I bought this machine at University in 1985, just as it was being made obsolete by the ST. Hence the bargain price of £170 which included a 1050 disk drive. My friend paid over £500 for similar equipment! He also bought a disk accelerator which replaced the 1050's internal 6507 CPU and Tandon firmware with a 6502 and new firmware and an 8K RAM for caching tracks. Lacking the parts, my friend copied the EPROM (with his Atom) for me. Lacking the PCB, I managed to fit the necessary parts by piggy-backing the EPROM and RAM into the old ROM socket, and plugging a 6502 from my Atom into the 6507 socket (many of the pins are the same). The pins that didn't quite fit were bent outwards and hand-wired. This arrangement worked fine!
Parts List
(for my particular machine, yours may well differ!)
Monitor Output,
Expansion Bus Connector,
Cartridge Connector
Atari 6502 'Sally',
ANTIC-E,
GTIA,
POKEY,
6520 PIA,
Atari multiplexer
I'm reluctant to put stuff on the web that isn't completely checked and finished but the documents below were only available on the web as TIF file scans of the original documents. These are hard-to-read and very large. I have OCR'd them and created HTML versions.
Atari Technical Reference Notes - Atari's tech docs for the 800
system
ANTIC Data Sheet
POKEY Data Sheet
GTIA Data Sheet
CGIA Data Sheet
a prototype combination of ANTIC and GTIA that never went into
production.
TIA technical data
This chip was used in the original Atari 2600 games console.
This was probably the basis for the GTIA and so the information
there may be helpful to deduce the workings of the GTIA.
Atari Archives link to a website containing:
Technical
University of Chemnitz, Germany, Atari pages:
including redrawn schematics!
Atari Historical
Society - source of scanned Atari chip data sheets,
and more.
Clarence Dyson's Atari video enhancements explains how to correct Atari's analogue video circuitry because this is so bad. Very well worth doing. I had noticed this when I first bought it but assumed this was due to the TV circuitry not being perfect. Where a line makes a sharp intensity/colour change, it casts a shadow to the right.
Best Electronics sell Atari spares, including the custom chips and crystals!
Ex-Atari engineers:
Jed
Margolin's web site - lots of interesting very
technical information.
Owen Rubin's web site
-
Jay Miner
(May 31, 1932 to June 20, 1994) - designer of the TIA chip in the
2600, founder of Amiga.
Joe Decuir, Steve Mayer and Ron Milner -
designed the 2600.
Allan Alcorn - Atari's first full-time employee
(1972), Alcorn built Pong.