Tonyscouter Posted August 26, 2021 Share Posted August 26, 2021 When playing Centipede I noticed that the trackball started drifting up after I initially moved it up on my own. I'm guessing that I have to adjust the pot in the 5200 console to stop this from happening. Are there any adjustments in the trackball itself? Thanks in advance for your expertise & feedback. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CommodoreDecker Posted August 26, 2021 Share Posted August 26, 2021 (edited) Good catch with the console pot itself as that was new to me and explains a couple issues I have on mine... every 5200 owner gets to deal with that at some point, but with corrosion cleaned up they'll still last for a long while (probably decades unless the resistance is too low for the current applied to it)... And so glad I did housekeeping, I've got photos of my Trakball innards still available. I won one from eBay, disassembled, reveled at their use of gold contacts in a way they didn't for the regular joysticks, used contact cleaner on the gold tabs, then cleaned the axles, corner roller with WD40, and alcohol to get rid of as much of the green and brown corrosion as possible, dusted the wheel areas with compressed air, and added grease to the roller/washer joins though that didn't do too much and I used them sparingly so no splatter would get to the mainboard. I think that grease doesn't conduct electricity... That aside, using the contact cleaner on the potentiometer on the 5200 (lower right corner closest to the controller port and not the side edge) then calibrating with Peter's cartridge where, if I recall correctly, you should see "112" and "115" for port 1 (after centring the stick), or manually via game playing but I'd go with the cartridge and more closely calibrate with actual readouts as much of the process as possible... Yeah, I was lucky that the Atari ball was an ISO standard cue ball and not one of the 1/8" larger ones, but I did clean and replace it once the novelty of this side pocket wore off... Found the potentiometer video: I love how the video starts out with "Hi there!" in the same way as Peter Gabriel's "Big Time" song does... ? Edited August 26, 2021 by CommodoreDecker Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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