What was typically repaired on a "FACTORY RECONDITIONED" 2600 / VCS unit?

[classicgamesnut]

     This is purely to satisfy curiosity.  Anyone in the know about the 2600's that got sent back on warranty returns?  Was there some kind of "one size fits all" procedure where every unit got the same selection of parts replaced, or a more case-by-case diagnosis and repair, or some combination of both?  (Excepting those units with obvious physical damage.)

     As well as these were selling back in the day, there had to be some kind of streamlined process, or else a huge team of skilled technicians standing by.  And one would 

 

     Larry

[+DrVenkman]

7 hours ago, classicgamesnut said:

     This is purely to satisfy curiosity.  Anyone in the know about the 2600's that got sent back on warranty returns?  Was there some kind of "one size fits all" procedure where every unit got the same selection of parts replaced, or a more case-by-case diagnosis and repair, or some combination of both?  (Excepting those units with obvious physical damage.)

     As well as these were selling back in the day, there had to be some kind of streamlined process, or else a huge team of skilled technicians standing by.  And one would 

 

     Larry

The official Atari VCS Domestic Service Manual has a pretty detailed troubleshooting flowchart.  They would not have bothered creating and distributing that kind of info to warranty centers if the general process was just “replace everything.”

 

There are also Tech Tips in it (at least later revisions of it), that detail some field service tips and tricks like adding Zener diodes to the switch inputs on 4-switch units and adding conductive foil tape around the switch housings back to the RF cage. There’s another factory-suggested tech tip for Rev14 and earlier 4-switch models to add a resistor across two pins on TIA in order to boost color saturation. 

 

From this kind of thing, you can infer that one of the biggest warranty complaints for 4-switch machines was static discharge damage to the 6532 RIOT. I personally have run across two 4-switch machines where one or the other Difficulty Switches didn’t register, and neither of them had that Zener diode mod. So likely static damage as the Tech Tip warns about. And of course you can infer that a second “warranty” complaint for 4-switch machines was unsatisfactory color saturation, which was more of a design flaw in the video than a failure.

 

But anyway, I’d suspect that one of the biggest issues for Sixers was failure of the ribbon cable or ribbon cable socket, or failure of the chip sockets on the motherboard. The earliest Heavy Sixers used a type of socket that is not very common today and those are known to have had a high failure rate.

[nick3092]

On 6/19/2021 at 8:24 AM, DrVenkman said:

There are also Tech Tips in it (at least later revisions of it), that detail some field service tips and tricks like adding Zener diodes to the switch inputs on 4-switch units and adding conductive foil tape around the switch housings back to the RF cage. There’s another factory-suggested tech tip for Rev14 and earlier 4-switch models to add a resistor across two pins on TIA in order to boost color saturation. 

 

From this kind of thing, you can infer that one of the biggest warranty complaints for 4-switch machines was static discharge damage to the 6532 RIOT. I personally have run across two 4-switch machines where one or the other Difficulty Switches didn’t register, and neither of them had that Zener diode mod. So likely static damage as the Tech Tip warns about.

Curious, which revision manual talked about adding zeners to the switches? I've only seen the tech tip that talks about adding the zeners to the joystick ports on 6 switchers to protect the 4050 hex buffer chips that are not present on 4 switch units. And they recommended the foil strips for both 4 and 6 switches. But I've never seen a recommendation to add zeners to any switches on either model.