Got my new (old) Atari!

[jdsony]

I just got my first Atari since the Junior I got in 1987 yay! I still have my junior but it is stripped apart and the video is garbled. My new Atari is a heavy 6'er that looks all nice and shiny after I cleaned it up. Got it for $8 with 2 controllers and 5 games plus shipping. I have yet to test it because I don't have a power adapter at the moment.

 

Anyway...I had to take it apart of course to have a look at it's guts and it appears that it has all the main 3 chips (all removable) and a space where a fourth 24 pin chip was at one time. I believe there was a chip here at one time because the solder is not perfect in the holes and there is some flux around some of them. Is this normal and doesn anyone know what might have been here in the past?

[moycon]

Hmmmm Here's an interesting page out of Atari Age magazine:

 

http://www.randomterrain.com/a2m/aa7inside...7atari7vcs.html

 

It's from cavelevels new site. Maybe that will help?

[cwilkson]

Hmmm.....it's hard to say if someone tried to install a chip there.

 

The best theory (maybe it's been verified by this point) is that Atari had plans to have a builtin game, probably Combat. That space is for the ROM chip. If you install a ROM there it will work, but that's all you'll get. If you put a cartridge in the slot, you'll get garbage. There's no way of detecting a cartridge and disabling the builtin ROM, so you'll get some poor mixture of the two.

 

-Chris

[Room 34]

http://www.randomterrain.com/a2m/aa7inside...7atari7vcs.html

 

Two things right off the bat in that article crack me up:

 

1. "Don't do it!" Sheesh. Yeah, the 2600 is really fragile. That's why millions of 8-year-olds banged them around in the rec room back in the early '80s and most of 'em still work fine today.

 

2. "The main difference between the CX2600 and the CX2600A is the position of the difficult switches." Ha! On the OUTSIDE, yeah. Anyone who's opened both up knows the 6-switch and the 4-switch are WAY different on the inside.