Rob Mitchell Posted December 2, 2003 Share Posted December 2, 2003 Within 7800 .. are all chips (specifically the TIA) soldered in place? I just checked my two 7800s and both are soldered! Anybody want to trade 7800s that have socketed chips? Rob Mitchell, Atlanta, GA Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Curt Vendel Posted December 2, 2003 Share Posted December 2, 2003 All depends, the first run of 7800's from May/June of 84' should have all their chips socketed, I have 3 (sorry not letting them go) that are all from original 84' boxes and all are socketed.... I've seen several from 86' that have some chips soldered and some socketed.... The other thing is I've seen numerous variations of the U13 chip location.... some have the chip, others have a zero resistor across two pins, others have a full assortment of resistors and axial caps across them.... this may be why some 7800's will work with certain games and others will not.... A note on the May/June 84' socketed boards, they all appear to be rev -002's and don't even have a U13 socket or a C64 capacitor, while the rev -004's do have these and are the design used up until 1991 when Atari switched to the all new Peritel design that was both NTSC/PAL with just a few minor jumpers on the board, those boards are layed out completely different from the original board layout done by Dan Schwinn of GCC. Curt Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Mitch Posted December 2, 2003 Share Posted December 2, 2003 I agree with Curt, it's pretty much only the early 7800s that have the socketed chips. Tramiel was too cheap to spend a few cents extra on sockets. The later universal boards had the TIA, Maria, and OS chips socketed but I've only seen those boards in PAL format 7800s. Incidentally, the U13 location is the home of the infamous timing circuit which, as Curt suggested, is the reason for most of the 2600 compatibility problems. And sorry, I'm not trading any of my 84 7800s either. Mitch Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DanBoris Posted December 2, 2003 Share Posted December 2, 2003 ... Tramiel was too cheap to spend a few cents extra on sockets... Mitch I really wouldn't fault them for doing this (I would fault for a lot of other things, but not this). With the profit margins on a consumer products being so small you want to look for every chance to save a few cents on the production cost. Not only would you have to consider the cost of the sockets, which would start to add up if you socketed all the major chips, but you would also have to look at the added labor, 2 operations per chip instead of one, and the risk of relibility problems if the chips worked loose. Dan Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jsoper Posted December 2, 2003 Share Posted December 2, 2003 2600 juniors aren't socketed either, and some 5200s are less socketed than others (4052 chips and such). And intv-2s and CVs aren't that much either. My boss said there's a machine at work that makes it easy to desolder chips non-destructively. Gotta check into that sometime. Rob, I'll look around in my 7800 stash. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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