Atari 2600 Console/Joystick Repair and collection talk.

Jackdeth · December 1, 2023

Hello everyone. I don't have many friends to talk about Atari with so I thought I would post here. Here are a few pics of some of my collection and troubleshooting I've done. I had an light six sixer in my basement that never worked and gave up on a year or 2 ago. Well, a week or 2 ago someone was selling a 4 switch Atari with an Atari joystick and a Wico joystick for $25 untested on Facebook market place. I spoke to the seller and she said she would take $15 for it. I figured the Wico controller was worth that much alone. Well, the console would turn on and have picture but after about 20 seconds the picture would get really bad, then go out. I took it apart, but didn't see anything wrong. The Atari controller had a bad plug on it, and the Wico controller didn't work right neither. I found part of the wire on the Wico was bad so I ordered 2 new controller cables for around $13 so I replaced both cords. I also had a few old joysticks that were missing the boot ring. I found 4 of them on ebay for around $12 so I fixed the one I just got and an old one I already had. Also, the paint was half worn off on the joysticks so I bought an orange sharpie paint pen. The color is a little brighter than the original, but WOW! the joysticks look great with the bright orange.

Getting back to the consoles, I watched a few youtube videos on how to replace the 3 chips on the main board. I labeled each chip and took all 3 of them out of my light sixer and 4 switch Atari and put 1 chip in at a time on another working Atari I have. I put a picture on this post. It was really hard getting those old chips out of the sockets, but I found using a flat head screw driver and slowly prying up on the bottom of the chip was the best way to get them out. (I bought a chip puller to do this, but they were too tight to get them out with it) Well, after trying each chip in the working Atari, I found the CPU chip in the sixer was dead so I put the CPU from the 4 switch in it and was happy to see it works now! I've had that in the basement for at least a year and never thought I would be able to use it. I put a picture of that in here too.

The last thing I wanted to mention is the home made Joystick I built. It's the first joystick I ever made so it's not the best looking, but it actually works pretty well. I used plywood instead of MDF and the finish is not that great. I built this to work on a regular Atari and the Atari flashback. If you notice the 4 buttons oh the top, each button is for a direction. up/right/down/left. I added those buttons because I found that on the Flashback, if you hit a combination of 2 buttons, it activates the menus that the flashback controller does. It's kind of a pain figuring out what button combinations do which function, but it works. Well, I found out something that I never planned on that makes this controller ROCK! That is the game Decathlon. As I kid I really liked that game, but DESTROYED one or two joysticks playing the game so I stopped playing it. The 2 outside buttons work as left/right so this controller works great to run in the game. The only problem is that it doesn't work very well on the Flashback console because if you hit both buttons at the same time, it brings up a menu. Because of that, I bought the cartridge and play it on an original Atari. You smash the buttons like you are playing drums, then it the fire button to jump/throw/ect.

Well, that is all I wanted to talk about for now. Feel free to leave comments to this. if you have any Atari stories or pictures you want to share, please do!

Larry

DarthDuke · December 2, 2023

Your home made controller actually looks pretty good. I love that the corners of the wood cabinet for it are angled. Nice touch.

Interesting that the chips were going bad on your 2600 rather than something like the RF modulator. I wonder if one of the chips in my childhood 4 switcher 2600 is going bad too and it's not just the RF.