130xe Troubleshooting

[R.Cade]

17 minutes ago, 1050 said:

NEVER.

The 64 x 4 memory are famous for holding onto memory many seconds after power down, this is due to the much better silicon being used by the time they came along. It's "working" only because of that trait and not the 7 bits of refresh it's getting from the older ANTIC. All 4 bit wide memory is like this, only the one bit wide memory will forget its contents in the time it takes to shut off the computer and turn it back on.

Makes sense. The machine does take at least 5 seconds of power down to fully reset. Not as bad as my XEGS, but still a bit longer than usually hoped for. For this reason I have the patched ROMs where I can hold shift to reset it.

 

Should I expect to see some kind of problem with it? Crashing, instability, anything? I left it running the dealer demo for hours and played several games.

Edited July 20, 2019 by R.Cade

[R.Cade]

BTW, I was warned that the Atari XE boards were cheaply made and the pads and traces pulled up easily. Maybe I've done this too much to old boards but I didn't notice it being any worse than any other old cheap consumer PCB of the time.

 

I socketed 3 RAM chips and two 40-pin chips using my old cave-man solder sucker with no problems...

[+DrVenkman]

18 minutes ago, R.Cade said:

BTW, I was warned that the Atari XE boards were cheaply made and the pads and traces pulled up easily. Maybe I've done this too much to old boards but I didn't notice it being any worse than any other old cheap consumer PCB of the time.

 

I socketed 3 RAM chips and two 40-pin chips using my old cave-man solder sucker with no problems...

They’re definitely lower quality than XL and 400/800 boards, and (not surprisingly) about the same as the C64 Breadbin I’ve been repairing over the last few weeks. However, if you’re not a complete hack and you know what you’re doing it’s not that difficult. I’d definitely say they’re less tolerant of clumsy beginner efforts than an earlier, more robustly-made board would be.