poobah

1770

No fair, my workbench is nowhere near THAT neat! (and I have been known to bite my nails) So, basically just soldering to the side of the pin and shrinking it down... Hmmm, Pretty much what I do, though I think I should switch to a smaller gauge wire (I run out of room to work- used some cat 5 cable for the last adapter I made). I'm just afraid smaller wire won't hold up long term. Time for me to get a bigger magnifying glass I hate when I forget to do the middle pins first... Why, oh WHY couldn't they have made these with solder cup pins????? Careful... techie red head with a soldering iron, could be painful when angered

Amen to that! I have a DDD Falcon (basically, they sawed off the keyboard area and squared it off into a pizza box), it uses a PC style keyboard, But I think I am going to mod it to take a Mega style one. Pics Soon. -Ken

Not to get too far off the thread here, but those 5.25" disks were pretty resilient. I remember back one day at our local computer store, I was waiting for my mom to finish the paperwork on our brand new Atari 800 (Hey, I was only 11), anyway, dude at the desk behind the counter is eating a sandwich, big gob of jelly falls on a floppy disk on his desk. Chaos ensues. Another dude takes the disk, slits it open, takes out the really floppy part, rinses it off in the bathroom sink! Slits open a new disk, inserts the now dried floppy in the new empty 'envelope', puts it in the drive and copies that data! I was floored. Alas, I only got a 410 for my computer that day, had to wait a while before I had disks

Alison, do you have a pic of a pin soldered without the heat shrink? Hopefully I can refine my solid pin technique Thanks! -Ken

One other thought.... If you pay $20 for shipping, don't get too bent if the seller only paid $13 in postage.... packing peanuts, bubble wrap and boxes all cost money too. Now, you pay $25 and it shows up in $4.85 priority box with no packing... get angry =P

A decent seller would eat the difference. I just sold a TT030 on ebay, shipping flat rate $35 priority mail. It wound up costing me $46 and change for postage, and maybe another 6 or 7 for packing materials. My mistake for pricing the shipping too low. (darn TTs are heavy!)

Wow. Mere words can't describe how incredibly bad this game is! I don't know if I never played it "back in the day", or if I simple repressed my memories of it Anyway 885 is my best so far.

I ordered a video card once via UPS, took 41 days to go from Cleveland OH to Utica, NY (you could make the drive in 6 hours). I've gotten more than one piece (literally) of mail shredded inside a ziploc bag with a USPS "we're sorry" sticker on the outside.

Did you find 13pin DINs with solder cup pins? The last batch I got here in the states were solid pins... NOT fun to solder.

Hi all! Still have a couple of machines left that need homes: (3) 1040STf machines with non-working floppies. (1 meg, TOS 1.02 or 1.00) (2) 520 STm machines, 1 with power supply, 1 without (someone can take both). (512k, TOS 1.00) No mice, disks or documentation- just the machines. I do have power cords if needed. Any are yours for the price of shipping and a couple bucks for packaging. Pictures of the 1040's Here I'll add 520 pics soon. PM or email! -Ken

With analog comes calibration.... Which is why the Atari's don't use the full range of the paddle. By picking a conservative range of values, they ensure that the game will be playable on any machine. Your 'offset' is going to be different for each machine. Don't forget the the capacitors in these machines are 25+ ears old... they are most definitely going to vary!

Congrats mommy and daddy! Welcome baby! (quick, get that kid a 2600!)

Amazing, considering the prices they charge to ship stuff!

11.5 hours of labor? That's just mean

GREAT, Now I have to open up the still virgin XEGS

Ahhh. Atari RGB to SCART should be trivial. Here in the states, we'd have to do Atari RGB to S-Video, Composite or YUV

How do ST Low and Med look compared to an SC1224 or a Multisync?

I haven't really looked at the output signal from an 8-bit lately, but my recollection is that they do show 60 frames per second. In the normal NTSC, the 2nd field is offset by 1/2 scan line, this 'tells' the TV to drop down 1 scan line to draw the interlaced data. (the even raster lines) I am fairly sure that the Atari doesnt do this offset, so you get 262 scan lines painted on top of each other every frame (the 'odd' raster lines on the tv - its the reason for the thin black line between the Atari scan lines - the even raster lines are never painted). This is either good or bad! If your capture hardware is assuming that the interlacing is there, and interprets the 2nd frame as the other half of the 1st, it will try to combine them them into a single 525 line frame, and get odd results depending on the filters used. If the card doesn't do this trick, you should get a nice crisp 60 fps. All the above is for an NTSC signal, PAL will be similar, but with different numbers. -Ken

Heavy Sixer - its what we had when I was little. Then again. I have mentally ingrained the vcs = 2600 conversion.

I'd imagine an actual real one is pretty rare. I'd bet most people with one one had the ROMs installed when they became available.

They had this big kiosk display in the mall where I lived. I was still using my Atari 800 ("the dinosaur" as my XL owning friends called it). Strangely enough, I still have that machine! The kiosk dudes didn't grasp that you needed to have the TOS disk available, so the first day or two of display was just the machine whining for the OS disk!

Nice, I need to show the wife this pic and say "See! It's NOT JUST ME!!!!!" In an 11x13 room I have a Mac, a PC, an XEGS, 4 TT030's, 1 Falcon, 1 MegaSTe, many 520s and 1040s, and all the assorted electronic bling that goes with them.

wow, thats kinda wild, haven't seen one of them since I was a teenager!

UPDATE: The machines with working floppies are spoken for. I still have 2 more with dead floppies. I have a couple SF354 (SS drives), no power supplies, also free (you pay ship and pack $) -Ken