Improved my 7800 compatibility

[+DamonicFury]

Using Mr. Schell's ultra-easy to perform modication...

 

http://www.schells.com/7800mod.shtml

 

... I was able to play the following games on my 7800 that didn't work before:

 

Space Shuttle

Robot Tank

The Supercharger!

 

Dark Chambers (2600) even worked afterwards, although from the description of the modification, that isn't always the case.

 

I'm still not at 100 percent compatibility, but that is probably due to the late-model TIA chip that my 7800 has:

 

Kool-Aid Man still has the infamous "bouncing" problem

Time Pilot still crashes after a few seconds.

Planet Patrol still has enemy ships that have jerky flight and my ship's sprite becomes a diagonal line during the landing sequence.

 

None of these issues plague my 2600. Still, a big thanks to Mr. Schell for the tip... being able to play Supercharger games was worth the effort right there!

 

Makes me wonder if replacing the TIA chip would result in that holy grail... a 100 percent 2600 compatible 7800. :-)

[Albert]

I've done this mod to several 7800s as well and it has fixed compatibility problems for me.

 

..Al

[eric_ruck]

Er, can someone enlighten me into how this is affected by different versions of the 7800? I don't play a lot of 2600 games but I know the 7800 I have hooked up plays 2600 Dark Chambers fine.

 

Eric

[+Mitch]

Er, can someone enlighten me into how this is affected by different versions of the 7800?  I don't play a lot of 2600 games but I know the 7800 I have hooked up plays 2600 Dark Chambers fine.

 

Eric

 

Well, here's the short version.

The original 7800 (that had the expansion port) were pretty much compatible with all the 2600 games. But (possibly due to poor quality control) a few units would have problems with 2600 superchip games most commonly Dark Chambers. To fix this Atari added an additional timing circuit that fixed the problem with the superchip games. However, it also broke compatibility with some third party games (Decathalon, Robot Tank, Space Shuttle, and the Supercharger). I believe Space Shuttle and Decathalon were apparently also released with the standard Atari bankswitching, which don't have a problem with the timing circuit.

 

What this mod does is disable the extra timing circuit to allow those games to work again and possibly break the superchip games compatibility.

 

Mitch