Thought I'd share some photos of my Issue 4 Atom that I recently acquired, and document the steps I've taken and will take to refurbish it.
As you can see, the topside is in reasonable condition, albeit missing a couple of keys and suffering from a little plastic burn.
Looking around the back and underneath, you can see a previous owner's attempts to manage cooling - which they appear to have given up on as links LK6 and LK7 have been made. Filling these and making it look good will perhaps be the biggest challenge here.
Next, a quick PCB photo. It came to me not working, with 1K in the video RAM space and 2K elsewhere. The faults turned out to be a combination of poor soldering resulting in track damage around the modulator, and one of the 3.57MHz crystal legs had sheared off
Flipping around to the other side, it amused me slightly to see that the silkscreen on side one was the wrong way around
Any idea if this was common or not? Also, the PL8 headers weren't present (reinstated in this photo)
Stripping the keyboard down for cleaning revealed this delightful bodge:
So since these were taken, I've recapped the board and replaced all sockets with standard double wipe items (I know turned pin are best, but I find that they don't take reclaimed IC's very well). I've also made a start on reproducing the rear labels so I can replace the damaged originals:
I've also relocated the rear bus expansion socket to PL6, instead of PL7 which located the socket incorrectly and I imagine could never have worked properly in that configuration.
I'll also attempt retrobriting the lower case portion, as it's a a good few shades more yellow than the top. This might have to be an indoor solution though, as here in sunny* Ireland the best of retrobriting season is well behind us.
Long term, I'll be aiming to max out the memory configuration, add a colour board of some description, and of course an AtoMMC.
Comments, questions, criticism etc all welcome!
B
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