Harmony Cart with a heavy sixer

[SmileyDude]

I saw the other topic where some of the carts won't physically fit, but I don't think that's the case for me. It appears to go all the way in, but it behaves as if the cart isn't actually there. Are there any issues with a heavy sixer and the Harmony cart that aren't caused by physical mechanisms? Could there be something else broken on the sixer? One thought I had was that the Harmony cart would draw more power than a typical cart and if there were any issues with the power components on the 2600 that could be the cause. But at this point, I really don't know what the problem might be.

 

I know the cart actually works because I was able to use it in a 4-switch vader, but I had to switch to the heavy sixer because the other machine is missing a difficulty switch (one of the previous owners was a little rough with it) and the joystick ports didn't appear to work consistently.

 

I don't know what firmware the Harmony cart is running, since I can't run the tool on either of my machines currently (see other thread). But if that's a potential solution, I'll try to get it working on another machine.

[+LS650]

Weird. I have a Sunnyvale heavy 6-er and my Harmony has never given me a single problem.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

You can see the firmware version, if you select [.] on the root directory.

[SmileyDude]

You can see the firmware version, if you select [.] on the root directory.

I was just able to update the firmware on the cart, so I plan to give it a try later this week. Hopefully it will start working on my heavy sixer and I'll forget all about the problems I had

[SmileyDude]

Sorry for the double reply, but I had a chance to try it out again and no go -- my heavy sixer just does not like the Harmony cart at all. I'll try to clean out the cart slot again just to see if that might be causing a problem, but pretty much every other Atari cart that I have works in this thing.

 

Maybe I should just see if I can get another working 2600 instead...

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Maybe it has to do with the power supply? Have you tried exchanging them?

[+batari]

I saw your other thread: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/223002-ms-pac-man-bug/

 

With this evidence, I think your sixer may have a bad RIOT chip, which holds the 2600's RAM. A single bit of RAM that is flaky may not affect most games or cause subtle glitches in others, and some games don't use all of the RAM so they may not be affected at all.

 

Harmony is very sensitive to bad RAM, though. It executes code out of RAM so even if a single bit is bad, Harmony probably won't work on that system.

[SmileyDude]

I saw your other thread: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/223002-ms-pac-man-bug/

 

With this evidence, I think your sixer may have a bad RIOT chip, which holds the 2600's RAM. A single bit of RAM that is flaky may not affect most games or cause subtle glitches in others, and some games don't use all of the RAM so they may not be affected at all.

 

Harmony is very sensitive to bad RAM, though. It executes code out of RAM so even if a single bit is bad, Harmony probably won't work on that system.

 

I'll give that a try -- the 4-switch that I have has other issues, mostly mechanical, so I can just swap out the RIOT and the 6507 while I'm at it. At the very least, I know that those chips all worked well enough for the Harmony cart, so I shouldn't be making things worse