Fail Of The Week: [Mark] Makes An Atari Cartridge

Part of the magic of the movies is that the actors always know what will happen next. There never has to be a scene where James Bond orders wine, and the sommelier has to correct his pronunciation, or he miscounts his hand at baccarat. Real life is rarely as smooth. Of course, YouTube is more akin to a movie than real life, and we always wonder how many flawlessly executed projects you see on YouTube really went that well. [Mark Fixes Stuff] left no scenes on the cutting room floor, though, in his realistic portrayal of his quest to build a nice-looking Atairi 2600 cartridge. Watch it below.

Spoiler alert: In the end, it all worked out. But getting there was a series of misadventures. Starting out with [Parker Dillman’s] PCB, he put together the insides of the cartridge, including a socket for the EPROM. He then resin-printed a case. Like many of our own projects, the first run wasn’t quite the size he expected. It was probably close enough, though, but then he realized the socket made the board too tall to fit in the enclosure.

He also shows all the little parts that have to happen to get a nice-looking project completed. Printing a color label or just burning the EPROM, for example. He didn’t just produce them out of thin air.

We wondered if a low-profile socket might have been able to fit. Sometimes, two rows of machined pins will fit where a socket won’t, too. Barring that, it might have been nice to use an EEPROM — they make them that are drop-in compatible with EPROMS — and then allow reprogramming with a clip or pogo pins on a new PCB.

Overall, we enjoyed this realistic peek into a practical project. We might suggest a little tape to hold down components while soldering, though. What could you do with a custom cartridge? Maybe fix an old game. Of course, you can actually get recent official new cartridges.

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• Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/12/07/fail-of-the-week-mark-makes-an-atari-cartridge/