StickJock

Well, his name is Avon, so maybe he's trying to identify with the beauty products line? Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I'm a big fan of the double-slotted shelf brackets. They are adjustable and rated to hold a lot of weight. You can get pre-made wire & wooden shelves for them, or make your own. You could easily make a set with clear plastic shelving.

The blank spot where the left drive would go made me think of an empty DIN slot for a car stereo. This made me think of the single-DIN head units that have a retractable LCD display, which made me think how cool it would be if this had such a display. Perhaps make a custom top shell for a 1200XL with the 1450XLD look and have a retractable display in it? Call it a 1200XLD (D for Display, not Drive, in this case). @bob1200xl, get on it! ?

Dave's not here, man.

I had an 800 that also had a very low volume problem. It also had no color. I tracked it down to a faulty A104 (3086 transistor array). Replacing chip fixed both issues. Good luck!

I have an old LCD TV that I picked up for free when someone set it out on the curb with a 'FREE' sign on it several years ago. In fact, that's what inspired me to dig out all of my A8 stuff from storage. No remote with it, but it has buttons for Power, Input, Volume Up & Down, Channel Up & Down. I was able to change some of the picture settings by using a universal remote app on my old phone that had an IR port on it. I had to try a few apps to find one that had the correct codes for my TV. If you have a phone with an IR port, maybe you can find an app that can control it. Even if it is an old phone that you don't use anymore, you should still be able to connect it to your WiFi network to download the app. About making your own cable, I had trouble with the DIN pins shifting due to the plastic getting too hot. I was able to circumvent this by plugging the DIN plug into a DIN socket. This held the pins in place and gave it more thermal mass, so I was able to solder up the cable without having the pins move around on me. Good luck!

0.95" is, well, almost a full inch! That is quite the reduction in clearance! Methinks this measurement is possibly incorrect. ?

Fixed it for you! ?

Now if I could only stop being confused between an Atari logo and a Hershey's Kiss....

Huh, their logo reminds me of the Uber logo. Yes, I know that the MPI logo is actually a "Save File" icon. ?

Heh, heh - green power light. Nice. ?

I bought a driving controller off of ebay simply because I didn't have one. I started writing a game for it a couple of years ago, but haven't touched it for over a year now. I did some experiments to find out how fast you had to read the driving controller. It's a mechanical encoder with 16 phases in 1 full turn. IIRC, I had to read it 5 times per frame in DLIs evenly divided down the screen to prevent missing any transitions. I think that what I did was read it a lot more, and then report how many steps I got per frame. When I turned the knob as fast as I could, I seem to remember (it's been a couple of years now) getting 5 steps. If you don't poll the controller fast enough, you can get two or more transitions between reads. Two transitions results in a stall since you don't know for sure which direction the wheel turned (although, you could assume that if you had positive motion last time, then this is likely a +2). Three transitions, however, looks exactly like 1 transition in the other direction. Somewhere, I have a bunch of code snips of various ideas for reading & processing the encoder data. I even did one that accumulated motion and then reported it with a USR call from BASIC. You have to be careful with race conditions, though. The interrupt routine adds/subtracts to the counter, and the reading routine reads & clears the counter.

I assumed that he meant a modified case/shell shape, not a modified board shape. So, a standard cart board, but put inside a fancy cart case. Maybe one of the reservoir tip cases? (If you did do a custom board shape, you could put a pulsing LED in the tip!)

Interesting key placement. I think that I would prefer to have the Caps & Return keys swapped as well as the Break & Esc keys.

That's what I was thinking, so here are some D*ck Pics:

You mean like print it out in Atari rainbow stripes??

Keep checking continuity the whole way to the shoulder of the 4051 pin. Well, check from the 4051 to the keyboard trace. If there is no continuity here, figure out where it breaks. Most likely will be the motherboard to keyboard connector, or the 4051 to it's socket (if it is socketed). If it is socketed, you could also try removing the chip & putting it back in, which will help break up any insulating corrosion that may be present on the pin/socket interface. You could also try cleaning the keyboard socket (I used a piece of thin card stock cut to size, like an index card, and stuck in in & out of the connector - amazing how much gunk came out on the card). If you do have continuity all the way from the 4051 to the keyboard, then it may be that your 4051 has gone out. If they are socketed, try swapping the two 4051 chips. If the problem keys move, then you have found the problem, and you need to replace the bad 4051 chip. If the problem does not move with the chips, and you have continuity all the way to the keyboard (well, all the way to the last key on the trace), then, uh, hmm, uh, I don't know. Good luck!

My first thought was that the white stuff looked like what you get from super glue fumes. Then I noticed that the markings on some of the keys looked like they had drifted or floated away from where they were supposed to be. Maybe someone tried cleaning the keyboard with some sort of solvent (acetone, maybe?)?

I got my replacement 64Kx1 & 256Kx1 chips to resurrect my 320XE from Jameco a couple of years ago. Which is where I got my original set of 256Kx1 chips (to upgrade the 130XE) & 16Kx1 (for the 800) chips from back in the 80s.

When I got my SIO2SD from Lotharek a while back, I, too, had some issues with the tool that lists the files on the SD card. After some investigation, it turned out that the tool was using some direct address instead of the vector for something, which did not work on my 800 (designed on/for the XLs). I found a version of the tool online that had this issue corrected so that it would work on the 800. Perhaps you are having the same issue with your 400 that I had with my 800?

This seems like a missed opportunity to use Roman numerals for the score! ?

It's obvious, right? The 800s have 48K of RAM, so an 840 would have 50.4K of RAM! Or, maybe it has 1/10th of a 16K 400 in it, so that would be 49.6K of RAM. Or, maybe instead of a 1.79MHz clock, it runs at 1.89MHz? ?

I think that I started with AtariWriter, but switched to PaperClip in the mid '80s. I used PaperClip exclusively until the '90s when I used something PC based.

Clearly! ?