[1200XL Owners Club (serial tracker)]

Oh wow, i never noticed this thread before.  I have 5 1200XL systems I believe.   I will have to dig them up and find the serials.  I know I have 2 or 3 easily accessible .   

 

The 1200xl is still to me one of the best looking ever full-production computers.   

[XEGS]

I have a couple of them.   I always liked mine for the detachable keyboard.    

[Bravo Sierra Computers and Ben's status]

58 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

I find it's best to just give him a call from time to time... you'll get quite a conversation if you catch him...

OH yeah!!  I remember that he kept on calling me just to talk about Atari stuff.  At the time, I didn't have a good job so I couldn't afford much so I only bought the 800 from him but he kept on calling frequently.   We would talk about atari computers and so on.  Nice guy.   

 

I believe that all of us weirdo ancient tech hoarders are on the autistic spectrum to certain degrees, I think he just was a little more than some others. 

[Bravo Sierra Computers and Ben's status]

I was just thinking about Ben the other day.  I wish him the best in his health.  I remember ordering an original 800 from him back around 2001 or so and got it quickly.   

 

I hope he is doing well.  I'm hoping to go to Portland this summer provided things open up.  Maybe I could stop by. 

 

I never had problems with him even though I remember how he used to spam comp.sys.atari but honestly who cares anymore.  

[TT030 value?]

I agree, find one of the hardware devs here, like Joska and see if he needs one to test things with. I have considered doing the same with mine... except it somehow seems more compatible than my 1040 STe.... still would love to get a VME graphics / NIC board for it.

 

Also, any idea what is on the hard drive?

If I remember correctly, it had some sort of memory expansion and there was a bunch of music stuff on it. I also have a pair of Atari monitors but I think I remember using a standard VGA monitor with it instead.

[TT030 value?]

I have a working TT030 and a monitor (no idea what the monitor is) that I would like to sell on ebay. Any idea on a reasonable price? Its just the keyboard/system with a working hard drive. The last time I used it, it was working fine. I will test it again to confirm it works. The last one I saw that sold went for about 795 but I'm not sure what that one had in it.

 

 

 

 

 

[What to do with old computer magazines?]

I would love to have old issues of EG or Creative Computing from the seventies. Those were the mags I grew up on. I also would love to see scans of the old Sears catalogs and so on. I love that site where it has almost all old Radio Shack catalogs scanned in.

[486 vs pentium dos computer]

Thanks for the memory. Until you said this, I forgot how much fun I had with a 486 DX2/66. I've since forgotten how to edit AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files. Refresher course, anyone?

 

 

Edit: Remember the rare 486 DX-50? (NOT the DX2/50) This was one of the last processors where "bus speed" and "processor speed" were the same thing. Unless I'm mistaken.

I had one of those. I paid like 450 dollars for I think 1 meg of ram (4 256k simms/ sipps?) and a motherboard with a Cyrix 486 DX-50 running at the full 50mhz for both bus and processor. Most unreliable piece of crap computer I ever owned but when it ran, it ran decently compared to my buddy's DX2-66. I still have the chip I believe.

[Where Can I Find a 10 Input S-Video Selector?]

OH holy crap! Serious necrothread bump. I totally didn't see that Heck, back in 2006, I didn't own a component capable tv, we only had a 27" composite/s-video CRT tv.

[Where Can I Find a 10 Input S-Video Selector?]

To the OP, why are you using S-Video on devices like your DVD recorder, satellite box, S-VHS player, etc? Those devices are new enough that they will have component video which is FAR better than S-Video. I would use a component video switchbox to switch between those modern devices that have component video which gives you 480p/720p/1080i and s-video for the older modded composite systems that can't do component output. I have seen component video on really nice HD CRT tvs right up through the mid 2000's so you still will get that rich CRT experience if that is what you desire.

 

But doing s-video when component video is an option seems rather pointless unless you really are using a DVD recorder on an old 19" from the eighties. LOL

[Cartridge Market Crash]

 

Even us present-day enthusiasts had that attitude when we were youngsters. We were there to play games, not build a library. I wasn't much interested in building any sort of collection for the future, maybe a little. And it was nothing like you see in the "Show us your collection" thread. This collecting thing seems to be an aberration that grows into you just prior to mid-life.

 

The games they play with you now might be the games they care about 30 years later.

The big difference to me is that these kids never grew up with Atari. My oldest step-kid is 31 was born in 82. By the time she was playing video games, it was the NES for a short bit quickly followed by the SNES. She doesn't even know what a colecovision or a 2600 is other than to have played a game or two that I showed her. So even in 20 years if she were to start collecting, she would probably only care about the NES.

 

When i was actively collecting, about 10 years ago I found an original Odyssey game system in the wild complete with the box and the overlays and everything for 10 dollars. I was ecstatic because it was almost a grail item. To actually own the first home video game system ever. I also remember drooling over it in the Sears or the JC Penny catalogs of the very early seventies. Might have been an FAO Schwartz catalog? So i was happy to have it even though I never played it. After a while, I got super bored of owning it and sold it. Got well over 200 for it. Don't miss it one bit. It wasn't a system I ever had an emotional attachment to or played other than desiring one through a catalog. I still want a Telstar because that was the first game system I ever owned though. I don't see my kids caring about game systems older than what they played and had as kids so for them it might be the NES. Also remember, kids of today have easy access to emulators which we never had as kids. Heck, my kid can mod an original Xbox, put a 2 gig drive in there and have the entire discography of xbox games installed on it without even owning a single game.

[Cartridge Market Crash]

To me the classic gaming market is age based. Right now the early stuff from the seventies and early to mid eighties has its core fans being the 35 to 55 year old group. They have the most disposable income. But as our group ages more and more, we will start dying off and our collections will either be liquidated to the world full of younger people who don't have an interest in old Atari junk. I don't see my twentysomething kids caring enough about a 2600 to want to mod it for use with modern television connections or repair them to keep them working. Sure they will play games with me but they really don't care to own them or be curious about them beyond sort of enjoying them with me. No one I know cares about old classic video games except for one of my buddies who is my age. So what does that mean? As time marches on, there will be less and less people collecting classic games and the market will get saturated with old games from dying off members. I see the market having hit its peak now and not really increasing beyond what it has. Maybe the NES and SNES era of stuff might increase as the N64 but I don't see the more modern obscure stuff being of interest to younger fans. The Saturn has a loyal following but my kids never cared about them and have never shown an interest in that system as an example.

[Atari 5200 homebrew joystick?]

My next door neighbor stocks the 4051 and the 4053, can those be used if you change the circuit? maybe use 2 of the 4051?

[Atari 5200 homebrew joystick?]

Hmm!! I see that I can get 4052 chips on ebay for 3.99 for 5 of them. Now i'm tempted!

[Altirra 2.50 Final out]

So many options in this program. I'm having a devil of a time just configuring the program to work with my xbox 360 wired controllers. Seems like when I first fire up Altirra 64bit, the controller works for a coulpe of seconds then quits.

 

Both controllers work fine in Stella and other games.

 

Any ideas?

[Plastic Enclosure Case Screws]

For future reference, what I do is whenever i have some item that uses a plastic case that I am disposing of, I will rob all the self threading screws used to hold the plastic case together before I toss it. I have a tupperware container full of those little self-tapping screws from old thrown away crap.

[Atari 5200 homebrew joystick?]

 

In the case of the Competition Pro (which my arcade stick is based on), the original 5200 stick acts as the centers. The pots are used in conjunction with the arcade joystick. Center the 5200 stick and the arcade stick is centered. If the 5200 stick is off center, the arcade stick will act as if it is too.

 

To my understanding, the pots range from 0-500... 250 being center. The Competition Pro is wired to allow a constant one-way connection for the analog signal. Move the arcade joystick in one direction, and the stick hits 500, move it to the other direction and it goes to 0. The stick at rest is at 250... center (provided the 5200 stick is centered).

Can you explain this in a little bit more detail? I still would enjoy making an arcade stick for the 5200 but I never could get past the hurdle of how to get 250 when the stick is at rest.

[Atari 5200 homebrew joystick?]

But how do you let the joystick know that it is centered? Remember, when a 2600 joystick is centered, there is no connection for any of the signals. So in a sense, the center would have a resistance similar to the low resistance for either left or right or up or down. That is the part that I can't figure out. You gotta somehow let the 5200 know that the joystick is centered by having a resistance value halfway between left and right or up and down. But how do you hook it up?

[Atari 5200 homebrew joystick?]

Something I always thought was an issue with making a digital version of the 5200 joystick. Its easy enough to have the proper ohm value occur when the joystick is up/down/left/right or at an angle of some sort. You just put the appropriate resistor inline with the up/down/left/right signal feed. The kicker to me is that how do you show 250 ohms or whatever the proper amount would be if the digital joystick is centered. Generally, centered digital joysticks have a zero/null value since they aren't connecting a circuit but an analog joystick would be feeding a resistance roughly half of the full ohm value of the variable rheostat.

[Wico Joystick and two button games]

Generally all Atari 2600 compatible sticks with 2 buttons only work as one button. The two buttons are wired in parallel with each other so hitting either button responds to the computer with the same signal.

 

I believe that Atari 7800 joysticks use resistors or something so that instead of being a flat on or off signal to the 7800, there is either 1 of 3 states, off, then one resistance for one button and a different resistance for the other button which is why it can still use the same 2600 pinout.

[Old Wyse terminal, worth keeping?]

But the key problem is that I have zero software for the Northstar. That is one of the reasons why I haven't bothered setting it up.

[Old Wyse terminal, worth keeping?]

I was at my old house cleaning it out today. One of the things in the basement that I decided to keep instead of tossing was an old Wyse serial terminal. I kept on bouncing back and fortth between "save or toss" and finally saved it. Its one of those old amber screen crt terminals.

 

I actually wonder if I can use it with my ancient Northstar Horizon CP/M computer that I have never powered up.

[An end of an era is almost upon us...]

Heh. I had that same 160 in 1 kit and the no-battery crystal radio kit as pictured above. I actually bought a 150 or 100 in 1 kit at a thrift a few years ago. I hope I still have it in my storage unit.

[Wishing for Vintage Packard Bell Master CD]

No offense to the OP but I hated these PB systems back in the day. Especially those long combo cards. Ack. Back then it was nothing but dealing with IRQ conflicts, custom autoexec.bat/config.sys files, sound card issues, trying to get your new Multimedia CD-Rom to work with that new and actually trying to get your modem to connect. Ugh, I'm just happy those days are long behind us.

[An end of an era is almost upon us...]

Yup! I have been browsing the heck out of that link for the last couple of days but missed that they had some of the sales flyers with the flyerside chat in them.