kheller2

Week 25 of 1983.

Is there an ink stamp of "203" on the sticker?

The 1050 probably isn't loading anything anymore because U1 LM3086 is fried (Easily happens) or the heads are dirty from reading your old disks (often happens). Make sure your cartridge socket teeth are not bent and shorting. You should be able to get into diags with option, that button goes right to the GTIA. Ground pin 12 of the GTIA should do the same thing. Part of me thinks the BASIC ROM is toast. You could remove that, and it should boot w/o it. Remember to give time during power cycles, at least 5 seconds. If you can turn it on now with start down and hear the buzz, that at least signals part of the OS is still working. Turn on the 1050, then the 800XL, do you still get boot errors? - again signs the OS is working. StarRaiders doesn't have any diagnostic code (the self test is in the OS ROM). Star Raiders is considered a "diagnostic cartridge" because it has bit set in its own ROM (the diagnostic cart bit) that bypasses much of the OS initialization. SALT probably does too (but I'm not sure).

Couple of thoughts…. keyboard not working: ribbon cable issues/ corrosion/ not seated right, goes through 4051s, then to pokey. Silver keys go to other chips. You said you don’t have the power light coming on, check your ribbon and how it’s plugged in. how can you get boot error messages from the 1050 yet also a blue screen and stuck cursor? Is the cursor only when not hooked to the 1050? That sort of implies BASIC or MMU or PIA. however, can you boot with option down and run the self test…or is SALT the only thing working?

So, the later in the year 1984 stamp on the serial number will indicate if you have all sockets or not. Put another way, before summer 84, all were socketed? And basic C is also an aid for socketless boards.

Neither the Dynasty short boards or the TONG long board were designed with CGIA. There are '83 800XLF schematics with CGIA, but I don't think any samples exist in the wild. Designs moved to using KERI instead.

Some of the Avalon Hill games were on cassette and in big boxes just like the disk version, for obvious game playing reasons.

Why yes, there is a whole population of French folk in Illinois that brought SCART to the states in the 70s. 🤥

I said this many pages back. yes, people are crazy on eBay. Case in point: https://www.ebay.com/itm/313835006515? $1200 for a 65XE, $100 shipping. But I think it does come with a monitor, and 2 game cards.

@Dropcheck How are things going?

I need a 1400XL and a 1200XL. Of course custom ones are nice too, like a 1250XL, 1200XLS, ...

@Beeblebrox Are these 600XL board different from the one you converted here, which is a CHELCO REV 8A? I was comparing it to this PAL 600XL that was for sale:

There should only be two main 1050 bezel types, as there are two different 1050 cases: tandon vs world storage mechs.

Oh, all the DOSs are okay. In fact, I used Atari DOS 3 for a while before switching to Sparta with a USD kit. Atari DOS 4 was some historical fun playing. Even DOS XE was briefly used, but I sort of stuck to Sparta land.

I think there was a large effort involved in getting the proper DD disks created for Indus and ATR. It might be better to stay in the DD format, but that wasn’t Atari’s direction with the 1090 or sweetpea.