It's Alive!!!
WOW!
Yesterday I finally finished hooking everything up, I put in batteries, turned on the power switch, and... NOTHING. DEAD. NADA. It was almost midnight (I was so close I had to stay up late to finish it) so I didn't have time to troubleshoot it, but I went to bed thinking about how the whole thing might have been fried or something, and that it was going to be too complex to figure out what went wrong.
Tonight, I wound up ungluing the LCD screen from the case and took the whole thing back out (very difficult considering the mess of wires) to get full access to all the terminals where the wires were connected. I tested the pin on the LCD that was supposed to have 5 volts, and saw it had barely any power at all. So I knew there was a power issue. The voltage regulator (which had more to do with powering the Atari than the LCD screen) was giving out 5 volts as designed, and it was getting a full 7.2 volts, so that wasn't the problem. I then figured out that the A/V jack that I broke when I first took it off (as I mentioned in my October 23 posting -- should have known that would come back to haunt me) was the problem -- power was going in, but not coming back out! Since I am never going to hook this portable up to an external TV (I have a full size Atari for that), I just bypassed the jack and hooked the incoming and outgoing wires together, so I knew power was going to go to the LCD screen. I hit the power switch one more time, and... success! The LCD screen looked really bright and "overblown" but after I messed with the color tint potentiometer, I saw that it was easily adjustable. I need to compare it with a "known" game to get the color right, etc. but for now, I know it works!! Here is a photo of Atari basketball. Now I just need to put the screen back in the case and screw the thing together.
One other issue I discovered is that my speaker isn't hooked up to anything! So I need to figure out where to connect it. Also, I found that I wasn't able to plug the headphones into the headphone jack, since the case wall is too thick and is keeping the headphone plug from inserting all the way. But hey, no big deal considering the thing works! These are minor details I will work out.
Yesterday I finally finished hooking everything up, I put in batteries, turned on the power switch, and... NOTHING. DEAD. NADA. It was almost midnight (I was so close I had to stay up late to finish it) so I didn't have time to troubleshoot it, but I went to bed thinking about how the whole thing might have been fried or something, and that it was going to be too complex to figure out what went wrong.
Tonight, I wound up ungluing the LCD screen from the case and took the whole thing back out (very difficult considering the mess of wires) to get full access to all the terminals where the wires were connected. I tested the pin on the LCD that was supposed to have 5 volts, and saw it had barely any power at all. So I knew there was a power issue. The voltage regulator (which had more to do with powering the Atari than the LCD screen) was giving out 5 volts as designed, and it was getting a full 7.2 volts, so that wasn't the problem. I then figured out that the A/V jack that I broke when I first took it off (as I mentioned in my October 23 posting -- should have known that would come back to haunt me) was the problem -- power was going in, but not coming back out! Since I am never going to hook this portable up to an external TV (I have a full size Atari for that), I just bypassed the jack and hooked the incoming and outgoing wires together, so I knew power was going to go to the LCD screen. I hit the power switch one more time, and... success! The LCD screen looked really bright and "overblown" but after I messed with the color tint potentiometer, I saw that it was easily adjustable. I need to compare it with a "known" game to get the color right, etc. but for now, I know it works!! Here is a photo of Atari basketball. Now I just need to put the screen back in the case and screw the thing together.
One other issue I discovered is that my speaker isn't hooked up to anything! So I need to figure out where to connect it. Also, I found that I wasn't able to plug the headphones into the headphone jack, since the case wall is too thick and is keeping the headphone plug from inserting all the way. But hey, no big deal considering the thing works! These are minor details I will work out.
posted by leahkim at
10:28 PM
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