Justin

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/

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

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.
 

DISPATCHES FROM THE LAB - RAIDERS OF THE LOST EPROMS
Monday, March 11, 2024
 
  Hi and welcome to Lance’s Laboratory! This is the seventh 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!
Here’s a quick update on my ongoing search for EPROMs that I wanted to share with everybody on Atari I/O. I’m continuing to uncover interesting and odd Atari EPROMs and hopefully we will be able to get some of these to work. We will have to see.
Let’s take a look at what I unearthed in this batch:
 

 
Atari 7800 EPROM for Xenophobe, no date. This is the LO chip that I was looking for, to complete the set with the HI chip I found last time. So now we have 7800 Xenophobe the HI and the LO. There were two Atari 2600 EPROMs found. The first one you can see the label fell off. The other Atari 2600 EPROM had a label on it that says “VMS” on it or something in that order. (Are those somebody’s initials? Or is that an abbreviation for something else?) This EPROM is dated July 20, 1981. It’s only 24 pins, and 24 pins are 4k or 2k EPROMs. There were three TOSS chips in there for the Atari TT030 computer. Two Atari 5200 EPROMs for Millipede LO and HI, dated February 22, 1984. Two Atari 7800 EPROMs for Touchdown Football, NTSC, LO and HI, and the date is August 8th, 1989. 7800 Touchdown Football had been released in NTSC format in the US in 1988. Atari 7800 EPROM for Basketbrawl, NTSC, but only the LO chip. Dated 1990. Atari 7800 EPROM for Impossible Mission, NTSC, dated August 11, 1989. Atari 7800 EPROM for Galaga, PAL, that’s also dated 1989. And the thing about Galaga - it’s only 32K in North America, but it’s 64K for Europe. Atari 7800 EPROM for Desert Falcon, PAL, 1989. I think it’s a 48K game in America but it’s 64K in Europe. Atari 7800 EPROM for Jinks, PAL, 1989 Atari 7800 EPROM for Tower Toppler, PAL, 1989. Two Atari 520 ST EPROMs, both are labeled HI, undated. Parker Bros. Atari 2600 EPROM for Q*bert, dated 1983, and later handed over to Atari Corp. Unknown EPROM labeled “MONITR Rev 1.1”. I do not believe this is for the 7800 Monitor Cartridge.  
The Best Is Yet To Come
Now, there were a lot of other EPROMs in there too that aren’t pictured. We’ve continued our effort to try to find more of these EPROMs. I believe there are more, and this is what we’ve found so far. All the labels have fallen off of those, like the Basketbrawl label has half warn off, and on the Atari 2600 game the labels were off totally. I closed the cover to everything else, the EPROMs were kept in the dark so they may still be good. Fingers crossed!
What they all are? I don’t know. When will I get to all of them? I don’t know. Can I match everything up? I don’t know. It's a lot to go through and to make work.
 

 
Atari's Official Fixed Impossible Mission
This one is an interesting find - we’ll call this “Possible Mission” - it’s a 64K Impossible Mission EPROM for Atari 7800 dated August 11, 1989. This might be the fixed version of the game. Impossible Mission was originally released for the Atari 7800 in 1987, and yet this EPROM is dated late into 1989, long after the “unsearchable” bug had been found in the game.
1989 was a banner year. That was the year I signed up to be a Distributor for Atari. (Prior to that I was an Authorized Retailer, dating back to the Warner Communications days.) The only way Atari would let me sell Impossible Mission is if I sold it as a collectors item because the game can’t be finished. Atari was well aware of this issue by the time I became a Distributor, and yet this EPROM is dated August 11, 1989.
 
 
 

"What’s the difference between being an Authorized Atari Retailer, and being an Authorized Atari Distributor? It was: 1.) Pricing, 2.) Quantity you were allowed to buy, 3.) they made me an Authorized Atari Service Center, and 4.) Direct access to the Tramiels on a regular basis. I supplied Atari inventory to retailers in the Midwest, Canada, Latin America, Europe and beyond. When customers would call Atari looking for games or repairs, they would often redirect them to me. Access to the Tramiels allowed me to influence the product line, and I helped convince them to release the XF551 Disk Drive."
@Video 61 
 
 
 
I think the initial run of Impossible Mission was 100,000 units, with a great number of those held back from distribution. As the story goes, one of the missing pieces that you had to locate behind a computer terminal in the game was unsearchable and the game really was impossible to beat, and Atari had discussed internally with John Skruch the idea of shipping the defective inventory of Impossible Mission down to South America or scrapping it entirely, correcting the bug in the game, and ordering another run of 100,000 units.
 

 
Impossible Mission was a great looking game on the 7800 and would’ve sold well. Epyx made great games and it was very popular on the Commodore 64. At some point Jack Tramiel put the kibosh on more Impossible Missions, making the existing run of games a little more desirable because they became somewhat hard to find. How many more people would've bought an Atari 7800 to play a great game like Impossible Mission had it been available?
Is this EPROM the official fixed version from Atari that we never got? It sure looks like it! The Atari Inter Office Memo about 7800 Impossible Mission (shown above) from John Skruch to Garry Tramiel documents that this is likely the case, and states "we released a corrected rev. of the software on 8/11/89." That date is identical to the one on our Impossible Mission EPROM and confirms in Atari inter office documentation initialed by John Skruch that we've almost certainly uncovered an EPROM of Atari's official fixed version of Impossible Mission that was never manufactured. Cool!
 

 
Atari 520 ST
There were two 520 ST EPROMs that we found in there, but they both say “HI”, and I don’t know where the LO chips are.
 
 

 
Atari TT030 Computer
There were three TOSS chips in there for the Atari TT030 computer. However that’s probably not complete, because I think they used either four or six chips. I can’t remember at the moment, it’s something I will have to investigate further.
 
 

 
 
Q*bert, Parker Brothers, Coleco, and Jack Tramiel
And there’s one that just says “Copyright 1983 PB”. Oh I know what this is, as I’m making this Blog post I just realized that the “PB” means “Parker Brothers”. The labels as you can see are on little white circles, and printed in a way different from what Atari did.
At the bottom of this label it says “QB” which I bet means “Q*bert”. This is a Parker Bros. EPROM. What game it is, I don’t know for sure yet, but I bet it’s Q*bert since it says QB on it. I believe we found a Parker Bros. Q*bert EPROM with the 1983 copyright.
After the video game crash, Jack Tramiel bought up all of that third party Atari stuff out of Parker Brothers, Coleco, and others after the collapse, so Atari would have good software to support their systems in Jack’s red box era. To give Jack credit, that wasn't a terrible idea. Parker Brothers, Coleco and the rest were hurt badly, and Jack got it all for a song. That’s how you had games like Donkey Kong and Mouse Trap being re-released after 1986 in the burgundy Atari 2600 boxes. Most of these guys were not getting back into the Atari business and he bought all of Parker Bros. 2600 stuff, he bought all of Coleco’s 2600 stuff, he bought Activision’s Atari 8-Bit computer stuff which a lot of people don’t know, he bought over 300 games but didn’t name everything he purchased rights for. I’m looking at all of the EPROMs and images that I got from him, there must be 60 or more. The stuff that I don’t know that I’ve got I’m starting to unearth now. Will we find a Holy Grail?
 

 
IPL/MONITR?
And then there’s another one I have absolutely no idea what it is - it just says “IPL / MONITR Rev. 1.1” I don’t think this is related to the Atari 7800 Monitor Cartridge. I wonder what it could be for?
 
But How Did You Get All This Stuff?
These are all EPROMs that were purchased and sent to me by Atari Corp in the Tramiel era, during my time as one of Atari’s major Distributors. This was common. They’d send me this stuff, some stuff unlabeled, barely any paperwork or none at all. I probably set these down 30 to 35 years ago and lost track of them, only to find them again in unopened inventory.
So here's the plan: once I think we’ve found everything that can easily be found, we’ll catalog and organize what we have and I’ll methodically start to work on the EPROMs to see which ones work and which ones don’t, what kind of combination do we need have to have on the 7800 board, which 7800 board to use, etc. etc. etc. I don’t expect we’ll be doing much looking for more EPROMs after this because that will be a big undertaking, maybe another time, but once I feel like we’ve found everything that’s easy to get to, we are going to concentrate our energies into getting the EPROMs that we have found to work.
 
 
 

"There were only a couple Atari releases on the 7800 that I did not like: RealSports Baseball, Crack’ed and Jinks. I liked most everything else."
@Video 61 
 
 
 
The Slow Burn of Progress
In my previous Blog post about discovering lost EPROMs, I said I would be testing the games and report back. We've been busy searching for more of the EPROMs that I think will be easy enough to get to, however I’ve been able to quickly test some of the EPROMs and made a little progress, but haven’t yet gotten anything to play.
So far, I’ve got some of the 7800 EPROMs to display the Atari logo when you power on the game, but that’s it. These games have shown the Fuji logo but nothing else, and none of the games shown in the previous Blog entry have played yet. I think eventually I'll be able to get some to play, but that will take some doing and we will have to see how it goes.
 
More RAM
One of the things that will be very hard to do is test an Atari 7800 EPROM game that requires RAM to work. You see, if there's an EPROM for a 128K game that we want to test and it needs RAM, I currently have no way to test it. From what I understand, Atari had a 7800 board that had a cable hanging off of it, and on that board you could put 8K ,10K and 16K RAM chips interchangeably, so then you could test it as an EPROM board. It was set up to take two 64K EPROMs for a 128K game, and one of those RAM chips would plug into a socket. If the game required 16K of RAM, you could put the 16K chip in, if it required 8K you would put the 8K chip in, etc. I don’t know if Basketbrawl took RAM or not, but I know Commando did take RAM.
That’s all I have for this week! I will continue to post updates on my progress here on my Blog, along with Blog entries on other topics, and try to answer your questions the best I can. I appreciate all the enthusiasm, coverage and interest in this topic.
 
Thanks for reading,
- Lance  
 
Please visit me online for more at www.atarisales.com

DISPATCHES FROM THE LAB
Monday, March 4, 2024
 
  Hi and welcome to Lance’s Laboratory! This is the sixth 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!
Have you ever wondered what you might do if there were to be a long term power outage? I would miss my video games. So I thought for this Blog post I would experiment a little with my Atari Lynx and rechargeable batteries, and see what we find.
 
Things to Think About:
Power outages in severe weather Hurricanes Snow storms Black and brown outs Heatwaves Natural disasters Taking your Atari Lynx on a camping trip or RV  
First off, I know the Lynx is a battery hog. Those double "AA's" do not last long, and won’t be enough to get you through a long term power outage. What can be done? Let's step into my lab and explore some options:
Atari Lynx Battery Pack "AA" Rechargeable Batteries in the Lynx "D" Rechargeable Batteries + Atari Lynx Battery Pack Using Solar Power to Recharge Batteries Light Weight Batteries
 
The Official Atari Lynx Battery Pack, and Third Party Battery Packs
One survival option for a long term power outage is the official Atari Lynx Battery Pack. It comes with a shoulder strap and is large enough to hold six "D" sized batteries, and makes you look like the Terminator when it's strapped to your side. It will keep you electrified long enough to get you through a road trip, or a couple of nights without power, but when loaded with six big batteries it gets pretty heavy. Eventually though, that too will exhaust your batteries.
There was the NAKI Power Pak, a third-party rechargeable battery option that clipped onto the Lynx and added quite a bit of weight hanging off the back. There was also the Best Electronics battery pack - but the batteries for both of those products are long past their date, and no longer will hold a charge.
 
 
 

"There might be other aftermarket battery packs out there, I just am unaware of them if there are. Pairing the Atari Lynx Battery Pack with rechargeable NIHM batteries is the way to go."
@Video 61 
 
 
 
TEST 1: "D" Size Rechargeable Batteries + Atari Lynx Battery Pack
Now let’s try playing out this scenario of a long term power outage and see how much life we can squeeze out of the Lynx. What would happen if the power outage lasted so long that it exceeded the life of the "D" size batteries? The Atari Lynx Battery Pack takes six “D” batteries and can power your Lynx for several hours, but even they eventually will run out. We can stock up on extra “D” cell batteries, but that gets expensive and heavy to bring with you, especially if you're evacuating a storm.
I decided to try something different, so I went out and bought rechargeable NIHM batteries. They may cost a bit more at first, but you can recharge them over and over again, giving your Lynx nearly unlimited power and saving money over time. I found that the NIHM batteries are much lighter, so the Battery Pack is not so heavy and burdensome. This is an excellent option that lets you pair original Atari hardware with the ability to recharge your power, and not keep burning through batteries and hard-earned bucks.
 

 
I should also mention that the Atari Lynx Battery Pack was a good Jack Tramiel product. It’s heavy duty and well designed, with a metal knob and screw mechanism helping contain the weight of six "D" batteries and competently holding it all together. Pairing the Atari Lynx Battery Pack with rechargeable NIHM batteries is one good option to consider, especially in a long term power outage. It's nice knowing you have a portable power pack ready to go.
 
TEST 2: "AA" Size Rechargeable Batteries + Atari Lynx
Let’s experiment with another option: When I purchased the batteries, I also got "AA" rechargeable batteries to power the Lynx the “regular” way, with 6 "AA" size batteries in the Lynx itself.
So what kind of life can I get, and how will the "AA" batteries compare with the "D" batteries? I used by own Lynx to test this out, leaving it to run using my Blue Lightning demo dealer cartridge that is looped with the game playing in attract mode, and timing how long the different sizes of batteries and power options lasted before the Lynx ran out of juice.
The "AA" size rechargeable batteries went 3.5 hours. The "D" size batteries in the Atari Lynx Battery Pack went almost 8.5 hours. The Lynx only quit working once the batteries were exhausted. After both sizes of batteries were exhausted, I used my handy little battery tester ($6 at Menards) to see how worn down they were:
 

 
Here’s where it gets weird: Both sizes did exactly the same thing.
Of the six "D" size batteries, two were worn down almost exhausted. Another two were close to exhaustion, but still were usable. The last two were still almost fully charged. Yet that was not enough battery life to sustain play. It’s weird how the batteries were used up on the Lynx.
These same results were replicated exactly with the “AA” size batteries on the Atari Lynx.
 
 
 

"The "AA" size rechargeable batteries went 3.5 hours. The "D" size batteries in the Atari Lynx Battery Pack went almost 8.5 hours. The Lynx only quit working once the batteries were exhausted."
@Video 61 
 
 
 
No Sun Visor Required
So if the lights go out, and you have exhausted your battery life, get this: a solar powered battery recharger. These may be helpful if you live in areas with hurricanes or extreme weather, where you could be without power for several days after the storm and would enjoy a break playing games on your Lynx. They can also be handy on road trips or if bringing your Lynx along camping trips where you're away from electricity for extended periods of time. The solar battery charger I'm using can charge "D" / "C" / "AA" / and "AAA" size batteries.
Using the solar battery charger, it took about four hours in the sunlight to recharge eight batteries: four "D" sized, and four "AA" size. One idea would be to have a solar battery charger recharging one set of batteries, while you continue to play video games on your Lynx with another set of rechargeables. This would be like doing laundry and knowing you still have clothes to wear while the rest of the laundry is in the wash. It's a good idea for rechargeable batteries too, especially if you're waiting on the sun to do your charging for you.
 

 
Also, a solar battery charger could be very handy to keep in the house for use in inclement weather or a natural disaster. It's not just the hurricane or the snowstorm, it's the week after when the sun comes out and there's still no power until the crews are able to restore it. Using the sun to charge batteries in a long term power outage has benefits beyond just keeping your video games playing.
For now, I'm going to keep experimenting. Later on, once all the batteries are recharged, I will test our different options again to see how good and deep the battery charge is using solar. Will the batteries last as long using the solar powered battery charger as they do with the regular battery charger, or will solar end up giving the batteries a weaker charge? Let’s see how these different power options perform in the long term, and I’ll report back here with my findings.
 
Thanks for reading,
- Lance  
 
Please visit me online for more at www.atarisales.com

DISPATCHES FROM THE LAB - RAIDERS OF THE LOST EPROMS
Monday, Feb 26, 2024
 
  Hi and welcome to Lance’s Laboratory! This is the fifth entry of what will be my personal Blog, sharing small slices of life with you 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!
Quick update here from the Lab I wanted to share with all my friends on Atari I/O so you’d be the first to see. While I was working in my warehouse high atop the escarpments of the Twin Cities, cleaning up my office with my lab assistant on Saturday, we unearthed a trove of 7800 EPROMs I didn’t realize I had, and may have discovered Road Riot 4-Wheel Drive for Atari 7800 with a few other things. Like Rampart, Pit-Fighter, and Steel Talons, Road Riot 4-Wheel Drive was originally an arcade game from Atari Games that was released on Atari Lynx and believed to be in development for the Atari 7800 as late as 1993. I will try testing these EPROMs in some of my developer boards on the 7800 and see what we can get. It may take time to get this all sorted, but we will figure out what we have and I will report back here with more updates as we make progress.
 

 
We were cleaning up my warehouse office on Saturday and I said “Well, I know I’ve got EPROMs here from Atari that we should go through and catalog, and I know that I have them in two different places in the warehouse and in my office.” I hadn’t looked at these, and they were sitting in a package from Atari collecting dust for decades. My warehouse assistant and I pulled them out, and of course like everything I got from Atari, there was no rhyme or reason to it, it just gets thrown. In those days, Atari would send me all sorts of things from EPROMs to joysticks, just thrown in a box and sent to me with hardly any documentation at all.
One of the things we were looking for was Fatal Run documentation, which we found. Because I don’t have the strength to venture into the warehouse all the time to do this, I thought some of it could be in my office and we should spend some time looking in my office and cleaning up in there. We started cleaning up and sorting through packages, and of course there were tubes and tubes of this stuff from Atari that I got towards the end of the Jack Tramiel days. 
One of the packages I got from Atari were full of tubes of chips. If you don’t work with electronics you may not know, chips come in protective plastic tubes, usually five to ten or more at a time. And I’ve got rolls and rolls of this stuff, and you don’t know what they are - there’s just a kazillion part numbers and labels, or there’s nothing. Some of them are so old that the labels have fallen off to the bottom of the box and gotten all mixed up. And it’s hard to find out what they are, because it’s like trying to put a puzzle together. Not only are the labels missing, mixed up, or mysterious, but you have to figure out what the chips are and where they go, and on what board. For example, Midi Maze for the Atari XE was a 256K game, but they put it on a board that had 8 chips on it originally, so you’ve got 8 different chips that you have to sort through and figure out what goes where and get it to work.
 

 
When I found the EPROMs, most of them had labels on them. I found Sentinel LO and HI chips, Xenophobe HI, and KLAX LO and HI chips which I believe is a different version of KLAX than the one I’ve published before which was also given to me by Atari. I found Barnyard Blaster and Food Fight, both of which are PAL and have dates from mid-late 1989. That 1989 date is a little later than NTSC Barnyard Blaster, and quite a bit later than NTSC Food Fight, which was completed and shipped to retailers by May, 1984. So what does it mean that PAL Barnyard Blaster and Food Fight were being worked on as late as the Summer and Fall of 1989? Well, it’s possible these games play no different than the originals - but it’s also possible these versions of Barnyard Blaster and Food Fight could be different in some other ways. You just never know what Atari would’ve done, sometimes PAL market games had different sprites, they may have played different, or had other changes to the game beyond just PAL and NTSC. Sometimes those things would happen. 
 

 
Save Mary surprised me - I said “Hey look, these are on 7800 chips!” That’s different than what I’ve seen before. In my trove of EPROMS we unearthed, we found Save Mary on two 64K chips (LO and HI), not on two 16K chips as you might expect to find. Like KLAX, this is NOT the same version of Save Mary that I published years ago. The Save Mary I got from Atari that I used to sell, that is on one 32K chip which is different from what I found. This is Save Mary on two 64K chips, which means this would be a 128K game, which is what a lot of the newer 7800 games were put on towards the end. It may well be the 7800 version of Save Mary, or it may be that they started to work on it for the 7800 and got the 2600 ordered on there to get it to work and go from there. Another chip I found only had half a label, with part of the EPROM window exposed. I don't know if this EPROM survived, but hopefully it will be okay. We will have to see. The half of the label that was still stuck on the chip has handwriting on it that I think says "Save" followed by the number 4800, which usually means it's 48K. I'm wondering if this is a 48K version of Save Mary? 
 
 
 

"The test cartridges used two chips, but the final production cartridge would only use one, so there’s a LO and a HI on the test cartridge. The test cartridges were set up for a 64K game or a 128K game, with two sockets. So that’s why there’s two Sentinel (LO and HI), two KLAX (LO and HI) and two Save Mary (LO and HI)."
@Video 61 
 
 
 
The weirdest, most curious EPROM has a handwritten label that looks to say “Riot”. Clearly this is an EPROM and not a RIOT chip for the Atari 2600. The EPROM is dated 1993, which is very late for 7800 development but not unheard of. We MAY have found Road Riot 4-Wheel Drive for the Atari 7800 - we’ll have to see. The label on the EPROM says “Riot” on it, it’s dated 7-20-93 and it has the number “2” circled, which means this could be one of two chips needed to test the game - a HI and a LO. This date I believe is two months newer than the last version of 7800 Toki that has been shown, so two months after Toki was nearly complete and ready to go, this game “Riot” was still being worked on for the Atari 7800. Even if this does turn out to be Road Riot 4WD, it’s possible we’re still missing one of the chips needed to get it working. I can imagine someone testing the game and on such a tiny label writing “Riot” instead of “Road Riot 4WD” almost as an abbreviation of the name, it was common for these guys to do that, just because the EPROM labels are just so tiny.
 

 
Atari 7800 Games thought to have been in development during 1991-1993:
Pit-Fighter ElectroCop Steel Talons Toki Rampart Road Riot 4WD More? From my knowledge there were at least five games in development under Atari Corporation for the Atari 7800 as late as 1993, probably more. In those days, the Atari Lynx still had life in it, and Atari Jaguar was coming up on the horizon. The story as I hear it was that Jack Tramiel took one look at 7800 Pit-Fighter and how bad it looked and put the kibosh on anything more for the 7800. He pulled the plug right then and there and that’s all she wrote. We know Pit-Fighter, Rampart and Toki have been found in different levels of completion, and the date on this “Riot” EPROM is newer than all of those. We will have to research to see if this chip dated 7-20-93 is the latest 7800 EPROM dev date known to exist. It may be, I don’t know for sure, but it’s got to be close. 7800 ElectroCop was shown at the 1991 CES and Juli Wade told me she had an EPROM of it on a cartridge in her desk but wouldn’t share it with me. I had hoped John Skruch would. I don’t know if ElectroCop was one of the batch of 7800 games still in development as late as 1993 or not, but the other ones definitely were. It would be cool if we could find those hidden away somewhere in my warehouse office too. It may take time to get this all sorted, but we will figure out what we have and I will report back here on my Blog with more updates as we make progress. Stay tuned!
 
Thanks for reading,
- Lance  
 
Please visit me online for more at www.atarisales.com

I already made a blog post not that long about about my new designs and had posted pics of the render of the PCBs. Well, I actually received the PCBs in the other day and have had a chance to test them out. While I did make a pretty big blunder on my model 2 specific PCB, it was easily fixed and isn't that big a deal to fix in situ when installing. And it only affects me since the gerbers that I play to release publicly already have the fix in place so future boards that get made up should be good to go.
A quick recap on these PCBs. It is a total of 3 different boards. The bottom base PCB is the same for both original 2609 model and INTV 2 model consoles. I designed it that on purpose. So what is different between the models is the top PCB that you use as they are specific to the model of the console you plan to use them in. These mounts are designed to be installed in place of the RF modulator so that a 'No Cut' option is able to be achieved when upgrading your Intellivision.
Here is a mock up the 2 PCBs put together for the original 2609 model of the console. This is essentially an upgraded extension of my original older mounts that is easier to install and secure into place vs the older mount PCBs I've been using. The top PCB has a large solder section on it so that the mini din jack that is used can be more easily be quick tack soldered into place to test alignment and fit before flood soldering all around the jack to secure it into place. While the mini din is technically being installed upside down in this fashion, it is important to know that the actual 2609 style mainboards install upside down to begin with. As a result, the mini din is actually right side up in the end.



 
The model 2 setup was much more difficult for me to design and I really gave my calipers a workout making so many measurements. So the main difference with the INTV 2 setup is that the bottom base mount PCB (Again it is the same on both models), has cut outs on one corner of it. This is because the top board of the INTV 2 mount actually has you solder the mini din direct to the PCB like it would be normally. The cutouts on the bottom base PCB allow for room for these soldered pins off the mini din to come through and allow the two PCBs to sit flush together. It does require that the pins and ground tabs be clipped fairly flush to the PCB once soldered to make sure nothing sticks out beyond the bottom PCB where it would likely then short on the large ground plane that the RF modulator was sitting on. But this isn't a big deal and the end result is a nice finished mount where the mini din is again able to be right side up when all put together. Previously, the mini din was actually upside down on the INTV 2 installs. So this will be less confusing for people going forward.
Here is a detail showing the two sections assembled. You can see the cutouts on the bottom base PCB to allow for the soldered pins of the mini din to come through. So this means that you need to solder the mini din to the top PCB first.

When you cut the soldered connections pretty flush to the PCB the mini din was soldered to, it will ensure that the soldered connections and pins don't come through to cause any issues below. Here you can see where I trimmed an applied fresh heat to the joints after to be sure everything was secure and wouldn't cause any issues with shorts.

Like mentioned before, the entire PCB assembly is designed to install in place of where the RF modulator was located. Here you can see how that would look internally. There are solder pads provided on the PCB for all the needed connections. There are 2 sets of RGB pads that are to be used depending on if you use the 8-pin or 9-pin part of the PCB. Yes, I designed it with through holes for both types of commonly used mini dins for RGB installs like this. There are 3 pas in the center that are shared between both mini dins. Those are the +5, Sync, and Audio. In the picture below I used an 8-pin mini din. So you can see the space in the opposite corner for the 9-pin through holes that weren't used in this install. You can also see the pads specific for the 9-pin that weren't used. The blob of solder on the mini din is part of what I have to correct for on these first set of PCBs but won't be needed on future ones.

And once in place, it should be centered pretty well in the spot where the RF used to be allowing for plenty of room for your cables to be plugged in without any modification of the case. Again, a 'No Cut' option is achieved. Ignore the switch below this as that is needed for something else since this INTV 2 uses an older RGB setup.

 
So again, the plan is to release the gerbers for these publicly so others can have them made up for their own installs. I've already had a few other modders reach out to me wanting the gerbers because they actually want to change out their current mounting to use of these new setups. 

I know I've not made a video in a very long time on my ITC Youtube channel. But I figured I would mention here the latest things happening at the 'Tower'. Just because there haven't been any vids uploaded, doesn't mean there isn't something always still going on.
First is that console service requests have picked up quit a bit for me over the past 2 years. It really started during the pandemic, but then larger and larger service requests started to come in since and at this time, there is pretty much always a console or 3 at the 'Tower' waiting to get serviced it seems. When not working on enthusiasts game consoles, then I use that time to work on my own consoles to improve old install work I did in them (Some going back over 10 years ago). 
Well, currently what is at the ITC to be serviced is essentially done and will be getting shipped out soon, but as we had some pretty inclement weather come in this past Sunday and as a result our offices were closed at my normal day job yesterday. I spent the time to finally design some new PCBs for use in my services. One isn't that big a deal but is my own pcb breakout for use with 9-pin mini din connectors. I've got an old gerber file set that I either found a few years back or was sent to me that I've been using. But decided to make my own with some slight alterations on the design I'd been using. Not a big deal so not really anything to show there.
But, I also finally designed revision 2 of the 7800 mount board. I already had another slight revision that I was calling r1b for the past 6 months but decided to just add in one new feature to make it easier in the future as I'm now getting requests for it. The new feature is adding in an optional audio input pad with resistor onto the mount board that can be used to mix in a 3rd audio input source into the 7800 setup so that it along with the normal audio can all be heard from the RCAs or whatever is used for the audio output on the console when upgraded. I'd been doing this manually by just adding in a resistor in series on separate wiring that would then get soldered to the + pad on the output filter capacitor. It works but I like how this will look better and I don't have to hide a resistor to solder in place anywhere and can just run a wire straight off the pad to the jack used for audio input.

 
The other project I worked on yesterday was to finally design a new mount board setup for use in the Intellivision RGB installs. I previously designed a small mount PCB about 2 years ago for this and that will still be needed and used in some circumstances. But more and more lately, most of my clients have me remove the RF modulator and install the mini din jack there for the RGB output. This is because with a PCB of the right height, you can place the jack here without having to cut the case. The current PCB mount is kinda difficult to install as it requires a lot of heat to ensure that the solder seeps it way under the PCB and has always been a little smaller than I'd like to help provide the needed anchor and support for the mini din. Well, after installing a few other difficult kits into consoles designed by others, I decided to adapter something similar. This new mount is larger and uses 2 of the original intellivision RF anchor holes that I run clipped leads through some vias to solder the mount board into place easier with less heat and possible provide a more secure mount as a result. It does actually use a 2 PCB setup to achieve the height needed but I've found that 2 PCBs in a stacked configuration is still going to be much easier and cheaper to have made. The older mounts were 2.6mm thick PCBs and as a result, they weren't cheap to have made. Using a 2 board solution will also similar results with less cost. I will be refining this further. But this is the top PCB that the mini din will fit into the lower right corner section and then be held in place with solder along the two large ground planes along the left and rear of the jack. Both PCBs feaure hashed ground planes to help with strength. The top logo and wording on this PCB are now silkscreened but in fact are done by removing the solder mask over a copper filled section of the PCB. This way the logo and words have a shiny look to them that is actually part of the PCB and not just silkscreen that can wear/rub off.

So, yeah all of these and other parts on order now and I'm excited to see how it all looks and works first hand.
 

The Atari 5200 has been my all-time favorite console for a very long time.  However modern times have not been kind to it.  The machine itself is fine and I don’t mind the RF hook up it received but the controllers have a poor working ratio when not used often.  Which is weird considering most other systems can tolerate months without being used.  The Atari 5200 controllers, however, are a double edged sword. If you don’t use them once a week they fail, if you use them too often they can fail.  It’s hard to find a happy place sometimes.  However the controllers are not what this is about.  I’m just setting up the logic behind my thoughts.
When it was in production the idea of full analog controllers sounded good… on paper.  Once shown to the public it wasn’t all bad but it was clear that the 360 degree controllers to beat out Intellivision just wasn’t the right answer.  Super Breakout was also considered a poor choice for a pick-in game but it was the only 4-player game ever released for the console. While I loved playing the game when I woke up that Christmas morning to a 5200 sitting in my living room I never found another four player game.  Even as I child I questioned Atari’s decisions.
 

 
I never had issues with my original Atari 5200 because it got played every single day for hours on end.  Being an only child living where the only time you seen friends was at school made the 5200 my best friend.  I endured and learned how to harness those controllers on a per game basis because each game reacted differently.  Each game approached the analog controls differently. It was a “how well does this work with this game” thought process when getting a new game.  Sometimes the analog controls were great, sometimes they were OK, other times it was like “blah”.  I still say the Atari 5200 port of Pole Position was the best port made because of the analog controls.
While I now know there were controller “solutions” those were never seen in my area by my mother or me.  So the standard equipment was it.  Which leaves me to the thoughts I have today that I think might have helped the 5200. Ignoring the lack of self centering joysticks, what if Atari gave two controller options where there was a choice of the analog controllers we all know and the option to pick up all digital joystick controllers which would have shared the same controller design?  Another option could have been to include a cable adapter that would accommodate the use of a standard Atari 2600 controller combined with the 5200 controllers.  Similar to what the Wico does.  There were so many things they “could” have done when they knew the original controllers were going to be an issue.
 

 
Regardless, the 5200 is a great example of how something advanced doesn’t always plan out.  It does showcase some of the best arcade game translations of the time.  It is easy to see all the hard work that went into the system and its library of games. Some of the loved arcade games of the time were represented faithfully on the 5200. Games that easily come to mind are Qix, Joust, Space Dungeon, and Defender.  The unreleased Sinistar is impressive work as well.
I’m sure I’m missing a few things and I know the truth behind the 5200 costing Atari millions of dollars. I just hope newcomers to the 5200 will find enjoyment and the help they need to keep it interesting.  It still has a lot to offer.
 

I already touched on this in an earlier blog post not that long actually, but I will summarize again really quickly.
Main issue is that in 7800 mode and games, one or both fire buttons might show as being pressed without a controller plugged in. Plug in a controller and everything behaves as it should but ultimate, the console shouldn't read anything actively from the ports without a controller plugged in.
In my previous blog, I mentioned that an out of spec resistor located at R35 was only reading about 217Ω while the schematics state that this resistor and the on next to it, should be reading 220Ω. Most of the resistors in the 7800 I believe are 5% tolerant meaning that the value of the component should read within +|- 5%. In this case, such a resistor would still be technically in spec if it were reading as low as 209Ω or as high as 231Ω would still be within that 5% tolerance. So a resistor reading 217Ω is well within the tolerance spec of the resistor.
This was likely fine years ago when everything was much newer, but it seems as the equipment begins to age, these values become more and more tight and the tolerances allowed will no longer work.
Because to fix this 7800 over the weekend, required that I again find a replacement resistor that was reading closer to 220Ω to resolve the issue. In this case, the resistor reads 219Ω.
I've attached a picture that shows the location for these resistors. R34 affects player 1 and R35 affects player 2. And again, these resistors only seem to come into play as causing an issue when the console is in 7800 mode. You can actually remove these resistors and the 7800 fire buttons will still work properly on 7800 games. But they will not work in 2600 mode. So the resistors are only needed for 2600 mode but if will actually effect 7800 trigger readings once they get to a certain threshol.
To be fair I don't think these resistors are just suddenly now starting to read off spec. I suspect the issue is actually the TIA starting to show signs of failure internally as swapping out TIAs will also fix this. But for now, with TIA being much more expensive to replace than a simple resistor, I'm going with changing out resistors to be more in spec going forward and I might just start stocking up and replacing out R34 and R35 with 1% types as part of preventive measures.
 

TECH TIME
Saturday, November 11, 2023
 
  Hi and welcome to Lance’s Laboratory! This is the fourth entry of what will be my personal blog, sharing small slices of life with you 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 more than 40 years!
If you want to know why the Atari XEGS cartridges rattle, it’s because Atari used hot glue in at least three to four places within the cartridge to hold the PCB firmly in place and properly in the shell. When some of the hot glue comes loose, it floats around inside the cartridge, and that is the rattle you hear.
Here is a picture of an Atari XEGS ribbed super cart disassembled with the glue in place. In this example, you’ll see that one piece has came off that caused a rattle. The piece of glue is circled, and where it came from is circled also.
 

 

 
Now this brings up why Atari designed a ribbed shell for most of their Atari XEGS cartridge releases, and basically abandoned the handle on the back shells.
 

 

 
The handle on the back of the cartridge was really made for the Atari 65XE, and the 130XE. Both had the cartridge port on the back of the machine, just like Jack Tramiel’s Commodore 64, really intended for combining the cartridge port with other ports, to utilize external devices. This design choice was of course born for cheapness.
Then, no need for two separate ports, just one port. The cartridge handle was to give some sort of support for the cartridge not to sag from gravity, and also make the game easier to remove from the back of the machine. However, the problem with the handle cartridges is that they were not as easy to install, let alone extract in the Atari 400/800 cartridge well, and the 1200XL once installed, was not so easy to remove at all.
So, redesign time. The ribbed cartridge shell, with the ribbed design taken directly from Regan Cheng’s design for the Atari 5200 cartridge.
 

 
This ribbed Atari cartridge design solved all of those problems, and then some. The ribbed sides made the cartridge substantially easier to remove in the Atari 400/800s and 1200XL computers. Yet the ribbed cartridge was snug enough to help defy gravity in the Atari 65XE and 130XE computers. Not perfect, but good enough.
Keep in mind, this ribbed design also was cheaper in terms of the plastic cartridge shell and the printed circuit board that was inside. On the handle shells, the cart was held together with a screw, while the ribbed cartridge no longer needed a screw, as it was held together very firmly with clips on the side of the shell.
Plus, the handle cartridge board used four capacitors and four resistors, while the ribbed cartridge board used only three of each. With Atari ordering games 100,000 units at a time, saving one resistor and one capacitor per cartridge really added up, and Jack knew where to cut corners to save the additional cost of 100,000 resistors and capacitors.
Here are my Tower Toppler and Vanguard prototype cartridge boards. You see the Tower Toppler handle board is bigger, and has more support electronics, while the ribbed Vanguard board is smaller, and has less support electronics.
 

 
The ribbed Atari XEGS cartridges were all-around cheaper, and solved some problems. And really, the glue was not needed, but was a “just in case” sort of thing.
Now, you can take cheapness just so far. Once, Atari sent me a shipment of new Atari XEGS cartridges. I opened them to see if any changes had been made before I started to sell them, because with Jack, you just never knew what was coming next. When I opened them up and held them you could feel that the plastic was so soft, I could eventually crush the cartridge shell with my bare hand. I sent them back to Atari as unsellable.
That never happened again. 
 
Thanks for reading,
- Lance  
 
Please visit me online for more at www.atarisales.com

I've been attempting to put in a 4-color Pokemon Mini display. A few days ago, I made another minigame to my Virtual Boy minigame collection. I tried unsucessfully to try to change the Super Game Boy palette for the Game Boy. I found my letters I use to make my "26 Squares" puzzles and made another one of those. I went to the post office today to mail my Odyssey games I sold. So I guess I've been busy with all my various projects.
I've been really sleepy lately and I don't know why. I got up at about 8:30 a.m. Right now it's 4:30 p.m. and I could go to sleep and sleep for about 15 hours.
Here is the title screen for Pac-It in a Pokemon Mini emulator. As you can see, it has a bunch of stripes in it and I don't know what I can do to not be that way, yet still have 4 colors. I guess it's "dithering."

it looks a little better on a real Pokemon Mini, but not much. It's copyright banana. Why? It's a take off of Apple Computers. And Oric's Tangerine Computers to a lesser extent. But I think I may have to change the name of it since apparently someone already did Pac-It. How sad.

Master Code Must Be On
DE0004000000
Infinite Lives
8026B1CB0003
Enable All Levels
8125508800FF
Match Levels Completed
8025508A0005

A quick blog entry just to share the beauty of Oregon.  My wife and I took a 40 minute drive in our new car to Sandy, OR, at the base of Mt. Hood to visit Barlow Wayside trail.  If you ever visit Oregon, expect very nice people and some spectacular natural areas.  This park has some very quiet, serene trails for a self-guided tour of a forest.  It looks like that third moon of Endor.  In any case, stop and enjoy the peace.  Breathe in the crisp, clean fall air.  Refreshing.  This one is considered an "easy" hike, and we walked about 2 miles according to my fitbit.
More info:
For 10,000 years local Indians would have fished, foraged, camped, and hunted in this area. Then, merely 170 years ago, emigrants rested at a place such as this, arriving along the historic Barlow Road, the last segment of the Oregon Trail, allowing them, their stock and covered wagons, to cross the south slope of Mt. Hood to reach the "Promised Land" of the Willamette Valley. Built in 1846 by Sam Barlow and Philip Foster, the rugged overland trail avoided the treacherous Columbia River rapids yet traversed extremely steep terrain, rivers, and dense forests. As you explore the park with its towering trees and lush habitat, we hope you may find some solace as those who came before.
 

I resumed work on a Virtual Boy game I last worked on in 2016. It's a collection of mini games. I worked today on finishing one of them. I have a new minigame idea all lined up to begin work on the next time I work on this.
In the game "Cranberry Capers," Craig the Cranberry must rescue his fellow fruit from evil monsters.

Here, Craig is about to rescue two cherries. Other fruit include watermelon, strawberry, and tomato. While working on this, I accidentally made it so Craig must move in order for a fruit to appear. I liked that idea, so I kept it in.
I had to modify the code I had to make it work on a real Virtual Boy. So I did that. I have no idea why it does what it does. Perhaps the minigame code loop is too small? I don't know. I have a game in here called "Supper Mario."

I couldn't sleep last night, so I decided to attempt to put in the SMB theme in it. I like my results. Then I went to bed at about 2:30a.m. and woke up at about 2 p.m. I don't know, I guess I sleep too much. It's about 5:30p.m. and I just yawned.
In "Supper Mario," spinies come falling from the sky and land and you must not touch them. If Mario goes off screen, he reappears at the other end, to avoid the spinies. Mario can move only left and right and he can't jump. But I don't know if I should keep the Mario sprites and music in. I really hate C&D orders and I haven't gotten one yet. It's so dumb. I should be able to use this if I want to. What are copyright holders afraid of? Losing money? Like they'd lose a lot with this even if it does get released. If someone uses my stuff I made, I'd be impressed, not angry.
I also have a sort of medical problem: A sort of disc-shaped bump up my butt. It doesn't hurt except when I poop. I have been putting Preparation H on it but it doesn't seem to be helping any. I really don't want to go to the doctor, but I'm getting really sick of it and I may have to if it keeps up.

THE UNAUTHORIZED AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ATARI DISTRIBUTOR
Monday, September 18, 2023
 
  Hi and welcome to Lance’s Laboratory! This is the third entry of what will be my personal blog, sharing small slices of life with you 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  more than 40 years!
I need to update my website about my longevity. I always have so much to do. Anyway, with everything going on in the Atari world right now, I had some thoughts from these 40 something years as an Atari dealer that I wanted to share with you. I have now survived at least FOUR incarnations of “Atari”. I started as an Atari dealer in 1983 under Atari, Inc. - “Warner’s Atari.” I really didn’t know anyone there.
 

Steve Ross, CEO of Warner Communications in 1983. Steve Ross is not often spoken of within the Atari community, but it was Steve Ross who bought Atari from Nolan Bushnell, who both hired and fired Ray Kassar, who single handedly took control of Atari in 1983 often showing up in person to run the company, who ultimately sought out Jack Tramiel with a deal to take Atari off his hands, and who orchestrated the Time-Warner merger.
 
WARNER'S ATARI
Atari dealers at the time were contacted and supported by dealer representatives who were supported by Warner Communications and would occasionally stop by the stores. I had a good one that supplied me with lots of dealer cartridges, floppy disks, and promotional materials. This is essentially the same way PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo support their retailers today, with reps who go into the stores to update the demo games in kiosks and make sure there’s current promotional signage in the stores. They usually have goodies to give to the workers too.
One day my Atari dealer rep came into my store and announced “This might be the last time I see you. A new owner is taking over… everything is up in the air, and the rumor is he does not support his operations in… let’s say… “a traditional way.”
That was Jack Tramiel, later on affectionately known as “Jack".
He was right. That was the last time I ever saw my friendly dealer rep, and I never heard another word from Atari until the Atari ST computer was released.
 
 
Alan Alda from the popular TV show M*A*S*H* was a celebrity spokesperson for Atari Home Computers during the Warner Communications era of Atari. (1984)
All high-paid celebrity endorsements were dropped when Jack Tramiel took over.
 
One day out of the blue I received a packet along with an Atari ST with some software. Gone were the days of glossy print ads in National Geographic, and sophisticated TV commercials with Alan Alda, the popular actor who played “Hawkeye” on the top TV show M*A*S*H* and was Atari’s spokesperson. The Atari ST that I was sent came with the instructions that - as a dealer - it was up to ME to educate my customers about the new Atari ST computer line, and it was up to ME to support and sell the machine as support from Atari would be minimal. STUNNING, to say the least.
This began the second incarnation of “Atari” - Atari Corporation, or Atari Corp., - “Jack’s Atari”. This was the incarnation of Atari that I was most involved in, and had a lot of day-to-day interaction with. That was sometime in 1985.
 
JACK'S ATARI
I did not hear from Atari again until 1986 or possibly 1987. It’s been so long that it’s difficult to remember the exact timeline, but around that time I received a letter from Atari Corporation with a hefty “release schedule” of games lined up for the Atari 2600, Atari 7800, and Atari XEGS. I was impressed! For nearly two years it was crickets out of Atari, and finally we were receiving real support and a commitment for new games.
At the time, the only real major supporter of the Atari 2600 was Activision. It felt like they were the only kid on the block. Atari had been quiet, and most other third party publishers like Imagic, Coleco, M-Network and Parker Bros. hadn’t survived the crash. Activision was still with us though, and at Video 61 Kung-Fu Masters, Ghostbusters, and Pitfall II were serious strong sellers.
 

Jack Tramiel with the Atari ST
 
When I received the new release schedule from Atari, I thought “Hey, maybe the new owners figured it out!” There was still plenty of life left in Atari, even for the 2600, which I could see in my stores. To my dismay, many of Atari’s newly announced titles never came even close to being released on time, or worse - never came at all!
This was very frustrating because I could see the demand for new Atari stuff and yet the Atari potential was being pissed away. There’s this common belief that “The Atari 7800 was released in 1986.” That’s not really true. I had received a few 7800s from Warner’s Atari Inc. in 1984, and they sold quickly. This was in Minnesota, not California or New York City. I never got a thing from Atari again until 1986.
So as Nintendo took America by storm with Mario, Zelda and Metroid on the NES, and with Atari being run so poorly, I thought the jig was up.
 
 

"When I received the new release schedule from Atari, I thought 'Hey, maybe the new owners figured it out!' There was still plenty of life left in Atari, even for the 2600 which I could see in my stores. To my dismay, many of Atari's newly announced titles never came even close to being released on time, or worse - never came at all."
- Lance
 
 
Then came the fury. After defaulting on their release schedule and missing any new releases at all one Christmas season in 1988, I was outraged. I picked up the phone and called Atari. I wasn’t just a customer, I was in business with Atari as a dealer responsible for a percentage of all Atari games sold that year. I was helping make them money. When I called Atari, I was given the run around about “how hard it was to keep these games in stock” and “how hard it was to bring out new games.” I interrupted the lady and told her what she was saying was word for word what Nintendo was saying to their distributors - she broke down and agreed that what she had been instructed to say was not really the case.
Later on I came to find out about certain “business details” and “practices” that were happening under “Jack’s Atari” which made it clear to me HOW and WHY Atari had missed so many release dates, launch windows, and even lost new releases, but thats a whole other story that we will go into another time in an upcoming Blog entry.
 

Jack's Atari: This was the incarnation of Atari that I had the most day-to-day involvement with
 
I continued on the phone and was trying to be nice. It wasn’t this nice lady’s fault that she had been instructed to lie. So I asked what can be done. I was sent “upstairs" and told that Atari "had messed up and badly damaged the market" and had really had messed up in my region of the country, the upper midwest. Sales and support in our part of the country needed help, and I was asked by Atari Corp. to become a service department and distributor for Atari. I was stunned. I dealt with other Atari dealers, but it was mostly to buy or trade what was needed.
I said yes. I was blown away later on when I found out how just badly Atari had shrunk. They had lost almost 90% of their workforce. Yet the "Atari" brand still commanded household name recognition and selling power, which they underutilized thanks to certain business ideologies and practices from the Tramiel family.
Here is a link to my Atari distribution paperwork, which is hosted on my website:
 
  http://www.atarisales.com/dis.html
 
I became really enmeshed in this as Atari sent me to deal directly with third parties, who I then bought from as what’s known as “direct". During this time I got to know many good people in third party companies like Activision, Avalon Hill, S.S.I., Datasoft, Eypx, Sierra Online, Microprose and more.
As an Atari distributer I purchased immense amounts - truckloads - of games and software direct from Atari and all third parties at the time. When Atari pulled the plug, I had about 250,000 pieces of software in my warehouse. Today it’s dwindled to under 40,000 pieces left.
 

Jack Tramiel's son Sam Tramiel took over leadership of Atari in the mid-'90s with Jack's continued close involvement.
Was the Atari ST named after Sam Tramiel? Was TOS the "Tramiel Operating System?"
 

Jack Tramiel and wife Helen in their retirement years
 

Jack Tramiel traveling the world
 
HASBRO'S ATARI
After Jack Tramiel pulled the plug on Lynx, Jaguar and the Atari computers, I could see what he was doing. Sam wasn’t going to save the company, and J.T.S. Corporation - an Indian hard drive manufacturer founded after the Jaguar’s launch - acquired Atari though a “reverse merger”. (Was Atari, as an entire company, "laundered" through J.T.S. so it came out nice and clean to be able to sell to a potential buyer?)
This lead to Atari, or what IPs and documentation was left of it, being sold to Hasbro. This became the third iteration of the of Atari that I dealt with, “Hasbro’s Atari.”
When Atari was sold to Hasbro, Atari gave Hasbro a list of contacts. I was one of them. Not only for service, parts, and software, but I was also Atari Corporation’s person who interacted with movie studios and television networks. Atari no longer had the game systems, computers, many times the software and games, nor the man power to supply the entertainment industry with Atari “props” when filming a movie or tv show that was to feature Atari in it.
Atari just sent them to me for systems, computers and games, and I supplied the movie studios and television networks with what was needed, under the license agreement from Atari.
 

 
One day I got a call from Hasbro, and very arrogantly told me that they would do the supplying, and the legacy Atari market was really no interest of theirs. They were going to release new games for new platforms.
I supplied Atari items to Columbia Pictures (now Sony) Warner’s of course, Paramount, 20th Century Fox and others. I almost got some footage into one of the Alien movies, but Fox still owed me money from Fox Sports, and they could not come to agreements with “Jack". Many TV shows had my Atari stuff in it, one name I remember was The King of Queens, there was an Atari 7800 and Video Olympics if I remember right.
 

Atari 2600 and 5200 game cartridges on NBC's cult classic show Freaks and Geeks (2000)
 
Later on, my contact at Paramount studios was dismayed they could no longer get legacy Atari hardware and software for their productions, and that Hasbro’s Atari would only supply them with the newest games, which in the case of the studios and networks, was not what they wanted. I apologized to her, and said my hands were tied, "I can’t do a thing."  These people at Hasbro were clueless as to what they bought. They didn’t understand what Atari was, what they still had, or the potential even for legacy markets. Hasbro really messed up quickly, and quickly sold Atari off.
Meanwhile - almost daily - ever since “Jack” sold off Atari, I would get calls from disgruntled stock holders, former suppliers, and people who were owed money by Atari. Some even made threats of suing me, because in their eyes, I was Atari. That lasted even into the early Infogrames days, which is what came next.
 
FRENCH ATARI
The French company Infogrames Entertainment SA acquired Atari in January, 2001 as the biggest part of their purchase of Hasbro’s software division “Hasbro Interactive”, which also included MicroProse, and Hasbro’s game.com monochrome handheld system which was a joke compared to what the Atari Lynx could do, even years later, and couldn’t compete contemporaneously against Game Boy Color.
This began the fourth incarnation of Atari - “Infogrames Atari” or “French Atari” which now goes by Atari, SA. (Infogrames rebranded themselves as Atari in 2003 and began releasing games like Splashdown, Driver 2, The Matrix and Ghostbusters for modern game systems of the time.)
 

Splashdown was one of the first new "Atari" games released by Infogrames in November, 2001
The cover art featured branding for both Atari and Infogrames
 
Infogrames never contacted me period, until one day a fellow named “Wim” (not sure of the spelling…) gave me a call. I tried to enter him into my contacts database, he would not spell his name for me, and acted quite annoyed that he even had to speak with me.
I found out that Infogrames had an operation that was local to me in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, Minneapolis / St. Paul, in a suburb named Plymouth I think.
“Wim” wanted to know who I was, and he was looking for certain items. He would discuss nothing, could care less about Atari’s legacy, knew that many, many people were looking for Atari service, parts, games etc., but "Wim" was only interested in my Atari 2600 power supplies, Atari 7800 power supplies, TV switch boxes and R.F. cables.
He demanded to buy them all. I said no. “What about my customers?” I retorted … let alone the legacy Atari systems that found their way to me.
 

 
"Wim" had no interest in the Atari legacy, nor the history I was privy to, and had lived through much of. "Wim" only wanted to get the people off his back who were looking for those particular legacy parts. Why?
I found this simply amazing. Here I was, and of course the two other legacy dealers (we’ll get into that in a minute) who could step in and help Atari’s legacy customers, and help guide Infogrames in making decisions around the needs and potential of the legacy market.
I thought to myself "Here we go again!” Never interacted with them directly again, only indirectly when I was contacted by a debt collector wanting to know “what happened to Atari" as they were owed money. Something I have heard about many times before before, and I thought “Man, will this ever end?”
I told the collector Atari was now located in New York, last time I heard. As it turned out the collector ended up being an old friend from high school that I hadn’t seen in decades.. small world indeed!
 
 

"'Wim' wanted to know who I was, and he was looking for certain items. He would discuss nothing, could care less about Atari's legacy, knew that many, many people were looking for Atari service, parts, games, etc. but Wim was only interested in my Atari power supplies, switch boxes and R.F. cables... Why?"
- Lance
 
 
Here we are, now well over 20 years since Infogrames acquired Atari and has become the longest owner of the name, with new products being developed - finally - around Atari’s greatest strengths - it’s legacy.
So that's the history of my involvement with the many evolving incarnations of Atari. The history in my eyes that counts the most, was the "Jack" era. The stories, what happened within those walls, what they pulled off and what they got away with - it’s almost too amazing to be true.
When "Jack" merged with J.T.S., the government would only allow the "reverse merger" to proceed if Atari kept the American market supported. That was ignored entirely, and Atari was sold to Hasbro.
The other two legacy dealers are Bruce at B&C Computervisions who started in 1984, and Brad at Best Electronics who started in 1985. I was introduced to both of them by Atari Corp.
Together, the three of us became heavily involved day to day under “Jack's" Atari. This is just a minor rundown in who I am in the Atari world, and I wanted to share my thoughts and experiences with you. Today, after over 40 years, I continue to march forward in the legacy Atari world, still providing sales and support, and developing new games which I hope will continue to entertain and dazzle Atari players for generations to come.
What comes next?
Thanks for reading,
- Lance  
 
Please visit me online for more at www.atarisales.com
 

It took a couple of days but I think I have the game working with win detection. It was really stubborn for some reason. During the madness, my computer crapped out on me, so I had to force a shutdown and turn it back on again. After I turned it back on again, I decided I should really get some sleep.
I awoke at about 9 a.m. I was really hot. Whenever the furnace is on, it gets really hot in my room and not elsewhere in the entire house. It's stupid, but oh well. So I went back to programming in the hotness. A few hours later, I think I have it now.

One thing I must note is apparently I didn't have enough space in the bank I thought I had, so in order for this to work, I had to remove the words "CEDAR GAMES" from the intro. I thought "Which would be better, a working game without CEDAR GAMES showing or not?"

I've seen something similar to this before although not in the way I was seeing with a recent 4 switch console I was servicing. As part of diagnostics I will use Paul Slocum's excellent Test Cart program as it should some primary colors, shows the current state of all switches minus power of course, but also has a basic graphical view of each controller and small block on the bottom that will move left/right when you plug in paddles to test those too. So all in all a nice utility to know that all controller functions are working properly on the console.
Well, on this one, player 1, player 2, and player 4 paddle controls would move from left to right and back turning the paddle as you would expect. But player 3 paddle control would just site on the left side, and then after a point when turning the paddle, it would suddenly just be on the right. No movement of any kind. Just one sec on the left, and then next thing you know it is on the right. So it was acting more like a digital control vs analog. It wasn't the paddles since I used the same set to test player 1 and 2 and that was working fine.
Going through the service manual will yield some interesting stuff to help isolate this, but unless you have the diagnostic controller plugs and the 2.6 diagnostic rom, you aren't going to be able to see exactly what you need to see. But lets review that..
If you have the diagnostic plugs, plugged into the controller ports and the diagnostic rom up and running with the controller matrix screen up. Then you use an Oscilliscope to probe the paddle lines off the TIA pins 37,38,39, and 40. They represent player 4, 3, 2, and then player 1 on pin 40. Well, what you should see on your scope if you have it set to the right settings, is something like the picture below from the service manual:

 
However, when I probed pin 38 that is for the player 3 paddle line. I was getting a flat line. Well, actually I was showing a flat line of about 1v but the point is...not pulse like you see in those pictures. (And btw...I was seeing that same pulse line on my o'scope for the other paddles). 
Well honestly there isn't much in the way of electronics from the controller port to the TIA where the paddles are read and handled. In fact, there is really only 1...just 1 component in the middle of the mix from the controller port to TIA. At least on the 4 switch and above units this is the case. That one component is usually a small ceramic disc, or poly capacitor that doesn't usually go bad. So I first checked that the traces from pin 5 of the player 2 controller port to that cap (C220) was good. It was, and then checked from the cap to pin 38 of the TIA. That too pinged out good. So I went ahead and replaced the capacitor just to see if anything changed. Sadly.... no.
What did fix it?
Well, if you've gotten this far and read my description of the very simple circuit from port to TIA... it should come as no surprise that is was the TIA itself. This is even more sad considering how rare these IC chips are now becoming and there isn't any projects I'm aware of to make new ones or something to replace the TIA. 
But yeah... if you find the paddle lines aren't working, chances are that it is the TIA chip itself that has failed if the actual traces are good. Apparently this was less of an issue with earlier 2600s as they used buffer ICs to help control this and therefore the TIA was more protected. Just more cost cutting at work as the console lived on...
 
 

So it took 6 hours, but I finally got x and o input working. Use the left controller for x and the right one for o. Next up is win checking. I have about 300 bytes left to do that in. I'll do that later sometime.
It works just like I intended it to: pressing up makes a letter in the upper middle, etc. Diagonals work well too. Press ACTION to put a letter in the center part. Now I will test it on a real Odyssey 2.

I just took my pills this morning. One tried to escape. I could feel the capsule going around my mouth, so I drank some more water.

I'm making a new game for the Odyssey 2. This because I got real bored.

The title screens switch between a screen with x's and a screen with o's. First I plan to make a simple tic-tac-toe game as an Easter egg. You'll move the joystick to the desired space, and press ACTION to use the center square. I'm imagining something like the Tic-Tac-Toe game on the Channel F.
If you click on the link above and download the zip file, I've also included the code for the game. Which shows a lot of code crammed into less than 500 lines. I have about 1,300 bytes left in the starting bank for the tic-tac-toe game. I think I can pull it off (keep it all in the bank) if I make it a 2 player game.
So if a tic-tac-toe game is an Easter egg, what is the actual game? I don't know yet. But that's okay. I often start Odyssey 2 games without knowing what I want to do. One thing I learned by attempting a Legend of Zelda-type game using the letter Q (and another adventure game starring a lowercase i) is that it's not going to be terribly long. I need to think of something to engage the player for a while.

I find it easier to work on Game Boy projects since I can use C on them. Well, I guess I could use C for Game Gear as well, but since I learned how to program the Game Gear in assembly before I learned the Game Boy in C, I just decided to keep using assembly for Game Gear. So here is a Game Gear program I have been working on. It's called Yum! It's a very simple game, yet I was having quite the trouble programming it.
I thought I had made it random, but someone pointed out it wasn't. So I went to work this morning trying to make it random. I think I succeeded.

The goal of the game is to close the mouth for the icky green vegetables and open it for the cookie and pizza. If you're interested in trying it out, you can download it on the website I posted a link to.
I woke up at about 11:30p.m. I tried to sleep all day AND all night to get back on track and live like a normal person, but my leg hurt (from being in bed too long I presume), so I had to get up. I guess I could try to go back to sleep now, but I don't think I would be able to.

Hello. I decided to make a blog for all my stuff I get busy working on. I have made lots of projects. I completed a lot, but I continue to make more. I live here in Oregon, which, while having a reputation for being rainy all the time, I don't find it so. It's supposed to be in the 90s this weekend.
I maintain the Atari 2600 Land, which used to be a project of mine, but I don't care about it much any more. Even so, I will NOT entertain offers from Atari about buying it. I also periodically make a periodical, an e-zine about my computer-related musings, called the Big Belch Computer News.
I have quite the menagerie of consoles, ranging from a Maganvox Odyssey to a Nintendo Switch. Sometimes I am awake all night and sleep all day, and other times I'm asleep all night and awake all day. Right now I'm awake a little after midnight here.
I used to play my Atari 2600 a lot, but not as much since i got the other retro consoles. Now I have about 350 Atari 2600 games in the pantry just sitting there collecting dust. Perhaps I should sell them.

A quick trip on a beautiful Saturday to the Evergreen Air Museum in McMinnville Oregon.  It's about an hour drive from my home.  This museum is most famous for housing the giant WWII Howard Hughes "Spruce Goose".  I assure you, it is huge. 
Also a picture of the author on Atari Day with an Atari shirt, relaxing in an old airline seat, a delicious lunch at a place that serves sandwiches on fresh-made bread, a sweet late 60's Ford Falcon I spotted in a parking lot, and our current sweet ride too, which looked nice in the sun. 

The other day, I was cleaning out drawers upstairs, which were full of our kids' school stuff.  Old papers and art and various supplies and books..  Out came this purple box, which I assumed was a pencil box. 

But when I opened it, nope!  It's a Nyko Gamoboy game case.  And that writing on it?  That's my wife's handwriting.  It all came flooding back to me like a sharp zoom!  My oldest child's first game system was a Gameboy Color.  We learned pretty quickly that if he took it to a friends home or on vacation, he could potentially lose or leave behind a game.  So this was the solution.  Just make sure each game is in the case before you leave.

Anyway, the memories here, probably only valid to myself, my wife, and probably our now-grown-up son, are priceless.  My next step is to find those old original games (I hope we still have them) and put them in the right slots.  Then this becomes a most prominent piece of my Gameboy collection.
 
 
 

Hi and welcome to Lance’s Laboratory! This is the second entry of what will be my personal blog, sharing small slices of life with you from within my Lab.
For those of you who are just getting to know me for the first time, my name is Lance Ringquist, I’m from Minnesota, and for nearly 40 years I’ve been in the Atari business operating Video 61, one of the last surviving original retail Atari distributors. We started in the video business as a local chain of video rental stores serving the Twin Cities area with locations along U.S. Highway 61, the road that musician Bob Dylan referred to in the album and song Highway 61 Revisited. I also love classic "Drive-In" movies and spending time with my family and friends at my cabin up north.
For decades I’ve gotten to know you guys as my customers and friends, buying, selling and remanufacturing Atari systems, games, software, and computers, and developing my own line of Atari-compatible Video 61 games and controllers. I’m still in my Lab working away dreaming up new creations and shipping off new original Atari products, and I thought after all these years of being in the Atari community it was time to start sharing tidbits of Atari memories and Minnesota life with you here on my blog. To old friends and new, WELCOME!
This is my first BIG Blog post, and I wanted to talk about an interesting bit of Atari history that still applies today and can be helpful to homebrewers and independent developers like me:
To remain profitable if you don’t have the buying power that Atari did themselves you have to look at alternative ways of packing your products.
 

 

 
Having been in the Atari business for decades and running Video 61 as an independent company for nearly 40 years, I began selling Atari products in my video store when Warner still ran Atari. Once Atari got back on their feet during the Tramiel era, I became an officially authorized Atari distributor and service provider. In that time I’ve seen things in the World of Atari that you couldn’t begin to imagine. I’ve had good conversations with Jack Tramiel, I’ve had inside information on the development of games and products which Atari never released, I’ve talked with other 3rd party publishers, I’ve seen absolutely insane things happen in the world of Atari - I’ve even received death threats over this stuff. I’ve survived it all and lived to tell the story.
All through Atari’s history, smaller 3rd party game publishers came up with alternative methods for packing their products. Did you know it was common at the time for many 3rd Party Atari developers to release game cartridges, floppies, and other accessories in simple “budget” packaging such as clear inexpensive clamshell cases and plastic baggies? Some publishers even just shrink-wrapped the floppy disk and documents! (Examples are shown below, and in my Atari I/O photo gallery). Unique, alternative packaging kept costs low for the buyer, while keeping the games profitable enough for the small developers to stay in business and continue publishing Atari games and software.
 

 
The way to get the costs down is to make things in quantity. It's the same idea as shopping at Sam's Club or Costco: the more you buy the less it cost per item. Retail boxes, glossy cartridge labels and colorful instruction manuals cost much less per game when you’re manufacturing 100,000 of them at a time, as Jack Tramiel's Atari did. BUT - when you’re making 10 to 20 games at a time as an independent developer, glossy packaging drives the price up significantly. The developer pays more and you pay more. This is one reason why you see the new Atari charging upwards of $99 per Atari XP 2600 cartridge, and why many new homebrew and independently released cartridges cost so much to buy while the developer makes such little profit on their work.
When Atari was still in business, during the Tramiel era, Atari would regularly provide me with inside information and Atari’s sales history. Beginning in 1985, Atari would fax me their sales history numbers for video game hardware and software and continued to do so until around 1990. These faxes were HUGE. I still have them after all these years, although the faxes are now yellowed and almost impossible to read.
 
 

"Like Jack Tramiel, independent Atari game developers and homebrewers have to weigh costs and pricing, and understand that some games sell well, some so so, and some hardly at all."
- Lance
 
 
The sales figures provided in the fax covered the product lines for Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Atari XEGS, and I think the Atari Lynx. For each Atari game, I was able to clearly see how many were manufactured and how many were sold. This gave me a big picture understanding of what things looked like at Atari, and just how big of a slice of the video game market Atari still had going into the 1990s. 
People have no idea just how big a piece of the video game industry Atari still had in the late 1980s, in the midst of Nintendo dominating the market and Sega making moves. It was still a big slice of the pie, and certainly enough to make money. Between the Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Atari XE and everything else, Atari often had a bigger chuck of the video game market than Sega did with the Sega Master System.
 
Jack Tramiel discussing "Business is War" at Commodore and Atari
 
What I learned from the insider info on Atari sales figures, and through my conversations with Jack Tramiel, was that Atari had a very lean business model that “spread risk” over many games, and to publish a game with a fancy box, slick labels and docs, Atari had to order 100,000 units of a game to get good enough pricing to make a profit on a title.
But there was a problem. Not all titles sold well! Jack Tramiel wanted to get pricing down low enough for each game, so that in case one game did not sell very well, the risk would be spread around different games, so that the successful games would more than make up for any financial loss from games that did not sell.
Like Jack Tramiel, independent Atari game developers and homebrewers (both then and now) have to weigh costs and pricing, and understand that some games sell well, some so so, and some hardly at all. So you need to spread the risks out to make a profit. Do you grasp that concept? Your winners cover your losses.
 

 
So for Atari to be profitable with the XEGS, which used very good packaging in the iconic “blue tile” boxes, and to cover the cost of materials and the cartridge itself, Atari put out around 30-35 new titles for the XE. That meant to get good pricing, spread risk, and make a profit, Atari had to order over 3 million+ units of video game cartridges for the XEGS.
Take for example Necromancer, a video game for the Atari XEGS. Atari manufactured a standard order of 100,000 units of Necromancer, and ended up with around 50,000 units left because the game didn’t sell very well. On the other hand, Atari XE games like Crystal Castles, Airball and others were almost completely sold out.
The idea was to spread risk - to create different games for different genres. Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket, instead spread them around! If you create too much of the same thing - the same world, the same ideas, the same game - it may sell out or it may flop. Infinite diversity in games leads to infinite success.
This is one reason why you see some independent developers and homebrewers struggling. Some of them focus all of their time and attention,  years even, developing a single game, a passion project. Often it will come in an expensive box with glossy label and colorful instructions, all put together by hand. Other developers work on multiple games at once, and work hard to keep manufacturing costs down, and passing those savings on to both the customer and to themselves.
 

 

 
Say what you will about Jack Tramiel, but he understood this simple concept. Atari would release a few games at a time, each in a batch of 100,000, and the successful games would cover any shortfall of the less successful games. Atari would order 100,000 games at a time - enough to keep the manufacturing cost low on slick docs, a nice box with that beautiful Atari XE blue box artwork, and a glossy label, which was something the Atari 7800 didn’t always benefit from. If the game sold well, another order of 100,000 games could be manufactured, should Atari believe there was enough excitement about the game to sell out a second batch.
A similar story was unfolding at Activision in the late 1980s. After the video game crash Activision was a much different company than it had been during the Atari 2600 boom, when Activision saw incredible success with games like Pitfall! and River Raid. Yet they survived the crash and lived to fight another day. Now Microsoft is buying them. By the time Jack Tramiel was running Atari, Activision (and their sister company Absolute) was a much leaner operation. I used to speak with the Activision guys often, and developed a pretty clear understanding of their sales history numbers for Atari systems, and how they ran their business.
 

 
Activision was smaller, and did their ordering 10,000 games at a time. To make a good enough profit, Activision and Absolute needed to sell all 10,000 units to justify a reorder of the game. The first order of 10,000 games sold would break even, and Activision/Absolute would recoup all of their money put into the development and manufacturing of the game. Then, if the game was successful, Activision would order another 10,000 units and suddenly that game would become pretty profitable! However, they told me that only one of their Atari games was able to surpass 10,000 units, which was Title Match Pro Wrestling, and that was a reason why they pulled out of the Atari market. Yet Jack Tramiel was able to sell out quite a few of their video game titles at 100,000. Even with games at the end like Alien Brigade for the Atari 7800, they were able to sell all 100,000 out, and this was with Jack not only not supporting the system properly, but competing against himself with the Atari XE.
There was a reason why so many 3rd party Atari developers released games in alternative “budget” packaging like clamshells, zip lock baggies, and even just shrink wrapped the disk and docs without a box. Because if you cannot attain the high number of sales per unit as Atari still could, you could not get the price per cartridge down low enough to be profitable. This meant finding creative ways to cut back on packaging, and just about every 3rd party company did just that. Broderbund, Adventure International, Epyx, Sierra Online, Datasoft, S.S.I., as well as many others sold games with limited “budget” packaging.
Those 3rd parties made up sales volume with budget packaging, cartridge labels and instructions, because they did not have the customer base Atari still did at that point.
 

 
The new Atari charges a lot for their line of limited run "Atari XP" games for the 2600, many of them are priced at $99. I’m betting its because they use fancy boxes, instructions and "labels". But they do not have the same Atari market that Jack had in the 1980s-1990s, thus much smaller sales volumes and the inability to order a large enough quantity to bring the price down. The Atari XP program harkens back to APX: The Atari Program Exchange and is meant as a gift to the Atari community, and not focused solely on being a profitable, but it's not likely that Atari wants to lose money either.
So when it comes to passion projects like the “Atari XP” games, the new Atari has to cover their costs and hope for a profit. To do this they have to charge a lot more for their games due to much smaller sales volumes. That’s a pretty big risk for the new Atari, and a pretty big expense that gets passed onto you, the customer.
In the 1990s, some classic video game collectors called me a liar for pointing this out, and insisted that game companies like S.S.I., Epyx, Sierra Online, Datasoft, and many other well known (and not so well known) companies never offered their games in clamshells, zip lock baggies, and other forms of budget packaging to be able to offer their software at prices people could afford.
In this blog post you will see lots of pictures I recently took of my own inventory, showing  just that: actual software releases from said companies and more, in alternative budget packaging. I’ve never received an apology from those who were so quick to berate me and call me a liar for being so kind as to explain the truth. Today is their chance.
- Lance  
 
SEE MORE PHOTOS IN MY PHOTO ALBUM: