Restoration of a Bucket full of 1977 Atari VCS Games Console

hello cave dwellers welcome to the cave the atari 2600 is before us it's an iconic system it doesn't matter if you were there at the time in the 70s i was certainly too young to enjoy it first time around mark not sure about you are you calling me old doesn't matter how old you are you can recognize this as an iconic system can't you mark when i was filming this my daughter looked at the console and said oh i know what that is between the console and also the joystick of course anyone can recognize that joystick it just screams gaming and that's why it deserves our attention whether we've got nostalgia for this system or not we recognize it as one of the the granddaddies of console gaming and it really does deserve to be respected and treated that way and as we consider the exhibition space that we're setting up here in the cave how can we not have an atari 2600 for people to come and play it has to be there doesn't it can i make a confession though go ahead when i was growing up the machine of the day was the spectrum and by that point these were kind of old you'd see them at car boot sales and people couldn't give them away but now looking back on it i actually think i've missed out quite a lot do you yeah it's incredible just looking at some of the cartridges on the table here the years on them 1988 1989 still producing games for them so it you know it was a much loved machine but i didn't actually know anyone who owned one they'd all moved on same story for me i think yeah yeah this video is sponsored by pcb way you can get an instant quote on a variety of services or browse a library of talented makers designs add them to your cart and have them delivered directly to your door so when you came across one that was in something of a sorry state you contacted me and said no we've got to restore this for the channel just tell us about it how did you find it well actually i didn't find it someone contacted me a lovely lady who had rescued it from a household recycling waste center which in the 80s we would have called the tip or the dump the dump and it had its cable cut off and everything and she thought that she needed to put a plug on it well obviously most people will know that's the aerial and she took it all to pieces realized it wasn't the power input and then threw it all in a box and put it in the shed 10 years ago one of those projects i'll get round two one day yeah but it rotted in a shed so she delivered it to you what was your first impression of it did you hold out much hope for restoring this one just to put in the context it came to me in a poundland tub okay um and i was assured that all the screws were there neil were they mark no they were not nil and it was a bit of a puzzle to go through it but yeah did i hold out much hope for it um yeah i think i did because just taking the parts out i realized it was built like a tank yeah it's certainly seen better days hasn't it mark looking at the footage of it there it's discombobulated yeah so it prompted you to bring it here to the cave and get to work on it i did and why don't you talk us through the restoration so the first port of call is to see if it actually works so with that in mind i got the boards out made sure everything was there as you can see and the boards aren't looking too bad they've been pretty well protected in the case a bit dusty a couple of odd splodges around the switches can i spot that yeah i'm not sure if that's some kind of flux but it's in the wrong place for flats because it's just on the edge of the board so don't they get sweaty fingers on the switches do you i don't know if somebody's sweating that color they might want to see their general practitioner soon obviously there's been some fluid in here because we can see there's corrosion around some of the aluminium elements which is kind of normal for the atari 2600 i've got an example that displays exactly that on the switches it's all corroded so it's heartening for me to see what a good job you've done on this restoration it gives me hope that i can do the same with these switches so what was your approach to testing it did you just plug it into the mains and turn it on or were you a bit more sensitive in your approach mark the only reason i didn't plug it in and just go for it is because it's only got rf and they can be a pain to tune in anyway so if there was anything wrong i wouldn't know and i didn't want to sit there for hours trying to tune in something that perhaps wasn't working so i thought i'd start by testing these electrolytic capacitors so we tested the first one and as you can see that's come out pretty good then we moved over to the smaller capacitor and i'm trying to test it in circuit but the tester can't quite detect the capacitor so i have to lift a leg i'm going to test it as you can see it's massively high resistance so that could be the reason they ended up in the uh in the dump to begin with right nothing to say that might not have happened in the in the dump it's not conclusive that that was why it went in there but it's one indication it's certainly something that's got to be changed but then we've hit a problem now i don't have that capacitor in an axial format so i had to do something which i'm ashamed of confessional mark i had to take a radial capacitor and bend it to shape and use it in place of an axial capacitor i don't think nolan bushnell would mind that i think you'd be pretty pleased with that as long as it's working swap that capacitor out that informed me when i looked at the main board that you can see here that this capacitor is exactly the same value exactly the same package format it's probably dead as well but for the viewers at home i thought we'd test it anyway so i hooked this one up and this one i could test in circuit and we can see that it's got similar degradation and really it should be about 0.6 ohms so that's got to come out and neil you're not going to like what i've got to say i had to replace it with a radial capacitor i'm fine with this i'm fine with this i'm so ashamed i'm not worrying i'm so ashamed i'm going to have to go to retro confessional so two problems identified fixed are we ready to game now can we switch on well i was ready to test it but then i looked at the control panel and the the power switch is unfortunately floppy and lifeless so what did you do with that is it a standard switch that you could just replace it with or did you fix it up i did have a look around to see if i could find a standard switch but i couldn't find anything that would fit so i hopped on ebay i typed in atari 2600 switch and it came up 20 pounds wow for a single switch for one that someone had clearly just ripped out of another console so it says 120 pounds if you want to replace the lot basically you know and there's two problems here one it's 20 pounds and two i can't support people who are gutting consoles for parts yeah can't do it i decided just to pull it apart and see what was going on inside and when you opened it up was it obvious what the problem was yeah the spring contacts these two pieces of metal had been squashed down and also it was really dirty so i cleaned it up used some contact cleaner i used a fiberglass pencil on the surface contacts retention the contact so i bent them out again and then i put the switch back together leaving me with absolutely no contact cleaner here in the cave so thanks for that mark well it's not my fault that you only had one can of contact cleaner this was a big project so now you've figured out how the switches are put together did you then service all the other switches or were they okay they felt okay looking at the dirt in the first switch i thought they might be dirty so that's why you have no contact cleaner left that went into all the other switches then just to squirt on off on off just to clean out any dirt and that seemed fine did it yeah they all feel mechanically spot on it's just the power switch that was flopping around so two capacitors replaced you've got the power switch sorted is it time to test it out now one of the reasons that 2600 doesn't turn on sometimes is because it can't detect the cartridge in the slot due to dirt in the slot or dirt on the cartridge so and you need to have a gaming don't you for it to actually display something yeah exactly so um preempting that we clean the slot and i have a small piece of thin mylar which i use with a bit of j cloth wrapped around it soaked in contact cleaner and it's just the right size to push into the slot and get the contacts nice and clean with mylab in a thin flexible plastic it's exactly the right thickness for the slot it doesn't bend the pins back with the j cloth you can see any dirt coming off as you can see here there's quite a lot of dirt coming out so that would have potentially stopped the console turning on with the cartridge in the slot now we've changed two capacitors we fixed the switch we've cleaned the slot can we game now i've got a cartridge i gave it a quick blow and then popped it into the console hooked it up and when you say hooked it up are we trusting a 40 year old power supply with this thing well i don't have the power supply so it's not an issue of trust at all because i don't have it so we got out the bench power supply didn't we and um nine volts is what you need for this thing it's one of those power adapters originally that had the horrible three and a half mil jack like you put in your walkman i really don't like them i don't know why they chose to use them but obviously it was cheap and cheerful at the time so nine volts in and what happened when you powered it on well it worked wonderful sort of oh well yeah so i managed to tune the tv in via rf and i got the game on the screen but it was really noisy but there's an additional problem if you even breathe heavy near the power switch the whole thing cuts out or flickers and if you turn it on and off again sometimes it doesn't come back on and was this to do with your original power switch repair or was this something else well i know that the power switch repair absolutely worked because i tested it with a meter just a simple continuity test on or off the problem lies elsewhere so that's when i took the board up turned it over and this is what i found oh that doesn't look good mark no there's a bit of movement on that as you can see just a bit the good news is it's easy to fix so i added some more solder freshen up those joints and then i went and i checked all the others but this does lead me to believe that this console probably doesn't work because i think it was dropped at some point in its previous life it's been dropped on the power switch it's pushed those leaf spring contacts in and it's also cracked those solder joints oh you're like a retro detective i think that makes a lot of sense yeah but with that fixed we're still stuck with the same problem on the screen it's really noisy so i've found this composite mod kit do you mind if i install in this console be my guest mark go ahead now composite mod isn't the best but it's got to be better than rf and when you say it's not the best presumably what gamers strive for is an rgb output as the best rf being the worst but to be honest i think sometimes you can take it too far especially with something like an atari 2600 yeah the atari 2600 has graphics that you can only refine so much so following the instructions here there's four components that need to be removed from the board we'll whip those out really quickly and then it's just four wires connected the board and i route the cable underneath the cartridge slot and solder the four wires into the board as indicated on these instructions as far as difficulty goes where does this sit for anyone at watching who might want to try this themselves it's pretty easy but then again i have a desoldering gun which doubtless made it a lot simpler and there it is that's the mod in looks pretty good you confident that would work i'm always confident and there was no modification needed for the case you just came out the same place as the original rfy came out didn't you yes i came out the same hole so next up i've got this large piece of aluminium now obviously aluminium must have been a fairly common natural resource back in 1977 because this thing is huge look at the size of this nail probably accounts for most of the weight of the console i think if you hit someone with an atari 2600 it's manslaughter at least it's a common question isn't it that comes up what's the most lethal console if you had to grab one in in an end of the world situation or a zombie situation so you go for the 2600 well actually strictly speaking if it's only consoles 2600 but if you're including home computers it'd have to be the cpc force you need the range yeah because it gives you that extra foot and a half of swing anyway back to the 2600s so this large lump of aluminium is yeah there's not a lot going on apart from this part here is where the cartridges slide in and out and as you can see there's a lot of oxidization this white powder so to clean this off i'm using a magic sponge you sometimes see these advertised for getting the children's crayons off the walls and stuff but they're actually slightly abrasive so it's really handy cleaning metal surfaces i had a similar problem when i was refurbishing the atari 800xl here although it doesn't contain the huge chunk of aluminium on the inside it does still have the metal flaps on the cover of the cartridge slot and that had the same oxidization but they've obviously moved away from putting chunks of metal into their machines by this point for a cost saving either in the materials or no doubt in the shipping of the things because it's so heavy and probably also to do with changing regulations in terms of the emissions the rf emissions from the machine so that big chunk of metal perhaps helped with that i think it could probably block x-rays it's huge and now we get onto the bit that i know our audience love and it hasn't happened on the channel for a long time because of the move because we haven't got the new lab set up here properly just yet we're just working on what we've got and that's a good old cleaning montage so uh sorry it's been a while enjoy it cave dwellers [Music] when you're cleaning something like this black plastics you're never quite sure how much dirt and filth is going to come off of it and also for people who know the 2600 quite well they'll notice there's something missing around the switches yeah the rather iconic orange banding around the edge of the switch bezel is unfortunately worn off and is no more and it is the case on many consoles certainly the case on this other example that i've got on the table here there's still a little bit just at the bottom but i would say a good 70 of the orange is just just rubbed off and it's not like someone would have gone around with their finger deliberately rubbing that it's just with age it's just come off i think it's because it's such a raised surface yeah any paint you put on there is going to come off but we can fix that oh you've got a way of fixing that i have i've sourced a special pen and is this special pen of yours known amongst the atari 2600 community or is this a new solution that you've come up with well i mean i just searched for it on google so i wouldn't go to forest and it's my new solution um but this is the fly c graffiti 0.7 millimeter extra fine pen and it's almost exactly the right color it looks phenomenal from what i can see that's left on this and and your restoration over there it looks like an exact match it works pretty well now i did apply it and then i thought i'd do the rub test about 10 minutes later when it looked dry and it came straight off so i repainted that section left it overnight gave it a little rub test this morning and it didn't come off so i think it needs to you know settle dry cure give it overnight at least yeah and it's a great result it looks really good it really is and even if you do dint it and i did dint it you can touch it up again dead easy with this pen okay this is really coming together now mark and the plastics they weren't that black when they went in they'd faded a bit over time so what have you done to restore that yeah they were fading they had a couple of white marks so i used a product called simonized jet black trim restorer as you square out the bottle it looks like a thick black cream but as you're spreading it around on the console it starts to take on this sort of look of an oil with a gray suspension in it because i was kind of worried that if it went over anything that wasn't black it might stain it but it didn't and you can just wipe it straight off yeah did you look for this brand specifically or not because i've used back to black i've used bondo black and lots of other brands on things like behind us we've got the cbc6128 which isn't actually black it's more gray but it brought it up nicely so was there something about that specific product or was that just what was available i had a look at all the different reviews because i wanted something that wouldn't come off on your fingers okay and wouldn't dry streaky and this came up really well in the reviews and you applied it with a brush i did i applied it with a brush but it wasn't drying very well it was kind of glooping together so i started spreading it left and right with a brush and as i was putting the brush on i i hope you don't mind i used your hair dryer to dry as i went and that's come up beautifully not quite as shiny as my head you've got the nice matte black finish it looks as good as newmark it really does it's much much better than i ever expected it to come up and the nice thing is it doesn't print off so if you touch it it doesn't come off on your hands and sometimes when you use these products if you touch them with your finger you get a really obvious fingerprint it doesn't seem to do that either so i do think that this is probably a winner for retro this product when it comes to using these on cars it does fade over time but as i've seen on my 6128 because you're not driving it on a road every day it's not being hit by the elements it actually does last a long time and i imagine it'll be the same that's something that is said in the reviews as well it said that you might have to top this up after a couple of weeks of heavy rain so i thought that's probably quite a good gauge for it lasting quite long if it rains in here we've got problems if it rains here we've got bigger issues than this product so i think you'll agree it's looking good so far incredible yeah so at this point i thought about reassembling the machine and i'd already had a little bit of a go at cleaning one of the toggle switches with some brasso and it came up okay so that gave me the confidence to then try the others and i thought i'd do it before i put the machine back together for easier access and brasso is a really useful thing to have in your tool kit not just for that but i'm told it's good for just getting out light scratches just to polish them out with brasso on plastic haven't tried that yet have you no but i've got a product called megwas which is actually a plastic polish so it's a very fine grinding paste probably costs a lot more than brasso then it probably does it might be worth a little test someday we can we can see if brazo is good for that we've certainly got enough stuff here for the exhibition area to polish up i think we can try all manner of solutions tried the brasso came up okay but i was wondering if i could get it a bit shinier so i have a special polish called autosol metal polish and i use it for chrome all kinds of stuff and as soon as you put it on a metal it kind of goes black and i'm not sure if it's grinded or anything but it really works well so i tried that in the end it didn't come up much better than the brasso but it does require a little bit of effort no restoration is complete without a bit of elbow grease so did you have to put in the work to get this polished up yeah i had to put in the work of leaning over to the drawer and getting out my dremel and polishing room i've got a small buffing wheel and i use that for polishing up the switches you have to be careful because it can be slightly abrasive but the good news is it worked well and as you can see the switches are on now free of oxidization i can see them glistening in the light from here they look fantastic so on with the reassembly now if you look on your atari 2600 that you've got there neil you can see through the switches you have dust covers let's have a look yeah i see them they're kind of a black sponge a round black sponge unfortunately as you can see here these are all rotten in fact the more you touch them the more they rot they're just falling apart into actual dust what can you do about that then is that a case of just having to take them out and forget them or can you replace them well i tried to take them out and i tried to forget them but i just couldn't deal with it because it didn't look right so i decided i would make my own one of those things that you might think to be simple on the face of it but if you don't get it right it's going to look wrong it's going to look really wrong so how did you approach this well the original ones were circular and i knew there was no way i could cut them circular so i opened it up and i used my brain and then when that went wrong i decided to approach it methodically and then when that went wrong i decided i'd just wing it so i took some black material that i just had hanging around the house and i cut some pieces which cover the aluminium in both switch positions and then i took a scalpel and i cut the middle out square so it will fit over the switch and how did you affix that material onto the control panel i just left it loose like the original one the first time i put it together unfortunately i left too much hanging over the sides and it blocked the screw holes then with a little bit of trimming eventually it all went back together nicely and allegedly mark has six atari 2600 sized holes in his curtains at home now don't tell the wife so on this av mod kit nil it's got a cable which you generally would plug in through the outside of the case but i fed it from the outside of the case through the original aerial socket hole and i connected it inside the console to give that tethered cable feel that we're all used to with the atari 2600 i wrapped it around these posts and added some of my favorite hot snot so surely now it's it's all cleaned it's all tested it's ready to go you've got the mod in there can we put it back together yes okay and does it work no no it didn't work and i'm not going to say it's my fault because it probably is and i don't like admitting blame but i think i followed the wrong instructions for installing the composite mod so when you say the wrong instructions did you have instructions for a different model it was the instructions which came in a box full of mods and i think that what i've done is i installed the deluxe mod using the standard mod instructions right when i went to the website i found completely different instructions okay how much did you have to change them was a lot of work to rectify not really all i did is i left the audio cable in the original position because that was correct but i cut the other ground five volt and video cables brought them out removed the modulator and just put them in where the modulator was straight away it burst into life well this isn't really a tutorial video for anyone who's trying to do this mod so if you're trying it do double check the the instructions and not the footage from earlier in this video because you'll make the same mistake as mark but we got there in the end didn't we yes a lesson learned and that's it done and i can see across the room here it looks fantastic but um i think we should really set it up and we should play some games with it and we've got a nice 70s sideboard over there which i'm not quite sure where i'm going to put it in the exhibition space but i think it'd be perfect for the atari 2600 unfortunately i don't have a late 70s television to go with it but these things were used well through the 80s so we'll hook it up with a crt yeah we'll have a go with it and see how it plays i'm interested to see how good the picture is with that composite mod [Music] [Music] [Music] mark it plays as good as it looks you've done a great job on restoring it always surprises me when we play the 2600 i always get into my head that the graphics are just blocks just squares but it's not that limited is it no that was my memory as well of the 2600 back in the day i wasn't interested it was blocky it wasn't like the spectrum but actually looking at the graphics especially when it comes from sort of the 1980 to 1988 89 the graphics were quite impressive we turned it on went that's really impressive yeah i actually i would sit and play some of these games instead of perhaps my zx spectrum or something like that the the games have evolved that much anyway it's not about the games it's about the restoration and it looks fantastic anything you would have done differently if you went back and did it again mark uh well i think we're probably going to have to revisit the machine um i think the colors could be a bit bolder it seems a little bit dark we had to turn the tv up didn't we on the bright all the colors on the picture yeah and looking around some popular forums it could be that the little green capacitors i think are polyester caps could be tired and need replacing and that could well fix that so that's something that we can look at people always say when we do these things why do you always just recap everything you know get get to the bottom of the specific problem but actually it's always worth recapping it when you're in there anyway because of things like that that's right and uh ruling out the caps can then help you troubleshoot in other ways um so yeah with the polyester caps i wouldn't naturally change those in the machine but reading the former people have changed them and it's improved the video output so that's something i'd look at and something i noticed as wonderful as your orange surround was on the good ones here we go and restored one a little chip came off on your orange paint didn't it yeah and i think this um actually harks back to what happened to all of the bezels back in the day originally of course yeah yeah because it's such a raised and small piece of plastic i think what's happened is it's so easy to knock it's so weak so i think maybe it might be worth looking at maybe some kind of clear varnish i don't know if clear varnish comes in a pen or something that can protect that you can borrow one of my clear nail varnishes perhaps yeah yeah all joking aside that would probably work pretty well probably yeah yeah well it's been a great restoration thanks for sharing it with us and such a good addition to the exhibition space so that you can hopefully come and play it and enjoy it and i've got a good idea as to how to restore this one now so it's always good to have one in reserve just in case that's right you can never have too many especially for that zombie apocalypse thank you everyone for watching thank you to mark for coming and doing this restoration for us today and as always take care and we'll see you next time bye bye [Music] [Music] so two down mark you've identified two definite problems and sold them is that it are we ready to game we're working well i thought so and i was ready to hook it up when i looked at the controller board i noticed that the main power switch has well some kind of physical damage oh all right i'm gonna get home tonight am i

Channel: RMC - The Cave

Views: 56,404

Keywords: atari vcs, atari vcs games, atari 2600 games, atari restoration, how to test a capacitor, restoration, restoration videos

Id: qxfbHP4LmQw

Length: 27min 53sec (1673 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 06 2021