Atari 800XL Repair

RAM It Is Aways RAM

I have had this machine dead for a while, it is why I got it so cheap. I was worryed it would be one of the custom chips & thus game over. However I was lucky. It was a pretty normal failure for 8-bit & modern micros.

The next thing to tackle was the RAM, so I desoldered the chips, put them in my IBM 5150 & if I remember correctly, only about two chips still worked. So they were as dead as the Queen. Once they were replaced the computer fired to life & passed its self system check.

At first I thought it might be the CPU, so I desoldered it, stuck a soket in its place & poped in a 6502. There was no diffrence. So I sat on it for a while. Also mesure a few bits with the scope.

This is a cool bit of external hardware I got hold of way before i had the actule computer. The perfect functionaly test.

One of my artistic test images. At least it proves the machine works.

Atari 800XL running the tablet & tablet software on the cartrage. On the bed as that was ofter my work bench back in the day.

My drawing using the tablet. The resolution of the tablet was not very good, you would be hard pressed to do anything good with it.