Atari 5200 Refurbish Report

[retromod]

This weekend I took the chance to pick one of the incoming Atari 5200 to get more experience with them.



On friday I got 2 Atari 5200 with trakball, joystick dual holder, power supply, joysticks and a bunch of games. I picked the broken one. The joystick bay top was broken on the right side. About 6 x 2 cm was broken in different pieces. I used glue to fix them and a large piece of carbon to improve the stability of the whole construction (see pic). The outside was cut to hide the glue.

My first intension was to paint the top afterwards but as it was not noticable from the front I decided to use some black tape to hide the carbon and to use special color painting to partial paint the obvious parts. I used special polish creme to polish the cover, plastic front. A special creme to remove small scratches was used to beautify the housing.

The joystick missed the silver cover so I created a new one. Testing was successful and it seems even the picture was not really great on my TV using HF the console still works. There was also no audio output which most likely is due to the weak HF signal.

After removing the shilding I cleaned the mainboard and removed the rust from the shielding and mainboard traces. The cartridge slot was cleaned, too.

Picture two contains the prototype PCB of the AV/Stereo-Surround mod for this console. I also noticed the expansion slot on the left side of the console which misses the closure. Is there any available modul for that expansion slot? I'm asking because it would be great using this slot to add the two required switches on a piece of black metal hiding the slot and also preventing any further drilling.

Here the result of nearly 3 hours of cleaning and reconstruction (and tons of gel, cremes...)



Next step will be to solder the PCB.

[TrekMD]

Wow, fantastic work retromod!

[retromod]

Wow, fantastic work retromod!

thanks. looking forward to the AV mod results as my plan is to remove the NTSC requirement, too. My TV doesn't support NTSC at all so i currently use an old (expensive) VCR to be able to get a picture at all.

From modder point of view this console is great as it has plenty of possiblities to route cables or add components without drilling and there is plenty of room inside of the console, too.

Only one game was not able to start: QBERT. 10 others works fine thanks to the great solid design of the cartridges which prevents any dust. The non working one is from parker without the complex shutter and it failed! So after some chemical intervention it is now working, too.

[retromod]

Just recognized the A5200 offers an expansion slot which is able to drive the Stereo/Surround Mod. So by offering a small cartridge for the slot ANY 5200 delivers stereo/surround sound output. I will check if this is worth to implement.

[retromod]

this port only contains "audio out" on the 2port model. Anyway a cross-install PCB with additional cables for internal hookup for 4-port model may improve compatiblity.

[Carlos]

Just recognized the A5200 offers an expansion slot which is able to drive the Stereo/Surround Mod. So by offering a small cartridge for the slot ANY 5200 delivers stereo/surround sound output. I will check if this is worth to implement.

Nice one. Good work as ever retromod. ;-)