Paddle Games Not Working 7800

[christo930]

I was trying to play some paddle games on a 7800 I have. They work well on a 2600 I have as well as the FB2 unit. They do not entirely not work. On Breakout they cause a vertical line and the paddle jumps from the left to the middle to the right and then back. Presumably this is something on the board, like a cap or something? Does anyone know what would cause this behavior?

 

Also, are there any test carts for displaying colors? Like a cart that puts up color bars with the name of the color? I think my TV is out of adjustment.

[VicViper]

Have you tried a different cart? also, have you opened and cleaned the pots on the paddle controllers?

[+sixersfan105]

The jumping of the paddles is pretty common for out of whack paddle controllers. As VicViper suggested, you should clean the pots on the paddle controllers themselves.

[+-^CrossBow^-]

I was trying to play some paddle games on a 7800 I have. They work well on a 2600 I have as well as the FB2 unit. They do not entirely not work. On Breakout they cause a vertical line and the paddle jumps from the left to the middle to the right and then back. Presumably this is something on the board, like a cap or something? Does anyone know what would cause this behavior?

 

Also, are there any test carts for displaying colors? Like a cart that puts up color bars with the name of the color? I think my TV is out of adjustment.

 

Can you take some pics of the vertical line and maybe a video to show this exactly? It could be more than a cleaning needed.

 

As for a test cart, there are two diagnostics that are available. The roms for them can be found on this site I believe. You could go to the AtariAge Store in the 7800 section and request a customer cart to be made. You could then have either rom image put onto that custom cart. The color tests on these tests do not have the colors labeled. But they do each feature a color bar along the bottom where both halves basically should be about the same color when the console is cold. After about 5 - 10min the console actually warms up enough that the color hues change and shift.

 

Also keep in mind that there are two color adjustements in the 7800. One for the 2600 TIA for 2600 games, and the other for the Maria for 7800 games. So you would need different tests for each. The 2600 has a rom known as the colorbar generator. It does the same thing in that the main screen has top and bottom halves that should be matched to look about the same colorwise. But the color bar generator also has dedicated screens of solid red, green, and blue along with linearity tests etc for the 2600 side of things.

[christo930]

It is definitely not a dirty paddle controller. I took them apart and cleaned them before I even bothered plugging them into the FB2 I was using at the time. When I did hook them up to the FB2, they worked perfectly. No shake at all. Same thing with a heavy sixer Telegames and also a 2600 JR. The paddles are not the problem.

 

On the 7800 the symptom was that the paddle would appear in 3 places. Either the far left side of the screen, the middle or the far right. IIRC, they jumped between these 3 positions as the paddle is turned.

 

 

As for the test cart, I would need a 2600 rom because I have no way of getting roms into a 7800. I doubt if there is anything wrong with the color output, rather it would be the TV out of adjustment. I had been fooling around with the color controls on the TV and I don't have any way of adjusting the color because I don't have anything that outputs a screen which has named color boxes.

Perhaps there is a dvd I can download that has distinct labelled color boxes... This TV is never really used for anything but old video games.

[christo930]

I did a bit of further testing today. I tried Kaboom first. When I turn on the 7800 with no controller, it comes up normally, but with the paddles plugged in, it distorts the screen and it appears to be locked up. Then I tried breakout and it behaves as it did before with the paddle jumping around. I don't have another clean pair of paddles. I also took video to show exactly what it looks like if that will help, I will upload and post it here.