I recently purchased a cheap Atari 800XL which was listed as not working. I’ve been trying to find some broken computers as fixing them up and learning about how they work has started to become a big part of this hobby for me.
So when I plugged in the computer and it sprang into life, I was pretty dissapointed. At this time it seemed like the only fault was a loose connection on the power LED.
However, the 800XL has a built in system test mode, and when I ran this it looked a bit odd. All the memory passed the memory test, but there wasn’t enough of it showing. This issue was confirmed when I tried to run a game on the system and it just crashed.
I looked at the system using my thermal camera and couldn’t see any obvious faults with the memory.
I had some spare RAM chips, so decided the next course of action would be to fit some sockets and start swapping the RAM chips around. I decided to fit the sockets one chip at a time and then test swapping the RAM as I go.
As luck would have it, after swapping the first chip, things started to look correct on the system test, and games now loaded without issue.
So, as repairs go, this was a pretty easy one and not the most exciting I have dealt with. But is was nice to pick up a bargain computer and return back to its working state.
My next task will be to give it a bit of a clean up and see what this system has to offer. I have a couple of other 8bit Atari’s but it isn’t really a platform I have spent too much time playing with yet. This is something I need to change.
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