Krenath

1. Soldered in the rotary switch with the 0 facing the front edge of the board as shown. Thanks! 2. Moved my main crystal to the top two holes as pictured. I am curious, however: On the 1221 board, there are four holes rather than three in that area. If I move it to the top two holes instead of the middle and bottom hole, it appears that it ends up connected to the same traces on the back side, as the top hole and bottom hole are connected together: Please pardon the dirty board. I haven't cleaned off all the spattered rosin flux (and cat hair that sticks to it. yuck.) yet. 3. Working on removing the extra PAL components currently. 4. Thanks! When would that connector be used? Is it intended to be something like one of these? https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Wurth-Elektronik/61201021621?qs=W%2B2sBeLta1a0dwX5pxbfXw%3D%3D&mgh=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwmqKJBhAWEiwAMvGt6EOFUq3Qi1xXUks9JieGirrPp_6bLTFBht4QQiMdvIe5XzPkYnGDnxoCh4YQAvD_BwE

Don't know if it's any kind of a clue, but those garbled shapes are the bit patterns for consecutive numbers. Wherever it's getting its character data from right now is just a bunch of 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F...etcetera

I've been idle for a while and just started working on my 130XE remake board. Here's my progress so far: Mine's a 1221 board so I feel a little like I might be missing out a little on the ability to use larger ROMs in the BASIC slot. And I don't have the convenient A5 pin, though I haven't noticed much else different. I had a nice time desoldering the entire J4 A/B assembly from my donor 130XE without damaging it. I noticed the right-angle cartridge connectors I had ordered didn't let the cart seat deeply enough once installed in the board, so they came out and the original entire J4 assembly went in. This one will be an NTSC board. I do realize that there are too many components installed in the PAL area. (I was in "Solder by numbers" mode when I was installing things, and was just putting everything in the holes labelled for them. The components that aren't needed for NTSC will be removed later.) It will eventually have Sophia 2 installed. The cable connector is pretty hard to find right now and I might end up de-soldering one from a Sophia DVI board I have handy. I find that I don't actually know what gets installed in the holes just below the words VIDEO SETUP... I'm also short some resistors and capacitors that were backordered. Also, when I ordered the Mouser shopping cart, I got some components that I think were intended more for the 1271 board, as I have some leftover resistors, capacitors, and chokes in values that don't correspond to anything on the 1221 board. I currently have the following extra components that came with the shopping cart order but don't have a slot on the board: 8 - 4.7K ohm resistors 1 - 180 ohm resistor 1 - 33K ohm resistor (Perhaps this goes in the 36K ohm slot?) 1 - 75 ohm resistor (Perhaps this is an alternate value for the 82 ohm slot?) 2 - 2.2uf 25v capacitor 1 - 10uf 10v capacitor 1 - 100uH inductor 1 - 47uH inductor (perhaps this goes in the 47MH slot?) Empty slots still on the board: 4 - 1K8 resistors 2 - 1K5 resistors 3 - 2K resistors 1 - 10K resistor 1 - 36K resistor Empty slots still in the UAV area: 1 - 10K pot 1 - 47MH inductor 2 - 1K24 resistors 1 - 10M resistor 2 - 2M2 resistors 3 - 10uF capacitors (backordered) 1 - 100uF capacitor (listed as not used and jumpered in errata file) 1 - GAL22V10 (on order) The rotary switch S2 on the back side of the RAM expansion will get installed as soon as I dig up a diagram or picture that shows me which orientation it goes in. If anyone notices any issues I haven't, I'd like to hear about them before this ever sees power

And if there's a way to avoid doing so...

Here are a few schematics I used that might help

I have a mighty need!

The official key spacing being in imperial measurements rather than metric or mils, I switched my PCB software over so that I could further divide the placement grid. In imperial measurements, a key space is 3/4" by 3/4". In order to get the right key offsets and wider key sizes, you basically need increments of 1/4 key width, and for some reason my PCB software wouldn't let me divide the 19.05mm value into grid squares 1/4 that size because it didn't like the number of decimal places. With a grid size of 0.1875" I found I could easily snap the key objects to the grid at exactly the spacing I needed, and then flip back over to mils or mm for everything else. The top two rows are 15 units wide, so 11 1/4 inches total width. The next two rows are a half a key unit narrower, indenting 1/4 unit on either side. So, 10 7/8" wide. The spacebar is 9 units wide, so 6 3/4" (My keyboard is different, as I found that it seems difficult to source a 9U spacebar, but I did find a 4U, which left me room for 5 additional keys (and potential room for more if I wants a 2U spacebar or just wanted to use keyswitches to stabilize the 4U bar.)

I've tried on my 800 with both the SCCC and a UAV I had ordered before the SCCC arrived. With the stock CPU card and stock video hardware, all of my 800s produce blue/green artifacts. I can get other artifact colors, but only if I completely mess up the normal colors. If the normal memo pad/BASIC screen is blue, the artifacts are always blue/green on any of my machines' stock video hardware. I even have an extra CPU card I ordered off eBay and it does the same blue/green colors as above. With the SCCC or UAV, the artifacts change to purple/green and no amount of fiddling with the delay/color pots can get it back to the original 800 colors. I've even tried modifying the SCCC to get back to 800 artifact colors, but it seems that the 800-style artifact delay is outside of the range of the SCCC/UAV color adjustment range.

Hard to tell from the pic, but it sort of looks like you're getting magenta/green on the artificial horizon ball. Interesting. If I try to adjust my 800 to get similar artifact colors, everything else looks really odd. The blue notepad/BASIC screen is far from blue. I don't seem to be able to get any of my 800s to display like that. When I run Flight Simulator on my 800s, the artificial horizon has blue sky and green ground. Faicuai insists that it should be blue and orange because he has a plane that has the same colors. I wonder just how much variance in tolerance in components there were back then, and how often they changed. The three operational 800s I have currently have different manufacturers of just about everything. Resistors, capacitors, even the main VLSI ICs are all over the map.

Of all the NTSC machines I've messed with: 400/800 artifact colors are blue/green. Games like Ultima III were designed with this in mind. XL machine artifact colors are purple/green. XE machine artifact colors are red-orange/blue. Games like Flight Simulator II were designed with this in mind. Of course, if you mess with the color pot, this can shift significantly. And, as we found out somewhat recently, if you put a UAV or Super Color CPU Card (which uses the UAV circuit) into an old 800, you'll change the artifacting from 800-style to XL-style. I haven't played with a PAL machine to see what artifacting looks like on those.

I've seen two kinds of Stackpole keys so far. Sometimes both on the same keyboard. They're interchangeable on the Stackpole plungers but might affect how the 3D printed adaptor holds them.

I wish I had noticed that beforehand. It would have saved me a good pit of soldering. But it did let me test with and without diodes. Both seem to work fine for normal usage. It is, however, fun to write code that can detect keycodes that everything else says can't be detected. I'm thinking about creating a new board layout where everything is mounted on a backplate with standoffs so the height of the keys can be adjusted. Soldering the switches directly to the same board as is screwed to the case doesn't leave a lot of room for adjustment. I used EasyEDA after watching some tutorials from a youtube channel by a guy named Ruthsarian. I'm beginning to think it's required. the PCB alone wiggles quite a lot. There needs to be a strong support to keep the center of the keyboard from flexing and there really ought to be a place to snap the switches into to keep them aligned properly. I was thinking of a triple layer of switch mounting plate, PCB, then support plate, but with some creative metalwork, it might be possible to use the mounting plate for the switches as the backplate and give it mounting ears to screw into the Atari case.

Just dropped into this thread but I noticed nobody else took a shot at this question. It swaps A and B without needing a third register.

I have found it incredibly convenient to remove the keyboard cable, solder right-angle pin headers in its place on the bottom side, facing backwards, then use an old IDE hard drive cable to connect the keyboard to the Atari motherboard. You just have to make sure you're using the same pins of both ends of the header, because it's two rows instead of one and is two pins wider than you need. The hardest part about soldering the pin headers is the fact that the keyboard PCB is single-sided and all the pads are on the same side you'll be putting the right-angle pin header on. I just solved this by removing the pins from the header strip, plugging them into a cable header to hold them straight, and soldering them that way. It gives you two ways to disconnect the keyboard when opening the case, and if anything else happens to the keyboard cable in the future, you can replace it with another IDE cable in seconds. Also, if you're using the computer out of the case, such as when installing mods, you can use a long IDE cable for convenience.

One, please.