DavidMil

Just got my sixth 850 yesterday. This is one of the cleanest one that I have bought (inside and out) from ebay. No rust, no dust! All for $39.00. The wife is starting to frown at the stack of 850's in the closet! DavidMil

I actually had a 1090 once. I was told by the person that gave it to me that it was worthless because Atari had decided not to support it. It was a case without the top cover and no power supply, and I was told that it was fully functional, but Atari was not going to make any "expansion boards" for it. His words not mine. He would know as he was the Atari distributor for Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and I think Arkansas, at the time. But to answer my question, you're saying no remakes of the 1090 baseboard. Is that correct? DavidMil

I've seen lots of talk about expansion boards for the 1090, but has anyone ever made an actual bare 1090 mother board that is being sold? DavidMil

I thought that size only mattered to women? David

Yes, you are correct Nezgar. Ugly, but that would work and make the job of running all the traces look more uniform without so many traces going back and forth on the top and bottom of the PCB. In fact you could get away with a much smaller single sided PCB if you did that. Me personally, I would want a box to conceal that though. David

You people are over working this. I did this just as an answer to a question, not to try and make money. The few pennies that I would make from selling these would not even cover the cost of gasoline or shipping materials. And my time is much more valuable to me! This was designed as a simple coupler to connect SIO cables, not as any fancy splitter. DavidMil

There is always room for improvement. The 'zero ohm resistor' is really just a piece of wire with the insulation left on it. I will modify my drawing to reflect this change. Thank you Mathy! David

Thanks Nezgar. That was what I was wanting to know! David

Can you give me some advantages to this. As opposed to two floppy disks in two drives (besides not waiting for the drives to spin up and transfer the data? DavidMil

The other day someone had asked about a SIO coupler. I had been kicking around the idea off and on for some time. Anyway, that motivated me to send off my file to ExpressPCB and here is the final outcome : DavidMil

If your springs actually break, there is a company called "Lee Springs" that sells all kinds of torsion springs, and would be glad to work with you to find a match. DavidMil

I have gotten all the keycaps except these four: 2, C, Break, ? DavidMil

I will give this a try and see what happens. I'll let you know when I'm done. It may take a few days as we are getting a lot of clouds (not much ran though). DavidMil

I'm confused. Are you saying that ALL Atari 800 keycaps should be "golden-cream / light brown"? I wasn't talking about Stackpole keyboards specifically. My keyboard that is missing the yellow keycaps is a Hi-Tek keyboard. The keycaps on my Stackpole keyboards are all white. Are you saying that putting the white ones in the sun for a few days will cause them to turn "golden-cream / light brown"? DavidMil

Thank you DrVenkman! I've been using a tiny amount of hot glue on my worst ones. David PS. Remember not to cross the streams!

Thank you Stephen! David

Thank you Erichenneke! David

Atari 800 Computer keyboards came it two varieties; Yellow keycaps and White keycaps. I'm not sure why, but three of the four 800's that I have are all white keycaps. Here's a picture of the difference: DavidMil

I won't argue that I like to fix things. Especially Atari products! Here is something that I've been working with, off and on for a long time. I bought this keyboard as a damaged keyboard on Ebay for about $10. When I got it, I discovered that someone had tried to drill the copper contacts out for the space bar. They got one out but they missed the hole for the other contact and drilled out the via hole for the jumper wire (See picture 1). No problem I thought; I'd just desolder all the keys, repair the PCB, put it back together, and I'd have a working keyboard. Wrong! When I got the PCB off I discovered that the person had drilled through the PCB and into the plastic keyboard matrix. The bottom of the plastic that holds one of the copper contacts was gone! Ok, one thing at a time... I used some two part epoxy to fill the holes in the keyboard, sanded it smooth before it got too hard, then drilled new holes in the PCB and inserted new eyelets and repaired the traces. Finally covering everything with varnish to protect the new copper and the exposed copper from sanding. (See picture 2.) After some thought I found a plastic matrix from an old CX85 number pad. I cut one of the sections off that held a key and ground it down to fit the keyboard. (See pictures 3 & 4). Then I had to modify the keyboard plastic a bit to accept the new plastic part (See picture 5). I then glued the replacement part onto the keyboard and soldered the PCB back to the plastic matrix (See picture 6). Finally I placed all the caps that I had (See picture 7). Now all that is left is to replace the ribbon cable which I am also modifying. DavidMil PS. One thing I can say is that other than some super glue, epoxy and copper traces, this is still all Atari parts.

Please note that the keycaps are for an original 800 not an 800XL. They must also be the yellow keycaps. I'm paying $5.00 each (via paypal) plus shipping for each of the caps listed bellow... 2 Delete Break O (not zero) S D X C N ? Fuji key Shift key (right side only) Thank you for any help offered, DavidMil

Funny how this price increase happens just as I'm thinking of buying a second 400 to do upgrades on. DavidMil

Ignoring the price and the bad description (16K RAM); does anyone have any idea what this mod might be? It's definitely a RAM board. I'm guessing maybe a 256K upgrade? DavidMil

This is how my modifications are done (with CS3 trimmed). If it didn't work, maybe that is why I still have it in my Atari IC's box. DavidMil

I guess my old data sheet info is wrong. But the IC actually has six chip selects. some low, some high. If CS1 is not connected, it just can't be addressed as chip one. It still has 5 other chip selects it can be addressed as. I guess this was to facilitate large numbers of 6810 RAM chips. DavidMil

I thought that pin 11 is an I/O pin (Three to be exact)? Is there a difference in 6810 chips? DavidMil