Dead Atari 2600 - repair, recap and composite mod
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- Опубліковано 20 сер 2020
- CELEBRATING 1000 SUBSCRIBERS! THANK YOU SO MUCH!
In this video I do a repair on an old Atari 2600 games console from around 1981. This is the original 6-switch console. I was dead on arrival. Some cleaning and repairs got life into it. I also do a composite video modification and replace the electrolyte capacitors.
However, the video-output is only black and white, and I suspect it is because it is a NTSC system, while I have PAL cartridges. It might be an issue with the TIA chip also. If anyone knows, please comment below.
I used the following recipy for the composite mod:
www.instructables.com/id/ATAR...
(among others)
Music from Bensound and UA-cam studio.
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I found you thanks to Adrian's Digital Basement giving a shout out. It's good to see you have a boost in subscriptions!
Thank you very much for this instruction. You helped a person in USA repair his old and beloved game machine from his youth.
I enjoy this...
I was amazed at my recent accomplishment ... I diagnose problem, and re-cap an old radio of my mother who died 2 years ago. Now it works like new. I get much satisfaction and happiness from restoring electronics. Most are put in bin and go to waste. Now I am confident that I can restore old electronics, maybe a little.
Thank you very much, and I hope you and your family receive all the blessings this life can bestow upon you.
T
Nice to hear. Thanks for the feedback😀
Great video mate! One suggestion, get some Kester solder. That stuff you got doesn't seem very good. Kester solder, especially lead solder is amazing. Subbing :)
Love the video mate!
Great video !
I've been an avid gamer for a long time and this is the first time I've ever seen the inside of a 2600 so thank you for the great video actually pretty complex for the 80's
Thanks. If you look at the schematics, it is pretty simple, but the chips (TIA and 6502) was pretty advanced at that time.
70's, actually.
Greetings. The cable you were talking about is not modded. It was the original cable. It came with this box that connects to the TV that lets you switch between the TV to game signals. (It’s called a TV Switch Box.)
Incredibly Atari XL is now selling new replica 2600 game carts for $99. Those RCA cables were standard in USA. The units also shipped with an RF UHF antenna switch box which plugged into TV antenna jack. We didn't have composite inputs back in the day. The RF and composite cables use different wiring.
What I liked about this original good old Atari 2600 video game console is that, it had sure granted me comfort. It was even great when it even knocked off, the typical opponents going one on one up against each other. Especially when there was the Atari 2600 version, of asteroids that came in 1981. Followed by the Atari 2600 version of berserk. Different compared to Stern's arcade game version of berserk.
Your Videos are Great!! 👍🏻 Thank You
Thanks a lot :)
It looks like someone tipped a coke in that machine. Congratulations on 1200+ subs.
Thanks:)
Helped me install a composite board into my fathers childhood 2600 (all no-cut, wanted to keep it as stock as possible :) ). The RF was borderline unusable with all its static. Thank you!
Nice work!
Nice video! :)
Thanks!
I just saw your C64 build video series, that's awesome, I'm gonna watch them later for sure! Also, I hope I'll get a 1084 someday. They're really hard to come by on finn.no, at least locally to me.
There was one 1084s for sale today :)
Congratulations on reaching and passing 1k subscribers :)
When I saw the Atari 2600 version of middle command, it was pretty wimpy to me. It didn't include features like, the bomber jet and the satellite fkying by. Also the smart bombs, they're suppose to include as well. Would you like to know which Atari 2600 game version was hard to control? That was the one called 'Gravitar.' Sometimes you can say that again, it's nothing like the original thing. 😕 😐 😪 😔 😑 😳 😕
The three TIA chips produced.
NTSC palette has 120 colours + 8 Gray scale.
PAL palette has 96 colours + 4x8 Gray scale, missing (as Gray) hue 1 Olive->Yellow, hue 14 Greenish Brown->Tan and hue 15 Brown->Tan, all other hues play musical chairs to NTSC palette.
SECAM palette has 6 colours + Black & White.
Hence the reason for NTSC & PAL cartridges, the hues(colours) are messed up.
NTSC called never the same colour used a colour burst signal and phase from it to produce colour - all colour TVs had a Tint control to adjust picture green to purple of image. It was fixed with solid state PLL circuits.
PAL (Phase Alternating Line) a second kick at the can fix colour drift with auto correction.
I would have put a pinned connector in the board and replaced the pinned connector in the switch board.
You can also replace the film caps with small TDK box film caps.
Adrian's Digital Basement Sent Me :)
Tak 👍
I realized how old is this Atari 2600 when I saw the difficult selectors on the front panel. The next revisions they changed these switches position to the top back videogame panel.
Try it with an NTSC cartridge, the TV may handle it.
Someone spilt a drink on that console.
Super interesting. The resistors to remove are different for every model I think. I have a jr. model as well as a model that is known as the vader model because it's all black. Each model has different instructions for applying the a/v mod.
Thanks:)
Brand new Atari
They were really worried about RF in relation to microprocessors in those days. What did they know that we've forgotten?
It made noise on the RF on TV´s back then. I remember when my father came home, we saw the noise on the TV when he drove up to the house with the car :O
It was the first one that repaired back in 1982
Good call on it being NTSC. I wondered if you weren't trying to use an NTSC console on PAL when I saw the squashed image. 2600 games have to manually draw the screen a scanline at a time, so NTSC games are going to draw fewer lines before generating the next vertical sync. The TIA chip in these units creates the colorburst based on what you set in its registers, so it'll be totally incorrect for a PAL/NTSC/SECAM console on a different regions TV's/montiors.
Thanks for this, I have often wondered what makes a heavy sixer so heavy, now I know. I would love to restore a 2600 but the "dead" one I bought at a garage sale works perfectly 😂 Oddly the RF out is very snowy on our Samsung flat screen TV until I switch it to a 4x3 aspect ratio, then it look perfect - at least as perfect as a 240p image can look on a 60" screen. My 10 year old Nephew is now becoming an Adventure Master 😆
Thanks:)
That's not the heavy. It's the light...
@Damion Manuel Interesting. I only have a Vader that i picked up as a repair project. It turned out to be working perfectly so i just checked for leaking caps and closed it back up. It feels very light compared to the memories of my 14 year old self. We had a sixer in the 70s but now who knows if it was a heavy or not.
The 2600 uses a 13bit address chip and no ROMs inside it. The smaller chip is a 6507 CPU which only accesses 16K of RAM/ROM in the cartridge. The other chips are the TIA (TV Adaptor Graphics Chip) and the RIOT Chip (does basic I/O for the joystick ports and gives the CPU 128 bytes to work with). Everything else is in the catridges.
Thanks for the info :)
How dare someone give him a thumbs down!
Greetings, friend , this time I dusted off my six lever VCS, light sixer, the atari in question turns on, gives video on the screen, but after three minutes of seeing the game on the screen, it loses the image, they seem as if it were blurred, the pixels of the figures in the game are dropped until the game is completely unviewable. I uncover it, check the voltage regulator and it shows me 5.1 volts on the output pin. I understand that it has to show 5 volts on the output pin, but in my atari it shows 5.1 volts on the output. I ask you, is this regulator good or bad, will this be the cause of the problem with my atari that the video of the game goes off the screen as I explained above. Please, what answer do you give me?
Or rather the problem of my atari will be a malfunction of the chips, for example one of these, RIOT, CPU or TIA.
5.1 volts is ok for sure. 5.3 or above I would be concerned about
Tilykke med de +1200. Er lidt misundelig på det flotte landskab ved Bodö, fik set dine drone videoer 👍
Tusen takk:) Kom på besøk! Jeg liker Danmark. Var der i fjor.
A transformer is rated at it's RMS voltage of the AC wave. The peak of 10V RMS is 14V. That's important because the capacitor levels the voltage off at it's peak.
PS, you divive the peak by the root of 2. So 14/1.4
No colors - looks like problem with voltage on TIA or the chip itself
That's not actually the 2600. It was originally released in 1977 as the Atari VCS (Video Computer System), and had 6 switches, 2 of them being left and right player difficulty switches. The Atari 2600 was released in November 1982, and only has 4 switches... without the difficulty switches. I bought mine in December 1982 with money from my newspaper route in grade 9. 😎
Nice faultfinding on the cable, but crimping the new cable wasn't your best job. My suggestion is to buy some precrimped cables, you can find them in china very cheaply in different lengths. I always have a good stock of them, these are pre-crimped and you could have just cut of one end and 'done'. When I saw the US adapter I was wondering if the system was NTSC and you would have a problem with the colours, well that was answered near the ende of the video. Regarding the rca connectors, you could have also just ran a video/audio cable out of the console where the tuner cable was I'm not a big fan of modding a case, and this would have saved it. Another option is this one one thingiverse, it's for a megadrive but should also work in the 2600. www.thingiverse.com/thing:3433580
Nice job...
Yes I know. I just recently got the crimp tool, so it was the first time I used it.
@@Arcticretro I have bought several crimping tools, because the quality varies. Also different connectors require different crimping tools. In the end it's always a hassle and never ends up as good as precrimped wires, so my advise is but some now, and you'll be happy next time when you need it.