Troubleshooting the Atari 8-bit

Your Atari won't start. The screen is black, or full of garbage, or the keyboard died halfway through a game. Somewhere on that forty-year-old board is one bad part - and the hard part isn't fixing it. It's finding it without destroying three good ones on the way.

This manual walks you through that search in the order a working technician uses: power first, then contacts, then measurement, and chips only at the end. Most "serious" faults in these machines turn out to be a tired power supply or a dirty socket, and both are free to rule out.

Written for both ends of the bench. If you have never used a multimeter, the book starts with which socket the probes go in and why the wrong one blows the fuse. If you have been repairing for years, you will find free-running bus tests, logic-state references for every chip, and the voltage-drop method for locating a short without unsoldering the board.

Inside:

• Symptom-by-symptom diagnosis - black screen, garbage, no color, dead keyboard, dead joystick port


• Pinouts for every chip: 6502C, ANTIC, GTIA, POKEY, PIA, FREDDIE and the memory


• Clock measurement points with both PAL and NTSC frequencies


• Bus continuity tables and logic-state references


• Soldering and capacitor replacement, with the full parts list for an XE board


• Over-voltage protection that stops a failing supply from killing your machine


• A one-page bench card to print and pin above your desk