Justin

Amazing blog entry @Video 61  One day I'd love to read some of your stories about your interactions with John Skrutch and Julie Wade over new game development.

Very great read Lance. 🙂 Sorry they had you holding the bag and left you so much trouble. But we all appreciate your hard work in keeping the Atari legacy alive. 😄
 

Amazing blog entry @Video 61  One day I'd love to read some of your stories about your interactions with John Skrutch and Julie Wade over new game development.

Excellent!  Thank you for posting this!

Incredible reading.  Thank you so much for sharing this!

Yes, absolutely. 
My post was just meant as an explanation of why you got that specific behavior with the Test Cart, but the diagnosis still stands: the TIA is toasted.😄
 
I don't think it is possible. It's not only that you need to watch the CPU address and data bus to see when the program writes to the TIA register used to turn those transistors ON and OFF (not impossible, but surely complicates things a bit), as that "DUMP" signal is not available outside the TIA, but the fact that you'd need to remove the bad transistor from the circuit for this to work!

Ah.. I see. I wasn't sure if that signal was available outside of the TIA to be found elsewhere or from another pin etc. 
I wonder if the cost to need ratio just isn't there for a new TIA replacement to be produced or hardware emulated/simulated off a PCB?
 

Thank you for the detailed explanation on it all Alex! But again, in this case the failed transistor is located where....? 
Inside the TIA. So I guess it is awesome to know what is failed in this case, but still stinks because it isn't something that can be fixed. Unless it were possible to just wire in an actual transistor to handle this externally on a small perf board or just wired into the system directly and then shrink wrapped up? Hmm... a bodge to allow a 95% working TIA to still be used for 100% functionality in a console. 
I'm kinda like the idea of this...
 

I think the issue is that the "dumping" transistor (in red in the attached excerpt from the TIA schematics) for that paddle line is bad (shorted).

Each paddle line has one of those and they are activated (all 4 at the same time) by the "DUMP" signal shown in the diagram, which is under software control (the program writes to a TIA register to enable or disable it).
The purpose is to discharge the capacitors attached to the paddle lines. After doing so the program disables the transistors again and then keeps checking the paddle lines and measures the time it takes for them to switch to a digital "1". That time is determined by the RC circuit formed by the (fixed) capacitor in the console and the (variable) resistor in the paddle controller itself, and it's therefore proportional to the position of the pot. That's how 2600 games read the paddles.
The bad transistor is the reason why you don't see the pulses on the scope.
Note that the TIA paddle inputs are strictly DIGITAL (they only read "1" or "0"), and apart for those additional transistors, they're identical to the joystick triggers ones.
The "shorted" transistor  results in a low resistance between the paddle input and GND. When you have a paddle controller plugged in, you add another variable resistor between the line and +5V, obtaining a simple voltage divider.
And so depending on the position of the pot you either get a logical "1" (voltage above a threshold value)  or "0" (below that value). The cap is never discharged and just keeps that same voltage determined by the divider. So there's no charging time to be measured.
That's why the paddle just sits either on one or the other side of the screen in the Testcart.
 

Some beautiful birds in that place. 🙂
 

That's awesome Rick!

game cases make nice accessories for handhelds. Jack Tramiel cut corners wherever possible but the lynx pouch and carrying case were very high quality and most of them still hold up today at 35 years old. this looks like a nice organizer for game boy.

I've got the Lynx pouch!  It is very nice quality. 
 

The GBC was indeed from Toys R Us, which was our go-to for GB games at that time.  I'm sure the Nyko case came from there. 
Oh how I'd love to have one of those Turbo Booster Plus!  I'm using RF output with my TG-16.  It looks pretty good that way, but composite would be better.

That's what I use.  Very nice pouch.  And if you turn the games just right you can fit a lot of games in those two pockets.  Now that I think about it you can take more games than you can battery oower.  That makes sense.

I have two of those Lynx pouches.  I also have two of the larger carrying cases.  Those are also nicely designed and can carry a lot of games.

The juiciest details. 😛
There is nothing wrong with that, they look great. 🙂 Social media and the companies like Limited Run Games, and New Atari, are feeding into the FOMO culture we have right now. If you don't get it NOW! You'll lose out! Ebay, FB, marketplace, etc. they fall into that too, everything old is rare, even if it's not. Just to get an artificial value to something. "ATARI 2600 COMBAT CART! RARE!! VITNAGE!!! L@@K!!" -Buy It Now  $1000! 
So people willingly pay for something that they will think is premium.
 
Some of these limited editions though are they really limited? Some seem to be like "It's limited to how much money we can milk you for, then we'll stop making them." Others it's like limited to what, 50,000 copies? 100,000?

Is it really that rare then? 😛

Yes especially when you need to split the cost among a bunch of people, that extra stuff adds up.
The most vocal collectors seem to be Youtubers who want fancy games to look good on camera or in their shelf. So that probably drove things that way.
Sure they can afford it, but I sure can't most of the time. Growing up I'd buy maybe one new game a year brand new. The rest, I'd grab the cheap used copies the video store was liquidating.
CD-ROMs is a good point. One reason the Playstation PSX beat the N64 in sales. I remember PSX games were like $30-40 since they were CD-ROMs, and N64 games could be upwards of $70 because they were on cartridge. I would only get a new N64 game very rarely. $70 in 1996 that's like $136 for a game today. Luckily the video store had $10 and $20 N64 games back then. 

Im guilty of this but I'm trying to remedy that.  I may have a channel but I haven't posted anything in a long time.  My need for games to be in fancy boxes is nothing more than a want for a complete in box game.  It is easier to obtain the game by itself and get the PDF version of the instructions but I all about the physical contact and trying to experience areas I missed as a kid. I am referring to old stock new in box and complete in box games.  I am not referring to homebrew games.

Next time we talk about money laundering an entire company  

Atari is the sole reason why I wanted to get into programming. To hear all of this from an insider perspective is priceless. Thank you for sharing.

thanks @Justin and yeah I want everybody to do well and the future is unknonw right now for many. its not just independent developers and homebrewers but the people in the atari community who buy these games also. its my hope this Blog post gets the word out to all atari developers that there are ways to do this and succeed and stay in the game for a long time delivering good games at good prices.

This was a great read!  Thank for sharing, Lance!

hi @Jinroh yeah! thanks and im glad you remember the days when they did that! I mean here’s my thing about packaging today: when i release a new game for an Atari system I keep prices down to make it affordable for me to make and you to buy. some new games are $50-$60 dollars if not more and not everybody can afford that. Jack Tramiel would say they make computers "for the masses, not the classes". And when I put out a game and keep the costs low, they scream about my boxes and scream about my clamshells but what about a CD rom jewel case? that thing's under a buck. It’s got a little glossy thing in it but it’s real small. Some manufacturers only have a glossy picture of the game on the front not on the back. This obsession with fancy glossy boxes and packaging, its fine and looks nice but you have to have the numbers for that, a lot of numbers sold, to keep the cost down. otherwise people are paying $50 and there's not much left for the developer to survive.

hi @RickR yeah! the cassette games were great, many times you could break into them and list out the source code and learn about them. but yeah that’s how they made a profit they didn’t have the huge numbers atari had and that’s how they remained in business. if you want to get in there and make a big library of games that give you some sort of cash flow you just have to do things like that, ziploc baggies and very inexpensive packaging is just the only way you could do it.