Atari Falcon video issues and troubleshooting….

[Clint Thompson]

Seeking experienced advice from the community on a Falcon I’m upgrading. 
 

First, I’m positive the NVRAM battery is dead. The mechanical hard drive it had was screeching and as a result, it would also not read floppy disks for some reason. Removing the HDD and the disks read fine now. 
 

The machine has original Atari 4MB of RAM. Lotharek sent over a 14MB and the machine refuses to post, no screen at all. It does power on but no video and is lifeless. I’ve tried holding in the reset button for 10 seconds with no luck. Replacing with original 4MB and it works as it did before. While I find it hard to believe a newly built ram module is defective, it’s hard to be certain and things happen. No other machines to test it on.

 

Now onto the real problem; video. As you’ll see in the pictures in VGA, there’s a slight yellow border around the TOS windows and the video acts weird and glitches every 20 seconds or so in ACE tracker. I have tried booting with all auto items disabled, same result:

 

And one of the pinball games does this: 

 

 

Lastly, I had to order a custom made RGB cable and this is the output I’m getting:

 

 

It’s possible the cable was made wrong. I got it from eBay as suggested elsewhere here. What sucks is it cost me about $50 shipped and this is the result. Given the other issues the machine is displaying, I can’t be certain it’s not the machine instead of the cable. 
 

As far as I can tell with the original sticker over the screws, the machine has been sealed since August of 1993. It’s super clean, little to no use, but problematic. 
 

Could it be as simple as a bad or failing power supply? Has anyone ever seen an issue similar to this regarding video output?

[Zogging Hell]

Yeah it could be as simple as a bad PSU. If the floppy didn't work with the hard drive and does without it does suggest the PSU might not have the oomph it used to. There also some caps on the motherboard that it is highly advisable to replace as they can damage the VIDEL chip as they age. However...

Was the orange border in GEM there before the cable or is it something that has occurred afterward? It looks like a very specific colour is being swapped out (grey) which could suggest that either cable is wonked or the GEM palette is off. You can adjust that colour used for shading in a CPX module, which either points to that CPX or the NVRAM.

The image cutting out could be a monitor sync issue, which may be down to the TV/ monitor your using not quite liking the Falcon's output or the cable again.