Hi everyone -- several people pointed to the membrane at Sell My Retro but didn't notice this is for a pre-order with no ETA. May be helpful in the future but isn't at the moment :-) www.sellmyretro.com/offer/details/replacement-atari-800-keyboard-membrane-%28mitsumi-56-_7324a%29-pre-_order-38662
Hi Adrian, Just wanted to say that i enjoy your channel and hope to learn more about electronics and computing by watching you repair microcomputers. Could you perhaps have a short segment listing some of your favorite or preferred books on these subjects ? Hope you can. Thanks.
@@administratorwsv8105 I'm skeptical of this. Adrian tried really hard to determine whether it was an alignment issue, and wasn't able to get an improvement. Separating the membrane then made a dramatic difference. You'll need to make a better argument to account for these empirical results.
When you want to look for alignment issues place a piece of “carbon” paper between them, screw them back together and press every key. When you separate them you will see the points where the keyboard is pressing on the board.
I was thinking of dabs of nail polish or some slow drying paint, but your carbon paper ides nails it. I really wanted to see the key points and how well they aligned with the dots.
The Esc key seems to be working fine, as designed. The way it works on Atari 8-bits is pressing Esc puts it into a mode to escape the next character for inclusion in a string... so pressing Esc twice first puts it into Escape mode, and the second Esc is actually added as a character in a string. And if you were to do Esc then Up arrow, you'd see an Up Arrow character instead of actually changing the cursor position. Atari used this to do things like clear the screen, move the cursor, line breaks, etc. while outputting a string to the screen, like from a PRINT statement in a BASIC program. To clear the screen, for example, you'd enter: 10 PRINT ", then press Esc then Clear, then close the ".
Right. On the Commodore an open quotation mark or the INSert key would cause special characters to show up as an inverse video symbol; ESC is like Atari's version of that. So Esc by itself doesn't show anything, but Esc twice prints the "Esc" symbol.
One of the things I did the most with my Atari was a small program that worked similar to this. You would enter characters in to move around the screen and change things, and it would record the entire key sequence and then you could save that to a file, then if you loaded the file it would play the whole thing back as an animation.
if you want to see a game that was ahead of its time, get a Star Raiders cartridge, a 3D shoot-em-up based vaguely on the old Star Trek games from mainframe days, but with first person pursuit and battle, with shifting star fields and enemies that dart backwards and forwards around you while you try to shoot them down. Considering it was written in the late 70's when I first saw it I was transfixed and used to hang around the computer shop waiting for my turn to play it! It's not the best game that was ever made for the Atari, but it was the best of the first games made for it and still my favorite to play. It played like an arcade game at a time most home computers couldn't hope to do so.
good luck on that, its the model in the family that most people want by name and it seems to be on the rarer side with relatively few being available at any point in time, took me months on mine and i had to go for a nonworking one to get it at all, granted it was an easy fix but still
@@nickolaswilcox425 eBay seems to always have some floating around for sale. They're on the more expensive side (not being sold for just $20 bucks anymore) but they're still pretty easy to get a hold of if you want one.
@@shamrice that wasnt so much the case when i went looking so my perspective might be a tad off, but when i was looking there were only 2 or 3 and all on auction with too much time left and a bidding war already in motion so no way in hell i was gonna try for them, plus i dont generally pay a collector price for my systems and make every effort to avoid it mine i managed to grab for around 100 and had it back to working order about a day after getting it
Great job! It reminds me how I fix ZX Spectrum +2 membranes by taking them out and rolling them into a tube. It seems pretty similar except that here instead of being two layers of plastic, it's just one layer making contact against a PCB. But the solution seems to be the same: To unstick one layer from the other.
My first Atari computer was the Atari 400, but one of the first things I did was replace the keyboard with an after market mechanical keyboard and expanded the RAM. Later I bought an Atari 130XE form a friend... it had been hacked to run 512K (big ram disk) and with that and seven floppy drives (not Atari drives and Lambda power supplies for everything, including the computer). I ran a BBS on it for several years. I eventually ended up with a 1040 ST and for a while, I was one of the Atari Sysops on Compuserve. It was a fun time.
Good job on the keyboard fix. That Mitsumi keyboard design is very, very similar to the 1200XL keyboard, though on that particular model, one of the most common ways for them to fail is at that contact strip toward the bottom. The carbon traces get diffused and embedded into some tape material Mitsumi used between the silicone insulator layer and the traces. On the 1200XL, the “canonical” fix is to remove the old paper tape over that contact strip and repaint those traces with carbon conductive paint, then reassemble. I’ve done two of my 1200XLs with that fix several years ago and they still work great - it’s slow and tedious to disassemble those keyboards and remove the silicone layer to access that contact strip, but it’s worth it.
Actually Dell, HP, Intel keyboards have this same construction. However when working on the newer keyboards, the film layers just come apart if there is no liquid spilled inside the keyboard. The company I worked for would that refurbished computers would also refurbish the keyboards as well. We would take the keyboard completely apart, clean the keys, clean each layer of the membranes and put it back together. Ones that wouldn't work previously would work perfectly afterwards.
I don't know if anyone has mentioned this yet but the Atari 2600 and 8-bit computer line was done by Jay Miner who also did the Amiga so the Atari 800 has a lot in common with the later Amiga as you mentioned the 800's 256 color palette along with the Amiga. I love my 800 and it outputs very clear RF and Composite. Thanks for the video, as I have yet to have a keyboard issue on mine but now I know what to expect!
Watching Adrian's videos is an exercise in being shamed for how impatient you are compared to him. I'd have thrown that thing across the room about 10 minutes in. Congrats on getting it working at all.
It has been 20+ years ago, but I rebuilt a Mitsumi membrane using an X-acto knife, a paper hole punch, signage vinyl, copper tracing bodge wire, Avery hole reinforcements, and the power of OCD. It worked, but I cannot recommend my method. It was two weeks of my life that could have been better spent.
Atari's were my first computers -- I had an 800XL and a 130XE. I normally really enjoy your content, but these videos have been something special to me. Thank you for making them!
@@sideburn I started with a 1030 and an 800XL myself and ran a BBS in GA from 1984-2000. :) I had a few US Doubler 1050s as well and dabbled with PBXs and phreaking. Yeah, I had a few private sections for my friends too, and people knew where they could find a bit of everything...hehe! Good times. Wish I hadn't given my drives and 800XL away. I still have a good number of the floppies.
@@anthonyferguson7158 wow that’s a long run all the way to 2000! I still have a lot of my original floppies. Unfortunately the ones with my programs I wrote are all unreadable. I just recently fixed my 800xl, 130xe, and 1050. Do you happen to remember a BBS called Gecko in California? His was pretty popular but I haven’t t been able to find any info on it. He was a friend of mine in the neighborhood. Always wondered what happened to him.
One of my first hustles was taking all the PET and C-64 computers from my high school home for the summer and cleaning and repairing them. I came up with a keyboard repair that works to this day. I would take the keyboards apart and clean the carbon contacts and rubber plungers with a white gummy eraser and 70% Isopropyl alcohol and reassemble them. They worked flawlessly for the next school year. A great way to earn a few hundred bucks towards Electronics Engineering school when I graduated.
I had a similar situation on the Atari 130. I tighten the screws, it stops working. Relax - it works. As a result, I put spacers between the membrane and the case - everything works well
I have an 800xl that was stored under leaky batteries and I have three episodes when I get it working, one episode was just on the keyboard pcb, I never saw anything like it.
You did a wonderful job! I love seeing old tech getting repaired, it feels like paying respect to the people who spent hundreds if not thousands of hours into developing and engineering it an writing games and programs for it. I also wonder how many Atari 800s or machines with similar keyboards ended up in the trash that could've been relativ easily been repaired like this one. Also worth mentioning: Half a year ago I've found an old Linux game from 2007, called "wordwarvi" (yes, without l...), that is still available in some repositories. It looks, feels and sounds very similar to Atari's "Defender".
Making the surface of carbon membrane rougher through light sanding is a great way to remove the shiny/sheen and stickiness of keyboard keys/TV remote buttons.
@@dunebasher1971 The PC never convinced me to move away from my Atari 8 bit till the 486.... even then I loved my 8 bit and ST more. However, I could not play Doom or Wolf 3D on those.
You probably won't see this but here is a cheap and easy fix, get 2.5mm(?) heat shrink tubing, cut in approx. 2mm "cylinders" and put over the "nubs", alot of cutting to be sure but not bad. I fixed two 1200XL and 1 TI-99/4a keyboards this way, it works. I think the sizes are right, I made the video a long time ago about this.
As I watched, your trials and tribulations reminded me of the fail ing U.S. torpedoes at the beginning of WW2. Each failed keystroke was equivalent to an individually failed launched torpedo. You did well. Took them ~2yrs.
Fascinating stuff, and very methodical. Great presentation, and awesome fix. I used to hack on the Atari 400 in high school, and eventually the 800, and then, in college the Amiga 500. The Atari was always my favorite because I mastered 6502 machine language and the Atari memory mapping first. When you insert a cartridge it memory maps it to an area where there is no RAM. Maximum RAM was 48Kbytes, on 3 cards of 16K each. The cartridge(s) would map above that to complete the 64K of addressable space. One third-party created a cartridge where half was permanently mapped, and have was switched as needed between multiple banks IN that cartridge so they could fit more in less. Another third-party created a cartridge where the R/W could be enabled via a toggle switch on top... so one bypassed the "open case shutoff" like you did and keep the lid open... load up a "disk loader", browse the disk for saved cartridges, load it up, set R/W to no W, and reset to run your new "cartridge." To save to disk, run the loader, remove the pseudo-cartridge-with-toggle, then *QUICKLY* insert the real cartridge hoping it won't fry some logic somewhere, and then save to disk. Brilliant. The system bios(lowercase) checked if it could write to a particular memory space. Yes meant it was RAM. No meant it was a cartridge and it would jump to a particular address to execute. Copy protection on floppies (yeah, 5.25") was done by the application checking if it could read a particular sector. On a copied floppy it could, and it would refuse to run the copy. On the original, the factory had put "bad sectors" which would not load. In time we figured out how to make the copy, then change the fdd speed and write the bad sectors (from a sector map utility) and that worked too. The original 400/800 shipped with the CTIA chip, which was Atari VCS style graphics capable (later renamed to 2600 when the 5200 came out) and it was eventually replaced by the GTIA, which supported more simultaneous colors per scanline and more sprites. That was a user-serviceable replacement, a far cry from today's copyright-excuse anti right-to-repair world. If it wasn't for learning 6502 I never would have graduated to learning VAX-11, became a VMS hacker, and gained the perspective of how hardware works, including CPUs, opcodes, registers, memory-mapping, virtual memory (hence my note about that third-party cartridge), etc. Good times. Thanks for the memories, the video, and congratulations. Ehud Gavron Tucson AZ
I'm pretty sure that cartridges (in the left slot on the 800) actually map to $A000, which is at the 40K mark. You have to remove the cartridge in order to use the 8K of RAM that it displaces. Above 48K is the OS ROM (and extra space reserved for future OS expansion, which the XL and XE series utilize) and I/O memory map. The CTIA chip is *not* the same as the TIA chip used in the VCS/2600. It has all of the 400/800's graphics modes and sprites except for the three that would later be called the "GTIA modes", which are GRAPHICS 9, 10, and 11. The GTIA chip also corrects the misalignment between background and player-missile graphics (sprites), which has the side-effect of reversing the artifact colors in the hi-res (320x192) mode (GRAPHICS 8). The GTIA chip only adds some modes that allow more colors to be placed horizontally across the screen (albeit with only 80 pixels of resolution), it does not change any other modes or add any sprites.
With mine just cleaning the actual PCB with isopropanol did the trick, and I was also lucky that the foil could be removed without help of heat. Thanks for encouraging me for giving it a try after all :)
My uncle had an Atari 800 that he bought in '79 or '80, I forget precisely when, as I was only a kid, 9 or 10 years old. I remember playing a game called Star Raiders on it -- really enjoyable.
This was my second computer. I had an Atari 400 that I gave to my cousin and she used that for ages when I upgraded to the Atari 800 which I added memory boards to. I think there's something missing on your memory cards. From what my old brain says to me is there was a pressure bar or something to hold those PCBs in place but I might be mistaken on that. Heck, it's been 40-plus years now. If it wasn't for the Atari 800 and Atari BASIC, I would never have been interested in computers. I had built electronic kits from Radio Shack, but it was my Atari 800 that introduced me into programming. I learned Atari BASIC inside and out and wrote a few programs at the time. When it came time to take college classes, I took some programming classes. I had the understanding behind me of BASIC before I took the class. Remember, this was the 1980s and BASIC was considered a real language back then. In the end, I chose hardware engineering and ended up as a hardware tech instead, but the Atari was the kernel of it all.
Hi Adrian, Best Electronics in San Jose, CA is an operational exclusive Atari Computer Dealer. I bought a new keyboard membrane from him for my 800xl as well as rebuildable power supplies for both the XL and 1050 5.25" drive. He has thousands of parts/components.
Alas, Best Electronics doesn't. They've had upgraded replacement keyboard membranes made for every Atari keyboard except for the Atari 800 Mitsumi made keyboard. Best estimates that only 1% of the production run utilized this due to its extremely high failure rate and only receives a request for a replacement about once a decade, making producing a replacement obviously not cost effective. Had Adrian not managed to get this going again, likely the only replacement would've been cannibalizing a better keyboard off of a parts machine to swap into this 800.
Ahh thanks for the clarification. I felt lucky to have found them as I actually was able to order an entire keyboard with the upgraded membrane from them, they were great to deal with!
@@jlg001-o8o Yeah, Best Electronics is a huge asset for the Atari community and I suspect will prove very useful to Adrian if he continues to dive into these classic Atari machines.
since Adrian works in IT security, i doubt he'll love their "email us your credit card" aspect.... Haha... (Yeah, they sorta do take paypal now for additional cost and restrictions)
@@brianv2871 One could always use one of those temporary credit cards you can buy at the checkout aisle at places like Walmart, that only has whatever funds you've loaded it up with.
Looking forward to seeing what you do with the Atari 8bit family of computers. I recently started my own first time exploration of this line with a 400, 800XL, XEGS, and 130XE. Coming from the Commodore clan it’s interesting to finally see the competition from back in the day.
I received a TI-99/4a today with a Mitsumi keyboard with problems, so I came back to this video. Using a fiberglass scratch pen to clean up the pads made it easier. It freakin works!
Great that you were able to get the keyboard working. It's always kewl when one obtains their objective and can see positive results of their labors. Nice job!
You probably won't want to unplug the internal speaker because some games (and maybe some other applications) use it for sound effects, especially ones that are ported from the Apple II, which has a similar speaker. One example that springs to mind is the _Ultima_ series of RPG games. And yes, the 800XL and later models lack the internal speaker, and route its output through the TV/monitor instead.
There is an Atari parts company called Best Electronics that is near the Atari warehouse in Sunnyvale. The people at Best have replacement parts and keyboards for all Atari systems except the one keyboard you had issues with! They only get one request about every 10 years for replacement Mylar for those late in production run 800s. The only options I am aware of are to clean and if necessary recoat the contact points and bad traces with liquid silver pen or nickel print paints, or purchase a cartridge which provides a USB connection and plug in a USB keyboard. You will need to drill a notch in the cartridge door for the USB cable (ugh!) You were fortunate to make it work!
I work at recycle center in the computer dept. I found one of these exact machines just thrown in the pile, asked my boss if I could have it and he said I could. Took it home and plugged it in and it worked perfectly, I didn't have to fiddle with it at all. Constructed like a tank, it's missing a few keycaps and I only have pole position for it, at some point I need to decide what to get so I can load software on it.
Adrian, the replacement mylars were made. They didn't work. They depress all keys at once. I have two of them. It might be that they need the rubber layer as the Mitsumi. I can send you one if you want one. I did reply in the previous 800 video with the fix that you mostly did here. Very glad you got it working! Read on please. There are at least four types of keyboards for the 800. First the female square-plunger variants. They are true mechanical keyboards. Yellow plungers (stackpole, uncommon or rare to find) are the worst. Keycaps fall out very easily due to plungers cracking with age. White plungers (HiTek, most common) still do crack but they hold the keycaps much better. Green plungers (Stackpole, somewhat rare) are the best of these types. They are all truly mechanical with 'wings' connectors visible. The Mistumi you have are most like the 1200XL keyboard and while finicky have perhaps the best typing experience. The Mitsumi's are the only 800 keyboard with a mylar. The greens plunger Stackpoles also type great too. None of them type poorly ofc. As far as graphics/capabilities it depends on the game. Games native to the 800 can have better graphics than the C64. When a game takes advantages of the hardware of either platform, it will be best on that platform. You'll see a much higher framerate on the 800 for games like Return from Fractalus or The Eidolon or the newly ported games Stunt Car Racer and Total Eclipse. Then look at Yoomp!. They did a C64 version that shows well how there are graphics that the Atari's can do that the C64 can not. But other games that are native to C64 look better on C64 of course too. Atari got a bad port of Commando for example, too. Pitstop II is much better on C64. Paperboy looks great on C64. C64 got music for Ultima IV. They could have added a 64K RAM check for Atari version but no they just completely omitted it. Atari got no Ultima V or VI =( =( Spy vs Spy 1 is native to Atari and the graphics fill the screen better and I think are better (more colorful) on Atari. I even much prefer that game's music on Atari because it has levity and punch. Also I recommend trying Blue Max on Atari and listen to how well the sound effects are done, much better than C64 version. The big plane sprite shows the better sprite engine on C64. Still prefer the A8 version due to sound and color use. The general rule of thumb is that early 80's games will usually be better on Atari 8bits, and later 80's games will be better on C64 either due to bad porting or the exploiting of hardware unique to each machine. Oh check out Gyruss on Atari.. Fantastic music and color that the C64 version lacks, but the C64 version has a better framerate. There is a modern 'bugfix' of Gyruss for A8 but the original version is fine to play too. What you are experiencing is very often true. The Atari machines often work well still to this day. They were built well. The IC's run much cooler (at lower voltages etc) and were likely fabricated to higher standards. The late-era XE machines were built to lesser standards, however. They often still just work but not always. I made a tutorial video on how to use these machines please watch it. You will learn a lot. The first seven minutes are skippable where I cover the hardware ruclips.net/video/mPQzDnaAs0g/видео.html Very, very few people saw 800's in the 70's. It's really an early 80's high-end computer. Very few were available at the Nov '79 launch. Yours was made in the 6th week of 1983 by the date stamp code on yours. God bless you and thank you for the video and I shared your joy in this video and many others of yours too.
If you can get your hands on a Star Raiders cartridge, then you can see how this machine really shines. The history of that game is pretty interesting as well. It slows down in order to calculate the 3D motion of the particles in an explosion. A true 3D game from that era was so far ahead of its time.
What an amazing game that was..!! 🙂 I spent many hours on it back in the early 80s on my original Atari 800....later had an 800XL. Wonderful home computers at the time, although I did envy the C64 SID chip... 😉
@@stevesstuff1450 I also upgraded to an 800XL once my 800 started overheating and crashing all the time. I had an Atari computer during high school and college. Then in 92 I got a Mac.
@@jasonmiller3167 Out of curiosity, did your 800 have those RAM and ROM cards inside plastic covers (looks like cartridges)? The only 800 overheating issue I'm aware of involves those cards. My 800 is one of the later ones with "naked" cards, and it has never had issues with overheating. By that time, all 800s came with 48K RAM standard, so the cards were put in at the factory without the plastic covers (that trapped heat), and the door was screwed shut.
@@rbrtck That was exactly my configuration. My 800 was one of the early production models with the RAM/ROM cartridges. I upgraded it from 16K to 48K soon after getting it. Had I known that was the problem at the time, I would have pulled the cards out of those cartridges myself. Although, the overheating may have damaged some components anyway.
@adriansdigitalbasement I had the same exact issue with the dreaded Mitsumi keyboard. Followed your repair exactly sans I was a able to peel up the membrane without a heat gun. My original Atari 800 from childhood is now working! Thank you so much for your fix video! -- Tom J 😊😊😊
What a pain of a keyboard! My Atari 800 has the square posts with metal contacts. I didn't know how lucky I was! My only keyboard problem is that I'm missing the keycap for the "g" key. Also, when you put the felt in the back with the RAM it reminded me that my 800 had a piece of plastic that went across the top, just like your felt, that held the RAM cards in place! I love your channel, thank you!
I'm still in possession of what is probably the only 16-bit upgrade for an Atari 800. (I strapped a Motorola 68000 into one of the expansion slots and made it sorta go for a Computer Engineering class in 1986 or so.) Doesn't work anymore - pillaged it for chips back in the day, before the whole thing landed in a box that moved with me forever.
I think you nailed it when you said the push part had worn out the membrane pad at that point. And thats why your finger was able to make it work. So moving things around got a fresh piece of pad contact. Basically the membrane is worn out but giving at a bit of clean and maybe a slightly new position seems to be good enough to make it work again. If it does it again, you may need a new membrane. Great to see it working!
I had trouble with these Mitsumi membrane keyboards myself. The white layer you have ripped a little is the contact layer with carbon caps just over the PCB contacts. So first thing one can do is to lift off the membrane/contact layer gently using the heat gun method and then apply IPA with 99.8% purity onto the PCB contacts. The carbon spots can be re-fitted using graphite in a decent amount or, like you did, gently grind off some of the „used“ graphite layer from the rubber domes. This all is quite time-consuming but all worth it considering that these keyboard assemblies are hard to get in a good quality state nowadays, Threat to see this machine working well again! :9
I'm not surprised by the video capability. The Atari 8-bit video chip (CTIA & GTIA) was developed under the direction of Jay Miner, who was also responsible for the Amiga's original chip-set (OCS) graphics.
Great video! My first computer was a VIC-20, my second was an Atari 400 then an Atari 800. All within a year! I miss my 800. It was a fantastic computer! Enjoy it! My 800 keyboard was not the membrane type. Each key has two metal tabs that came together when the keycap was pushed.
When the Atari 400 and 800 came out, I was 15. I wanted the 400 because I thought the keyboard looked cooler. I may have been on to something after watching this video.
On keyboards where the membrane is a double silver, the pads end up with a brown spot. (Oxidized) Dip cotton swab in 99 ipa, shake the excess off, rub gently in circle. On many C64 keyboards or other carbon contact keyboards, the ipa-cotton swab, abrades and turns the shiny (no contact) spots to a fantastic dull (great contact) spot again. The cotton does act as an abrasive, in conjunction with the 99 ipa. I have used the white eraser meant for ink pen erasing. The pink erasers do not work. They worked but were to abrasive for my liking.
Thanks to patron Super Sparky, he pointed me to a PRE-ORDER replacement membrane for this board: www.sellmyretro.com/offer/details/replacement-atari-800-keyboard-membrane-%28mitsumi-56-_7324a%29-pre-_order-38662 No idea if/when it'll get made.
Adrian, the replacement mylars were made. They didn't work. They depress all keys at once. I have two of them. It might be that they need the rubber layer as the Mitsumi. I can send you one if you want one. I did reply in the previous 800 video with the fix that you mostly did here. Very glad you got it working! Read on please. There are at least four types of keyboards for the 800. First the female square-plunger variants. They are true mechanical keyboards. Yellow plungers (stackpole, uncommon or rare to find) are the worst. Keycaps fall out very easily due to plungers cracking with age. White plungers (HiTek, most common) still do crack but they hold the keycaps much better. Green plungers (Stackpole, somewhat rare) are the best of these types. They are all truly mechanical with 'wings' connectors visible when removing the plungers. The Mistumi you have are most like the 1200XL and while finicky have perhaps the best typing experience. The Mitsumi's are the only 800 keyboard with a mylar. The greens plunger Stackpoles also type great too. None of them type poorly ofc. As far as graphics/capabilities it depends on the game. Games native to the 800 can have better graphics than the C64. When a game takes advantages of the hardware of either platform, it will be best on that platform. You'll see a much higher framerate on the 800 for games like Return from Fractalus or The Eidolon or the newly ported games Stunt Car Racer and Total Eclipse. Then look at Yoomp!. They did a C64 version that shows well how there are graphics that the Atari's can do that the C64 can not. But other games that are native to C64 look better on C64 of course too. Atari got a bad port of Commando for example, too. Pitstop II is much better on C64. Paperboy looks great on C64. C64 got music for Ultima IV. They could have added a 64K RAM check for Atari version but no they just completely omitted it. Atari got no Ultima V or VI =( =( Spy vs Spy 1 is native to Atari and the graphics fill the screen better and I think are better (more colorful) on Atari. I even much prefer that game's music on Atari because it has levity and punch. Also I recommend trying Blue Max on Atari and listen to how well the sound effects are done, much better than C64 version. The big plane sprite shows the better sprite engine on C64. Still prefer the A8 version due to sound and color use. The general rule of thumb is that early 80's games will usually be better on Atari 8bits, and later 80's games will be better on C64 either due to bad porting or the exploiting of hardware unique to each machine. Oh check out Gyruss on Atari.. Fantastic music and color that the C64 version lacks, but the C64 version has a better framerate. There is a modern 'bugfix' of Gyruss for A8 but the original version is fine to play too. What you are experiencing is very often true. The Atari machines often work well still to this day. They were built well. The IC's run much cooler (at lower voltages etc) and were likely fabricated to higher standards. The late-era XE machines were built to lesser standards, however. They often still just work but not always. I made a tutorial video on how to use these machines please watch it. You will learn a lot. The first seven minutes are skippable where I cover the hardware ruclips.net/video/mPQzDnaAs0g/видео.html Very, very few people saw 800's in the 70's. It's really an early 80's high-end computer. Very few were available at the Nov '79 launch. Yours was made in the 6th week of 1983 by the date stamp code on yours. God bless you and thank you for the video and I shared your joy in this video and many others of yours too.
Good stuff. The changeable basic cart was very useful. This machine gave me my first experienced when Microsoft. Microsoft BASIC cartridge was available. Though I mostly programmed in A+ BASIC loaded from floppy disk from DOS 2.
This fix would really annoy me, because it feels so temporary and the keyboard will probably fail again at any time. Good thing you figured out the issue though and that it's working for the moment. Hopefully some replacement membranes will become available. Nice video Adrian and cool machine 😊
This is definitely one of the best looking machines of that era. Hard to believe it came out in 1979. Interesting fact: When IBM was looking to enter the personal computing market with the PC, they initially considered buying Atari and remodelling the Atari 800 into the IBM PC! There are images of a design mock-up for this 'IBM PC' - a white machine that is obviously based on the 800 but with subtly different angles to the case. Of course, IBM went a completely different route with their PC but it's interesting to wonder how the home computing market would have been different if they'd instead gone with a modifed Atari 800 as their IBM PC...
My 1983 PAL 800 had a mechanical keyboard. I seem to remember it had a plastic strip across the top of the ram cards with slots in it to hold them stable. Either that, or I made it. My current 600XL has a really nice mechanical keyboard, its smaller than a bread bin, much more practical permanently on my desk than the 800 would be, but no where near as cool or bomb proof. Regarding SID vs POKEY. Both is my answer, POKEY for sound effects, SID for music. POKEY was designed at a time when no games had music, and only arcade games had good effects. It can do good music, especially these days with amazing home-brew coders, but back then, no one had a clue how to use it for good sounding music. There's 2 POKEYs in my 600XL, 8 channels. Someone did a FPGA which had 2 POKEYs, 2 SIDs, and a Yamaha FM synth, for the Atari, but the chip shortage has screwed that up. I love the old sound chips, each machine having a distinctive voice, not all sounding generic. Apart from stuff with AY chips, thats super generic sounding, but can sound good in the right hands. The GTIA generates the clicks for the keyboard, this has been used to produce music too, its a bit 48k spectrum like. On the XL and later models, its mixed into the standard audio output so can be used as another channel.
Yes, the membranes are separate when new. I have dealt with this exact issue on other devices that use the exact same type of keyboard. My fix is to separate the two membranes, then re-paint the carbon conductive paint onto the rubber pads. Always works perfectly after that...I believe the paint actually physically wears out over time.
I'm sure someone probably mentioned this, but those RAM cards are loose like that because they don't have their cases. Atari originally had those RAM cards in plastic cases. But I think it was intentional from Atari. I think they started shipping them that way. Not sure if that was cost savings (if every 800 was going to have full RAM, then no reason to do the RAM card cases) or if there was some heating issue and they started removing the cases to let them breathe? I don't have an 800 myself, but did get a 400 recently. Just love the fact that you look at it and you can feel some 1970's in the design. ;-) Great vid! That was a LOT of work on that keyboard!
In the previous video on the 800, several people mentioned that Atari removed the plastic card cages on the 800 because they caused overheating and premature failure.
Membranes are such a mess. I'm not really sure why the the little black nodes stop working...whether it is dust or debris or they get slick and polished. Alignment is often an issue and like you said, the pcb is usually clean and a bit of alcohol often does the trick. I really, really enjoyed this and I have to admit, I smiled at each step because it just seems like this is the way it goes when these keyboards are being fixed. Good job and glad to see that it's not just me when i am fiddling with this stuff. Very satisfying video!
I commented on the previous video that I had bought an 800 on Ebay where the owner bought a new old stock keyboard. The keyboard indeed was indeed brand new and has the square guides with the metal contacts. Those must be out there available for purchase somewhere. The only problem was that something has shrunk, and the keycaps don't stay in place if you turn the machine upside down. So imagine the mess when it was shipped to me! :) Great job Andrew, and maybe we can find a better keyboard for your 800.
I remember yearning for an Atari computer when I used to hang out at computer stores dreaming of buying - there’s something about the design which makes it as iconic as an Apple ][ as far as I’m concerned. Gee they were great days.
That keyboard speaker is actually a 5th audio voice for the Atari 8-bit! I saw one music demo which used it used as such. BEST Electronics might have the parts you need for replacing the keyboard.
This video reminded me of working on an 800XL keyboard. I had it apart 3 or 4 times before I got it to work. That keyboard is now in the 600XL I bought to use the keyboard out of it. I have since given away the 800XL to my sister-in-law when I learned she had lost her Ataris in their house fire. The 600XL has a sound issue, low and scratchy. I need to try fixing that someday. I have an Atari 165XE that I use when I want to do Atari stuff.
The first keyboard on the Atari 800 felt loose and wobbly, but the late model 800 that I had, like yours, had a very nice keyboard, similar to that on the 1200XL.
Had a similar issue on my alarm keypad at home. I saw a video where you slighty abrasive clean the gold contacts on the PCB, then rub over with IPA. Then the little round rubber bits on the movable membrane section, do the following: Get a soft pencil and rub for a while on a piece of paper (to get a large black graphite shaded area). Then clean 1st with IPA the black rubber round bit and then gently rub it over the graphite shading on your piece of paper (Which is conductive), this sort of coats the black bit with the graphite / lead from the pencil. This seemed to work well on my membrane keypad. Also used the same technique on my cordless phone. Should then last a good few years more.
I have to say that I lusted after the Atari 800... I first had the Atari 2600, then Commodore VIC-20, the C-64. But I still look at the 800 kind-of want one today!
Now that it's all fixed up, that Atari 800 is the most gorgeous Atari 800 I've ever seen. And of course looks way better than any breadbox C= or Apple II. lol
Yeah, the 800's design is fantastic, although the C64 did get a nice and rather sleek makeover. Apple always got acclaim for their case designs, but I sure don't see why.
I actually didn't like the later c64c style (or 128) and prefer the breadbin to it.. but yeah, I'm not sure anything beats the atari 400 and 800 styling (at least not in the mainstream computers)
You could always try conductive paint on those pads if the keyboard quits working again. I had the 48K Atari 800 and I thought it was great. A friend of mine had a C64, too. I always thought the graphics capabilities of the Atari 800 were much nice than the C64 graphics, mostly because the Atari used a display list so you could have, say, 100 lines of graphics, then a few lines of text, or any combination of text and graphics on the screen at the same time. Other systems would require actually drawing text from a bitmap or you'd need to use machine coded interrupts to switch modes during the frame. In any case, the Atari 800 was the machine I really learned to program very well on. Nice to see one on your channel.
I'm not sure conductive paint would work. That might make the mylar fail. It would need a similar carbon coating. Agree the 800 graphics are often better but of course not always. Many other advantages including build quality as Adrian is learning here that the machine 'just works.'
Actually, the C64 can likewise change modes on any scanline, and in multicolor character mode (similar to ANTIC mode 4), it can even switch between multicolor and hi-res modes for each character cell. Perhaps these things were done less frequently on the C64, but it could certainly do these things, thanks to raster interrupts and the attribute map, respectively. Yes, switching modes involves interrupts on the C64 rather than a list, but then again, interrupts were frequently used on the Atari, as well, to do things like change color registers. The key is precise synchronization with the display based on hardware features, and both the Atari and C64 have this capability. Some other systems could do it as a trick based on timing or the CPU busy-waiting, but the C64 did this efficiently based on the current scanline. The main advantage of the Atari graphically is its 128-color (and in some ways 256-color) palette, and the C64's main advantages were its sprite system, more effective use of hi-res (games and applications could and often did operate at twice the horizontal resolution of the Atari), and being able to apply more colors horizontally across the screen at once.
The keyboard and disk/tape access sounds came through the internal speaker, and you could PWM additional sounds through it. It was common to install a toggle switch on the underside to enable/disable the speaker.
The disk IO on the 800 comes through the regular audio channel, not the internal speaker. Love the PWM musics coming out lately but better to hear them on XL/XE machines.
Sort of yes but BREAK will register regardless of how many are pressed and also SHIFT, CONTROL and the four function keys each register independently. There is a one key buffer and that is nearly always sufficient for a good typing speed.
I think the reason that it worked with the finger but not with the keys is that the keys press on the center of the membrane pad, while the finger press the entire pad. The center of the pad lost its conductivity. This is also why offsetting the pcb helped, when the keys now pressed the the pad off center.
I seem to remember the right cartridge used an assembler package that you could develop games and applications in pure machine code and when the programme had been created you saved the finished package onto your storage medium of choice and I do seem to remember there was a way to get EEPROM cartridges but were uber expensive.
As an experiment, you can try placing a piece of masking tape between the keyboard and the membrane. That should change how/when the keys respond, as it will spread the contact around but also decrease the force. Then you might have some insight as to what you can or can't do with the existing membrane. Also, I once described the user experience of a keyboard (for an Amazon review) as "poking a dead squid with a wet, rolled-up newspaper" but the "microwave" keyboard on the 400 makes a chiclet-key Aquarius seem like a luxury item.
Adrian, would you consider a few videos to show some serious applications of these computers ? Many of us who remember them fondly have memories of moms and dads doing some real work like word processing with them.
Yay it's working near 100% 👏Mine is somewhere in a box in the attic along with a 400 that has a modified keyboard. There are a couple of 810 modified "Happy Drives" as well if I remember. I wonder if anyone else here bought and did the Happy Drive mod ?
The Atari XE was my 1st computer (a version of this), and I later got a C64 to replace it. I remember the C64 being so much better in the sound department that I never wanted to go back to the Atari. But the Atari looking back at it now had a slightly better colour graphics display. The real problem with it (for me as a kid), was that a) the number of games for that machine was much much less than the C64, I remember being very dissapointed going into the game store and seeing the very small section for Atari compared to the C64 and other machines. And b) I loaded games from tape and they all took "Ages", i didn't really know it until I got the C64 but it seemed like all the Atari games took much much longer to load from the tape. I remember I had kick off and the tape reels nearly touched in the middle and game loaded "from both sides!!!", I think I only ever loaded that game once and it never actually worked most of the time.
A tidbit about computer history... The Atari 800 & 400 were designed in 1975 but Nolan Bushnell did not have the funds to make them at that time. So taking that idea he created the 2600. He sold Atari to Warner Com. with the promise of releasing the 800 and 400. They did but did do late into 1979. When Atari sold those bare RAM/ROM cards units there was a plastic retainer bar with a groove for each card. It went onto the middle of the bay area and held the cards in place. There should be a 3D printer file for it some where on the net.
I don't think they all had the retainer. I still have my original childhood Atari 800 (meaning no one owned it before me to remove) and it just had the bare cards similar to his. Maybe they stopped bothering at some point or pulled a commodore and ran out of them on some 😃
Good job with getting that keyboard working. I would have been thinking to convert the keyboard to use mechanical switches. Yes, that would be a bit of a project but I would expect better results than with a membrane. The other idea I had was to obtain some carbon domes (like the ones seen on the Atari ST) and use them in place of the top plastic layer.
Personally, I like the POKEY over the SID, though I definitely think these computers are lacking in the music department and feel Atari could have at least added a 2nd POKEY down the line.
Well, they weren't lacking in comparison to most computers back in the day. While I do agree that they could each have used a second POKEY or SID for two-channel stereo and twice the number of voices, in comparison to what was available at the time, they were tops in the sound department. The Apple II's Mockingboard and even more so the Phasor (which was like having two Mockingboards) sound expansion cards did what we're suggesting, but sadly there was hardly any support for them. And even then, I don't think I'd take those AY chips over the POKEY or SID.
@@rbrtck While they were quite groundbreaking at their release in 1979, I feel the Atari 8-bit line was very stagnant for the decade it was on the market. Really, the only thing that ever changed for the line was the amount of RAM, everything else was just a repackaging of the previous computer. Other computers, such as the Apple ][, had many great enhancements down the line, allowing for a computer that has both compatibility to it predecessors and comparability to other powerhouses at the time.
@@moon_fish9390 In the big picture, I don't think any 8-bit system really advanced much, though. The 8-bit era only lasted as long as it did (into the early 1990s) primarily as a low-cost alternative to 16- and 32-bit computers, so the main driving force was to keep their cost down. Atari struggled with this for the whole existence of the 8-bit line. The Apple II came first and captured the hobbyist, small business, and later the school markets, leaving the A8, despite its superior technology in most respects, with the home/family market in competition against Commodore. The latter made a name for themselves with the low price of the VIC-20, and then the C64 challenged the A8 technologically while being significantly cheaper to manufacture. Instead of advancing, Atari was forced to reduce cost, which wasn't easy, given the relatively large amount of LSI silicon that the custom chips required. Most sales of the popular XL series actually lost money for Atari, so except for the 16-bit ST, they were in no position to improve the A8 line. Likewise, Commodore was looking to the future with the Amiga, so there wasn't much improvement in their 8-bit computers after the C64, either. The C128, though often viewed as a failure for some reason, sold plenty of units (in the millions), and successfully improved upon the capabilities of the C64, but it was really a different computer with an excellent C64 compatibility mode that was one of its main selling points. The Apple IIGS, if that's what you had in mind, was even more of a different computer than the C128 was from the C64, and its compatibility was provided by a custom chip that was pretty much a whole Apple IIe in itself. Additionally, although its backwards compatibility was also excellent overall, there were more issues and caveats than with the C128 because it was really a new 16-bit computer rather than an Apple II at all. A similar compatibility chip was used in a card that could be added to the Macintosh later, and that was definitely a different computer. The Apple II, proper, was significantly enhanced over the years, at least before the mid-1980s, but then again it needed so much enhancement. Initially, it didn't even have lowercase characters for its text mode or BASIC with floating point, and although it was designed to be highly expandable, its expansion slots had to be filled with cards to provide capabilities that the Atari and Commodore computers had built in. The only real "killer" enhancement it got was a standard and well-supported 80-column (plus 64K RAM for 128K total) card, which for some reason never happened with the A8 or C64 (except for the C128, which has an 80-column mode). There were some options available, but 80 columns was never much of a thing on those computers: obscure and almost entirely unsupported by software. Once the Apple IIe was released in 1983, however, that was pretty much it for major improvements. The later "Platinum" version would have a built-in numerical keypad (so did the C128), but it was otherwise just an Apple IIe, and like I pointed out, the IIGS was something different entirely (with a IIe built into it). Others might have had to catch up with Atari initially, regarding 8-bit computer technology, but very soon it was a race to the bottom based on price (at least between Atari and Commodore--Apple's prices remained overly high, but they dominated the school market), not a race to the top based on capability--the latter was reserved for 16-bit computers that were already around during the early-to-mid-1980s, and stifled the development of all 8-bit computers, not just the A8.
![Lethal Company Music Video 🎵 "Follow The Orders" [VERSION A]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/QeooZB4Z7RA/mqdefault.jpg)
Hi everyone -- several people pointed to the membrane at Sell My Retro but didn't notice this is for a pre-order with no ETA. May be helpful in the future but isn't at the moment :-) www.sellmyretro.com/offer/details/replacement-atari-800-keyboard-membrane-%28mitsumi-56-_7324a%29-pre-_order-38662
Hi Adrian, Just wanted to say that i enjoy your channel and hope to learn more about electronics and computing by watching you repair microcomputers. Could you perhaps have a short segment listing some of your favorite or preferred books on these subjects ? Hope you can. Thanks.
@@administratorwsv8105 okay pal, you are really rude
@@administratorwsv8105 I'm skeptical of this. Adrian tried really hard to determine whether it was an alignment issue, and wasn't able to get an improvement. Separating the membrane then made a dramatic difference. You'll need to make a better argument to account for these empirical results.
@@HunterZBNS it was definetly not an alignment issue this particular comment is designed to call attention and create controversy.
When you want to look for alignment issues place a piece of “carbon” paper between them, screw them back together and press every key. When you separate them you will see the points where the keyboard is pressing on the board.
GR8T idea. You are truly.. Top Rahman. And who doesn't like that!
I was thinking of dabs of nail polish or some slow drying paint, but your carbon paper ides nails it. I really wanted to see the key points and how well they aligned with the dots.
yep that's what dentists do to properly fit a filling to the corresponding tooth.
The Esc key seems to be working fine, as designed.
The way it works on Atari 8-bits is pressing Esc puts it into a mode to escape the next character for inclusion in a string... so pressing Esc twice first puts it into Escape mode, and the second Esc is actually added as a character in a string. And if you were to do Esc then Up arrow, you'd see an Up Arrow character instead of actually changing the cursor position. Atari used this to do things like clear the screen, move the cursor, line breaks, etc. while outputting a string to the screen, like from a PRINT statement in a BASIC program. To clear the screen, for example, you'd enter: 10 PRINT ", then press Esc then Clear, then close the ".
Esc was a double press to get something on the screen
Sounds similar to ANSI terminal escape codes. Wonder how much overlap there is.
Right. On the Commodore an open quotation mark or the INSert key would cause special characters to show up as an inverse video symbol; ESC is like Atari's version of that. So Esc by itself doesn't show anything, but Esc twice prints the "Esc" symbol.
@@absalomdraconis Atari had its own version of ASCII called ATASCII. there are similar characters to ansi, but also very different characters.
One of the things I did the most with my Atari was a small program that worked similar to this. You would enter characters in to move around the screen and change things, and it would record the entire key sequence and then you could save that to a file, then if you loaded the file it would play the whole thing back as an animation.
if you want to see a game that was ahead of its time, get a Star Raiders cartridge, a 3D shoot-em-up based vaguely on the old Star Trek games from mainframe days, but with first person pursuit and battle, with shifting star fields and enemies that dart backwards and forwards around you while you try to shoot them down. Considering it was written in the late 70's when I first saw it I was transfixed and used to hang around the computer shop waiting for my turn to play it! It's not the best game that was ever made for the Atari, but it was the best of the first games made for it and still my favorite to play. It played like an arcade game at a time most home computers couldn't hope to do so.
I play Star Raiders a few times a week on my 800. Amazing experience for 1979.
Playing Star Raiders on a 400 made me want an Atari back then, went for the newer 800XL later :-)
The internal speaker also generates the system beep, for example if you press Ctrl-2 or type PRINT CHR$(253).
and booting sounds too iirc, which is useful for troubleshooting. or just knowing if you forget to close the floppy drive. :3
@@iceowl the booting sound is actually generated by POKEY.
The 800 is absolutely on my “grail” list. Great to see it all up and running again 👍
good luck on that, its the model in the family that most people want by name and it seems to be on the rarer side with relatively few being available at any point in time, took me months on mine and i had to go for a nonworking one to get it at all, granted it was an easy fix but still
LOL - I've got an (my) Atari 800 I bought as a teenager still in a cupboard! Who knew they would become a collectors item!
@@nickolaswilcox425 eBay seems to always have some floating around for sale. They're on the more expensive side (not being sold for just $20 bucks anymore) but they're still pretty easy to get a hold of if you want one.
@@shamrice that wasnt so much the case when i went looking so my perspective might be a tad off, but when i was looking there were only 2 or 3 and all on auction with too much time left and a bidding war already in motion so no way in hell i was gonna try for them, plus i dont generally pay a collector price for my systems and make every effort to avoid it
mine i managed to grab for around 100 and had it back to working order about a day after getting it
I found mine at a garage sale for $80.00 with aftermarket printer and disk drive tons of programs and books
Great job! It reminds me how I fix ZX Spectrum +2 membranes by taking them out and rolling them into a tube. It seems pretty similar except that here instead of being two layers of plastic, it's just one layer making contact against a PCB. But the solution seems to be the same: To unstick one layer from the other.
Missing your content. I hope you've moved homes by now!
@@JimmyCall - Same, Noel! :)
ESC key is fine - you have to press it twice to see the ESC character, otherwise ESC + another key provides a second function. Great job on repair.
My first Atari computer was the Atari 400, but one of the first things I did was replace the keyboard with an after market mechanical keyboard and expanded the RAM. Later I bought an Atari 130XE form a friend... it had been hacked to run 512K (big ram disk) and with that and seven floppy drives (not Atari drives and Lambda power supplies for everything, including the computer). I ran a BBS on it for several years. I eventually ended up with a 1040 ST and for a while, I was one of the Atari Sysops on Compuserve. It was a fun time.
Good job on the keyboard fix. That Mitsumi keyboard design is very, very similar to the 1200XL keyboard, though on that particular model, one of the most common ways for them to fail is at that contact strip toward the bottom. The carbon traces get diffused and embedded into some tape material Mitsumi used between the silicone insulator layer and the traces. On the 1200XL, the “canonical” fix is to remove the old paper tape over that contact strip and repaint those traces with carbon conductive paint, then reassemble. I’ve done two of my 1200XLs with that fix several years ago and they still work great - it’s slow and tedious to disassemble those keyboards and remove the silicone layer to access that contact strip, but it’s worth it.
Actually Dell, HP, Intel keyboards have this same construction. However when working on the newer keyboards, the film layers just come apart if there is no liquid spilled inside the keyboard. The company I worked for would that refurbished computers would also refurbish the keyboards as well. We would take the keyboard completely apart, clean the keys, clean each layer of the membranes and put it back together. Ones that wouldn't work previously would work perfectly afterwards.
Atari 800, the father of the Amiga thanks to Jay Miner's genius.
The amount of metal in those machines was amazing, and while every single youtuber fails to mention it, the cartridges too have metal!
I don't know if anyone has mentioned this yet but the Atari 2600 and 8-bit computer line was done by Jay Miner who also did the Amiga so the Atari 800 has a lot in common with the later Amiga as you mentioned the 800's 256 color palette along with the Amiga. I love my 800 and it outputs very clear RF and Composite. Thanks for the video, as I have yet to have a keyboard issue on mine but now I know what to expect!
Watching Adrian's videos is an exercise in being shamed for how impatient you are compared to him.
I'd have thrown that thing across the room about 10 minutes in.
Congrats on getting it working at all.
It has been 20+ years ago, but I rebuilt a Mitsumi membrane using an X-acto knife, a paper hole punch, signage vinyl, copper tracing bodge wire, Avery hole reinforcements, and the power of OCD. It worked, but I cannot recommend my method. It was two weeks of my life that could have been better spent.
Atari's were my first computers -- I had an 800XL and a 130XE. I normally really enjoy your content, but these videos have been something special to me. Thank you for making them!
Same. And then the 300 baud modem that launched my software piracy career 😂
@@sideburn 1030 or XM301?
@@anthonyferguson7158 1030... And my home brewed BASIC ATT credit card phreaking app + a Happy 1050 drive and i was the neighborhood pirate king LOL
@@sideburn I started with a 1030 and an 800XL myself and ran a BBS in GA from 1984-2000. :) I had a few US Doubler 1050s as well and dabbled with PBXs and phreaking. Yeah, I had a few private sections for my friends too, and people knew where they could find a bit of everything...hehe! Good times. Wish I hadn't given my drives and 800XL away. I still have a good number of the floppies.
@@anthonyferguson7158 wow that’s a long run all the way to 2000! I still have a lot of my original floppies. Unfortunately the ones with my programs I wrote are all unreadable. I just recently fixed my 800xl, 130xe, and 1050. Do you happen to remember a BBS called Gecko in California? His was pretty popular but I haven’t t been able to find any info on it. He was a friend of mine in the neighborhood. Always wondered what happened to him.
One of my first hustles was taking all the PET and C-64 computers from my high school home for the summer and cleaning and repairing them. I came up with a keyboard repair that works to this day. I would take the keyboards apart and clean the carbon contacts and rubber plungers with a white gummy eraser and 70% Isopropyl alcohol and reassemble them. They worked flawlessly for the next school year. A great way to earn a few hundred bucks towards Electronics Engineering school when I graduated.
I had a similar situation on the Atari 130. I tighten the screws, it stops working. Relax - it works. As a result, I put spacers between the membrane and the case - everything works well
I came here to say this. When I was fixing my 600xl I found the same. If the screws are over tightened then the keyboard won't work.
Built like a tank, except for the keyboard membrane. Nice to see the machine fixed. It's a looker.
I have an 800xl that was stored under leaky batteries and I have three episodes when I get it working, one episode was just on the keyboard pcb, I never saw anything like it.
You did a wonderful job! I love seeing old tech getting repaired, it feels like paying respect to the people who spent hundreds if not thousands of hours into developing and engineering it an writing games and programs for it. I also wonder how many Atari 800s or machines with similar keyboards ended up in the trash that could've been relativ easily been repaired like this one.
Also worth mentioning: Half a year ago I've found an old Linux game from 2007, called "wordwarvi" (yes, without l...), that is still available in some repositories. It looks, feels and sounds very similar to Atari's "Defender".
The later Atari 800's that didn't have the ram pcb covers had a spacer that kept the boards in line. Pictured here: i.imgur.com/gzOpxgb.jpeg
As others have said, that's how the escape key is supposed to work. Twice to get the Esc character.
Making the surface of carbon membrane rougher through light sanding is a great way to remove the shiny/sheen and stickiness of keyboard keys/TV remote buttons.
The Atari 8 bitters were well ahead of their time and even stayed technologically relevant long after.
Atari designed so much power in at the start that they were still superior to most 8-bit machines even as the 16-bit era began.
@@dunebasher1971 The PC never convinced me to move away from my Atari 8 bit till the 486.... even then I loved my 8 bit and ST more. However, I could not play Doom or Wolf 3D on those.
You probably won't see this but here is a cheap and easy fix, get 2.5mm(?) heat shrink tubing, cut in approx. 2mm "cylinders" and put over the "nubs", alot of cutting to be sure but not bad. I fixed two 1200XL and 1 TI-99/4a keyboards this way, it works. I think the sizes are right, I made the video a long time ago about this.
As I watched, your trials and tribulations reminded me of the fail ing U.S. torpedoes at the beginning of WW2. Each failed keystroke was equivalent to an individually failed launched torpedo. You did well. Took them ~2yrs.
I've always had great success using the eraser on the end of a pencil to clean membrane keyboard component and even pcb card slot contacts.
You're better off using a Mars plastic eraser, they don't leave residue like a pink pearl.
Well done. I guess you found out the Escape key is working like it is supposed to. All good wishes!
Fascinating stuff, and very methodical. Great presentation, and awesome fix.
I used to hack on the Atari 400 in high school, and eventually the 800, and then, in college the Amiga 500. The Atari was always my favorite because I mastered 6502 machine language and the Atari memory mapping first.
When you insert a cartridge it memory maps it to an area where there is no RAM. Maximum RAM was 48Kbytes, on 3 cards of 16K each. The cartridge(s) would map above that to complete the 64K of addressable space.
One third-party created a cartridge where half was permanently mapped, and have was switched as needed between multiple banks IN that cartridge so they could fit more in less. Another third-party created a cartridge where the R/W could be enabled via a toggle switch on top... so one bypassed the "open case shutoff" like you did and keep the lid open... load up a "disk loader", browse the disk for saved cartridges, load it up, set R/W to no W, and reset to run your new "cartridge." To save to disk, run the loader, remove the pseudo-cartridge-with-toggle, then *QUICKLY* insert the real cartridge hoping it won't fry some logic somewhere, and then save to disk. Brilliant.
The system bios(lowercase) checked if it could write to a particular memory space. Yes meant it was RAM. No meant it was a cartridge and it would jump to a particular address to execute.
Copy protection on floppies (yeah, 5.25") was done by the application checking if it could read a particular sector. On a copied floppy it could, and it would refuse to run the copy. On the original, the factory had put "bad sectors" which would not load. In time we figured out how to make the copy, then change the fdd speed and write the bad sectors (from a sector map utility) and that worked too.
The original 400/800 shipped with the CTIA chip, which was Atari VCS style graphics capable (later renamed to 2600 when the 5200 came out) and it was eventually replaced by the GTIA, which supported more simultaneous colors per scanline and more sprites. That was a user-serviceable replacement, a far cry from today's copyright-excuse anti right-to-repair world.
If it wasn't for learning 6502 I never would have graduated to learning VAX-11, became a VMS hacker, and gained the perspective of how hardware works, including CPUs, opcodes, registers, memory-mapping, virtual memory (hence my note about that third-party cartridge), etc.
Good times. Thanks for the memories, the video, and congratulations.
Ehud Gavron
Tucson AZ
I'm pretty sure that cartridges (in the left slot on the 800) actually map to $A000, which is at the 40K mark. You have to remove the cartridge in order to use the 8K of RAM that it displaces. Above 48K is the OS ROM (and extra space reserved for future OS expansion, which the XL and XE series utilize) and I/O memory map.
The CTIA chip is *not* the same as the TIA chip used in the VCS/2600. It has all of the 400/800's graphics modes and sprites except for the three that would later be called the "GTIA modes", which are GRAPHICS 9, 10, and 11. The GTIA chip also corrects the misalignment between background and player-missile graphics (sprites), which has the side-effect of reversing the artifact colors in the hi-res (320x192) mode (GRAPHICS 8). The GTIA chip only adds some modes that allow more colors to be placed horizontally across the screen (albeit with only 80 pixels of resolution), it does not change any other modes or add any sprites.
With mine just cleaning the actual PCB with isopropanol did the trick, and I was also lucky that the foil could be removed without help of heat. Thanks for encouraging me for giving it a try after all :)
My uncle had an Atari 800 that he bought in '79 or '80, I forget precisely when, as I was only a kid, 9 or 10 years old. I remember playing a game called Star Raiders on it -- really enjoyable.
This was my second computer. I had an Atari 400 that I gave to my cousin and she used that for ages when I upgraded to the Atari 800 which I added memory boards to. I think there's something missing on your memory cards. From what my old brain says to me is there was a pressure bar or something to hold those PCBs in place but I might be mistaken on that. Heck, it's been 40-plus years now.
If it wasn't for the Atari 800 and Atari BASIC, I would never have been interested in computers. I had built electronic kits from Radio Shack, but it was my Atari 800 that introduced me into programming. I learned Atari BASIC inside and out and wrote a few programs at the time. When it came time to take college classes, I took some programming classes. I had the understanding behind me of BASIC before I took the class. Remember, this was the 1980s and BASIC was considered a real language back then. In the end, I chose hardware engineering and ended up as a hardware tech instead, but the Atari was the kernel of it all.
I was an absolute Atari 400/800 fan. Please show more of these videos! Your videos are so informative!
Hi Adrian, Best Electronics in San Jose, CA is an operational exclusive Atari Computer Dealer. I bought a new keyboard membrane from him for my 800xl as well as rebuildable power supplies for both the XL and 1050 5.25" drive. He has thousands of parts/components.
Alas, Best Electronics doesn't. They've had upgraded replacement keyboard membranes made for every Atari keyboard except for the Atari 800 Mitsumi made keyboard. Best estimates that only 1% of the production run utilized this due to its extremely high failure rate and only receives a request for a replacement about once a decade, making producing a replacement obviously not cost effective.
Had Adrian not managed to get this going again, likely the only replacement would've been cannibalizing a better keyboard off of a parts machine to swap into this 800.
Ahh thanks for the clarification. I felt lucky to have found them as I actually was able to order an entire keyboard with the upgraded membrane from them, they were great to deal with!
@@jlg001-o8o Yeah, Best Electronics is a huge asset for the Atari community and I suspect will prove very useful to Adrian if he continues to dive into these classic Atari machines.
since Adrian works in IT security, i doubt he'll love their "email us your credit card" aspect.... Haha... (Yeah, they sorta do take paypal now for additional cost and restrictions)
@@brianv2871 One could always use one of those temporary credit cards you can buy at the checkout aisle at places like Walmart, that only has whatever funds you've loaded it up with.
Looking forward to seeing what you do with the Atari 8bit family of computers. I recently started my own first time exploration of this line with a 400, 800XL, XEGS, and 130XE. Coming from the Commodore clan it’s interesting to finally see the competition from back in the day.
I received a TI-99/4a today with a Mitsumi keyboard with problems, so I came back to this video.
Using a fiberglass scratch pen to clean up the pads made it easier.
It freakin works!
Great that you were able to get the keyboard working. It's always kewl when one obtains their objective and can see positive results of their labors. Nice job!
You probably won't want to unplug the internal speaker because some games (and maybe some other applications) use it for sound effects, especially ones that are ported from the Apple II, which has a similar speaker. One example that springs to mind is the _Ultima_ series of RPG games.
And yes, the 800XL and later models lack the internal speaker, and route its output through the TV/monitor instead.
I’ve had three of these over the years because the space bar keeps going out on them. It’s easily my hands-down favorite retro gaming machine.
Same issue happens on the 1200XL. I found that pressing down all the keys many times brings them back to life.
There is an Atari parts company called Best Electronics that is near the Atari warehouse in Sunnyvale. The people at Best have replacement parts and keyboards for all Atari systems except the one keyboard you had issues with! They only get one request about every 10 years for replacement Mylar for those late in production run 800s. The only options I am aware of are to clean and if necessary recoat the contact points and bad traces with liquid silver pen or nickel print paints, or purchase a cartridge which provides a USB connection and plug in a USB keyboard. You will need to drill a notch in the cartridge door for the USB cable (ugh!) You were fortunate to make it work!
I work at recycle center in the computer dept. I found one of these exact machines just thrown in the pile, asked my boss if I could have it and he said I could. Took it home and plugged it in and it worked perfectly, I didn't have to fiddle with it at all. Constructed like a tank, it's missing a few keycaps and I only have pole position for it, at some point I need to decide what to get so I can load software on it.
Adrian, the replacement mylars were made. They didn't work. They depress all keys at once. I have two of them. It might be that they need the rubber layer as the Mitsumi. I can send you one if you want one. I did reply in the previous 800 video with the fix that you mostly did here. Very glad you got it working! Read on please.
There are at least four types of keyboards for the 800. First the female square-plunger variants. They are true mechanical keyboards. Yellow plungers (stackpole, uncommon or rare to find) are the worst. Keycaps fall out very easily due to plungers cracking with age. White plungers (HiTek, most common) still do crack but they hold the keycaps much better. Green plungers (Stackpole, somewhat rare) are the best of these types. They are all truly mechanical with 'wings' connectors visible.
The Mistumi you have are most like the 1200XL keyboard and while finicky have perhaps the best typing experience. The Mitsumi's are the only 800 keyboard with a mylar. The greens plunger Stackpoles also type great too. None of them type poorly ofc.
As far as graphics/capabilities it depends on the game. Games native to the 800 can have better graphics than the C64. When a game takes advantages of the hardware of either platform, it will be best on that platform. You'll see a much higher framerate on the 800 for games like Return from Fractalus or The Eidolon or the newly ported games Stunt Car Racer and Total Eclipse. Then look at Yoomp!. They did a C64 version that shows well how there are graphics that the Atari's can do that the C64 can not.
But other games that are native to C64 look better on C64 of course too. Atari got a bad port of Commando for example, too. Pitstop II is much better on C64. Paperboy looks great on C64. C64 got music for Ultima IV. They could have added a 64K RAM check for Atari version but no they just completely omitted it. Atari got no Ultima V or VI =( =(
Spy vs Spy 1 is native to Atari and the graphics fill the screen better and I think are better (more colorful) on Atari. I even much prefer that game's music on Atari because it has levity and punch. Also I recommend trying Blue Max on Atari and listen to how well the sound effects are done, much better than C64 version. The big plane sprite shows the better sprite engine on C64. Still prefer the A8 version due to sound and color use.
The general rule of thumb is that early 80's games will usually be better on Atari 8bits, and later 80's games will be better on C64 either due to bad porting or the exploiting of hardware unique to each machine.
Oh check out Gyruss on Atari.. Fantastic music and color that the C64 version lacks, but the C64 version has a better framerate. There is a modern 'bugfix' of Gyruss for A8 but the original version is fine to play too.
What you are experiencing is very often true. The Atari machines often work well still to this day. They were built well. The IC's run much cooler (at lower voltages etc) and were likely fabricated to higher standards. The late-era XE machines were built to lesser standards, however. They often still just work but not always.
I made a tutorial video on how to use these machines please watch it. You will learn a lot. The first seven minutes are skippable where I cover the hardware ruclips.net/video/mPQzDnaAs0g/видео.html
Very, very few people saw 800's in the 70's. It's really an early 80's high-end computer. Very few were available at the Nov '79 launch. Yours was made in the 6th week of 1983 by the date stamp code on yours.
God bless you and thank you for the video and I shared your joy in this video and many others of yours too.
If you can get your hands on a Star Raiders cartridge, then you can see how this machine really shines. The history of that game is pretty interesting as well. It slows down in order to calculate the 3D motion of the particles in an explosion. A true 3D game from that era was so far ahead of its time.
What an amazing game that was..!! 🙂
I spent many hours on it back in the early 80s on my original Atari 800....later had an 800XL.
Wonderful home computers at the time, although I did envy the C64 SID chip... 😉
@@stevesstuff1450 I also upgraded to an 800XL once my 800 started overheating and crashing all the time. I had an Atari computer during high school and college. Then in 92 I got a Mac.
@@jasonmiller3167 Out of curiosity, did your 800 have those RAM and ROM cards inside plastic covers (looks like cartridges)? The only 800 overheating issue I'm aware of involves those cards. My 800 is one of the later ones with "naked" cards, and it has never had issues with overheating. By that time, all 800s came with 48K RAM standard, so the cards were put in at the factory without the plastic covers (that trapped heat), and the door was screwed shut.
@@rbrtck That was exactly my configuration. My 800 was one of the early production models with the RAM/ROM cartridges. I upgraded it from 16K to 48K soon after getting it. Had I known that was the problem at the time, I would have pulled the cards out of those cartridges myself. Although, the overheating may have damaged some components anyway.
@@jasonmiller3167 That probably was the problem your 800 had. There are plenty of things I know now that I wish I had known back then, too.
@adriansdigitalbasement I had the same exact issue with the dreaded Mitsumi keyboard. Followed your repair exactly sans I was a able to peel up the membrane without a heat gun. My original Atari 800 from childhood is now working! Thank you so much for your fix video! -- Tom J 😊😊😊
What a pain of a keyboard! My Atari 800 has the square posts with metal contacts. I didn't know how lucky I was! My only keyboard problem is that I'm missing the keycap for the "g" key.
Also, when you put the felt in the back with the RAM it reminded me that my 800 had a piece of plastic that went across the top, just like your felt, that held the RAM cards in place!
I love your channel, thank you!
I'm still in possession of what is probably the only 16-bit upgrade for an Atari 800. (I strapped a Motorola 68000 into one of the expansion slots and made it sorta go for a Computer Engineering class in 1986 or so.) Doesn't work anymore - pillaged it for chips back in the day, before the whole thing landed in a box that moved with me forever.
I think you nailed it when you said the push part had worn out the membrane pad at that point. And thats why your finger was able to make it work. So moving things around got a fresh piece of pad contact. Basically the membrane is worn out but giving at a bit of clean and maybe a slightly new position seems to be good enough to make it work again. If it does it again, you may need a new membrane. Great to see it working!
I had trouble with these Mitsumi membrane keyboards myself. The white layer you have ripped a little is the contact layer with carbon caps just over the PCB contacts. So first thing one can do is to lift off the membrane/contact layer gently using the heat gun method and then apply IPA with 99.8% purity onto the PCB contacts. The carbon spots can be re-fitted using graphite in a decent amount or, like you did, gently grind off some of the „used“ graphite layer from the rubber domes.
This all is quite time-consuming but all worth it considering that these keyboard assemblies are hard to get in a good quality state nowadays,
Threat to see this machine working well again! :9
I'm not surprised by the video capability. The Atari 8-bit video chip (CTIA & GTIA) was developed under the direction of Jay Miner, who was also responsible for the Amiga's original chip-set (OCS) graphics.
Great video! My first computer was a VIC-20, my second was an Atari 400 then an Atari 800. All within a year! I miss my 800. It was a fantastic computer! Enjoy it! My 800 keyboard was not the membrane type. Each key has two metal tabs that came together when the keycap was pushed.
When the Atari 400 and 800 came out, I was 15. I wanted the 400 because I thought the keyboard looked cooler. I may have been on to something after watching this video.
On keyboards where the membrane is a double silver, the pads end up with a brown spot. (Oxidized) Dip cotton swab in 99 ipa, shake the excess off, rub gently in circle. On many C64 keyboards or other carbon contact keyboards, the ipa-cotton swab, abrades and turns the shiny (no contact) spots to a fantastic dull (great contact) spot again. The cotton does act as an abrasive, in conjunction with the 99 ipa. I have used the white eraser meant for ink pen erasing. The pink erasers do not work. They worked but were to abrasive for my liking.
Thanks to patron Super Sparky, he pointed me to a PRE-ORDER replacement membrane for this board: www.sellmyretro.com/offer/details/replacement-atari-800-keyboard-membrane-%28mitsumi-56-_7324a%29-pre-_order-38662
No idea if/when it'll get made.
Adrian, the replacement mylars were made. They didn't work. They depress all keys at once. I have two of them. It might be that they need the rubber layer as the Mitsumi. I can send you one if you want one. I did reply in the previous 800 video with the fix that you mostly did here. Very glad you got it working! Read on please.
There are at least four types of keyboards for the 800. First the female square-plunger variants. They are true mechanical keyboards. Yellow plungers (stackpole, uncommon or rare to find) are the worst. Keycaps fall out very easily due to plungers cracking with age. White plungers (HiTek, most common) still do crack but they hold the keycaps much better. Green plungers (Stackpole, somewhat rare) are the best of these types. They are all truly mechanical with 'wings' connectors visible when removing the plungers.
The Mistumi you have are most like the 1200XL and while finicky have perhaps the best typing experience. The Mitsumi's are the only 800 keyboard with a mylar. The greens plunger Stackpoles also type great too. None of them type poorly ofc.
As far as graphics/capabilities it depends on the game. Games native to the 800 can have better graphics than the C64. When a game takes advantages of the hardware of either platform, it will be best on that platform. You'll see a much higher framerate on the 800 for games like Return from Fractalus or The Eidolon or the newly ported games Stunt Car Racer and Total Eclipse. Then look at Yoomp!. They did a C64 version that shows well how there are graphics that the Atari's can do that the C64 can not.
But other games that are native to C64 look better on C64 of course too. Atari got a bad port of Commando for example, too. Pitstop II is much better on C64. Paperboy looks great on C64. C64 got music for Ultima IV. They could have added a 64K RAM check for Atari version but no they just completely omitted it. Atari got no Ultima V or VI =( =(
Spy vs Spy 1 is native to Atari and the graphics fill the screen better and I think are better (more colorful) on Atari. I even much prefer that game's music on Atari because it has levity and punch. Also I recommend trying Blue Max on Atari and listen to how well the sound effects are done, much better than C64 version. The big plane sprite shows the better sprite engine on C64. Still prefer the A8 version due to sound and color use.
The general rule of thumb is that early 80's games will usually be better on Atari 8bits, and later 80's games will be better on C64 either due to bad porting or the exploiting of hardware unique to each machine.
Oh check out Gyruss on Atari.. Fantastic music and color that the C64 version lacks, but the C64 version has a better framerate. There is a modern 'bugfix' of Gyruss for A8 but the original version is fine to play too.
What you are experiencing is very often true. The Atari machines often work well still to this day. They were built well. The IC's run much cooler (at lower voltages etc) and were likely fabricated to higher standards. The late-era XE machines were built to lesser standards, however. They often still just work but not always.
I made a tutorial video on how to use these machines please watch it. You will learn a lot. The first seven minutes are skippable where I cover the hardware ruclips.net/video/mPQzDnaAs0g/видео.html
Very, very few people saw 800's in the 70's. It's really an early 80's high-end computer. Very few were available at the Nov '79 launch. Yours was made in the 6th week of 1983 by the date stamp code on yours.
God bless you and thank you for the video and I shared your joy in this video and many others of yours too.
26:50 And just like that, I was brought back to my childhood with the hand-me-down Atari 800 I had.
Good stuff. The changeable basic cart was very useful. This machine gave me my first experienced when Microsoft. Microsoft BASIC cartridge was available. Though I mostly programmed in A+ BASIC loaded from floppy disk from DOS 2.
This fix would really annoy me, because it feels so temporary and the keyboard will probably fail again at any time. Good thing you figured out the issue though and that it's working for the moment. Hopefully some replacement membranes will become available. Nice video Adrian and cool machine 😊
This is definitely one of the best looking machines of that era. Hard to believe it came out in 1979.
Interesting fact: When IBM was looking to enter the personal computing market with the PC, they initially considered buying Atari and remodelling the Atari 800 into the IBM PC! There are images of a design mock-up for this 'IBM PC' - a white machine that is obviously based on the 800 but with subtly different angles to the case.
Of course, IBM went a completely different route with their PC but it's interesting to wonder how the home computing market would have been different if they'd instead gone with a modifed Atari 800 as their IBM PC...
My 1983 PAL 800 had a mechanical keyboard. I seem to remember it had a plastic strip across the top of the ram cards with slots in it to hold them stable. Either that, or I made it. My current 600XL has a really nice mechanical keyboard, its smaller than a bread bin, much more practical permanently on my desk than the 800 would be, but no where near as cool or bomb proof. Regarding SID vs POKEY. Both is my answer, POKEY for sound effects, SID for music. POKEY was designed at a time when no games had music, and only arcade games had good effects. It can do good music, especially these days with amazing home-brew coders, but back then, no one had a clue how to use it for good sounding music. There's 2 POKEYs in my 600XL, 8 channels. Someone did a FPGA which had 2 POKEYs, 2 SIDs, and a Yamaha FM synth, for the Atari, but the chip shortage has screwed that up. I love the old sound chips, each machine having a distinctive voice, not all sounding generic. Apart from stuff with AY chips, thats super generic sounding, but can sound good in the right hands. The GTIA generates the clicks for the keyboard, this has been used to produce music too, its a bit 48k spectrum like. On the XL and later models, its mixed into the standard audio output so can be used as another channel.
Yes, the membranes are separate when new. I have dealt with this exact issue on other devices that use the exact same type of keyboard. My fix is to separate the two membranes, then re-paint the carbon conductive paint onto the rubber pads. Always works perfectly after that...I believe the paint actually physically wears out over time.
The raised nubs on the PCBs are known as Mouse Bites and are where the pcbs are joined together as big panels during the manufacturing process.
I'm sure someone probably mentioned this, but those RAM cards are loose like that because they don't have their cases. Atari originally had those RAM cards in plastic cases. But I think it was intentional from Atari. I think they started shipping them that way. Not sure if that was cost savings (if every 800 was going to have full RAM, then no reason to do the RAM card cases) or if there was some heating issue and they started removing the cases to let them breathe?
I don't have an 800 myself, but did get a 400 recently. Just love the fact that you look at it and you can feel some 1970's in the design. ;-)
Great vid! That was a LOT of work on that keyboard!
In the previous video on the 800, several people mentioned that Atari removed the plastic card cages on the 800 because they caused overheating and premature failure.
@@brentboswell1294 I figured it was something like that. Thanks.
Membranes are such a mess. I'm not really sure why the the little black nodes stop working...whether it is dust or debris or they get slick and polished. Alignment is often an issue and like you said, the pcb is usually clean and a bit of alcohol often does the trick. I really, really enjoyed this and I have to admit, I smiled at each step because it just seems like this is the way it goes when these keyboards are being fixed. Good job and glad to see that it's not just me when i am fiddling with this stuff. Very satisfying video!
I'm really liking these somewhat longer videos where you spend some time fixing things.
I commented on the previous video that I had bought an 800 on Ebay where the owner bought a new old stock keyboard. The keyboard indeed was indeed brand new and has the square guides with the metal contacts. Those must be out there available for purchase somewhere. The only problem was that something has shrunk, and the keycaps don't stay in place if you turn the machine upside down. So imagine the mess when it was shipped to me! :) Great job Andrew, and maybe we can find a better keyboard for your 800.
I totally forgot what the sound of the speaker was. When you demoed it at the end my memories from jr high came back.lol awesome.
What an amazingly frustrating problem to encounter! Old keyboards are definitely finickey (yes, that was intentional)
I remember yearning for an Atari computer when I used to hang out at computer stores dreaming of buying - there’s something about the design which makes it as iconic as an Apple ][ as far as I’m concerned. Gee they were great days.
Excellent video, as always. I am glad that your perseverance paid off, and the keyboard is now fully functional.
That keyboard speaker is actually a 5th audio voice for the Atari 8-bit! I saw one music demo which used it used as such.
BEST Electronics might have the parts you need for replacing the keyboard.
Unfortunately, BEST doesn't yet have the 800's mistumi mylar, only for the 1200. Wouldn't take much to adapt it!
This video reminded me of working on an 800XL keyboard. I had it apart 3 or 4 times before I got it to work. That keyboard is now in the 600XL I bought to use the keyboard out of it. I have since given away the 800XL to my sister-in-law when I learned she had lost her Ataris in their house fire. The 600XL has a sound issue, low and scratchy. I need to try fixing that someday. I have an Atari 165XE that I use when I want to do Atari stuff.
There is a small audio amplifier chip that you may need to clean and re-seat or maybe replace. It's six pins if I recall correctly.
@@gamedoutgamer Thanks. I figure either that or one of the capacitors around it. Hopefully not the Pokey chip.
The first keyboard on the Atari 800 felt loose and wobbly, but the late model 800 that I had, like yours, had a very nice keyboard, similar to that on the 1200XL.
With an original Atari 800, it's definitely time to play M.U.L.E. with four players :-)
Had a similar issue on my alarm keypad at home. I saw a video where you slighty abrasive clean the gold contacts on the PCB, then rub over with IPA. Then the little round rubber bits on the movable membrane section, do the following: Get a soft pencil and rub for a while on a piece of paper (to get a large black graphite shaded area). Then clean 1st with IPA the black rubber round bit and then gently rub it over the graphite shading on your piece of paper (Which is conductive), this sort of coats the black bit with the graphite / lead from the pencil. This seemed to work well on my membrane keypad. Also used the same technique on my cordless phone. Should then last a good few years more.
I have to say that I lusted after the Atari 800... I first had the Atari 2600, then Commodore VIC-20, the C-64. But I still look at the 800 kind-of want one today!
Now that it's all fixed up, that Atari 800 is the most gorgeous Atari 800 I've ever seen. And of course looks way better than any breadbox C= or Apple II. lol
Yeah, the 800's design is fantastic, although the C64 did get a nice and rather sleek makeover. Apple always got acclaim for their case designs, but I sure don't see why.
I actually didn't like the later c64c style (or 128) and prefer the breadbin to it.. but yeah, I'm not sure anything beats the atari 400 and 800 styling (at least not in the mainstream computers)
Awesome, glad you got it working.
You could always try conductive paint on those pads if the keyboard quits working again.
I had the 48K Atari 800 and I thought it was great. A friend of mine had a C64, too. I always thought the graphics capabilities of the Atari 800 were much nice than the C64 graphics, mostly because the Atari used a display list so you could have, say, 100 lines of graphics, then a few lines of text, or any combination of text and graphics on the screen at the same time. Other systems would require actually drawing text from a bitmap or you'd need to use machine coded interrupts to switch modes during the frame. In any case, the Atari 800 was the machine I really learned to program very well on. Nice to see one on your channel.
yeah conductive paint works great for carbon contacts
I'm not sure conductive paint would work. That might make the mylar fail. It would need a similar carbon coating. Agree the 800 graphics are often better but of course not always. Many other advantages including build quality as Adrian is learning here that the machine 'just works.'
Actually, the C64 can likewise change modes on any scanline, and in multicolor character mode (similar to ANTIC mode 4), it can even switch between multicolor and hi-res modes for each character cell. Perhaps these things were done less frequently on the C64, but it could certainly do these things, thanks to raster interrupts and the attribute map, respectively.
Yes, switching modes involves interrupts on the C64 rather than a list, but then again, interrupts were frequently used on the Atari, as well, to do things like change color registers. The key is precise synchronization with the display based on hardware features, and both the Atari and C64 have this capability. Some other systems could do it as a trick based on timing or the CPU busy-waiting, but the C64 did this efficiently based on the current scanline.
The main advantage of the Atari graphically is its 128-color (and in some ways 256-color) palette, and the C64's main advantages were its sprite system, more effective use of hi-res (games and applications could and often did operate at twice the horizontal resolution of the Atari), and being able to apply more colors horizontally across the screen at once.
A really lovely machine. I've wanted one since I was a kid. The looks, the build quality, the features. And an easy fix, too. :)
Good job keeping on it to fix that problem! Beautiful machine!
The keyboard and disk/tape access sounds came through the internal speaker, and you could PWM additional sounds through it. It was common to install a toggle switch on the underside to enable/disable the speaker.
The disk IO on the 800 comes through the regular audio channel, not the internal speaker. Love the PWM musics coming out lately but better to hear them on XL/XE machines.
@@gamedoutgamer My bad. It's been a while.
@@wesley00042 No problem! Here's a nice PWM tune made recently ruclips.net/video/Z0EWMu94dG0/видео.html
My guess is it's a '1-key rollover' design. Meaning if ANY key is held down (stuck), it won't register other presses on other keys.
Exactly what I thought when I saw it start working after the A came unstuck.
Sort of yes but BREAK will register regardless of how many are pressed and also SHIFT, CONTROL and the four function keys each register independently. There is a one key buffer and that is nearly always sufficient for a good typing speed.
I think the reason that it worked with the finger but not with the keys is that the keys press on the center of the membrane pad, while the finger press the entire pad. The center of the pad lost its conductivity. This is also why offsetting the pcb helped, when the keys now pressed the the pad off center.
You can disable the keyboard click from BASIC with a POKE 731,255 and enable it again with a POKE 731,0.
I seem to remember the right cartridge used an assembler package that you could develop games and applications in pure machine code and when the programme had been created you saved the finished package onto your storage medium of choice and I do seem to remember there was a way to get EEPROM cartridges but were uber expensive.
I loved playing Defender on my 800. Games made on the 800 I understood was arcade quality at that rime.
As an experiment, you can try placing a piece of masking tape between the keyboard and the membrane. That should change how/when the keys respond, as it will spread the contact around but also decrease the force. Then you might have some insight as to what you can or can't do with the existing membrane.
Also, I once described the user experience of a keyboard (for an Amazon review) as "poking a dead squid with a wet, rolled-up newspaper" but the "microwave" keyboard on the 400 makes a chiclet-key Aquarius seem like a luxury item.
Adrian, would you consider a few videos to show some serious applications of these computers ? Many of us who remember them fondly have memories of moms and dads doing some real work like word processing with them.
Yay it's working near 100% 👏Mine is somewhere in a box in the attic along with a 400 that has a modified keyboard. There are a couple of 810 modified "Happy Drives" as well if I remember. I wonder if anyone else here bought and did the Happy Drive mod ?
Wow those 810's are valuable, fyi. The summer heat in the attic is not good for the plastics either. =(
The Atari XE was my 1st computer (a version of this), and I later got a C64 to replace it. I remember the C64 being so much better in the sound department that I never wanted to go back to the Atari. But the Atari looking back at it now had a slightly better colour graphics display. The real problem with it (for me as a kid), was that a) the number of games for that machine was much much less than the C64, I remember being very dissapointed going into the game store and seeing the very small section for Atari compared to the C64 and other machines. And b) I loaded games from tape and they all took "Ages", i didn't really know it until I got the C64 but it seemed like all the Atari games took much much longer to load from the tape. I remember I had kick off and the tape reels nearly touched in the middle and game loaded "from both sides!!!", I think I only ever loaded that game once and it never actually worked most of the time.
Great video.. I had one of those and loved it too. 100% worth saving and keeping active.
Such a finicky keyboard model though! Glad it's working 👍
Insane in the membrane...Do you know I'm loco ? Love the Atari 800, got a 400 with a membrane keyboard though.
A tidbit about computer history...
The Atari 800 & 400 were designed in 1975 but Nolan Bushnell did not have the funds to make them at that time. So taking that idea he created the 2600. He sold Atari to Warner Com. with the promise of releasing the 800 and 400. They did but did do late into 1979.
When Atari sold those bare RAM/ROM cards units there was a plastic retainer bar with a groove for each card. It went onto the middle of the bay area and held the cards in place. There should be a 3D printer file for it some where on the net.
I don't think they all had the retainer. I still have my original childhood Atari 800 (meaning no one owned it before me to remove) and it just had the bare cards similar to his. Maybe they stopped bothering at some point or pulled a commodore and ran out of them on some 😃
Nice video. Good to see you had success.
The Atari 1200XL mylar repair is very similar. The mylars oxidize from disuse.
+1 for Defender! one of my favorite arcade titles on the Atari.
Good job with getting that keyboard working. I would have been thinking to convert the keyboard to use mechanical switches. Yes, that would be a bit of a project but I would expect better results than with a membrane. The other idea I had was to obtain some carbon domes (like the ones seen on the Atari ST) and use them in place of the top plastic layer.
Personally, I like the POKEY over the SID, though I definitely think these computers are lacking in the music department and feel Atari could have at least added a 2nd POKEY down the line.
Well, they weren't lacking in comparison to most computers back in the day. While I do agree that they could each have used a second POKEY or SID for two-channel stereo and twice the number of voices, in comparison to what was available at the time, they were tops in the sound department.
The Apple II's Mockingboard and even more so the Phasor (which was like having two Mockingboards) sound expansion cards did what we're suggesting, but sadly there was hardly any support for them. And even then, I don't think I'd take those AY chips over the POKEY or SID.
@@rbrtck While they were quite groundbreaking at their release in 1979, I feel the Atari 8-bit line was very stagnant for the decade it was on the market. Really, the only thing that ever changed for the line was the amount of RAM, everything else was just a repackaging of the previous computer.
Other computers, such as the Apple ][, had many great enhancements down the line, allowing for a computer that has both compatibility to it predecessors and comparability to other powerhouses at the time.
@@moon_fish9390 In the big picture, I don't think any 8-bit system really advanced much, though. The 8-bit era only lasted as long as it did (into the early 1990s) primarily as a low-cost alternative to 16- and 32-bit computers, so the main driving force was to keep their cost down.
Atari struggled with this for the whole existence of the 8-bit line. The Apple II came first and captured the hobbyist, small business, and later the school markets, leaving the A8, despite its superior technology in most respects, with the home/family market in competition against Commodore. The latter made a name for themselves with the low price of the VIC-20, and then the C64 challenged the A8 technologically while being significantly cheaper to manufacture. Instead of advancing, Atari was forced to reduce cost, which wasn't easy, given the relatively large amount of LSI silicon that the custom chips required. Most sales of the popular XL series actually lost money for Atari, so except for the 16-bit ST, they were in no position to improve the A8 line.
Likewise, Commodore was looking to the future with the Amiga, so there wasn't much improvement in their 8-bit computers after the C64, either. The C128, though often viewed as a failure for some reason, sold plenty of units (in the millions), and successfully improved upon the capabilities of the C64, but it was really a different computer with an excellent C64 compatibility mode that was one of its main selling points.
The Apple IIGS, if that's what you had in mind, was even more of a different computer than the C128 was from the C64, and its compatibility was provided by a custom chip that was pretty much a whole Apple IIe in itself. Additionally, although its backwards compatibility was also excellent overall, there were more issues and caveats than with the C128 because it was really a new 16-bit computer rather than an Apple II at all. A similar compatibility chip was used in a card that could be added to the Macintosh later, and that was definitely a different computer.
The Apple II, proper, was significantly enhanced over the years, at least before the mid-1980s, but then again it needed so much enhancement. Initially, it didn't even have lowercase characters for its text mode or BASIC with floating point, and although it was designed to be highly expandable, its expansion slots had to be filled with cards to provide capabilities that the Atari and Commodore computers had built in. The only real "killer" enhancement it got was a standard and well-supported 80-column (plus 64K RAM for 128K total) card, which for some reason never happened with the A8 or C64 (except for the C128, which has an 80-column mode). There were some options available, but 80 columns was never much of a thing on those computers: obscure and almost entirely unsupported by software. Once the Apple IIe was released in 1983, however, that was pretty much it for major improvements. The later "Platinum" version would have a built-in numerical keypad (so did the C128), but it was otherwise just an Apple IIe, and like I pointed out, the IIGS was something different entirely (with a IIe built into it).
Others might have had to catch up with Atari initially, regarding 8-bit computer technology, but very soon it was a race to the bottom based on price (at least between Atari and Commodore--Apple's prices remained overly high, but they dominated the school market), not a race to the top based on capability--the latter was reserved for 16-bit computers that were already around during the early-to-mid-1980s, and stifled the development of all 8-bit computers, not just the A8.