For the first time in over 18 years I finally hooked my Atari 800XL up to my TV via composite video from a monitor cable and a power supply from The Brewing Academy. The last time it had been powered on was August 2003 when we were moving out of the Euclid Avenue house which my mom lost due to foreclosure from taking out a 2nd mortgage after running up her credit cards while suffering from Bipolar Manic Depression. She had been injured on the job and was waiting for disability to kick in while fending off People's Credit Card filing a lawsuit against her in Alliance Municipal Court over $3,000 she owed them. There's a much longer story to be told, some of it involving an evil sister thief who stole from their own family.
We moved into my grandparents' house to hide / wait things out. It was the last time I had used my Atari 800XL for translating manga and lots of other various tasks which I managed to do with it. It got disconnected and boxed up. What happened was my mom buying a Windows XP Dell desktop computer. I still used WebTV and then I got the Toshiba Satellite 440CDX Windows 95 laptop to use.
It was also the last time I got to use an Atari 1040ST which I somehow sold to a friend.
There were things about my 800XL which I forgot about and will hopefully fix like the Joystick ports. They're loose and probably need the solder reflowed. I haven't opened it up since I installed the 256K RAMbo XL upgrade. And after testing a box of software cartridges, I have a cartridge slot to clean out. They all eventually worked, but only after going through them all a couple times. I will likely clean the cartridges, too.
I miss using my Atari 8-bit. Thankfully I also found AtariArtist to go with my Touch Tablet. Hopefully I also have the light pen software. Computereyes became obsolete for capturing images off analog video. I feel bad for ruining our first VCR using it.
At any rate, it was good to see it turn on and work again. Though one of the dome switches I soldered to one joystick PCB will need to be replaced. It got obliterated in testing.
It would also be nice if The Brewing Academy would include a card indicating while the yellow plug is Composite (come POZ zit) Video, Black is audio.
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