@abraxas
Last month I (finally) installed a composite-out mod on my Atari2600 Jr. I got this console off a friend in September 2022, and got the mod shortly after. The kit came in right around the time I ended up getting burnt out, had a death in the family, and holidays all kind of hit at once. The Atari sat in parts on my shelf until now. The mod was relatively easy, had to remove a few resistors, transistors, and capacitors, then solder in the four wires. I had to make some rudimentary adjustments to the metal shielding, as it is quite sharp and likely would have damaged the wires over a short period of time. Some simple snips and bends, and some electrical tape to make it less sharp should suffice. I also noticed that the Select and Reset buttons weren't working - not sure if I damaged the ribbon cable at some point, or if it was like that when I got it. I traced for continuity and found roughly where the issue was, but even under my microscope I couldn't see any breaks in the traces. I ended up soldering some tact switches in to work around that issue. Along with this, I got myself a Harmony Encore cartridge so I can have the entire library of games in one place. There are some really cool demos for it, but they're mostly all coded for PAL systems, and thus don't render correctly in my NTSC environment.
5 comments
I can't hold a soldering iron steady enough to do my own work on stuff anymore. :-(
Sucks :( I'm only just getting into it now. It's something I've wanted to learn for ages but never really had a reason to. I'm also (trying) to learn how to use a multimeter to trace voltage through circuits. I have a wireless, rechargable mouse that has lost its ability to recharge. I traced all the continuity, things seem fine on that front. I also found the spec sheet for the chip that handles the charging and it seems okay... but there's a whole section that (for some reason) isn't getting power when it's all plugged in and I'm not sure why. It's been a fun project so far - I'm way out of my element and I'm doing my best to make it my element haha. Maybe I can post about it later (I don't have access to the pics at work right now)
I used to do most of my sound equipment repairs myself, got my first soldering iron at Christmas when I was 14 years old (I think they bought it so I would stop borrowing my granddad's all the time).
Planning to stream some Atari, or just trying to get a better picture quality?
Bit of both. Ironically, somebody who frequents my stream discovered this package when I said how cool it would be if you could apply RetroArch (or similar) shaders over Windows apps https://github.com/mausimus/ShaderGlass So yeah, clean image then gets filtered by ShaderGlass to create a fine-tune a CRT-esque display, thus restoring the jank and "crappy" output again. The irony is not lost on me 😂 (however being able to control how the output looks is nice)