in after I do rework on them. It takes one of those bottles to submerge some of the bigger boards. I like MG Chemicals. I've got 3 unopened bottles and one that is about half full. Good stuff! One word of caution... Don't pore it down the drain when it get dirty. KABOOM! DavidMil

That will work on the 800 too. The 800 will stress it a bit (cause it to run a little hotter), and make it more likely to blow the internal fuse. DavidMil

The Atari power supply is 9Volt AC, 31VA output. As DrVenkman and the Doctor said, 'Do not use Rubbing Alcohol'. If you don't want to buy a bottle of 95% isopropyl alcohol you can buy some small sterile prep pads from the drug store. They are 70% alcohol and 30% water, but make sure you dry the boards good. Even using some compressed air to remove any leftover water. In lieu of that, Best Buy, or Fry's or a computer store may have some Alcohol wipes that are used to clean the CPU off before applying heat transfer compound. DavidMil

Changing the Freddie's didn't make any difference. I did time the difference in the tests, and it could be human error but it seems like the new Freddie ran a couple of seconds faster. So I guess all the difference is in the newer OS Chips. By the way, For some unknown reason both Freddie's started working in both system boards. Thanks to everyone for the really good info and feedback! David Milsop Kingwood, Texas

I guess that the few 130XE's that I've seen never had the Rev. 3 or 4 OS, because this is the first time I've seen those longer bars. Is it possible that the C061922 is designed to work with the Rev 3 or 4 OS chip? I'm going to swap Freddies and try the older Freddie with the new OS chip and see what happens when I run a memory test. David

This is getting curiouser and curiouser. Evidently I have never run the internal Memory test all the way through on the board with the different OS and Freddie chips. When I let it finish, I noticed that there are four lines of RAM blocks and the fourth line has four blocks that are the size of four standard size blocks all touching side by side with a gap between the four blocks. The total of the fourth line (space wise) comes out to 16 regular sized RAM blocks (4 blocks of 4). I am wondering, does the 1400 have an internal Memory test and does it look like this (3 standard lines of 16 RAM blocks and one line of 4 large blocks)? The computer runs fine (as far as I know). At least it boots to Basic, will boot to DOS, and runs Defender perfectly. David

I just noticed one other difference, however I don't think it has any bearing but... The board with the new OS ROM and the C061922 Freddie has TMS4164-12NL (120 nanosecond) RAM chips. The other board has M5K4164ANP-15 (150 nanosecond) RAM chips. David

I think that TXG/MNX meant the OS chips, not the Freddies. Info on the systemboards is: Both are 16 x 1's and both have the same part number and Rev code: C070067 Rev. 3. On the board with the older Atari OS (C061598B) there is a 1K resister soldered to pin 8 (ground) of the 74LS138 Chip (U2 between the Pokey and the PIA chips), the other end of the resistor is stuck into a via hole between pin 7 of the Pokey Chip and pin 25 of the PIA chip.