1200XL M.U.L.E.

I recently bought a 5200 console from Goodwill. It was a bit of an impulse buy but the idea had been brewing in my head for a while. I wanted one to learn more about the system, especially the differences between it and the 8-bit home computers. The console was filthy! There was hair, dirt, bug eggs, and rust on the shielding. I think it must have sat inside a storage locker for 30-ish years. No controllers and no power switch box was supplied. I didn't know the power was fed through the switch box. Ooops! That is the consequence of an impulse buy without complete prior research. I ordered the power conversion kit from Console5. It does not look complicated to install. I opened the console to clean the case and motherboard. The motherboard was surprisingly clean! I suppose the case and shielding did their job. The case was scrubbed with soapy water and a toothbrush to remove all the excrement. Assuming the power conversion kit installation goes well, what should I expect when I apply power? Should I see an Atari splash screen? Once I know it works then I will look for controllers and games. I see a GTIA chip here. Anyone install Sophia into their 5200? Thanks!

@santosp The board looks wonderful! Excellent job!! I put my name down for some blank boards in your other thread and cannot wait to reproduce your work. ?

@Simius I tested the system. Unfortunately, no good news. I do not have any image through UAV S-Video or Composite with Sophia plugged in. I installed original GTIA chip back in the socket and I have an image again. So, the Sophia board seems dead. Is there anything I can to revive it? Can I send it back to you for a failure analysis at least? Maybe there is some incompatibility between Sophia and UAV that may have overloaded Sophia? I am beginning to see some similar symptoms in my other 1200XL motherboard. The image seems to jump or jitter sideways (left to right to left) sometimes. Not often but it happens. Maybe this is my plasma TV?

One of my Sophia boards failed last night. It was installed in my 1200XL with the UAV Rev D modification. The computer would not boot up right away after powering on. I had to hold the reset button down for 5 seconds and then it would boot after release. Sometimes the picture would also shift left and right by a few Atari pixels, almost like slow jitter. All this went on for about a week. Now the DVI output is seemingly dead. The computer still boots so it’s probably working as a whole. This happened late last night so I didn’t have time to diagnose it much. Maybe the Sophia board is dead? Maybe the Sophia board is corrupted? Maybe the Sophia board needs a configuration reset with SCONF? Maybe something feeding Sophia died and I have a broader system problem? Anyone else have this experience?

@Gunstar I agree with you here but from a slightly different angle. Like you, I have no burning desire to acquire a 1400XL. Of course I will take one if an opportunity arises and I have the easy good fortune to get it. Who wouldn't, especially if it doesn't break the bank? I had the privilege to grow up with Atari computers. The 800 was a fundamental building block in my childhood but that experience was in my childhood - not my adulthood. As a child, I would not have appreciated the power and capability of applications like SynCalc or the deeper dives into the hardware like learning about the GTIA, ANTIC, and all the OS ROMs. In my adulthood all these more advanced topics make sense to me and I am able to connect my present Atari experience with my childhood Atari experience. Connecting these two times in my life makes the Atari ecosystem feel complete and right to me. It's like a sense of belonging and identification. I don't particularly need a 1400XL for this. My 1200XL and this forum is plenty! I find it odd that I am not drawn to the 800 like I am to my 1200XL even though I did not have any childhood experience with the 1200XL. Maybe this is because I feel like the 1200XL is the natural extension of the 800. It is where I would have gone if my Atari childhood experience had carried on without interruption to adulthood. Just as children naturally grow up, the 800 in my life probably would have grown up to a 1200XL. I don't necessarily feel some sort of pride with my 1200XL but it does feel special to me. My heart would be broken if the machine died. I would aim to replace it with another 1200XL system but I wouldn't fight fate if I was told to move to an 800XL or 130XE. That means there is something there for me and it would be another chapter in my Atari experience. Atari computers are just "things". They may be special "things" but they are "things" nonetheless. Even though a 1400XL is very, very cool all it would do is add "expensive" to the word "thing". It wouldn't add anything to the word "experience" for me.

I would be interested in two if the price is acceptable. Shipping to the US. Thanks!

I placed my motherboard on a massive mousepad. Worked well.

Knowing how irrational people can be, the price of a 1400 would go up even more as a repro would just attract more attention.

The GTIA socket in my 1200XL was super tight too. I took the motherboard out of the case, placed it on a pad, and then installed. Press down firmly, like wow-this-is-hard!, but evenly and it went in.

Damn! So happy that I have what I have and not want for (too much) more.

I ordered four Sophias and installed two so far. Each had different default settings. One of them was defaulted to 720x480p and it worked perfectly with my older plasma TV. The second one was defaulted to 1344x960 and did not work with my older plasma TV. I changed to a modern monitor with a DVI port and a perfect picture appeared. Then I was able to run sconf.xex to check the settings. I lowered the resolution and now the board works on my TV. Bottom line - if you see a black screen but the computer boots then don't panic!

I can hear that 800 screaming in pain as the drill ground through the plastic and a little bit of the machine's soul escaped into the ether. That poor thing needs some healing.

@Simius Fantastic! Thanks for the links!

@Simius Ahh, this saved me. I experimented with different resolutions and my TV turned black at every setting except the default 720x480! Thankfully I could always revert back. Then I attached one of my modern HD monitors and it can work with any resolution. That monitor has a setting to “compress” the image into a 4:3 ratio. The image on the monitor was even more bright, more vivid, and even more sharp than what my TV shows. Outstanding! Simply outstanding! I was once very excited about finding my TV at my local thrift store. It has 3 S-Video inputs, 2 Component inputs, and 2 HDMI inputs. That seemed to make it an almost perfect screen for my Atari “laboratory” and beyond. Now with Sophia all those analog inputs can be brushed aside. I truly hope Sophia becomes a de facto video standard that is as readily available as the UAV Rev D modification is today. I still have to figure out how to mount the DVI connector board. The massive heatsink in the 1200Xl covers so much valuable space and I’d rather not remove the RF modulator. What is the name of the cable connecting Sophia to the DVI board? Is that something standard which can be ordered in different lengths?

Just wanted to say, above all else that was mentioned here in 11 pages of posts, that I think it is absolutely fantastic and outstanding the Atari community has people all over the world developing upgrades, modifications, and other bits of new hardware for what is essentially a dead and historic product. Such a vibrant community! People like @candle and @flashjazzcat deserve some sort of medal! I'm actually a little surprised that someone in China hasn't tried making an 1:1 8-bit clone/knockoff and selling it on eBay or AliExpress for $100-$200. I'm not talking about emulated hardware but a real machine with reverse engineered GTIA, ANTIC, 6502, etc chips. Make the whole thing socketed so it can easily take these awesome upgrades. U1MB, Sophia, 32-in-1 ... it would be an experimenter's dream come true.

I am also using a DVI->HDMI cable. It's nothing special. The cable is connected to my plasma TV and the resulting picture is beautiful. Get a similar cable and you should be good to go!

This is a win, for somebody, no matter how it all goes. Atari will win short term for sure as the licensing deal will include a time period. Shortening the time period will no doubt incur fees that the licensee will not want to pay. However, if done right and the whole Atari image is reimagined from an old vintage platform to something new and exciting then the franchise will grow. Once travel recovers, the hotel operator will collect money from people staying. Even if you're not an Atari fan, chances are you may just need a place to stay and that's all that's available. Even if the franchise goes bust and the operator goes bankrupt there's still a physical building that can be sold to Hilton, Hyatt, Marriot, etc. It's a win all around but nobody knows who will win by how much.

My Sophia installation seems to work without any tweaking of the board's settings through SCONF.XEX ... but I am curious to know more about the settings. I understand resolution. It's pretty obvious. Mine is set to 720x480p and it works with my plasma TV. I get a stretched 16:9 screen. Can one of those settings make a 4:3 screen? Or, is the stretching more from my TV than the Sophia? How about those "Special Features"? It looks like I can set my analog output to RGB (SCART?), Component, or VGA. Mine is set to RGB but I am also not using any of the analog features. Does the analog output enable something special that would be missing from the digital DVI output? I understand the sync options change with the output selection. The next three sound like something I should recognize but I will admit I don't. They are set to "off". The bottom half allows configuration of registers. I remember seeing something about that in the PDF and I am leaving those alone. Suppose I set something and lose my picture. Is there a way to clear the settings or reset them to default? (sorry if all this was discussed and I missed it!)

@Faicuai Good eye! Yes, that photograph does look wonky. It was made by an iPhone 12 Mini and I think the camera is trying to play some tricks with slow shutter speeds, multiple stacked exposures to reduce noise, night mode, and auto white balance. The result of all those digital magic tricks is bad color rendition. My phone renders a different photograph each time I press the shutter button. Now my phone gave me this photogragh. ? To address your comment, I can confirm my 0 band (top row) does show a grey scale gradient in 16 steps. The A band starts with a dark blue and goes to a light green-blue before going to emerald-ish and ending at something like cyan-ish? The B bands starts at dark green and increases brightness/color/luminosity to almost like a green-turquoise before stopping at a green-cyan. It's really hard to describe these colors and the wonky iPhone photos only make it worse. The RGB in the upper right hand corner there is actually orange-ish, green/blue, and light purple.

Oh, and I wanted to ask how are people modifying their case to accommodate the DVI connector? Are you using a knockout/punch to cleanly cut the plastic?

I just installed a Sophia board into my 1200XL. Some observations. First, it was very, very difficult to install the board into the GTIA socket. It seems the socket is super tight! Maybe it is a "precision" socket with smaller holes for the pins. I had to press down with a bit of force to even gently get the Sophia installed. Second, my 1200XL has the UAV Rev D mod installed and the Sophia works fine. No need to remove the UAV. Third, the color rendering in the Sophia is very different than what I am used to seeing through the UAV Rev D and my S-Video connection. This is not a complaint. I think this could be the difference between analog and digital rendering. Maybe I am now seeing true-true-true colors and I am not used to them. I need to some A/B comparison between my two inputs. Fourth, the color/saturation trim pot doesn't affect the colors. I am attaching some photos of my TV screen showing a demo screen. The Sophia is almost a life-changing product for me! Now I am not limited to "TV sets". A whole world of "monitors" is now open to me. @Simius Thanks for making this available to the Atari community!

Anything available on the Pigwa site?

@leech I totally agree with you but with a twist. The 1200XL can be the nearly perfect Atari workstation with a little bit of help. Upgrade the video to clean it up and replace R63 with a 0 Ohm device to enable some SIO devices. Done! The design of the machine is beautiful. Perfect width, depth, and height ratio. The keyboard is tappity slick. Sometimes the cartridge port feels a little awkward but I use it so rarely that it’s kind of a “don’t care” for me.

There's a modified 1200XL on eBay. It's not mine. Atari 1200xl 8-bit Computer {256k RAMBO} {Clearpic 2002} {BASIC} {XL-OS} Tested | eBay The 1200XL seems to be gathering lots of attention lately with auctions ending at what seem to be high prices. Let's see where this one finishes.

I think some of us have felt something like this for something, either the Atari ecosystem, a hobby, a sport, etc. It may be part of our personality in that our focus and attention is binary. Either we are switched on and running red hot or it's completely dead to us. A former co-worker of mine (he's retired) had it real bad especially since he would move from one hobby to another. He called it serially monogamous hobbies. When he was young he was 100% into club automotive racing. He had a Camaro that he overanalyzed and raced as if he was a pro. Then he sold the Camaro and got into club motorcycle racing. After that it was firearms. Then it was backpacking. Then he got into economics and finances. Then ... I think you get the point. I think of my passions as a flame. They can flare up, they can flicker, and they can also flame out. The flames that smolder burn may burn colder but they can burn longer. Remember that old flamed out fires can be quickly revived compared to something cold that never burned. Acquisition is a thrill because it feels like a hunt, doesn't it? Receiving the acquisition is satisfying because it fills a hole or void. But remember, in the end it's just "stuff" and it doesn't care about anyone or anything. At some point, and I'm not sure where that point is, it can become hoarding. In order to myself in check, I always try to come up with a purpose for owning something. For example, my 1200XL is my workstation, my 800 is the 4-player family game machine, and my 65XE is for PAL software. A spare or two is certainly OK when you consider this hardware is no longer being made but be careful with too many spares too. I also keep myself in check when shopping by asking myself how much better off would I be if I took these XX dollars and invested instead. That $200 accessory today could be a $1000 dividend paying stock in 20 years! To each their own, I suppose. Ok, I'm done with my armchair psychology.