sramirez2008

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 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.
 

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

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.
 

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.