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Flashback 9 paddle hardware modification question


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I have done this "Hardware Mod to Support Standard Paddles on Atari Flashback 9 and 9 Gold" on my Flashback 9:

https://armchairarcade.com/perspectives/2019/10/15/hardware-mod-to-support-standard-paddles-on-atari-flashback-9-and-9-gold/

 

However, upon testing, my Player 3 is not working.  The others are fine.

 

Since this is a major pain due to the extremely small size of the resistors, I'd love to be able to focus on the exact resistor I should be looking at to fix.

 

Can anyone (Bill?) provide details as to which of the four resistors I should focus on?  Would be great to get an updated picture that includes which resistor belongs to which Paddle Number.

 

Thanks!

 

 

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On 10/31/2019 at 9:43 AM, chad5200 said:

Can anyone (Bill?) provide details as to which of the four resistors I should focus on?  Would be great to get an updated picture that includes which resistor belongs to which Paddle Number.

 

Thanks!

 

 

Send me an email to bill.loguidice@atgames.net and I can send you some info. It would help if you could send a photo of your board in the email as well, if possible.

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For the record... Bill relayed a message for me to redo R105 and R106.  I did this and now all four of my paddles are fully working!

 

Thanks Bill!

 

(Everyone, please note, these are NOT easy resistors to replace.  They are literally the size of a grain of pepper.  Proceed with caution.)

 

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Do you know the value of the four resisters you removed? We know that 510kOhms are spec'ed to replace them, but a (possibly) easier mod would be to add another resistor in parallel; i.e. on top of the existing ones. We know:

1/510kOhms = 1/r + 1/R where r is the existing resistance and R is the one we'd need to double up with it. If we have a little more information, it would make for a simpler mod.

 

DoctorMike

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On 11/14/2019 at 12:30 AM, chad5200 said:

I don’t think adding a resistor on top would be easier. Remember, these are extremely small surface mount resistors. They are literally the size of a grain of pepper.

You have to use a microscope or a powerful magnifying glass while soldering these.

Agree with all of this, except that removing a smc resistor and replacing it is surely harder than adding one on top. I'm happy to experiment, but needed to know what the resistor in place was; guess I'll just have to crack the thing open and look.

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  • 4 weeks later...

My resistors arrived from Mouser yesterday.  I ordered 2 different brands just for good measure and put the panasonic in the Gold model and Bourns in the standard 9 model.

 

They are definitely even smaller than I expected.  I have very good eyesight, but they're small enough that I wouldn't attempt to do it without a magnifying glass. 

 

My first round (on the Gold model) went really smooth.  I just used a fine tip soldering iron to remove the original resistors and had no trouble putting on the new ones.  The whole thing only took a few minutes.

 

The second round (on the standard 9) did not go so well.  Although I used the same technique as before, those things just did NOT want to play nice.  It took several attempts and then 2 of the solder pads lifted off, leaving nearly nothing to solder to.  I then spent nearly 30 minutes trying to get the 2 troublesome resistors to stay in position and line up to the nearly microscopic sliver of plating at the edge of were the solder pads used to be.  Eventually I got it to work (all 4 players), but good grief.  I don't know how long that one will last.  A few good temperature changes might flex the board enough to render players 1 and 3 inop, but I hope it will hold.

 

If you want to do this, I recommend either removing them with a hot air station.  I should have done that, but after the first round went so well, I didn't expect any trouble on the second.

 

All that being said, I think there is probably a better resistor value we should use anyway.  These 510KOhm resistors use the entire range of the paddle and seem to even be a little shy of going all the way to the left.  It's not that big of a problem with Warlords or Circus Atari, but Kaboom is definitely harder to play when you have to rotate the knob all the way to the stop in both directions.  Super Breakout is also harder to play this way and Street Racer doesn't go all the way to the left side of the road.  Also, the emulator doesn't know what to do with paddle games it doesn't know.  So, the Kaboom Deluxe hack by Darrel or the Drive homebrew don't work with paddles.

 

IMG_1149_sm.thumb.jpg.0f2ef418a4377f1e5b92c6f33dc34804.jpg

IMG_1148_sm.thumb.jpg.ed77965fa0c6de0dc9ef4a42175f7790.jpg

 

A pic of the one that went well.  They're kinda hard to see in the picture because the Panasonic brand has a beige dot in the middle, making it blend in a bit with the solder in the pic:

IMG_1147_sm.thumb.jpg.ee20a6b1e0dd3c2c91faf331fb47dd79.jpg

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 12/7/2019 at 8:49 AM, KevinMos3 said:

All that being said, I think there is probably a better resistor value we should use anyway.  These 510KOhm resistors use the entire range of the paddle and seem to even be a little shy of going all the way to the left.

 

Would it be better to go with 400KOhm or 600KOhm then? You can order SMDs with pretty much any resistance value from digikey.com

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  • 3 months later...
On 12/18/2019 at 9:09 AM, ft55555 said:

Would it be better to go with 400KOhm or 600KOhm then? You can order SMDs with pretty much any resistance value from digikey.com

Hi.

 

I just did this mod today, using 510k resistors.  It does indeed stop shy on the left edge.  Gah!

 

Anyway, as this is a difficult process (I think I invented several new swears), I would suggest going with 430k or even 390k.

 

After measuring the resistors taken out, which are 5.1k, it appears that the engineers went with a straight scaling for the replacement: 5.1k are designed to work with 10k pots in the paddles, therefore they are suggesting 510k for the standard 1M pots.  This doesn’t quite work, so drop that resistance from 510k — judging by where the ‘left’ (high resistance) position runs out, my estimate is drop to 430k.  [Series is 510k, 470k, 430k, 390k ...  470k may do it, but go for 430k I reckon.]

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16 hours ago, boggis the cat said:

Hi.

 

I just did this mod today, using 510k resistors.  It does indeed stop shy on the left edge.  Gah!

 

Anyway, as this is a difficult process (I think I invented several new swears), I would suggest going with 430k or even 390k.

 

After measuring the resistors taken out, which are 5.1k, it appears that the engineers went with a straight scaling for the replacement: 5.1k are designed to work with 10k pots in the paddles, therefore they are suggesting 510k for the standard 1M pots.  This doesn’t quite work, so drop that resistance from 510k — judging by where the ‘left’ (high resistance) position runs out, my estimate is drop to 430k.  [Series is 510k, 470k, 430k, 390k ...  470k may do it, but go for 430k I reckon.]

Heh. I bought some of these resistors (can't remember what resistance), but after seeing how small they were, I scrapped the idea altogether. 

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  • 1 year later...
On 12/27/2021 at 4:50 AM, Atarifatboy said:

I need some help when I connect My old original Paddles to the flashback 9 the firing buttons move the item left to right on the game kaboom but the knobs are not recognized can anybody help

As mentioned above, your options are to change the pots in the original paddles (swap out the 1 MOhm with 10 kOhm) or modify the board: https://armchairarcade.com/perspectives/2019/10/15/hardware-mod-to-support-standard-paddles-on-atari-flashback-9-and-9-gold/

 

I have done both, and the paddle modification was much easier (gave that FB9 to my sister).  Go for that if you can get original paddles easily, and buy decent potentiometers (I gave a link to suitable ones in an earlier post — they have to survive a lot of rotation, so cheap Chinese stuff is not a good idea).  Otherwise, unless you are good with soldering tiny resistors, find someone locally who works on cellphone repair or such and can easily do the work.  My suggestion is to use 430 kOhm resistors as the 510 kOhm (suggested in the guide linked above) didn’t work well in my FB9.  I haven’t swapped them out yet, because mental health is important.

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  • 4 months later...

I've just bought an FB9 and already have an FB6 with paddles, which don't work with the FB9.  Do I understand correctly that this modification (either to the paddles or the FB9) will make them work, or does this only apply to original Atari paddles?

 

At the moment I have the same sort of experience as Atarifatboy - pressing the fire buttons is like I'm moving a joystick left and right and pressing the rewind button, and turning the dials only brings up the error message about wireless joysticks not working properly.

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  • 4 months later...
On 5/12/2022 at 1:27 PM, RichardB said:

I've just bought an FB9 and already have an FB6 with paddles, which don't work with the FB9.  Do I understand correctly that this modification (either to the paddles or the FB9) will make them work, or does this only apply to original Atari paddles?

 

At the moment I have the same sort of experience as Atarifatboy - pressing the fire buttons is like I'm moving a joystick left and right and pressing the rewind button, and turning the dials only brings up the error message about wireless joysticks not working properly.

Since this was never answered, atgames paddles are same as atari paddles in this situation. Need to do one of the mods. 

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On 12/7/2019 at 9:49 AM, KevinMos3 said:

My resistors arrived from Mouser yesterday.  I ordered 2 different brands just for good measure and put the panasonic in the Gold model and Bourns in the standard 9 model.

 

They are definitely even smaller than I expected.  I have very good eyesight, but they're small enough that I wouldn't attempt to do it without a magnifying glass. 

 

My first round (on the Gold model) went really smooth.  I just used a fine tip soldering iron to remove the original resistors and had no trouble putting on the new ones.  The whole thing only took a few minutes.

 

The second round (on the standard 9) did not go so well.  Although I used the same technique as before, those things just did NOT want to play nice.  It took several attempts and then 2 of the solder pads lifted off, leaving nearly nothing to solder to.  I then spent nearly 30 minutes trying to get the 2 troublesome resistors to stay in position and line up to the nearly microscopic sliver of plating at the edge of were the solder pads used to be.  Eventually I got it to work (all 4 players), but good grief.  I don't know how long that one will last.  A few good temperature changes might flex the board enough to render players 1 and 3 inop, but I hope it will hold.

 

If you want to do this, I recommend either removing them with a hot air station.  I should have done that, but after the first round went so well, I didn't expect any trouble on the second.

 

All that being said, I think there is probably a better resistor value we should use anyway.  These 510KOhm resistors use the entire range of the paddle and seem to even be a little shy of going all the way to the left.  It's not that big of a problem with Warlords or Circus Atari, but Kaboom is definitely harder to play when you have to rotate the knob all the way to the stop in both directions.  Super Breakout is also harder to play this way and Street Racer doesn't go all the way to the left side of the road.  Also, the emulator doesn't know what to do with paddle games it doesn't know.  So, the Kaboom Deluxe hack by Darrel or the Drive homebrew don't work with paddles.

 

IMG_1149_sm.thumb.jpg.0f2ef418a4377f1e5b92c6f33dc34804.jpg

IMG_1148_sm.thumb.jpg.ed77965fa0c6de0dc9ef4a42175f7790.jpg

 

A pic of the one that went well.  They're kinda hard to see in the picture because the Panasonic brand has a beige dot in the middle, making it blend in a bit with the solder in the pic:

IMG_1147_sm.thumb.jpg.ee20a6b1e0dd3c2c91faf331fb47dd79.jpg

 

To make games paddle compatible like kaboom deluxe you need to change its file extension to .a26x Then edit the retroplayer.ini to reflect that as well. 

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On 11/15/2019 at 2:58 AM, DoctorMikeReddy said:

Agree with all of this, except that removing a smc resistor and replacing it is surely harder than adding one on top. I'm happy to experiment, but needed to know what the resistor in place was; guess I'll just have to crack the thing open and look.

In this case we cant put a resistor on top of a resistor. If it was a 510k ohm resistor and we needed to drop to 5.1k ohm we could add a resistor on top in parallel. But with a 5.1k ohm resistor already there, there isnt enough resistance. We need to add more. So the 2 resistors would have to run in series and not parallel in this case. 

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Two resistors in parallel always equate to a total resistance of less than the smaller value of the two resistors. 

 

If the original resistor is 5.1k and you mount a 510k resistor in parallel, then the total resistance will be about 5050. 

 

You cannot build up resistance by going in parallel.

 

You need to go in series to build up the resistance, but with smt parts you can't really do that, so your only option is to replace the resistor with a suitable value. 

 

Since there is some question, or issue, with the paddle movement not being correct with the 510k replacement resistor, then someone should temporarily solder wires to a multi-turn potentiometer and dial in the resistance until the paddle movement matches closely to the real console and then simply measure the pot

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On 9/28/2022 at 5:01 PM, pimpmaul69 said:

Since this was never answered, atgames paddles are same as atari paddles in this situation. Need to do one of the mods. 

Thanks for this.  Looks like I need to work on my soldering skills!  I'll watch out for any further developments here about what resistors to use.

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17 hours ago, RichardB said:

Thanks for this.  Looks like I need to work on my soldering skills!  I'll watch out for any further developments here about what resistors to use.

Whatever day my 430k resistors decide to show up, i will let you know how they work and if it goes all the way to the edge. And if they do i will change the ones on fb x too since i assume they use 510k and they dont go to the edge on one side of them. 

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On 10/4/2022 at 1:22 AM, fdr4prez said:

Two resistors in parallel always equate to a total resistance of less than the smaller value of the two resistors. 

 

If the original resistor is 5.1k and you mount a 510k resistor in parallel, then the total resistance will be about 5050. 

 

You cannot build up resistance by going in parallel.

 

You need to go in series to build up the resistance, but with smt parts you can't really do that, so your only option is to replace the resistor with a suitable value. 

 

Since there is some question, or issue, with the paddle movement not being correct with the 510k replacement resistor, then someone should temporarily solder wires to a multi-turn potentiometer and dial in the resistance until the paddle movement matches closely to the real console and then simply measure the pot

So i installed these 430k resistors. These ones sold on ebay in america are way too small. Hardest thing i ever had to solder. So now the paddles act pretty much the same as the flashback x. About 60% of the paddle to go from left to right in kaboom. In warlords its the same as the x too and doesn’t go all the way to the right. So i will be getting bigger resistors and try to get some 10 turn 500k potentiometers to really dial in the ohms

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15 minutes ago, pimpmaul69 said:

So i installed these 430k resistors. These ones sold on ebay in america are way too small. Hardest thing i ever had to solder. So now the paddles act pretty much the same as the flashback x. About 60% of the paddle to go from left to right in kaboom. In warlords its the same as the x too and doesn’t go all the way to the right. So i will be getting bigger resistors and try to get some 10 turn 500k potentiometers to really dial in the ohms

Harder than that miniHDMI cable you wired up for me?

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23 minutes ago, fdr4prez said:

oh, wow

 

those look like 0201 package size, yeah?

 

those will be tough to do by hand

 

I don't envy you... glad I don't have a FB9 :) 

Yes they are 0201. All thats available in the us for 430k resistors on ebay. I wont mod another one with these particular resistors. The fourth one took me like an hour to be able to get it, lined up and soldered on. 

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