Yesterday was sent getting ready for the first big rain of the season. Boards that were still scattered about from the fence building were put away. Loose items secured for the wind. I took down the chimney from the wood-burning stove we no longer have. It’s always leaked so it’s good to have it down. Last year in a hurry we taped a plastic bag over it but that is long gone. The screws for the supports came out without unscrewing them so I think we got to it just in time.

For future weather I dug a hole to put in a pole for the satellite dish so it stops going out of alignment every six months. Then I found out that there aren’t any 2-inch diameter, 8-feet long fence poles around on a Sunday so that will have to wait.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to putting a layer of plastic under the house and after this rain it’ll probably too wet under there to do that easily. Next year for sure!

 

This summer Henry was over and wanted to play the Atari 2600. I went to go turn it on and found there was no way for the video signal to get where it needed to go. I removed the VCR from the stack of equipment awhile ago since we don’t have any more tapes and that was the only RF input I had. Then I realized that with the ending of analog broadcast pretty soon nothing will be able to handle the RF signal. I looked for standalone RF converters and found that, while they do exist, it’s cheaper just to get a VCR, but I don’t want a VCR just to run the Atari. I found a kit from The Longhorn Engineer. The kit is easy to assemble (even though I had been out of practice soldering). The instructions on the site are complete but I was having trouble making it work with my model so I put it aside for awhile. When I went back to it the instructions were updated and they worked perfectly! Now I have composite and s-video and pseudo-stereo outputs!

Later in the summer Vinna wanted to play Asteroids and it wouldn’t turn on. I thought it might be the kill-switch that triggers when the back panel is open but that tested fine. The power coming out of the power supply was non-existent though. I looked up replacement power supplies and found the service manual. From that I learned about the fuses. One of the six fuses was bad so I replaced it and it powered up. Since I was working on it I replaced the lock on the back panel so I wouldn’t have to tape it in place anymore. I’ll try harder not to lose this set of keys.

Now I just have to replace the RAM chips in the Battlezone machine.

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