juansolo

I agree, where it's not the best description, and he could have taken more pictures, it's also not out and out fraudulent. I also worry that the damage may have been caused by the courier. I've had that happen so many times with stuff I get imported. I suppose in my case I'm buying machines that I'm aware are sold as spares/repair, but still, it's not always malicious... When it comes to this one I'm with you, it's kinda 50/50. From the listing, description and photo's I'd have walked away from that one unless it had been incredibly cheap, in which case I'd have just sucked up any transit damage.

Yep. Raise it with him, but the second he seems like he's going to be arsey, click on return this item with the reason that it was not as described. When I do that I always embed pictures and explain why just incase ebay themselves review it so they can see the difference. Even your return postage should be covered then by ebay who'll then claim it back from the seller. Ebay is heavily biased towards the buyer, if you choose to force the matter in this way, there's not a lot the seller can do about it. He should know this... Which is why as a seller it can pay to be accomodating. But he might be banking on you not realising that so he gets you to pay for the return delivery. If you go through the official method of return, he hasn't a leg to stand on essentially and you will get your money back. That said, being fair to the seller, from the top two photo's that's not a system I'd describe as mint. I'd give that acceptable at best. Not mentioning the hole on the back is out of order unless it happened during shipping (it happens... Old plastics can be brittle and couriers are far from gentle). This missing screw, less of an issue, easy to stick another in there. It depends on what you expect.

I was being diplomatic The PAL 7800 is a little bit challenged...

If you have no luck, send it up to us and we'll take a look if you like. Most PAL 7800's have pretty bad RF output and will look really bad even if you manage to get it tuned in to a later panel with poorer analogue signal handling. It's easy enough to mod for composite video or S-video whichever your TV can handle.

So this is essentially what we do. But seems odd given that... Recently we bought eight Jr's in various states for £50. Most without cases, all sold as non-functional. Some evidence that someone with little experience had a go at getting them running. See the thing is for us, £50 is easily covered by a few working TIAs, Riots, CPUs, Cart slots and other hardware as spares. As it was we ended up with 6 working boards, 5 dead ICs, and a few bits of hardware. A restored Jr on it's own out of the batch will cover the costs (we'll sell a couple of them). So it's worth doing and it keeps more Atari's alive. Binning them is kinda wasteful IMO as there are custom chips and parts in there that are getting difficult to get hold of and are only going to get worse as time goes on. Someone can use them. As for buying non-working machines with little to no experience repairing them and asking where to start. That's fair enough, but honestly the best way to do that is make friends with someone who knows how to fix stuff and get them to go through it with you as all sorts can be wrong with them. You'll need to be able to read schematics, be decent with a soldering iron (it's not as easy as it looks as has been proven by some utterly dreadful soldering I get to see), you're gonna need diagnostic tools like a multimeter and ideally a scope or a data probe. We have a socketted up Jr board that we use to test ICs, it can be worth doing that to be sure, but again you'll need skills in soldering/de-soldering. It all takes time and patience. As for where you do start, I always start with power. Do you have a known good PSU? Then you work into the machine where the power comes in, is switched and is regulated, is a solid 5v coming out of the regulator? Is that then getting to the ICs? That's all multimeter, and where I'd start with fault finding a non-working machine with nothing on screen. Where it goes from there depends on what results you get. They're all different.

I forgot to mention on that front, after re-reading the thread, you really want to get your hands on an NTSC 7800 cart. With only a 2600 cart (a PAL one with likely work there but the colours will be wrong), you're only testing the TIA side of the 7800 and won't be touching the MARIA at all. It's essentially two machines in one.

How are you feeding it with a signal? If it's over RF it can be massively variable as to the quality of the signal you're feeding it. Likewise domestic TVs are massively variable when it comes to setup (talking about the stuff you can't easily change). Also CRTs are getting on and the parts in them can fade with heat and use, like the tube itself, but they're but caps failing can also have a huge effect on the picture of a CRT. If you're over RF into a cheap domestic TV, you'll probably just have to manage your expectations accordingly. I went to the UK National Museum of Computing and a perfect example of that would be the 2600 they had there. That said, that's particularly bad. All that said, I did the whole scaler thing way back (long before better options like the OSSC came along to be fair) and CRTs, if you've got the space and can find good ones, are a much simpler and more pleasing option (to me) than trying to make a panel look like a CRT while still running with original hardware.

The 5200 board is actually surprisingly large (considering a 600XL isn't). Mostly it's just the controller bin at the back that's all dead space. But the rest of it is pretty much board. The IV you'd struggle shrinking because of the way it's laid out inside. The Coleco for me is the easy win with regards to shrinkage. But the 5200's are one machine that would really stand for new cases. So many of them are damaged or missing the flap at the back at the very least. I'd be nice to have an alternative there.

I think a lot of it depends on how it's been stored over the years. Obviously a lot of it comes down to the plastic itself, it's composition and how it ages. But constant exposure to UV, extremes of temperature and humidity are all going to play a part. We've had machines that were super brittle. Most of those pegs you can save if you gather all the bits and epoxy them back in. Plastic welding can work also on things that are out of view. But occasionally things are beyond saving. I had a paddle controller that I dropped from about a foot from a wooden plinth. It hit it and pretty much exploded into pieces. Yet I've got other's that are just fine. I think we've currently got something like two juniors, a six switch and a 7800 board all good and without cases because they were too far gone. As a proportion of machines we've had pass through our hands, it's not a bad plastic failure rate... It does bring me back to thinking that with the advent of 3D printing, there has to be a demand for replacement cases (like the one @PacManPlus was working on). Likewise there are some machines I'd put in an alternative case in a heartbeat. The Coleco for one, a modded one only needs to be as big as the main board... I'd love to make my coleco a slimline model. The 5200 you could get some depth from, but it's always gonna be a big bloody thing. EDIT: Which is when you've found out someone already did one: https://technabob.com/blog/2008/08/19/colecovision-mini-console-hits-ebay-casemod/ That said, I don't see any reason why you wouldn't keep the side mountedjacks, and front expansion. Basically make it like the console is, just cut in half without the controller bins. Kinda wish I had a spare case to have a go at just sawing one up...

There are only three electrolytic caps on the 7800 main board and none of them pertain to the RF (though can be worth swapping due to age). The ones that do are inside the RF modulator, which you'll have to remove to get to. Once it's off the top and bottom of the can come apart quite easily. Couldn't tell you what caps are in there as when I'm pulling the RF modulators out, I'll ususally gut them and fit a composite or s-video mod.

I switched my XboxOneX on yesterday to see if you could still download AMR2 to it (you can't ). It might have been a while, as then for the next several hours it chonked away updating 15 games. What the hell do they keep changing on them?! Gone are the days when a complete game is released for you to play that just works. Now we're in this constant cycle of hours and hours of updates and waiting to play games. I'm totally with you dude. Put game in Atari, play game, job done.

Oh totally. I only buy games for the PC from GOG these days. If it doesn't come out on GOG, I don't buy it. Simple as that. Voting with my wallet there. Indeed, that's why I posted my opinion on the matter to a forum

When it comes to the physical release of PMC40 are you and Al considering a YM loaded cart or will it just be TIA only sound?

That sadly is the future of gaming in a nutshell. Perfectly described and it will happen if Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo get their way. Not that many modern games are worth the effort any more.

All IMO of course: OG Releases: Asteroids DigDug Food Fight Joust Robotron 2084 (NTSC only) Ms Pac-Man Galaga Pole Position II Homebrew: Rikki & Vikki (OOP, very expensive now) Donkey Kong PK (Talk to Tep392) Armor Attack II B*nQ T:ME Salvo Froggie Frenzy (Includes Berzerk) Dungeon Stalker Asteroids Deluxe (Includes Asteroids) Astro Blaster Moon Cresta Pac-Man Collection Space Invaders Knight Guy in Low Res World Complete but not yet released: UniWarS Galaxian Penta Popeye Keystone Kapers EXO There’s loads of WIP stuff also (the forum and ZPH are your friends). 7800 has a lot of really good games.

I currently have @GDT2019 's Jag and JagGD here and I noted that Raiden didn't run right on it. But it does if you add a 50/60hz switch and switch it to 60hz. Handy if you're gonna run that cart as games like Sensi Soccer run better at 50hz also. It's really easy to add one.

I'm going to regret this... Piracy exists in two main flavours that I'm going to call freeloaders and chancers. Freeloaders aren't going to buy your stuff regardless, they just want shit for free. These people are not a market for homebrew and never will be. The next are chancers, these are the people who want to make a quick buck out of someone elses work by selling it to someone else. These people also won't buy your stuff because they're thieves. The problem is that people who would by your stuff might buy the pirated one on eBay rather than the officially released one. These are people who buy games, and they are impacting the people who make the stuff. This brings us to a couple of complications: Preservation and collecting. Preservation becomes more and more relavant as time goes on. Ultimately there won't be any original hardware left, or it will become prohibitively expensive. It's already happening with a few platforms. FPGA and software based emulation will be how you have to play old games in the future and unless those ROMs exist, that isn't happening. I'm not advocating piracy here as it is possible to buy ROMs from the developers in some cases, but ultimately piracy goes hand in hand with preservation. Because without piracy, there wouldn't even be the possibility of emulation. Collecting is an issue when limited or rare games that are simply unavailable to those who would want to buy them. The completly valid argument here is that you don't have any right to them whatsoever, but collectors hoarding and scalping removes games from the market to people who want to play them leaving piracy as an option. Personally I have issues with DRM in a modern context. My Xbox One for example irks me. I've got something like 300 games installed on that thing spanning from the OG Xbox to now and every single one of them is bound to a connection to Microsoft. As we've seen with Nintendo and Sony, their attitude towards their older games and our rights to play them are somewhat anti-consumer. They'll happily turn off servers and remove games forever. You can even have the physical disk and hardware (again this is the case of the Xbox One) and if they switch of the servers, all your games and the console after a while will no longer work. Of course this is because they want to rent you the games now by getting you to pay a subscription. It's all about ongoing revenue and they're conditioning people to do that. But for preservation this is terrible as you don't actually own any of the games any more. Certainly when this becomes the norm, and it will... An example of DRM that really bugs me is one of my favourite games is Oids. The original author ported it to the Mac (PPC) back in the day and I bought it. It's the best version of the game by far. But it has DRM that locked it to the CPU ID. I changed Mac a few times and the first two times he sent me new versions of the game for those machines. My last (and current) PPC Mac doesn't have Oids on it because he stopped responding to e-mails. That game is now gone other than the demo version you can find online. I've got my binaries somewhere, but they're tied to machines I no longer own. This is where DRM ruins preservation and essentially breaks a game I bought. I've other examples on PC: Company of Heroes, I've got the original on a shelf but I can't install it as it tries to connect to a server that's no longer there to validate it. I've a few instances where I've got the boxed games like this and the cracked version installed on my PC. Indeed I only buy games on GOG now and have a massive archive of the installers downloaded. But, to prevent chancers profiteering from your own hard work creating a game, I can completely understand the reasoning behind them using DRM. My problem is that in the long run, it will absolutely impact the preservation aspect of all this. That was a really long post that could be summarised as: The whole thing is complicated, but ultimately how a dev/publisher decides to distribute their work is ultimately up to them and there's not a damn thing any of us can do about it. I know FOMO is a thing, but it doesn't give us the right to impose our views on them in what they do with their own property, and we should probably just accept that as it's been this way since the creation of copy protection.

Adding you to the group PM mentioned here. We're a collection of UK AA'ers trying to get some stuff as a group order to spread the pain...

Best I can do is try, I'll add them to the group PM.

I've added you to the PM Thread with everyone in the group order. The last couple of posts are the pertinent ones.

Honestly I'm surprised they didn't want it on paper. I've had that before when dealing with our government and trying to get shit sorted. It's all tragically archaic.

Will do. Shouldn't be long.

I'll add you to the PM. Just for clarity, we still can't place an order yet. We're still waiting on that.

Replace the RIFA caps in the PSU if they haven't been already. Those things crack and can destroy the machine when you power it up... Used to get a load of stuff from Poland, there's a LOT of retro activity there. That's just not really an option any more for us. Brexit really screwed everyone on that front. I still buy consoles from the US, but they're usually basket cases that go for cheap enough to make the fees not so painful.

No probs. I'll fire up a PM with everyone involved on this end to save cluttering up the thread.