Qix Raiders

Funny you mention the electronics knowledge. While I am no expert, one of the tasks that kept me from getting to the storage area until it was too late was addressing why my mother's range hood was not working. After inspecting the main board I noticed that a cap was leaking. Rather than spend $200 on a new board I looked up the cap on Mouser, ordered it, and now the range hood is working for less than $10! (Really, less than a dollar, but there was shipping :P) Thanks for the words of encouragement, I am actually more looking forward to putting your advice to use in cleaning the 5200 pots. Just have to wait until December to get back home. That is the worst part!

Wow, thanks for the detailed write up patroclus99! It is good to know that the pots can be reconditioned. Sadly I didn't find my Atari 5200s on the trip home. There were lots of little things to do for my mom, and I foolishly waited until my last morning to start going through all the stuff in storage. I quickly discovered that there must have been a water event at some point in the past year, as all my boxes were wet. This means over 6 inches of water must have intruded at some point, as I had everything elevated on plastic pallets in order to avoid this situation. While many things were protected against the worst with heavy duty plastic box liners, quite a bit was ruined. I only got through a few boxes before it was time to leave and the fates of the 5200s are not yet known. The Jaguar didn't fair so well. At least the boxes and manuals. The stacked boxes were completely stuck together. Thankfully AvP was high enough that it didn't get damaged, but all this stuff was mint or near mint

Hello everyone! Sorry to start one of these threads, but as I searched through the existing ones it became hard to tell if information was still accurate or not and I didn't want to make any costly mistakes : ) I am hoping to get one of my 5200s out of storage and back to playable condition. I have both a 2 and a 4 port, with the 4 port using the super cool auto RF switch. My first question is which system is a better candidate for a video upgrade? My second question is what is the recommended video upgrade? (From my research it would appear to be a Composite/S-Video output, but I guess I am curious if component video is an option as well.) Next, these systems have been in storage for about 25 years because the Start buttons stopped working on the controllers. The side buttons could be problematic at times, but the number pad and sticks were great. (I never understood all the frustration, I guess I must naturally auto center :P) I see a lot of controller repair kits on ePay, but they seem really expensive and it is hard to trust unknown sellers. Is there a preferred source of 5200 controller repair kits here at AtariAge? (From my reading it sounds like Dr.Venkman manufactured kits are amazing, but he appears to be out of stock for the foreseeable future.) Thank you for your time and please do not hesitate to educate me on anything I might have gotten wrong or missed!

I am really sad that everything seems to have an ultra bright white LED on it these days. Thankfully Sony TVs let you turn it off on the logo, but I really wish my PS4 would use the blue light when powered on instead of white. I miss the days of red or orange for off or standby, green for on, and blue for disc state. Plus it didn't seem like LEDs were so blindingly bright. They were just bright enough to do the job without being distracting.

Yeah, shipping is really out of hand. I have seen some auctions for small things with $50-70 in shipping fees. And when did ePay start charging tax???

Amazon frustrates me in how they show amazing images of pristine items when you find a classic game, but then when you look at what is really for sale the truth is rarely that nice. At least this seller does have a pic and describes things truthfully. Most of the time the descriptions are not that good.

Yeah, I don't think a cart has ever been put in to it, as the cover flaps still have protective film on them with no signs of scratches.

I bought an Atari 800XL...but it looks so nice now I don't want to use it