KingSmed

Did as you suggested - pulled all the new components, and reverted to the original RAM sticks. Also went ahead and pulled the BIOS battery for a few minutes. Powered system back up - it booted. Was curious which of these changes actually made the difference, so I put the new RAM back in and tried again - death screen. Then tried the new SSD with the original RAM, and again I had a good boot. Not sure why the new RAM failed after initially functioning, but something there was definitely wonky. Now back to trying to get Ubuntu to install - and dual boot.

Thanks for the suggestion, I feel a little stupid for not thinking about something so fundamental on my own. However, it unfortunately did not work.

I am working on upgrading an Atari VCS for a friend and I am stuck at the Black Screen of Death, nothing a I do seems to get a response. (By Black Screen of Death, I mean no video signal.) First, a little backstory to let you know how I got here. Met up with an old friend a few months back we had both been in the local Atari user group during the ST's peak. Told him about my VCS and he was so excited about it that he went onto Atari's website and bought two. Of course this was December when everybody was getting stuck in that OS update loop, and he had the same problem. He'd also ran into an issue where he'd set the video mode to 4K and he was on the Black Screen of Death. I came here looking for info, and stumbled across this thread as a solution to both the Death screen and the update loop: So I made Atari OS Flash stick, popped it in the USB port, and his problems were solved. Fast forward a couple months, and he's decided to set up one of the VCS units as a backup PC, so gets a pair of 16GB RAM modules and a 1TB M.2 SSD to upgrade it. He's unwilling to do the disassembly himself but knows I've done it before, and I agree to handle it for him.I crack it open and get it all installed, but when I fire it up - death screen. I'm worried I screwed up the install, so I revert to the original config and try again, still nothing. I reach out to him and learn that he's never even used this unit (despite it being out of the box). So I pull out the Atari OS stick I made before, and poof - that brings the unit back to the land of the living. Note that I do not go through the usual set up process here, as I do not know his user credentials. I just make sure it boots. So now I crack it back open, reinstall all the new bits, and boot - still a happy machine. He wants me to install Ubuntu, so I make another USB stick and boot it. Note that I also pop into the BIOS to turn off the secure boot. Put in the Ubuntu stick and boot it, then go into the install process. Ubuntu detects the Atari OS (Apertis, I think) so I tell it hey, don't kill that, install Ubuntu alongside. I set up the partitions I want on the new drive as follows: /boot 1 GB swap 4 GB /root 32 GB /home all remaining space Now, I put all these on the new 1TB SSD. When the install completes, I reboot the system, but first make a stop in the BIOS to change the boot sequence to USB -> SSD -> eMMC. I get a message saying there is no boot disk in the drive. Huh. So back to the BIOS, look at the boot options, and I see there is a new item listed under the eMMC. I didn't want anything added there, but if the Ubuntu installer thought it was a good idea, then I'll see what happens. So I change the boot sequence back to normal (USB -> eMMC -> SSD) and let it rock. But boot fails to start, and I'm at the death screen. I think again about what the Ubuntu installer added to the eMMC, so I put the Atari OS flash stick back in, and get the machine back to normal. Now back to the Ubuntu stick and the install process. It detects the fact that the same version of Ubuntu is already present on the SSD but seems to be aware of a couple issues, so it asks if I want to reinstall. None of the issues it cites have anything to do with the eMMC or the Atari OS. I check and make sure it doesn't appear to want to use the eMMC for anything, at least as near as I can tell, so I tell it to go ahead. After all, if it goes wrong again, I can always reflash. Well, it did not work. Death screen. Really scratching my head here, but I still got that trusty ol' Atari OS flash stick. I put it in and... nothing. System does not respond to it at all. I try fully removing power overnight. I try unplugging the USB hub (and with it the keyboard & mouse). Unplugged the network cable. I try making another Atari OS flash stick in case the first one got corrupted. I even power cycle the monitor in case it is locked up and not seeing the video. None of this works So now here I am, with my friend's apparently dead VCS (I do have a power light and can hear the fan spin when I turn it on, but that is it). Any ideas? BTW - when I hold the power button down to shut down, his power light stays on. Not sure if that is significant.

My apologies, I failed to do proper troubleshooting in my first post. As I was thinking back on that day, I realized I had NOT done a cold reboot, but a warm one. Realizing my error, I tried again, and sure enough the issue has gone away. Probably a transient RAM corruption issue, and I am very embarrassed.

My VCS has been idle for a few weeks while I gathered the parts for an upgrade, which I did a couple days ago. RAM is now 16GB, and put in a 500GB M.2 drive. Powered it on to see a big pile of updates being processed. Truth be told, I had been doing precious little with my VCS before deciding to start buying parts. So I decided to try the Guntech demo. My system is connected to a monitor that has no audio, so I paired up an external bluetooth amp (Monoprice IIIP) for the sound. A few minutes into the game, the audio just quit. After a few more minutes, it came back. This went on for about 15 minutes, then I had to step away. When I came back, I was working on a few other things on my laptop so I decided to stream some YouTube videos on the VCS. I soon noticed the same trouble (audio cutting in and out) was happening here as well - it wasn't just the game. Did a cold reboot, no change. I soon noticed that often times, the audio cutting out would happen at the same time as the system fan spinning up - but not every time. I also found that if I paused the video when the sound stopped, I would later know that the sound had come back on because about a half second of audio from the moment it stopped would be played back. I experimented a bit with this, and it was clear the audio came from the moment the sound had dropped, and NOT from the moment when I hit pause. This makes me think the audio issue is in the VCS and not the amp, but to be fair I don't know anough about bluetooth audio to be sure. Has anyone else experienced this? If so, was it happening before the recent OS updates?

Why not? Even the Jaguar eventually made it onto Walmart shelves. Sure, it was just the Super Stores, but still...

Just to make sure I understand what I am looking at here - am I seeing a cable from the connector used for the WiFi card going to the video card? I'm assuming that's a PCI-e slot. But with a WiFi card, I can't imagine it would need anything better than x1 bandwidth. And yet for the video card, I'd expect x16 would be required. How much bandwidth does it have? I am suddenly imagining my VCS resting in an absurdly large custom dock, akin to the original Intelly's Blue Whale, to house the PS and video card "riser":

Early in the video he's complaining that the charging ports on the controllers are not USB-C. I see this complaint a lot, with MANY different products. Why are so many people uptight about this? Aside from not looking at which way the cable is oriented, is there really any advantage to USB-C over other cables? It's not as if you have to go digging for a compatible cable, they included them in the box. Or is it just a matter of appearances, of looking modern? Though I did find it funny that after complaining about the port, he opens the joystick and disconnects the battery by PULLING ON THE WIRES instead of gripping the plug. Wonder how many times he repairs something to find the battery (or some other internal component) no longer works? (Sorry to be snippy, it's actually a good video, I'm just prone to nitpicking.)

As I recall, most of Songbird's titles were actually unreleased games that they secured rights for. Don't know if they'd have the resources for full blown ports - or the rights. But as long as we're dreaming... why isn't there a Tempest 2000 port??? IIRC, there was a PC version - and even an indie PC remake. Seems either of those could be ported to Atari OS without too much expense. (Of course, I'm not a developer, so I really hjave no idea what it takes, I may be way off here.)

Don't recognize the keyboard (remote?) to the left. Did I miss it in one of the IndieGoGo tiers?

It's logical that some units will fail due manufacturing issues - especially with such early units as these. Sorry about your crap luck, I hope they are able to get a new unit out to you soon.

One was Ubuntu. The other was an old stick that I use to run Spinrite - it boots to FreeDOS. Pretty sure that one predates UEFI.

This has not been the case for me. I have tried two different bootable USB sticks, neither would launch without pressing ESC and changing my boot media. How did you persuade the BIOS to boot from USB without manually instructing it to?

That explains why some of those apps are only a hundred bytes or so in the store. And why I can't use my controller to operate them!

Watched this video, although despite the title he technically is working with the internal flash storage, NOT an M.2 drive. I think he just misspoke when he wrote the title. Still the process he shows for restoring the original image (and his prior video showing how to create that backup image) is valuable info.