retrohax.net

… or I just wanted to play RiverRaid 😉

Intro

Today, a short post with the Atari 400 on the workbench. I did work on a few of those machines before but I don’t have a complete set of pics so I won’t cover it here. Maybe in another post someday 🙂

This particular machine is a 110V NTSC version released on the US market. It came boxed with a lot of cartridges. We will surely be adding some Atari 400 mods to it so it is more convenient to use in current times 🙂

The machine itself was just slightly dirty but in relatively good shape.

Disassembly

Below are a few pics of disassembled Atari

Introducing mods and add-ons

The idea was to upgrade this Atari a bit.

I’ve used some cool mods from thebrewingacademy.com and van-radecke.de which are awesome websites with various add-ons.

• TBA’s Ultimate-A8 SD Cartridge for Atari 400/800/XL/XE & 1088XEL/XLD
• TBA’s Ultimate Atari Video (UAV) board for 400/800/XL/XE and Also for 1088XEL/XLD + BOBby
• TBA’s Internal Audio Board (Atari 400, 2600, & others)
• Atari 400 RAM-Card

Installation

The manuals that come with these mods are written very nicely so making the installation process straightforward. First, A/V mods were installed.

A quick test with an A/V BOBby – the video output is crystal clear! YaY!

Now, let’s see how the RAM Card fits in.

Assembly and testing

While I was soldering all the mods with one hand, the other hand auto-magically cleaned the case, disassembled and cleaned all cartridge connectors so I was ready to run some final tests 😀

The end

This is it, the upgraded Atari 400 is roaring again! I’ve played with it for a while and the machine was shipped to another (hopefully) happy client 🙂

PS. Yes, I did bubble-wrap it thoroughly 😉

Outro

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