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THE UNAUTHORIZED AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ATARI DISTRIBUTOR Tuesday, March 26, 2024 Hi and welcome to Lance’s Laboratory! This is the eighth entry of what will be my personal Blog, sharing small slices of life with you from around the Twin Cities and from within my Lab. For those who are new to Atari I/O let me introduce myself: My name is Lance Ringquist, I’m from Minnesota, and I am the world's oldest surviving Atari dealer. You may have heard of me before as Video 61 Atari Sales which I have consistently operated since 1983 and I have been at it now for over 40 years! Before we jump right into the story of the Atari XE Mario Bros. cartridges, let’s take a giant step back and see the big picture of how Atari was ran in those years. Have I ever told you about the 400 400 computers? Well, in one of Atari’s warehouses around Sunnyvale they stumbled upon 400 Atari 400 computers they still had brand new in the box, that they had inherited from Warner. This was in the early 1990s during the time of the Atari Lynx when Jack Tramiel ran the show with his three sons. When this happened, Jack’s people at Atari called up and wanted to know if Bruce, Brad and I wanted to go in on this together and buy out their remaining inventory of 400 400 computers. We said “YES! We’ll be there to get them the next day.” - But that’s not what ended up happening. More on that one in a minute… It had come down from Jack that this was the only way they would sell to us. Let me tell you how expensive it was for Atari to process an order - it cost them about $125 to write out a single invoice. And you have to understand, even under what Jack had done to Atari, his austerity measures, cutting down their workforce by over 80%, it was still a huge company. Efficiency experts had figured out that for Atari to write out one invoice and ship an order, it was $125, regardless if it was one video game cartridge or 100. This wasn’t the shipping expense, this was Atari’s time and labor. So when you’d send in an order to Atari for one 2600 game or one 7800 game, a new joystick or something like that, it cost Atari $125 to fulfill the order in time and labor - for someone to write out your order, for someone else to find your game in a warehouse, for a worker to pack it, label it, and ship it to you. For it to cost them $125 to fulfill an order for a $15 cartridge, Atari went in the hole. They’d lose money, and Jack wouldn’t have that. That’s why when you’d pick up the phone and call Atari in those days for a cartridge order or service repair, they sluffed that off onto me because it cost them too much money to do it themselves, although it shouldn't have. It was much easier and much less expensive for them to just answer the phone. It became a very expensive thing. "Many of the people who try to pry information out of me, like the Vice guy who ran the hit piece on Brad, have this idea in their head that Atari only had one warehouse. NO THEY DID NOT. They had MULTIPLE warehouses around the world, and it was expensive to have all these employees and insurance, air conditioning and electricity, property upkeep, taxes, everything needed to keep those warehouses going day in and day out. It's expensive for me too." @Video 61 Jack Tramiel never looked at video games as a premium. He looked at games as too costly, too much money to develop, publish, warehouse, retail. And of course that’s how he made money, but he just didn’t understand it. He thought it was all hardware sales and games were up to third party developers who were left all on their own. "Here's a Jaguar and a dev kit, you go do it." Jack would do everything he could to sluff off sales onto other places like Federated electronics stores, which Jack Tramiel owned through Atari Corporation from 1987 - 1989. Jack used Federated as a way to directly retail warehouse loads of Atari merchandise almost into the 1990s and beyond, especially overstock remaining from the Warner Communications days: “Business is war” Jack said. I’m sure every little boy or little girl buying Mario Bros. understood that. They were so eager to make me a distributor - “We need somebody in the midwest to help us out, we made a lot of mistakes” - and me not having been a distributor before and not knowing the ins and outs, of course I said YES. Boy, I had no idea just what I was in for. "I didn’t realize they were setting me up to be not just an Atari Distributor and Service Department for them, but also a public relations sort of thing for them too. You wouldn’t believe how many invoices I wrote for $9.95 power supplies and TV switch boxes. $10 orders that would’ve cost Atari $125 or more to fulfill. So just think about all the money I saved them, and I think that’s one of the reasons why they looked so fondly on me and didn’t want to burn me, because if they had burned me then I would’ve been just like everybody else. Everybody else got burned but us." @Video 61 Just to give you some sort of idea how Jack managed things and micromanaged almost every aspect of the business: This one time, one of the developers who was working on one of the Jaguar CD games (I can’t remember which one) needed more blank CD-Rs for testing the game. This was a game that Atari had over $1 million bucks tied up into developing. This was before CD-Rs were in peoples' homes and spindles of CD-Rs would not have been commonplace yet in stores like Office Max, CompUSA, or Sam's Club, but they should’ve been available within a place like Atari. The programmer went up to the office manager and requisitioned more blank CD-Rs for testing and development, expecting that there’d be a spindle of them somewhere. “We don’t have any” the office manager told him. The programmer thought the manager didn’t understand what he was asking for. “What do you mean, this is a million dollar game with a deadline and I’m under pressure to get this done. When are you going to get them in?” Manager said “I don’t know, Jack’s waiting for a sale.” So he held up production on these games waiting for one of his suppliers to have a sale on blank CD-ROMs, and only then would he okay the office manager buying them. That’s called micromanagement, and it’s not something the President or CEO or Chairperson of a company that size should be doing. POW! Losing Sleep Over A Plumber And A Trucker So the Mario Bros. story: There was another time when there were 1,500 brand new Atari XE Mario Bros. cartridges sitting at Atari new in the box, being offered to me and I wasn’t able to get them. I’m still sick over that one. I had accepted Atari's offer for me to purchase the Mario Bros. cartridges and they slipped through my fingers like sand. You really don’t know what “pinching pennies” means until you hear this stuff Jack Tramiel used to do. He did this sort of stuff all the time. I still lose sleep over this XE Mario thing. This is a story that should be told, though. Atari had me as a distributor supplying foreign Atari dealers. I was told it was cheaper for Jack to have me deal with these Atari dealers in Latin America and Europe than for Atari to do it themselves. But if you knew some of the reasons why, you’d be stunned, because he’d probably have made more money directly dealing with these people. "I was on the phone with Atari as much as ten to twenty times a day, if not more. It was a constant barrage." @Video 61 You see, one of the ongoing things was Jack didn’t like dealing with all these dealers and distributors - he just wanted to deal with a couple of them. I don’t know why. It's how Jack did business. So I had Atari’s inventory and I was watching it GO-GO-GO. It sold well, and of course I had access to all of that stuff and the ability to buy more directly from Atari. But I couldn’t buy it all, because of course there were millions of cartridges. So I was trying to buy up the cartridges that were going faster because I knew those were good games. And Mario Bros. was one of them, especially the version that had been released for the Atari XE. Atari wisely made this Mario Bros. for the XE, and there was still a huge userbase for the Atari 8-bit computer from before Jack took over that would love to have a Mario Bros. game for their Atari XL computer too. So I put an order in for a couple of master cartons of Mario Bros. cartridges for Atari XE. That’s 72 cartridges to a master carton. I receive them at my warehouse and they sell through quickly. I come back later to order more from Atari, and another huge chunk of XE Mario Bros. cartridges are gone from their inventory. They were going fast! One time I went to order some and there were only 1,500 left. “I’ll take them all...” I said to the person from Atari the phone, "...everything you have left." Atari came back and said “Well there’s something here you might be unaware of about those Mario Bros. cartridges.” I said “Well, what are they?” and they said “Those games are locked up in semi truck trailers in our lot.” Okay, fine. I asked that they open the semi truck trailers up and take them out - “We can’t do that” she said, “because they are parked against each other, bumper to bumper, so you can’t open them.” Hmm, okay. I said “Well get a truck and move them.” Atari responds: “Oh we can ’t do that.” I asked why. “Oh Jack won’t let us, that will cost money.” Me: “Well how do I get them then?” Atari: “Well you’ll have to hire a trucking company to come in and do this. You’re just going to have to do this on your own. Once the trucking company comes in and moves the trailers apart and we can get into them, then we will call you back and tell you what cartridges we have, but for sure we have 1,500 new Mario Bros. for the XE game machine. What else is in there we’re not exactly sure.” "Yep, that's me. You're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation. Here I am on the phone ready to buy 1,500 Mario Bros. cartridges directly from Atari, who wants to sell them to me, but are held back by Jack’s penny-pinching policies. Spend a dollar to save a penny. This is just how things were ran. This is the reality of things that I dealt with day in and day out." @Video 61 So to get access to the Mario Bros. games in the semi trailer, I have to go and hire a trucking company myself, to go do the work for Atari. Remember the $125 it cost Atari per invoice to fulfill an order? Not only was Atari not paying for the trucking company to come do the work, they were having me do all the legwork with making arrangements with the trucking companies, so that Atari didn't have to pay their employees to do it themselves. That's a cost saving measure. I called some trucking companies here in Minnesota to see if they had anybody out in California who could do this for me. Yeah, some of them had some guys available out there near Sunnyvale, CA - but this wasn’t over yet, it would take some time. The trucking companies came back and said YES, they could do the job of going out to Atari, hooking their truck up to the trailers and pulling them apart - but I’d have to pay for the licensing and insurance, yada yada yada, pay for the truck drivers to go in there, move things around, unhook the trailers, and then let Atari go in and take inventory and wait for DAYS. So I would have to pay for the truck and the driver, for all of those days, until they are done with Atari going through everything and taking inventory. For every minute of every day they are doing that, I would be charged by the trucking company to sit and wait. So you can only imagine how much that was going to cost me. This took some doing, but I got it all sorted out. I called Atari back, and said the expense of the trucking company could cost me $5,000 - $10,000 dollars. In those days that was the price of a nice new American car. Atari said “Don’t worry about it. Jack got mad and we just trashed it all. We sent the semi trailer full of games off to the scrappers.” I said “Well then you had to hire a trucking company to come in and do the work.” Atari: “Yeah we did. But the thing about it is we didn’t have to have any of our Atari employees inventory anything. The truck drivers just pulled the trailers apart and hauled it away. We didn’t have to spend money on employees doing inventory.” You got to remember those trailers were rented also, so by throwing the Mario Bros. games in the dump not only did they avoid having to pay the expense of employees inventorying the games, they also didn’t have to pay the rental on the trailers anymore or the taxes on the inventory. That was "Jackthink". "When I say 'Bruce and Brad' I'm referring to my old colleagues, Bruce is Bruce Carso of B&C ComputerVisions, and Brad is Brad Koda of Best Electronics. The three of us have operated independently in the Atari business for many, many years, and we dealt directly with Atari every day. Yes, Bruce and Brad are my 'competitors' but not really, we each have a speciality: Mine is games, Brad is parts, and Bruce is mostly computers." @Video 61 People think the E.T. in the garbage dump in New Mexico story is bad. This was insane, I still can’t believe it. Jack would rather manufacture cartridges to just sit unsold, parked in a hot trailer in a parking lot, and then throw a truckload of brand new Mario Bros. games in the garbage - than to spend a few extra pennies inventorying the games so he could sell them to me and have plenty of room for him to make a profit in the end. This is how this guy thought, it was just beyond unbelievable. In the end, Brad, Bruce and I managed to get all the 7800s out of Atari and we managed to get what was left over of the Lynx stuff except for 10,000+ units sitting in Hong Kong that needed to be repaired. I may have gotten some of them, I don’t remember it’s so long ago, whatever happened to the bulk of them. Brad doesn’t have them, Bruce doesn’t have them, and I don't know what happened to the rest of them but, that will be a story for another day. Oh, and what happened to the 400 400 computers you ask? Well when we went there the next day ready to buy them and load up the truck, Atari had already tossed them into the dumpsters and the dumpster divers and scrappers got them for $ZERO. Most of the Atari 400 computers went to the scrappers because if the dumpster divers had gotten them we would’ve known immediately. Many of the dumpster divers at Atari would call us up immediately, because they knew they could only sell them to flea market type things one or two at a time, and it was easier for them to call me, Bruce, and Brad, and try to get money out of us because they knew we’d buy a bunch of them. And they were right. This was Jack saving money. Instead of waiting a day or two for me to get everything organized, it was “Well we don’t need the labor, we don’t need the added expense of paying more employees to do more work, just get rid of the computers now.” That’s the way things operated under Jack. It was ran as a feudal system with Jack as King and his three sons as Princes. They wouldn’t wait five minutes, they’d just ask if you wanted it or didn’t. Sometimes Atari wouldn’t even ASK if you wanted it or not, they’d just ship it to me. Things would arrive on trucks to my warehouse that I didn’t order, or ask for, or knew anything about. Jack would decide to get rid of something and use Lance as his dump. That’s how I ended up with so many random things out of Atari that I’m still uncovering and have to make heads or tails out of. (See my recent series of Blog posts titled “Raiders of the Lost EPROMs”.) That was the frustrating problem - there’s quite a bit of Atari stuff that I have no idea what it was or asked for, and some of the Atari stuff I wanted bad went to the scrappers or the dumpster. Had I been able to purchase them back then, today they'd all be in the hands of loyal Atari players out there like you, instead of in the dump. Thanks for reading, - Lance Please visit me online for more at www.atarisales.com

I appreciate that they’re standardizing the CX78 Control Pad. It always should’ve been that way.

Boxes are included, as with the Plaion re-release of Berzerk and release of Mr. Run & Jump. They are also including instructions this time! Here's a sample from "Ben at Plaion."

Just watched this video on the Atari 3200, also knows as "Project Sylvia" and "Super Stella," which was meant to be the Intellivision killer. Check it out...

New WIP available for download. This game is already pretty impressive. https://forums.atariage.com/topic/365031-dreadnought-assault-wip/

I just discovered the thread here. Someone asked why they can't voting for Carrot Kingdom™, and the answer was "There was no public binary release." or something like that, which at the time there was. You just had to download from the Carrot Kingdom™ site, not from the other forum. 😛 That was kinda uncool IMO, along with the very limited list of games that do not including the rest of us. Like Peter said, no Songbird, Video61, etc. I don't keep up with the whole scene, but IMO the Venture port for 7800 that Peter and Lance did should have been way up the list! Either way, I appreciate the hard work of everyone, and love checking out what I can from everyone. 💖

Yoomp! ATARI VCS/ATARI 8-BIT/ATARI 400 MINI Controller: MODERN CONTROLLER / CLASSIC CONTROLLER / PLAYER'S CHOICE Difficulty Level: Normal/Level 1 Start Play on: Real Hardware/Emulation is OK ✔ Squad Challenge ends 11:59 pm PST APRIL 30, 2024 Objective Play for the highest possible score using the difficulty settings defined in the challenge. Post a photo or YouTube video of your score in this thread. Scores must be achieved between April 1 through April 30, 2024. Screen captures are not allowed as they are more easily manipulated for falsified scores. Multiple submissions are permitted. The player with the highest score at the end of the competition is the victor! Eligibility This is a Club VCS Exclusive Challenge. All Club VCS players are welcome! Play Rules This is a special cross-platform challenge. Games may be played on real hardware or using emulation. Choosing which controller to play on is part of formulating your strategy. Enhancements, rewinds and hacked versions of this game are not allowed. Difficulty Level We are playing YOOMP for the Atari 8-bit computers! Start the game at Level 1 and play until game over for the highest score possible! Fair Play Your integrity is everything. Players should play fairly, be honest, and have fun! Falsified scores will result in your immediate removal from the site. It goes without saying that we will not allow cheats, hacks, cartridge frying, enhancements, rewinds, deceitful photo manipulation, subterfuge, or any other unfair advantage. Everybody hates a cheater. More To review detailed rules on how to play, please visit the High Score Squad page here: Message Welcome to our 26th Club VCS Recharged Squad Challenge!!! For this challenge, we're celebrating the release of the ATARI 400 MINI by playing the Atari 8-bit game YOOMP! Play on the VCS via Atari 50, on real Atari 8-bit hardware, on the 400 MINI, or using your A8 emulator of choice! Yoomp! is the winner of the 2007 ABBUC software competition. Like a combination of Trailblazer and an often-seen demoscene effect, you fall down a tube, landing on each square progressively in a rhythmic manner. Landing on certain tiles will have certain effects, such as making the screen quake, decreasing the brightness or forcing you to jump. Navigating the tube itself is a matter of planning ahead and compensating for your limited movement capabilities. This game is freeware and can be downloaded on the Yoomp website. Start at LEVEL ONE and take the game as far as you can for the high score! Club VCS Recharged Squad Contest This game is the fourth title in our fifth Club VCS contest giveaway! Prize details will be announced shortly. This time we're going a full 12 rounds with the winner announced in January 2025! 1) All challenge participants will receive one (1) entry for each challenge in which they submit a valid score! 2) The top scorer of each challenge will receive two (2) additional entries - for a total of three (3) entries in a single challenge! 3) On Twitch or Youtube? Stream or record and post your ClubVCS high score attempt for one (1) additional entry in each round. You must post a public link to the video in the Challenge. This contest is open to everybody, including Atari I/O Moderators, with a U.S. or Canada mailing address. It's really easy, all you have to do is participate be a Club VCS member and participate in our Recharged Squad Challenges.

Re-releasing some old games that include a cart and box for $30. Good deal if you ask me. Pre-order now for shipment in May 2024 Ninja Golf: https://atari.com/products/ninja-golf-7800 Food Fight: https://atari.com/products/food-fight-7800 Fatal Run: https://atari.com/products/fatal-run-7800

This finally arrived from Hamburg Germany in the mail yesterday! I really enjoy these niche music album on cartridge formats and have most of Remute's releases from the past. But this is the first time he released something for an Atari system so I had to get it. And for those curious, there is a brief 1 min video of the cartridge in action. My only very minor complaint about this particular release, is that the audio seems a tad lower quality as compared to what I've heard a Jaguar able to do. Tempest 2k is a prime example of this. And the fact that the songs do not change over to the next track automatically. Whichever song you choose to start playing, just auto loops as many Amiga like module files did back in the day. So as a result to listen to something else, you have to go back to the playlist menu and then choose another song. Although, you can also hot select a song from the keypad directly if you know what the track# is you want to play. Still, it would have been nice if it did go onto the next song on its own so the cart could be inserted and just left to play in the background.

First attempt after a few practice runs to get used to the game: 2817. Game is hard. Wow, those graphics are...not great. 🙂 I will submit a better score and screenshot soon.

Good question! I think they did the same thing with Berzerk and Mr. Run and Jump when those were on pre-order. They did ship with boxes. It may be worth a question on the Atari Discord. I'll get back to you.

738 🥇 FIRST place!! for now 😂

Got me thinking about them after watching this new awesome video by MVG. GP2X Wiz - The Handheld Retro Emulation Beast from 2009 Description - The GP2X Wiz is an early ARM based gaming handheld device that released in 2009 by Game Park Holdings. While it was not a success, the Wiz was very popular with emulation enthusiasts due to its open platform and many popular emulators were ported to run on the device. With the impressive specifications of the GP2X Wiz meant it could run many systems at good levels of performance. And it came complete with an AMOLED Touch screen. In today's episode we take a deep dive into the GP2x Wiz and see why it was considered an emulation beast as far back as 2009. Please Enjoy! Today it would seem we are spoiled for choice by handheld emulation devices by the likes of ANBERNIC, MIYOO, POWKIDDY etc, and though I don't have any of the modern options back when things like the GP2X debuted I was actively working and collecting and was really into them. After this recent video on the GP2X WIZ I pulled these out of my collection. The Open Pandora, GPH CAANOO, the Dingoo of course my GP2X WIZ. These were the open source handheld Pioneers that paved the way for and held options that we have today. 😎👍

Final Legacy is an absolute classic Atari 8-bit game. It combines Star Raiders, Missile Command and Battlezone in one naval adventure. And you only need a joystick to play, though to get out of the sub-games immediately you have to press the Space Bar.

OK, I consider myself an expert on the Atari 8-bit computers because I had one since 82 and love it still. There are TONS of great games, so it would be hard to give a limited list. Given that you know the 7800 so well, you should consider starting with the 7800 conversions. One on One basketball (more stark graphics, but faster gameplay), Karateka (absolutely a classic on 8-bit, but you'll need a keyboard), Ballblazer (faster than 7800 on OLDER technology), Donkey Kong (faster, better sound), etc. I think that will give you a great perspective on how well designed the 8-bits were. Beyond that and also beyond the great included games, you MUST check out Blue Max, Preppie 1 and 2, Archon, and many more.

Hello, This is a calendar program I wrote back a decade ago, and recently ported to Lynx when getting the C compiler working. It's a bit like the calendar on your phone that can keep generating calendars for months long into the future. The data is calculated, not data stored within. Enjoy! Perpetual Calendar.lnx

Selling the spiritual successor to Aquarius by Mattel. Not using it enough with all my other projects going. https://www.etsy.com/listing/1716171301/aquarius-signature-edition-with

I'm selling off the dupes I've amassed. Prices don't include shipping, and I'll ship using USPS from 97086. All games are tested and clean. More pics available by request. Stellar Track - (sold) Earth Dies Screaming - a bit of label wear. $24 Super Baseball - $4 Double Dunk (box and game only, no manual). $15 Astroblast (game and manual) $5 Payment via paypal, $10 minimum please.

Testing my new CRT. It’s a Zenith Space Command SF1315A. It’s hard to take a good picture of a CRT, but it has a great picture and the remote is original and barely used. So far, I’m very happy with the purchase.

Ok: 3183

Vectrex UV overlay and light kit. The pics don’t do this justice.

I am trying to decide whether to play on Atari 50 on VCS or load the ATR file on real hardware. There's only one right answer for me....BOTH! I'll let you know which one I like better. 🙂 Also going to see if Pengo is already loaded on my modded PS1 Classic. Scores will be posted soon....

Are you sure that box is included? I think at the $30 mark, it's cartridge only despite what's shown in the product photo.

That's awesome! Quite the deal! I had this little thing show up today...

Change is inevitable

You guys, I'm going to create a "Share Your Vectrex Collection" thread, as we have some truly awesome stuff here for a very unique console.

Let's get the word out about this Recharged Squad Challenge! The more people participating the more fun the challenge! Spread the word and invite friends to play!

I never expected to add Vectrex releases from the 80s to my collection, but I did just that 🙂 Before adding these, I only had three, and everything else in my Vectrex collection were homebrews. I also picked up three cartridges by Binary Star.

Congratulations Marco1019! Congratulations to @Marco1019 on another victory in High Score Squad Challenge! @Marco1019 takes the top spot in our Final Standings for Ken Siders' Beef Drop on Atari 7800 with an outstanding score of 56,900 points. WAY TO GO MARCO! Our runner up winner for the Beef Drop Squad Challenge is @TrekMD who takes 2nd Place with an excellent 46,600 points! VCS guru @Sabertooth takes the 3rd spot on the board with an impressive score of 39,600 points. "The Don" @RickR takes 4th with 26,700 points. As always I'd like to encourage @Marco1019 to post his high score on the Scoreboard, and let's make sure this Challenge continues on! Congratulations once again to Marco on his big win, and I'd like to thank @TrekMD for nominating this game! 👉 Be sure to join @Sabertooth in Club VCS for this month's VCS Recharged Squad Challenge on the Atari VCS! Our next High Score Squad Challenge will be for the original Arcade version of Pengo on MAME. Be there!

He grabbed screen captures from several 7800 games. A couple that I have tested (one remains a WIP) the other was E.X.O. He happened to show a screen that’s named after me. Each tester has one.

This is something I've messed with on and off again over the years. After I discovered the controller pause modification you can do on the Sega Master System, it got me to thinking if something similar was possible on the 7800. And yes, it totally is as similar to the SMS, the pause line on the 7800 is always active and only when pulled low to ground does it trigger the pause. So I had played with it a bit using home made perfboard setups etc. But it wasn't really as useful or needed on the 7800 as it is on the SMS so I hadn't really invested much into it. For those that might not be aware, the Master System also uses a 2-button controller like the 7800, but the SMS also has a pause button on the console itself just like the 7800. The difference it that many SMS games actually use the pause on the console as a 3rd button to pull up inventory or stats..etc. in quite a few games. As a result, playing those games can be a bother when you have to get up and press the pause on your console each time you want to access those extra functions in the game. So naturally a modification for the SMS was going to come about to allow a person to add a 3rd button to their controller and along with a simple logic circuit in the console, you can make impossible controller combinations trigger functions inside the system. In the case of the SMS it is using an extra button to trigger either an Left+Right direction combo, or Up+Down depending on how you wire it up. That in turn is fed to a logic OR gate so that when you press that button on the controller it sends that impossible combination to the chip and that in turn will trigger the reset function. The 7800 sharing essentially the same setup here can also be done in the same manner. However, due to the 2600 and 7800 internal logic regarding the paddles controllers; you can't use the Left+Right combo because it will confuse the console and sometimes thing paddles are plugged in. But aside from that, it is the same. Consoles Unleashed in the UK sells a lot of excellent quality modification and upgrade kits for various consoles. One of those they have the most kits for, is the Sega Master System. They provide their own pause button modification kit that is really well made and looks nice. Well, I ordered up a few several weeks back and got them in yesterday. I immediately went to work on installing one into my personal 7800 as I have 2 controllers that I've modified in the past to be able to use this setup. Here is what that looks like: As you can see it is a tiny PCB that will fit in lots of places on the 7800 main board. Again, it is designed for the SMS but will work just as well in the 7800. In the pic above you can see that I'm getting power and ground from the bypass cap just to the right of the 6502. The Player 1 Up and Dn connections are at the top of those two resistors right next to that cap. So you have half of what you need right there in that spot. Above is where the rest of the connections in my setup are going. The small blue wire that runs by itself to that single point below the RIOT IC is the reset trigger. This is an unused via that is present on every single 7800 main board revision I've see and always in this same spot. I assume it was there for testing but is also makes a great place to attach the PB pad from that board to trigger the pause function. The other two blue wires are going into cleaned out unused vias so they pass back down on the bottom of the board to attach to a similar set of resistors for the player 2 Up and Down connections. I did it this way because I didn't want to trim the RF shielding. The resistors are outside of the shielding for the player 2 controller port next to the Reset switch. And this is where the two wires come back through to the bottom of the PCB to attach to the resistors mentioned above. BTW, the Up and Down combo wiring attaches to Pins 1 and 2 on the controller ports. And that's it! Now with this in place, I can use my modified controllers to remote activate the pause on the 7800 console from either controller port. One thing to mention about using this kit from Console's Unleashed... You have to wire both controller ports! The reason is because instead of using an OR logic in this setup, they are using a NOR logic chip. As a result, the controller ports are always registering high. If you don't connect up the second set of wires, then the logic on the pause board in the kit ends up triggering the pause constantly. It needs to see that +5 from the port pins in order to maintain the logic. So if you only wanted one port to activate this, you need to use a different logic IC. Also, the kits from consoles unleashed has extra stuff I don't normally need as it comes with additional small PCBs to mount a 3rd button to and provide as a template to drill the hole into your SMS controllers for mounting it. An excellent touch to be sure, but I don't like the SMS control pads compared to other controllers and wouldn't be using them on a 7800 anyway. But they aren't that expensive and I might need those boards in the future so who knows? I might go into details on what is required on the controller side someday for this modification to work as there is work required in the controllers. I think I've covered it elsewhere online but might do that as a follow up someday. Here is a link to Consoles Unleashed in the UK and again, they have some excellent quality kits on hand to help modders and tech with making their projects look that more professional and easier to install. https://www.consolesunleashed.com/

Had a 7800 come into the ITC lab to get refurbished, and upgraded with a few things. Among the updates was to get a UAV plus mount board setup as I've been doing for over a year now. This is where it is important that you always...ALWAYS test the current status of electronics before you dive in and start doing stuff. A rule I didn't follow so what I discovered after putting all this work in, isn't something I could verify was an issue before the work started. I had been told that it was working 100% without issue as it was the daily driver 7800 for the owner. So what was the issue I discovered? Well, after installing the UAV setup and the 10pin mini din AV connector to test the system. I saw something odd when I ran Ballblazer for burn in testing. What I saw was odd additional background graphic information on the far left and far right sides of the screen that I'd never seen before? More specific...this is what Ballblazer looked like: So if you look on the left and right hand side of the image, you will see what looks like the blue in the sky being extended out along with some burgundy like brown/red below that. Now oddly enough the 5200 version of the game through a UAV actually looks kinda like this, but on the 7800 this isn't normal. Here is a closeup detail of the effect and you can see it is more like a checkerboard pattern within those extra graphics being shown. Making matters more confusing was that NOT everything had this effect going on. Ballblazer seemed to show it the worst but any game using a colored backgrounds would have this kind of effect going on. But anything using a black ground was fine as this color hue test screen shows from the 7800 utility program: I did figure out pretty quickly that the issue had to be something with the Maria IC because this same effect wasn't happening on 2600 games and was only present on 7800 titles. So a few days of delay (Waiting on a new heater for my desoldering gun), I removed the original Maria IC, installed a pair of new 24pin sockets (As I don't have 48pin on hand). And installed a different Maria pulled from a parts donor 7800. And what did ball blazer look like after that? It worked! So yes after nearly 150 Atari 7800s that I've worked on, this was a first. My guess is that this 7800 always had this issue but as it was mainly used on a CRT and was only present on 7800 games, it likely wasn't noticed or the owner simply thought it was normal. In any event the original Maria was working in that the actual game play area on the screen looked normal otherwise. But the blanking to mask the extra graphics junk on the sides, wasn't working properly on this Maria and only by swapping it out with another was the issue fully resolved.

Wow, all excellent info! Thanks! Well in my case, I believe I still have my channel select switch in place on my console and since I removed the RF from it over a year ago to add in the audio input jack, seems as good an option for making it useful again as possible? I will reform the leads on it a bit so I can try and move it further back a tiny bit to make it easier to reach.

The Atari XE has a nice version of Crystal Castles, the nicest released for an Atari home video game system - so far

It's not so easy to introduce in a post like this 😄 This video is testing the circuit for my own purposes, but the real use of the board is demonstrate in camera, how the Lynx ROM cartridge address bus was bodged onto what was originally designed to be a cassette tape drive machine. The Green row of LEDs is the eight bit data bus output from the Paperboy game ROM (which is what is stuck to the left side of the board). Think of it as something like an eyecandy demo when it's done in software, but in hardware 😉 I’ve completed the longer video that the above clip is part of. The short clip may be deleted.

Some of my favorites from retail: XE Mario Bros. Pole Position Boulder Dash Bruce Lee International Karate The Eidolon Bop'n Wrestle

P.S. - we found 3 new eproms. theyre all for the xe. 2 of them i know what they are. one of them i can’t read. expect me to make another "raiders of the lost eproms" blog post about this sometime soon with the latest update for you. thank you, lance www.atarisales.com

When an official Atari social account picks up on #AtariDay! @Justin

Please forgive my late response to this post as I have just recently found it. My name is John Behnke and at one time, decades ago, I was a part of the Chicago Users Group. I was very young back then and after getting a full time job, getting married and having kids, I moved on to the world of the PC and did not look back. About a year ago I reengaged with the group and after having retired and having free time, I offered to restart our long dormant newsletter as well as redo the group web page. It saddened me that so many fine people in the community had passed or moved on but such is life. The reason for this reply is that I wanted to add a few thoughts of mine and explain why the Chicago Group gave me permission and what my motivation was in restarting the newsletter. First off I would like to address the comment about the early issues having nothing but web content and reprinted old articles. While this is mostly true, I had to start from somewhere and not having sources of new content available, I had to put in more "nostalgia" that I would have liked. I added articles from myself as much as I dared but tried to limit this as this was not supposed to be a "John Behnke Newsletter" nor did I want to give the impression that this was some kind of ego thing all about me. I think you will find as the months go on, there will be more new content. I have reached out to what is left of the TI Community requesting new articles, programs and anything that might be of interest to the community. Aside from mentioning the next meeting and some discussion of the next TI Faire, we intend the content to be of interest to the entire TI community and not just a Chicago User Group publication. So far I have received a few contributions and they will be published in the April and May Editions. I hope to have more. I would like to thank you for this post and hope you continue to read our newsletter. While it will contain more rehash than I would like, as you suggest in your post, this reborn newsletter will prosper or die depending on the TI community. Retro gaming is all the rage and I would love if the reintroduction of this newsletter, dormant for 18 years, might spark others in rekindling the fire we all once had so many years ago! Once again thanks for your kind words and encouragement!

This one is a bit lowbrow from my usual postings...but too funny. I had to post.