Sunday, February 19, 2012

Aiming for the Atari

After wining the Atari XEGS on eBay, it finally came in.  Got the console, the keyboard and some game carts.  Cool beans.  I hooked it up to a 13" color TV and it came right up.  So it worked.  Now to tear it open and see what was inside.

A few turns of the screws later, I had the cover off and was looking at the motherboard.  I could see I had my work cut out for me.  The first thing I had to do was desolder the 6502C CPU, also known as the Sally chip.  So I fired up the soldering iron and solder sucker, then went to work.  About 30 minutes later, I carefully pried up the CPU, then I installed a 40 pin machine socket and seated the Sally back in.  I hooked everything up and turned the computer on.  It came up.

Great.

Now to desolder the 32K ROM chip.  Same song, different dance.  After carefully removing the solder from the pads, I gently pulled the ROM chip out, put in a 28 pin machine socket, soldered that, and put the chip in.  Fired up and it worked.

With those two chips socketed, I could now turn my attention to the truly awesome brain transplant: 6809, here we come.

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