anyone ever open an activision games in a controller

[Shannon]

By chance I happened to run across one of these cheap.

 

Is there a website or msg topic that discusses the innards of this thing?

 

I'm just curious as to what makes it tick.

[DanBoris]

There's really not much that can be discerned from the inards of these units. The circuit board just has two epoxy blobs on it, a crystal, and a couple resistors and capacitors. You can see a picture I did of the board here:

 

http://www.atarihq.com/danb/images/toymax.jpg

 

Dan

[Miqorz]

Standard cheap-o glop tops...surprise.

[Shannon]

Oh well... You have to figure this thing is almost like an atari on a chip, but I don't know much about these kind of things.

[tkarner]

I'm actually working on a little project with the Activision 10-in-1.

 

I bought the Atari 10-in-1 earlier this year and liked it a lot (despite the

nitpicking of a lot of people here). Then I got the Activision model to

play 10 more games. But unlike the great Atari controller, the Activision

controller is terrible.

 

So I opened it up to to see if maybe the chipset could be interfaced to

a different controller. Should be easy. There are two PCBs in there, one

containing the main chipset, the other is the gamepad PCB. They are

soldered together. The solder points for the four joystick directions, fire

button, and ground are all easy to figure out. So when I have some

spare time I will solder a 9 pin male D connector to it and I'll be able

to use any joystick I want. I will of course post the results here.

[Jasoco]

I have always wondered. What exactly are those blobs? Are they some sort of cheap solution to using real chips? I've seen them in lots of old small cheap electronics.

[DanBoris]

To understand what the blobs are you have to understand how a normal chip is made. The actual sillicon chip is faily small and has no easy way of being connected to a circuit board. The chip is put into a larger package , the "chip" that we are used to seeing in an electronic device, and the connection points on the sillicon chip are wired to the pins with very fine wires. The finished package protects the chip and wiring and makes it easier to put onto a circuit board.

 

In the case of the epoxy blobs, the silicon chip is attached directly to the circuit board and wires are bound from the chip directly to the circuit board. The epoxy blob is put over the chip to protect it.

 

The advantage to this method is that it takes up less space then a conventional chip, and when produced in volume is cheaper the concentional chips. The downside is that it requires special machinery to do the assembly and the initial setup costs are higher then with normal chips.

 

Dan