How come the A8 computers are so reliable?

[scelbi8h]

I was wondering about the reliability of the Atari 8 bit computers in general. I've been a Commodore 64, VIC-20 and C128 user for many years, and after dozens of fixed boards I can say the ICs on these computers die easily. I don't intend to do a Commodore/Atari comparison here!

 

When fixing a Commodore 64 many users add heatsinks, and are always really worried about the temperature. Working SID chips are becoming scarce, so do the VIC II video ones just because they die after working with high temperatures for a long time. I never saw an Atari computer with heatsinks on the ICs... Another thing that surprises me is the use of MT 4264 RAM chips. My two 800XL and my 600XL come with these MT ICs, and they just work fine. If a Commodore user see their RAM ICs are MT, they run to change them. It's becoming a must-do thing because they could die any time. I don't see many Atari users complaining about faulty RAM ICs around here, at least not as often as the Commodore ones do.

 

Something else that shocks me is the A8 computers need in general more cold boots, because the disk management is made that way. So many ON/OFF cycles, and still they are not prone to failure!

 

What do you guys think? How come they are so sturdy?

Edited December 19, 2021 by scelbi8h

[_The Doctor__]

we replace mt rams as well, but we have another problem... arcade cabinet owners cannibalize our machines and toss the machines in the garbage... seems they covet our sound chips and a couple other bits and pieces and then waste the whole of perfectly good machines...

it's criminal in some ways, but folks only think about their needs and no one else.

 

Some of Atari's sturdiness was also because is was all designed to behind a massive shield and was used in industrial settings... rather than change everything later on the chips pretty much stayed the same even as the shielding was minimized again and again and hole appeared in them for air flow.

 

The 800 had it's ram carts uncovered and eventually dropped for cost savings... people thought they did it due to overheating... I think in the long run that helped also as there was less heat as a result... however they could have used the metal backing on the ram carts as heat sinks if there were a problem like that... as a natural built in heat sink and spreader.

[+bf2k+]

I've had MT Rams go bad in 2 different 130XEs in the last two months.  The struggle is real...

[bfollowell]

41 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

we replace mt rams as well, but we have another problem... arcade cabinet owners cannibalize our machines and toss the machines in the garbage... seems they covet our sound chips and a couple other bits and pieces and then waste the whole of perfectly good machines...

it's criminal in some ways, but folks only think about their needs and no one else.

 

 

That is terrible, but if they've bought the machines, they're theirs to do with as they please. Still, if they were going to do that, you think they'd sell the rest of the machine without the POKEY, or part it out. Someone would be interested in every part of those old machines, even if they weren't interest in it as a whole. If nothing else, they'd be able to recoup some money. It really makes no sense at all to just discard what's left. It's sad, foolish, and wasteful.

 

[Gunstar]

1 hour ago, _The Doctor__ said:

.arcade cabinet owners cannibalize our machines and toss the machines in the garbage... seems they covet our sound chips and a couple other bits and pieces and then waste the whole of perfectly good machines...

it's criminal in some ways, but folks only think about their needs and no one else.

 

I had no idea this was going on! And many of those arcade cabinets take 4 Pokeys! That's an insane waste. I'm not upset about the Pokeys though, I'm upset about the probability that 4 8-bits can be wasted on one arcade cabinet! Has nobody told them about the thousands and thousands of the common 7800 Ballblazer carts with Pokeys in them to use instead?!? They've gone from $5 a pop to about what you pay for just a Pokey these days, but it's still cheaper than 8-bit computers and the loss of a Ballblazer cart when there are far more than 7800 owners in the community, it not any loss, really. Plenty of 5200's and 8-bit's to play the game on and just as good.

 

I just got a 7800 about six months ago, having sold my original about 15 years ago, with my Ballblazer cart amongst the collection, and I still had 3 Ballblazer carts laying around!  Others came with mixed electronic "junk" lots I bought or were given.

 

As far as the loss of Pokeys to our community goes, I don't mind anymore since we have Pokeymax now. And luckily I have a few extras from changing out my old Dual Pokey upgrades with Pokeymax's. I'm actually about to use two of them in my 7800 Dragonfly device. Normally, with 7800 users, you add your own POKEY to new carts that require them, and since the advent of the Pokeymax 7800 users have start using them instead, even if they are only used as a single Pokey, and not taking advantage of the rest.

 

However, developers have started taking advantage of stereo (and all the other feature on Pokeymax now like PSG and Covox), so new games are getting stereo, etc.. But because of the chip shortage, the guy selling the Dragonfly ran out of stereo Pokeymax's because Retronics wasn't producing and shipping them anymore, for now. And the Pokeymax's need to be programmed specifically for the Dragonfly/7800. So I ordered a Dragonfly without the Pokymax, planning on just installing one of my extra Pokeys.

 

Then I got the idea (since the 7800 community is using Pokeymax's) from my 8-bit experience of just doing a good old DIY Piggy-back dual Pokey (I solder a socket on top of the bottom Pokey and clip or bend the socket pins instead of the second Pokey's of course) since they are real Pokey's they don't need special programming (or I'd use one of my own Pokeymax's (Pokeymax 2 Quad+Covox and Pokeymax 3). And all the lines I need are on the header right there on the Dragonfly board since it was made for a Pokeymax. I'm not worried about missing out on 7800 PSG and Covox stuff, just demos and music, because I have those on my 8-bit Atari's if I need a PSG or COVOX "fix."

 

I'm flabbergast at the thought of all that 8-bit hardware going to waste though. I'd buy the left overs if they attempted to sell! About a year ago I purchase a NOS 800 motherboard, fully populated, less the cards of course, but also the Pokey. Again I didn't mind that the Pokey was gone as I have extras, and I know they are fetching around $100 or more now. It allowed me to get a brand new backup mother board for a mere $20! I also bought a NOS PSU board at the same time from the same vender for $15!. So for $35 I have a brand new 800 essentially (because I already have back-up CPU boards, two NTSC and one PAL, and now two extra OS boards, again one NTSC, one PAL because I installed an Incognito), if I need to drop it in my 800 case. But I'm planning on using it for the brain of an 8-bit robot I want to build ( the 800 will be the manager and in control of the Arduino boards and whatnot on the robot which are also 8-bit boards though!)

 

I was amazed that I could get an 800 mobo and PSU board for so cheap, just less the Pokey!

 

Edited December 19, 2021 by Gunstar
just typos I don't see before submitting.

[Gunstar]

I have and 800XL that wasn't working and after some trouble shooting using the Systemcheck 2.0 (I'd been trouble-shooting it off and on for a while before I had a Syscheck) it detected one bad ram chip. And sure enough the 800XL has 8 MT chips in it. I replaced the bad one, adding a socket under it and got the 800XL running, but I still intend to replace the other 7 and install sockets at the same time as I know it's just a matter of time before they all go out. Yes, just replace all MT drams as a matter of habit assuming they are bad or will be soon.

 

Of course it wasn't until after all this that I stumbled across the general knowledge (of people experienced with MT ram) of bad MT ram, I'd never had another Atari that had MT ram before, which is why I decided to change out all the rest.

Edited December 19, 2021 by Gunstar

[+davidcalgary29]

The durability of the original 400s and 800s is astounding, that's for sure. My original 800 survived a hurricane that flooded our house five feet deep in the Bahamas. Sure, it was in a box on a shelf in the garage, but still.

[glurk]

Yeah, my 800 I bought new ~1980 is still going strong.  I've modded it (a little bit) since then, but nothing has EVER required replacement!

[Gunstar]

I know as cheaply made as the 130XE was, besides replacing the keyboard mylar, I never had a problem or anything go bad on it in the 20 years I owned it. And I remember just in the first five years of my ownership, friends who got C64's and Apple IIc's around the same time had multiple issues with their machine's IC's and had to send them for repairs more than once. But I couldn't guess why. Of course thirty years down the line here, I've had to replace several IC's on both my 1200XL and 800 over the last few years. But I got them used, 20-30 years old already and I'm sure they had worked great for the original owners as they came to me working and motherboards looking untouched from the factory, just dusty in the 1200XL's case.

 

I'm sure it wouldn't hurt and may help the longevity, if heatsinks were put on the old IC's at this point and I have been contemplating that the last couple years myself, as every IC I have had replaced in the 800 1200XL were warmer to the touch than surrounding ones. Of course that's probably just because power is flowing into burned circuits inside at that point, but it did make me think about the possibility that due to age and many years of use, being powered on as well as possibly many years of disuse not always in climate controlled conditions and then being brought out and used again regularly after years of non use, they all run warmer than they use too, which I would think would help accelerate degradation.

 

I mean how many times have we all heard of, or had it happen to us, that a computer was in perfect working condition before the last time it was put away, but is non-functional completely or other issues when brought back out, whether from the environment or shock of being powered on again after so long, or both? But with socketed computers, more often than not, once chips are reseated, everything work fine. Changes in environment and expansion and contraction cause them to shift. Well this must be happening to all of them, but the ones with most IC's soldered in means repairs required. Of course I don't believe that this is the one "disease" that contributes to every situation. I'm sure it's a larger spectrum of reasons why. And changes in temperature and humidity over the years will effect the insides of IC's and other components just as much as the outsides and backplane.

 

You might say, "but the garage, closet, attic or basement in my home is a temperature controlled and humidity controlled environment"  but maybe not controlled as well as you think. Or maybe you forgot about that winter 10 years ago where the blizzard (or other drastic environment changing event) knocked out the power for a week and your computer was in freezing conditions for days. Then you came back and heated the house up as quickly as possible on top of it, didn't you? With nigh a thought to what that would do to your stored vintage or currently used electronics, right? Me too.

 

 Or maybe the same thing happened to the controlled environment storage facility you store it all at and you didn't even think of it and the company didn't bother notifying any customers that their controlled climate storage was currently being controlled by mother nature, of course.

 

That's why auctions with the computer's working condition being "untested, but it was working fine when it was stored away" are useless words that we all sneer at, whether being used truthfully or not by the seller. In my case, I specifically look for the non-working for parts only and untested auctions to get them on the cheap because I know I can repair and restore them successfully myself.

Edited December 19, 2021 by Gunstar

[+kheller2]

Caveat: I own 1 C64, and never really powered it on, however, I've read a lot of C and MOS history.

 

My understanding is that the C chips run rather hot as normal, and some of that has to do with they way they were designed and fabricated by MOS.  Most Atari chips were fabricated by rather large chip manufacturers, and MOS was a rather small player in comparison. I'm not trying to knock MOS, I think they did incredible work given the pressure they were under from Commodore to design, fab and manufacture chips to reduce the cost of there computer systems.

 

If I were to summarize it, the Atari 400/800s were overbuilt and were streamlined/cheapened as the years went on (XL -> XE).  The C boxes were designed to meet a manufactured price point and components removed if it didn't.  

 

Another way to look at it: Atari designed something well, and reduced costs where needed or forced.  Commodore usually had a price point for how much something would cost to manufacture (and typically it needed to cost a lot more than what was sold to management).

 

Were the early PET's lacking in robustness? C got burned a few times from TI in the calculator wars, so they had that bad taste going for them and sort of made sure TI suffered in later years.

 

I'm no expert.  Just a researcher, so please correct me.

 

 

[TGB1718]

14 hours ago, glurk said:

Yeah, my 800 I bought new ~1980 is still going strong.  I've modded it (a little bit) since then, but nothing has EVER required replacement!

Same here on my 800, 130XE had some keyboard issues on the Mylar that some conductive paint fixed, strangely when I got my ST

it broke down after just over a year with a faulty FDD controller chip, but been fine ever since.

[pixelmischief]

Atari's heritage as an arcade games company is probably the biggest reason their early computer hardware is so physically durable.  Taking a hardware product to market always includes a battle between quality and cost.  The engineers fight for quality.  The sales and marketing concerns fight for cost reduction.  The executive leadership makes the decision.  Atari's leadership came up in the arcade and, therefore, tilted toward quality and had a much higher tolerance for the cost that physical durability requires.  Commodore built an incredibly successful brand on price and their excellent products, beloved and available loooooong past any reasonable expectation of durability, are undeniably less durable than Atari's.  Tramiel leaned to cost-effectiveness and away from tank-like durability.  His moves at Atari with the XE and ST lines were recognizably consistent with that.

Edited December 20, 2021 by pixelmischief

[Mclaneinc]

I have found that older machines have been far more tolerant of us and less prone to breakage. Sure, there are similar issues in the C64 and XL etc with known non-good ram chips, the two system also share a problem with one model of PSU that cooks both machines. Yes the old C64 does run hot, especially the SID but it's only really been a short while since SIDs started dying, they were more reliable back in the day and let's not forget how old they are and how much use they have had.

 

In general, I'd say the Atari has been a more reliable machine of the two camps, but as someone said they do have a huge arcade history which Commodore did not.

 

Was sad to hear about the trashing of machines for Pokeys just to provide an arcade cabinet, there's nothing wrong with building the cab but make sure the rest of the computer goes to a repair person or collector for restoration or spares.

[bfollowell]

7 minutes ago, Mclaneinc said:

Was sad to hear about the trashing of machines for Pokeys just to provide an arcade cabinet, there's nothing wrong with building the cab but make sure the rest of the computer goes to a repair person or collector for restoration or spares.

 

 

Well, with the rise of POKEYMAX, hopefully, this practice will stop.

 

[Lostdragon]

I went through 2 800 XL machines during my time with them, one at the time, the other, when i got back into Retro, a rather big name UK seller had not taken the time to test it, before shipping.

 

Both had Ram chips fail. 

 

The power pack on my Breadbin C64 melted, had thought it an urban myth, till i had it happen on me ?

[Mclaneinc]

It's only in the last couple of years I heard about the dodgy C64 PSU, guess I must have been lucky with my machine and PSU.. And hell, Did I put it through it's paces, it was hardly off..

[BillC]

59 minutes ago, Mclaneinc said:

It's only in the last couple of years I heard about the dodgy C64 PSU, guess I must have been lucky with my machine and PSU.. And hell, Did I put it through it's paces, it was hardly off..

I believe the INGOT power supply was mainly a 120V issue, while I have seen pictures of a similar 240V power supply it had a high temperature cutoff which should reduce failures.

[Mclaneinc]

Pass on that Bill, I'll bow down to your greater knowledge, although I'm sure I've heard people say the same thing as you.

 

These machines, always a little niggle here and there, but I have to admit that melting or blowing PCBs up is more than a niggle..

Edited December 20, 2021 by Mclaneinc

[_The Doctor__]

Yep the ingot is crap, any epoxy filled mess has been on any platform including the Atari... the commodore had a crap ton of their shit power supply shipped out with theirs as well, people put them in high air flow areas and had fans blow on them until they could be replaced.

 

Thankfully we all know about them and keep vigil so it won't happen to anyone else if we can warn them quick enough

Edited December 20, 2021 by _The Doctor__

[Mazzspeed]

Most Commodore issues are a result of either the PSU killing the machine or the PLA simply fizzing out as it was never intended to last 30+ years. IMO, the original 400/800's aside, both the XL/XE also have their share of issues as time goes on.

 

Personally I've never noticed my breadbin with a rev 250425 motherboard to run that hot, I always found the heatsinks a bit of an overkill, I don't have heatsinks on my own C64. Even my rev 250425 C64 motherboard from when I was a kid still boots and runs fine and that's had a really hard life.

[+scorpio_ny]

On 12/19/2021 at 11:18 AM, _The Doctor__ said:

we replace mt rams as well, but we have another problem... arcade cabinet owners cannibalize our machines and toss the machines in the garbage... seems they covet our sound chips and a couple other bits and pieces and then waste the whole of perfectly good machines...

it's criminal in some ways, but folks only think about their needs and no one else.

Wow, this is terrible. When I need parts I try to source them from reputable vendors or from non-functional computers. Even with the non functional computers, I will try to see if they are able to be repaired first (That is how I got a couple extra 800XL’s. ?). 

[+scorpio_ny]

On 12/19/2021 at 10:47 AM, scelbi8h said:

I was wondering about the reliability of the Atari 8 bit computers in general. I've been a Commodore 64, VIC-20 and C128 user for many years, and after dozens of fixed boards I can say the ICs on these computers die easily. I don't intend to do a Commodore/Atari comparison here!

 

When fixing a Commodore 64 many users add heatsinks, and are always really worried about the temperature. Working SID chips are becoming scarce, so do the VIC II video ones just because they die after working with high temperatures for a long time. I never saw an Atari computer with heatsinks on the ICs... Another thing that surprises me is the use of MT 4264 RAM chips. My two 800XL and my 600XL come with these MT ICs, and they just work fine. If a Commodore user see their RAM ICs are MT, they run to change them. It's becoming a must-do thing because they could die any time. I don't see many Atari users complaining about faulty RAM ICs around here, at least not as often as the Commodore ones do.

 

Something else that shocks me is the A8 computers need in general more cold boots, because the disk management is made that way. So many ON/OFF cycles, and still they are not prone to failure!

 

What do you guys think? How come they are so sturdy?

From what I understand, a lot of the chips in the Atari are fabricated using TTL vs. Commodore’s CMOS process. CMOS is more susceptible to static damage so may contribute to the failure rate. Also to keep in mind, a lot more Commodores were sold in relation to the Atari systems. So naturally, one will hear more stories of failures due to the sheer larger quantities of computers in circulation.

[thorfdbg]

From what I know, CSG aka MOS was not able to do CMOS back then. The chips are fabricated in the rather oldish NMOS process. Given that the Atari Sally  CPU comes from the same source, and still lasts, this is likely not the problem.

[TGB1718]

13 hours ago, scorpio_ny said:

CMOS is more susceptible to static damage so may contribute to the failure rate. 

Once in circuit and running under normal conditions that can't contribute to failures.

Static kills during build/servicing mishandling.

[+gnusto]

It's pretty clear even from external appearances that the original 800 was a tank (lots of detail in the injection mold, super thick shell, etc). Then when you open it up and find that wildly over engineered aluminum cage you know you're in a machine that didn't have excessive cost control - even though that cage was unnecessary by the time of release, not much expense was spared in its construction. And that seems to be true for the internals as well; other than some dodgy power path issues, there doesn't seem to be any unusual failure points for the 400/800. It goes down hill from there in terms of reliability, and that's probably as well your answer to the C64 comparison; the C64 was a deliberate cost control strategy machine, as the XL, XE etc attempted to be. All of them suffered in reliability as a result in comparison to the originals.